14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Deep Look at the Holocaust, June 8, 2003
This review is from: Architects of Annihilation: Auschwitz and the Logic of Destruction (Hardcover)
This book will take sometime. It reads like a PhD dissertation. Perhaps it is because it is a translation of a German book. Whatever the reason, it is well worth your time and will give you a deeper understanding of the holocaust.
This book focused on the people who planned and managed the holocaust - demographers, geographers, economists, civil servants, and academics. They saw population movement, control, and elimination as levers to modernize the German economy and manage its war economy. They blamed much of the economic problems of Europe on "excess" population and moved from birth control, sterilization, starvation, to the gas chambers to "manage" the social structures of Europe.
They were not goose steeping cartoon Nazis or manic rascists. They just wrote reports and made analysis. The book shows that Nazi Germany was not just a nation of conquerors who just happened to hate Jews so they killed them, but that the killing was an integral logic of the state and its modernization program. If they had won the war and elminated every Jewish person from the face of the earth the gas chambers would still have kept running, because it was seen as a tool of social policy by the people who oversaw them in their offices.
A pure picture of immorality and horror in which everything - life and death - is at the whim of the state.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Keen insight into the people who made the Holocaust possible, September 11, 2004
The value of this rather dry book is that it shows clearly how the idea of the Holocaust gradually developed, dispelling the theory that the Nazis came to power in 1933 with the ultimate aim of exterminating the Jews. Instead, the regime employed hundreds of economists, demographic experts and the like who studied every aspect of life in eastern and south-eastern Europe to see how these regions could be made more efficient under German rule. Whether it was central Poland or Bulgaria, the findings were the same -- there were too many unproductive people (or "dead ballast") around and something would have to be done to get rid of them. Once the Germans had come to this conclusion, the idea of exterminating the Jews gained ground irresistibly and you get the clear impression from the book that this had just as much to do with economic realities as it did with racist theories. What is also interesting is the fight between Berlin and the German rulers of the Government-General (the large chunk of central Poland), who took it into their heads to make their part of the world an economically productive unit rather than acting as a dumping ground for the unwanted from central Europe. And what is depressing is the fact that so many of these experts who produced reports about the need to eliminate "useless mouths" prospered after the war, many of them attaining important positions rather than being put up against a wall or slapped in prison for decades. For anyone really interested in exactly how the Holocaust came about, this is a crucial read.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Fascinating Work on the Economic Aspects of the Nazi-German Genocide of Jews and Slavs: Erhard Wetzel Clarified, October 18, 2009
This review is from: Architects of Annihilation: Auschwitz and the Logic of Destruction (Hardcover)
This paradigm-shattering book goes beyond Nazi anti-Semitism and racism as the sole explanations for German genocidal policies. The author is a German scholar.
German economists, as elaborated by Aly, had studied Poland and come to the conclusion that her inefficiencies had been caused by a combination of Polish mismanagement and Jewish economic dominance. (pp. 53-59; see also p. 230). There was "overpopulation" (p. 43, 54, etc.), defined as follows: "Consequently, they would be consuming the theoretically possible surpluses that could otherwise have been invested in increasing the national income or promoting industrialization". (p. 60).
"Useless eaters" (mentally handicapped, etc.) throughout the Reich were killed. In order to increase conquered Poland's productivity for Germany's benefit, the Germans lowered the living standards of the Poles still further through massive exploitation, and removed "surplus" workers by murder or deportation. Millions of "redundant" Polish farmers were sent to the Reich's factories for productive work. This paralleled the earlier forced collectivization and industrialization under Soviet Communism. (pp. 66-69).
In order to increase the productivity of the remaining Poles (pp. 133-134, 138-139, 160-on), Jews were removed: first sent to ghettos, then to would-be Lublin-province or Madagascar, and, failing that, to death. Germans got rich off Jewish properties by keeping the best ones and reselling inferior ones at inflated prices to Aly-described needy [not greedy] Poles. (p. 121).
The Auschwitz complex was not solely a concentration camp and death factory. It was part of the long-term German project to develop Silesia into the "second Ruhr" (p. 102), and was intended to be used for at least 10-20 years. (p. 112).
Holocaust-uniqueness proponents have long contended that, whereas all the non-Jewish genocides in history had been rational acts intended to benefit the perpetrator, the Holocaust was a deeply irrational act that only harmed Germany economically and militarily. Aly soundly debunks this myth. He writes: "To put it another way: the railroad system in the East, already overstretched by the war in the Soviet Union, was placed under increasing strain with every day that the Warsaw Ghetto remained in existence. Even under a policy of total starvation, several hundred wagon-loads of goods had to be shipped in every day to keep the ghetto supplied, whereas the carriage costs involved in transporting those people to their death were much lower--and they were incurred only once." (p. 184). Nor did the extermination of the Jews create a labor shortage and hinder wartime production. Just the opposite: It was part of the 1942-1943 productivity-enhancing elimination/consolidation of 144,100 businesses in just the GG. (pp. 210-213). [Of course, some Jewish laborers, deemed productive throughout, were kept alive, and survived the war.]
To increase productivity further, Germans replaced locals entirely, at ratios of 1:2 to as much as 1:10 (p. 269), in such places as western Poland, the Zamosc area (pp. 275-279), and parts of Russia. This was only the beginning of the planned systematic Germanization of Slavic lands.
German planners spoke of at least 30-50 million "surplus" Slavs. (p. 159). Those who emphasize Poles and Jews as unequal victims are prone to cite Erhard Wetzel, who had said that obviously Poles couldn't meet the same fate as the Jews. What is left out is Wetzel's next statement: the fact that extermination of the Poles would cause intolerable world-opinion problems for Germany. (pp. 269-270). Friedrich Gollert came to an identical conclusion. (p. 272). Clearly, the different treatment of Jews and Poles owed to tactical reasons, not to Poles having some inherent right to exist.
However, plans did exist for the extermination of the Poles (e. g., pp. 128-129, 353) and other Slavs. (p. 185, 237). In addition, mass-sterilization methods were being developed--ones that could be done efficiently and preferably with the ignorance of the victims. (p. 265, 268-269, 281, 353).
Fortunately, Germany was defeated. Ironically, the Reich's economic advisor, Helmut Meinhold, toyed with the notion of the desirability of immediate-postwar widespread German population starvation, all because: "Meinhold now saw in Germany the economic chaos he had previously seen in Poland: severe overpopulation due to the influx of refugees, destruction of production facilities and lack of capital. In his terms, the erosion of manpower due to the war had not kept pace with the erosion of capital, at least not as far as the Germans were concerned. Consequently there were too many people living in Germany in 1945 for their combined labour resources to be exploited to the full with the capital that remained." (p. 183).
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