The Business of Genocide: The SS, Slave Labor, and the Concentration Camps (review)

Michael Thad Allen's history of the SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt (WVHA, SS Economic and Administrative Main Office) is a challenging book that will spark controversy. As other reviewers have noted, it is an iconoclastic work intended to put ideology back into our understanding of the Holocaust. In this respect, it is representative of a powerful trend in recent research on Nazi Germany. It does not achieve the purpose that Allen intends.

Allen concludes that the SS managers who populated the WVHA were ideologically committed to their task of murdering Jews. They were not mindless bureaucrats locked in an "iron cage." Instead, they followed an ideology of productivism that they hoped would lead to the defeat of market capitalism and the creation of a new commonweal society in Europe. Rather than causing conflict, Nazi polyocracy actually led to opportunities for collaboration among like-minded managers. Allen contends that industry came to the SS looking for slave labor, rather than the SS pressing slaves on industry, and also that the SS did not try to seize control of the armaments industry, as Albert Speer and others argued. He draws the broad conclusion that organization and ideology reinforce each other to animate modern businesses. Since modern institutions are "quite vulnerable to dissent" (p. 279), by implication these ideologically conscious managers were responsible for the Holocaust and employing slave labor.

This striking set of arguments collapses because it is based on a series of historical misconceptions and conceptual misunderstandings. Allen quite rightly attempts to place his subject in the context of the overall development of the Nazi regime and the war. Yet he stumbles in virtually every attempt to do so. For example, he asserts that the price mechanism ceased to operate in Germany in late 1942 or even 1944. In fact, the imposition of a price freeze had adjourned the market in 1936.

The conceptual problems with the book are even more serious. Allen's critique of the polyocracy concept is ineffective. He overlooks the massive duplication of effort and inflated transaction costs that resulted from the multiplication of organizations and overstates the cooperation that occurred at the working level. It was the ends that were decisive here, not the means.

Allen forthrightly confronts the difficulty of translating the German noun "Wirtschaft." He takes it to mean business. However, this word is better translated as economy. This leads us to the insight that the SS's enterprises were actually nonprofit organizations, with profound implications for those who link profit seeking with oppression.

Finally, the argument that the managerial ranks of the WVHA were filled by highly motivated, ideologically committed Nazis fails for two reasons. First, Allen misuses the concept of productivism to explain their embrace of Nazism. Karl Marx initially defined productivism as the desire by engineers and managers to produce as much as possible without considering market or political factors. In other words, productivism is the desire by engineers and managers to produce without constraint. Contrary to Allen's view, many SS officers gravitated to the Nazi Party because they thought that it would allow them to do just that, produce without constraint. They tacked on a racist component to their rhetoric to accommodate themselves to the Nazis. Secondly, Allen's contention is not borne out by his own data and is refuted by other studies. His own prosopographical analysis shows that less than half of SS officers were committed Nazis.

In conclusion, Allen's strident book fails to achieve its revisionist goals. His main assertions concerning the ideological stance of SS WVHA officers and the implications of polyocracy cannot be sustained. He does successfully show us that businesses sought slave labor and leads us to look at SS enterprises as nonprofit organizations. But readers seeking a reliable account of the activities of the SS WVHA should...