Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews by Peter Longerich (booksvooks TXT) 📕

etc.’ totalling 175,000 men. 11

Himmler set out his ideas for an ‘economization’ of the concentration camp in a

note written in late March 1942, responding to statements by Kammler, now

director of construction in the WVHA. Here Himmler criticized the fact, for

example, that Kammler had set the work performance of a prisoner at only 50 per

cent of that of a German worker. It was precisely in the raising of the individual

performance rates of the prisoner workers, Himmler stressed, that ‘the greatest

pool of labour resides. The chance to extract it is given to the head of the ‘Business

and Administration Main Office’. 12 The WVHA’s director, Pohl, stressed this change in the concentration camp system, by now under way, in a report for

Himmler on 30 April: according to this report, the ‘preservation of prisoners only

for reasons of security, education, or prevention is no longer the priority’; it was

rather that the ‘emphasis [had] shifted to the economic side’. 13 In an order issued the same day14 Pohl made the concentration camp commandants ‘responsible for the deployment of the workforce. This deployment must be exhausting in the true

sense of the word in order to achieve the greatest possible performance.’

It is quite plain that the ‘exhausting’ work programme of the prisoners was an

obstacle to their economically effective use in the armaments industry, which

also proceeded correspondingly slowly in the spring of 1942. Because of under-

nourishment, the disastrous living conditions in the camps, and constant exces-

sive physical demands as well as the security provisions that obstructed the

running of the work programme, the prisoners were comparatively unproduct-

ive; despite low wages (which were to be paid to the SS), the deployment of

prisoners was relatively unprofitable from the point of view of the armaments

industry. 15 The SS did not take the route of encouraging greater output from prisoners by offering incentives, as had been successfully attempted with Soviet

prisoners in 1942. 16 The prevalent idea was to terrorize the prisoners into Extermination on a European Scale, 1942

317

achieving higher performance rates before replacing the soon exhausted slave

labourers by new workers.

This unproductive, lethal deployment of forced labourers in a time of mounting

labour shortages is often seen as confirmation of the unconditional precedence of

ideological motives over economic considerations within the Nazi system, and is

singled out for its profoundly irrational and self-destructive character. But iden-

tifying such an evident ‘discrepancy between the physical extermination of the

ideological adversary and the exploitation of his workforce to develop the arma-

ments industry’17 assumes a bipolarity between ‘world-view’ and ‘rationality’ that was alien to the world of the SS. If instead we start with the idea prevalent among

the SS leadership around the end of 1941 and beginning of 1942 that the occupation

and reordering of the ‘Ostraum’ was imminent, then the interconnection of terror

and total exploitation to death, the system of ‘extermination through work’

appears as a horribly consistent anticipation of the barbaric methods of rule

intended for the East. Just as the planned conquest in the East, which was to

ensure the rule of the ‘Aryan race’ for centuries to come, destroyed any economic

calculations, concerning the work of the prisoners too, the SS went far beyond any

considerations of profitability. This was made easier by the fact that the initial plan

was to deploy the prisoners for SS projects above all; at first the idea was

construction, then later SS armaments production. 18

From the point of view of the SS, mass murder and mass production were easily

linked with the system of ‘extermination through work’. The concentration camp

system could also be extended, and the proof for its adaptability to the conditions

of war demonstrated. Above all, ‘extermination through work’ could be used to

defuse the argument repeatedly levelled against the SS during their murder

campaigns in the Soviet Union: the ‘pointlessness’ of the extermination of

urgently required manpower. This was because with ‘extermination through

work’ a context was established that provided an ‘objective’ justification for the

extermination of people ‘unfit for work’.

When the plans for the deployment of prisoners as forced labourers became

gradually more concrete around the end of 1941 and the beginning of 1942, 19

Himmler showed himself determined to deploy a large number of Jewish

prisoners above all, especially in order to find a quick replacement for the Soviet

prisoners of war who were by now exhausted. In preparation for the planned

major construction and armaments tasks, on 26 January 1942 Himmler briefed the

head of Department D of the WVHA on its new tasks: ‘Since no more Russian

prisoners of war may be expected in the near future, I will send a large number of

Jews who have been emigrated [sic!] from Germany to the camps. Prepare to

receive 100,000 male and up to 50,000 female Jews in the concentration camps

within the next four weeks. Major economic tasks will confront the concentration

camps in the weeks to come. ’20 Over the next few months, in fact, the deportations from the Reich were to go to the district of Lublin, where some of those Jews

318

Extermination of the European Jew, 1942–1945

‘capable of work’ had to perform forced labour in Majdanek and other camps. On

the other hand, several thousand Slovakian Jews were to be deported chiefly to

Auschwitz, where they were also to be deployed in forced labour projects. 21 Both camps had originally been intended to receive a large number of Soviet prisoners

of war. But it was to become apparent that apart from the goal of the economic

exploitation of the Jewish prisoners, Himmler achieved one thing above all with

this new policy: he created a pretext for the murder of the prisoners who were now

‘superfluous’, who were not used for the ‘work programme’.

We have access to a key document that reveals especially clearly the close

connection between ‘extermination through work’ and the murder of those

‘unfit for work’. It is a letter from the chief of the Gestapo, Müller, to the

commander of the Security Police in Riga, Karl Jäger, written on 18 May 1942.

In it he says that because of a ‘general (!) decree by the Reichsführer SS and head of

the German police’, ‘Jews between the ages of 16 and 32 are to be excluded from

the implementation of special measures until further instructions. These Jews are

to be added