So I'm about 2/3 of the way through this book, which in my case I'm doing the Audiobook:
KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps
First of all, I have to say what an astounding, incredible work this is. It's a painful read. Sometimes you want to just stop. But I've been studying this era for 30 years and now I understand the Holocaust better than I ever have.
There is so much to unpack here, like how the Concentration Camps evolved over time. How the true deliberate murder/extermination policy actually began with Soviet Commisars long before it was applied to the Jews. How there were in fact, very few Jews in the camp until the war kicked off, and they weren't initially imprisoned as Jews, but for other reasons. So much to talk about there, but I'm going to skip to a fascinating point that I sort of felt I knew, but never understood: The socialism of the Holocaust.
Wachsmann in this book goes very deep into the inner workings of the SS. He doesn't really talk about the Nazis and their economic ideology, but I've read enough to know that the socialism behind National Socialism is more than just window dressing. It's not as all-encompassing as in a communist system, but it's there.
However, where socialism REALLY raises its ugly head is in the concentration camps. Beginning with a brick factory at the Sachsenhausen camp, Himmler and his deputy, Oswald Pohl, the head of the SS-WVHA, began to explore ways to turn the SS into an economic engine.
Socialism, of course, has a lot of pseudo definitions, but the official one is government ownership of the means of production. A lot of liberals will use that clinical definition to pretend nothing they do is socialism, but in point of fact, there is no real difference between government "ownership" and government control or direction or mandates. If the government pulls the strings, sets the conditions, controls the finances or excessively regulates an economic activity in a way that sets it apart from the market economy (particularly setting it up at an advantage), then it's socialism.
What the SS did through the WVHA was set up a government run economic system using slave labor in direct competition with private business interests. (A quick note, several historians object to calling concentration camp victims as "slave labor" because in slavery, the owner has a vested economic interest in promoting the life and welfare of his slaves, because they are a perishable asset, whereas concentration camp victims were intentionally worked to death, thus making them perishing assets).
The project started, as I noted, with a brick factory. When the plans were unveiled for the new Germania city development and some of the monumental Nazi building projects, the SS got the idea of cornering the brick market. But immediately they ran into a common fallacy of socialism: non-market-driven entities frequently overpromise and underperform, because they don't have to worry about costs, and because non-market-related priorities distract them from their job. In the case of modern American socialism, this is something like hiring "diversity" consultants or some other nonsense with no relation to the product at the end. But in the case of the Sachsenhausen brick plant, the desire to meet unrealistic timetables, to use camp labor, with its low quality, etc. basically made the factory a flop. The bricks that were made were very poor quality and the project was abandoned.
Of course, they never learned their lesson and over the years, new projects were embraced. This included both civilian-oriented projects like turning out millions of flowerpots mid war, or pots and pans that were substandard and not really useful for the military, but which were forced on the military through the leverage that the SS could bring to bear on the economy, and of course, military-related production. All of it failed. At one point, there was supposed to be a flak gun manufacturing plant at Auschwitz. It never made a single gun.
There were reasons for its failure that were unique to this period in history: The SS had the dual aim of producing economically viable goods while intentionally working its employees to death. You can't fully blame that on socialism, because socialism generally only inadvertently works people to death. But then again, the Kulaks were starved in the Ukraine deliberately too.
But that aside, all the failures intrinsic to socialism were failures here. Now, does that mean you can blame the holocaust on socialism? Certainly not; the concentration camp system existed independent of this economic enterprise, and the gassings would have happened regardless. But to the extent that the Germans turned to slave labor in the camps to engage in economic enterprise and help the war effort, it failed because it was socialistic. A market solution would inherently have required the preservation, proper feeding and non-destructive use of the labor force, particularly insofar as the work needed was skilled work. For the same reason the slave owner does not kill his slave. To borrow a line from "The Ten Commandments" when Moses is protesting about the horrible conditions of the brick makers on the pyramids, the pharoh says he needs the slaves to make more bricks, and Moses replies, "the dead make none."
The movie Schindler's list is a bit stretched in its historical accuracy, but it does contain a crucial point. Schindler cannot run a viable private business if his workers are too starved to do their job, or if they are subject to arbitrary violence and a wholesale elimination of his workforce. The private sector, where it fully used slave labor, had a vested interest in protecting and maintaining its workforce, for exploitation to be sure, but keeping them alive, nonetheless. Socialism, because it is built on a planned economy and has built in forgiveness for failure through the inherent corruption of a monopoly system, does not have any checks. Thus, the socialism of the holocaust was just one more way that the Nazis combined evil and idiocy in the suicidal death spiral they created for the nation they claimed to serve.
KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps
First of all, I have to say what an astounding, incredible work this is. It's a painful read. Sometimes you want to just stop. But I've been studying this era for 30 years and now I understand the Holocaust better than I ever have.
There is so much to unpack here, like how the Concentration Camps evolved over time. How the true deliberate murder/extermination policy actually began with Soviet Commisars long before it was applied to the Jews. How there were in fact, very few Jews in the camp until the war kicked off, and they weren't initially imprisoned as Jews, but for other reasons. So much to talk about there, but I'm going to skip to a fascinating point that I sort of felt I knew, but never understood: The socialism of the Holocaust.
Wachsmann in this book goes very deep into the inner workings of the SS. He doesn't really talk about the Nazis and their economic ideology, but I've read enough to know that the socialism behind National Socialism is more than just window dressing. It's not as all-encompassing as in a communist system, but it's there.
However, where socialism REALLY raises its ugly head is in the concentration camps. Beginning with a brick factory at the Sachsenhausen camp, Himmler and his deputy, Oswald Pohl, the head of the SS-WVHA, began to explore ways to turn the SS into an economic engine.
Socialism, of course, has a lot of pseudo definitions, but the official one is government ownership of the means of production. A lot of liberals will use that clinical definition to pretend nothing they do is socialism, but in point of fact, there is no real difference between government "ownership" and government control or direction or mandates. If the government pulls the strings, sets the conditions, controls the finances or excessively regulates an economic activity in a way that sets it apart from the market economy (particularly setting it up at an advantage), then it's socialism.
What the SS did through the WVHA was set up a government run economic system using slave labor in direct competition with private business interests. (A quick note, several historians object to calling concentration camp victims as "slave labor" because in slavery, the owner has a vested economic interest in promoting the life and welfare of his slaves, because they are a perishable asset, whereas concentration camp victims were intentionally worked to death, thus making them perishing assets).
The project started, as I noted, with a brick factory. When the plans were unveiled for the new Germania city development and some of the monumental Nazi building projects, the SS got the idea of cornering the brick market. But immediately they ran into a common fallacy of socialism: non-market-driven entities frequently overpromise and underperform, because they don't have to worry about costs, and because non-market-related priorities distract them from their job. In the case of modern American socialism, this is something like hiring "diversity" consultants or some other nonsense with no relation to the product at the end. But in the case of the Sachsenhausen brick plant, the desire to meet unrealistic timetables, to use camp labor, with its low quality, etc. basically made the factory a flop. The bricks that were made were very poor quality and the project was abandoned.
Of course, they never learned their lesson and over the years, new projects were embraced. This included both civilian-oriented projects like turning out millions of flowerpots mid war, or pots and pans that were substandard and not really useful for the military, but which were forced on the military through the leverage that the SS could bring to bear on the economy, and of course, military-related production. All of it failed. At one point, there was supposed to be a flak gun manufacturing plant at Auschwitz. It never made a single gun.
There were reasons for its failure that were unique to this period in history: The SS had the dual aim of producing economically viable goods while intentionally working its employees to death. You can't fully blame that on socialism, because socialism generally only inadvertently works people to death. But then again, the Kulaks were starved in the Ukraine deliberately too.
But that aside, all the failures intrinsic to socialism were failures here. Now, does that mean you can blame the holocaust on socialism? Certainly not; the concentration camp system existed independent of this economic enterprise, and the gassings would have happened regardless. But to the extent that the Germans turned to slave labor in the camps to engage in economic enterprise and help the war effort, it failed because it was socialistic. A market solution would inherently have required the preservation, proper feeding and non-destructive use of the labor force, particularly insofar as the work needed was skilled work. For the same reason the slave owner does not kill his slave. To borrow a line from "The Ten Commandments" when Moses is protesting about the horrible conditions of the brick makers on the pyramids, the pharoh says he needs the slaves to make more bricks, and Moses replies, "the dead make none."
The movie Schindler's list is a bit stretched in its historical accuracy, but it does contain a crucial point. Schindler cannot run a viable private business if his workers are too starved to do their job, or if they are subject to arbitrary violence and a wholesale elimination of his workforce. The private sector, where it fully used slave labor, had a vested interest in protecting and maintaining its workforce, for exploitation to be sure, but keeping them alive, nonetheless. Socialism, because it is built on a planned economy and has built in forgiveness for failure through the inherent corruption of a monopoly system, does not have any checks. Thus, the socialism of the holocaust was just one more way that the Nazis combined evil and idiocy in the suicidal death spiral they created for the nation they claimed to serve.