Allen Michael T. The Business of Genocide: The SS, Slave Labor, and the Concentration Camps

Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005. — 392 p. — ISBN10: 0807856150; ISBN13: 978-0807856154During World War II, hundreds of thousands of prisoners were worked to death by the Nazis under a brutal system of slave labor 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 laborers to private companies such as Volkswagen and IG Farben. The Business of Genocide powerfully 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 book reveals their ideological dedication, even fanatical devotion, to slavery and genocide in the name of National Socialism.Origins of the SS: The Ideology Is the Modern OrganizationModern Men: The New Administrative Officers of the SS
The Führer Principle
Heinrich Himmler’s Favored Industrial Projects
‘‘We Are No Pencil Pushers!’’: Theodor Eicke’s Total Institution
and the Primacy of Policing
Origins of the SS Construction CorpsA Political Economy of Misery: The SS ‘‘Führer’’ CorporationThe German Earth and Stone Works
Profits from Women’s Work
Opportunistic Idealists and the Shady Legality of SS Industry
The ‘‘Organic Corporation’’Manufacturing a New OrderThe ‘‘Final Form’’ of the German Commercial Operations
The Venality of Evil: Modern Mismanagement of Slave LaborEngineering a New OrderA High Degree of Order?
Odilo Globocnik: Handcrafting the New Order
Hans Kammler: Modern Engineering in the SS
The ‘‘Great Industrial Tasks’’ of the SS
Engineering IdeologyMy Newly Erected House: Slavery in the Modern War EconomyIndustry and Ideology
The Rise of Albert Speer
Putting the SS’s House in Order for Total War
The Armaments Ministry’s First Pilot ProjectsThe Hour of the EngineerRehearsals
The SS and the Rocket Team
Mittelwerk and Dora-Mittelbau
Less than Slaves: Labor at Dora-Mittelbau
The Fighter StaffTotal War and the End in RubbleModern Management and Its Discontents
The End
Epilogue