The Business of Genocide: The SS, Slave Labor, and the Concentration Camps - Hardcover

Allen, Michael Thad

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807826774 ISBN 13: 9780807826775

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002

Synopsis

During World War II, hundreds of thousands of prisoners were worked to death by the Nazis under a brutal system of slave labour in the concentration camps. By 1942, this vast network of slavery extended across all of German-occupied Europe, but the whole operation was run by a surprisingly small staff of bureaucrats - no more than 200 engineers and managers who worked in the Business Administration Main Office of the SS. Their projects included designing and constructing the concentration camps and gas chambers, building secret underground weapons factories, and brokering slave labourers to private companies such as Volkswagen and IG Farben. This text contradicts the assumption that the SS forced slavery upon the German economy, demonstrating that instead industrialists actively sought out the Business Administration Main Office as a valued partner in the war economy. Moreover, while the bureaucrats who oversaw Holocaust operations have often been seen as technocrats or simple "cogs in the machinery", the work reveals their ideological dedication, even fanatical devotion, to slavery and genocide in the name of National Socialism.

About this title

About the Author

Michael Thad Allen is Assistant Professor of Modern German History and the History of Technology at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is coeditor of Technologies of Power.

From the Inside Flap

Allen examines the SS executives and engineers who built up the vast slave-labor system in Nazi concentration camps. While the bureaucrats who oversaw Holocaust operations are often portrayed as simply "cogs in the machinery," he reveals their ideological dedication to National Socialism.

Edition details

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807826774
• ISBN 13: 9780807826775
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 392