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Architects of Annihilation: Auschwitz and the Logic of Destruction

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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.

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.

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).

This eye-opening book, written by a German scholar, goes beyond Nazi anti-Semitism and racism as the sole explanations for German genocidal policies. The Reich had reduced humans to economic commodities.

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 only a concentration camp and death factory. It was also 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 like 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, entertained 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).

Given that Hitler was a frustrated architect himself, the metaphoric title of this book is apt in more ways than just one. In fact, Hitler had all but adopted Albert Speer, a talented architect, as his alter ego, friend and surrogate son, eventually commissioning him to redesign the city of Munich so as to better reflect the grandeur of the thousand-year Reich -- that in the end actually lasted only twelve years.

But the focus of this text is not just on the grandeur of the Third Reich, or only on key members of the upper echelon of the Nazi bureaucracy. It is primarily about the true architects of the Nazi Empire, the petite bourgeoisie: the civil servants, the policy wonks, the intellectuals, demographers, geographers, and other academics, who with cold-blooded, calculated and sterile logic and precision, conceived the models and the abstractions that became the intellectual basis for the machinery of death. It was bureaucrats that fleshed-out and put Hitler's plans on the drawing board, engineered the specifications for them, and helped implement Nazi aggressive war policy and hegemony in general, and the "final solution" in particular.

In what is a surprisingly routine, almost linear (but nevertheless very robust) analysis and investigation of the organizational planning, the political structure and bureaucratic recordkeeping left by the "anal retentive" Teutonic working level bureaucrats, this book connects the dots between what the petite bureaucrats (behind the Nazi throne) were doing as they became intoxicated with prospects of an early Nazi victory, and the actions taken by Hitler's military and diplomats during the period from the first nationwide pogrom against the Jews (Crystal Nacht) to the full operation of the gas chambers at Auschwitz. It was during this period, roughly 1939 to the end of 1941, that Germany was fully flexing its military muscles, rapidly emerging as the dominant power of the world. Hitler, along with his Luftwaffe, U-boats and blitzkreig had completely over-run Europe and now had his petite bureaucrats drawing up plans to overtake the rest of the world.

Among their grandiose plans were new models of world hegemony, plans for large-scale colonization, campaigns of annihilation, expansion to ease population pressures, especially Eastwards, involving the enslavement of the Russians and Slavs, but also for the complete subjugation of Europe. And of course the first item of priority on the new agenda was the clinical elimination of the Jews from German society and then from the rest of the world.

What this book makes clear is that of all of the key components of the Nazi machinery (the personalities of Hitler and his key henchmen, the hysterical fervor of the German people, the self-perpetuating machinery of racist exclusion, the efficient totalitarian system, and the highly compartmentalized, efficient and secret way in which the Nazi regime operated), it still could not have succeed were it not also for the abstract conceptual models, scenarios for aggressive war, plans for colonization and the incessant recommendations for expansion (lebenstraum) as well as the architecture for the final solution, drawn up by the petite bureaucrats and academic intellectuals.

It was intellectualized and bureaucratized dogma, rather than ideological dogma that allowed these models to be sanitized, compartmentalized and then rendered into secret recommendations. Only in this way could they be carefully couched in impersonal and sterile scientific jargon, and then made into careful depersonalized abstractions, which created the necessary "distancing" from human responsibility and moral accountability. In short, it was the petite Nazi bureaucrats, who were the real architects of annihilation, through their clinical analyses and recommendations. It was they who in effect stage-managed the mass extermination, "off stage" as part of a functional bureaucratic requirement for the establishment of the new Nazi world order.

These authors show dramatically how it was the intellectual experts who acted as advisors both to the civilian administration and to Hitler's inner circle, as well as to the SS: That it was young academics and intellectuals, not narrow-minded Nazi ideologues, who conceived of, and argued dispassionately and objectively the merits of their abstract models. It was they who depersonalized these abstractions and then compartmentalized them and turned them into recommendations that became state secrets.

The other subtext of these authors' text is that the modern West has inherited quite a bit from Nazi Germany that was good, among them was the bureaucratic orderliness and clinical efficiency of Nazi Germany. This is true whether we want to acknowledge it or not. The problem arises when we are forced to admit how dangerously uncomfortable and familiar this tableau seems. It even makes me an ex- government intellectual political-military bureaucrat feel extremely uncomfortable, primarily because the formula is so recognizable and so easily generalizable to any modern political/military bureaucracy.

What this suggests is that the very things that shielded Hitler's Germany from moral responsibility and accountability - compartmentalization, intellectualization and the creation of depersonalized clinical abstractions, and secrecy, can happen to any civilized nation. And thus the Nazi experiment in democracy is easily repeatable. Five Stars

If you read this book you will never look at World War II the same again.

Most BIG IDEAS fail. Regardless of whether they are good or bad, moral or immoral, they never get adopted or, if they are adopted, they end up watered down or adhered to only in lip service. On the rare occasions where they are truly carried out, there is usually more than ideology at work. Usually a confluence of many trends, some of them unrelated, come together to make huge paradigm shifts work in practice. Thus it was with Naziism and genocide.

The second to last chapter of this book, for example, deals with the issue of food supplies and German policies in occupied Soviet territory. Very early in the Nazi period, agricultural planners realized that Europe as a whole, and Germany in particular, were net food importers. In the event of full scale war with Great Britain and the USSR, the continent would have to cope with inevitable blockades and a drastic reduction in food supplies. The question then became: how to make up the difference so that the German people would not suffer, thus eroding the war effort and public support for the regime?

First was to get rid of the excess animals. The arithmetic of animal husbandry is that it takes several kilos of grain to produce one kilo of animal flesh. After conquering various parts of Europe, therefore, the Nazis ordered the slaughter of most of the chickens and cattle. This freed up huge amounts of grain, while simultaneously producing mountains of meat that was then stored and kept for future use by German consumers.

But that was not nearly enough. Before WWI, continental Europe received a great deal of grain from the Ukraine and other parts of Russia, but after the Bolshevik revolution those patterns of trade shifted. More important, the USSR in 1941 had more than 30 million more people than before who had to be fed. If Germany was to profit agriculturally and make up the shortfall of a blockade, something had to happen to the extra mouths in the USSR.

Starvation was the key. According to these historians, the Nazi armies deliberately shied away from conquering populous areas of the USSR while concentrating on securing the Ukraine. They were frankly surprised that the population of Leningrad survived their deliberate tactic of encirclement coupled with food blockade. Their goal was that excess Slavic populations would either die or relocate east, to Siberia or elsewhere, leaving a depopulated grain basket that would then supply the Reich. In the long run, when the Slavic population was dead, they would be replaced with German farmers, but before that, it was necessary that the Slavs die so that the Germans could eat meat.

Also in line with this was the deliberate starvation of Soviet prisoners, who died en masse when their Nazi wardens deprived them of food. The authors' documentation of the rapid drop in surviving Soviet POWs is chilling.

The arithmetic of food blockade and starvation is compelling. Once Germany embarked on expansion, food imports had to be replaced, and that necessitated starvation and death for subject peoples.

This is just one chapter in a compelling book. Other chapters deal with the economic logic of expanding German multinational companies by eliminating small scale wholesalers and competing manufacturers, especially in Poland but also in the Reich itself, all in the name of larger scale efficiency. It was, of course, quite convenient that most of the mid-level brokers and small scale manufacturers were Jews, whose property confiscations fueled economic expansion and a more streamlined economy. Leave out the genocidal aspects of the plan, and it sounds remarkably like the gobbling up of small firms that we now call globalization.

I disagree with reviewers who say that this book refutes theories that the Nazis planned genocide from the beginning, and that instead genocide was a byproduct of other policies. Instead, I'd say this book shows that genocide and German expansion, especially in the east, dovetailed so perfectly that it was as if they were made for each other.

I am an avid student of WWII history and the Holocaust, and I must admit that I feel like I knew nothing before I read this book. It meticulously dissects the CULTURE of Germany and the role of the civil servant class in perpetuating the Holocaust (and the role of the citizen in ignoring it). Hitler did not rise to power in a vacuum and, in fact, this book proves that many of the atrocities that were committed were primarily discretionary decisions in the "middle management" levels of the bureaucracy.

I also found much of the reconstruction of the German culture and mindset of the time to be frighteningly close to current American culture. Everything from the promotion of abortion as a convenience to the turning of a blind eye when "unprofitable" people are disposed of (Terri Schiavo, anyone?) can be seen in this evening's news. The social engineering aspect of all this is also getting eerily familiar.

That aside, you must be prepared for a challenging read. This book is a translation from German, and the second book I have read that is so. The translation from German to English is difficult to achieve smoothly. Coupled with the sheer amount of documentation and the scope of the subject, this book does read like a densely packed textbook. But if you are prepared to invest the time and mental juice to apply yourself to it you will come away with an entirely different view of that particular event....and also possibly a different view of your current culture as well....