During World War II, hundreds of thousands of prisoners were worked
to death by the Nazis under a brutal system of slave labor in the
concentration camps. By 1942, this vast network of slavery extended
across all of German-occupied Europe, but the whole operation was
run by a surprisingly small staff of bureaucrats--no more than 200
engineers and managers who worked in the Business Administration
Main Office of the SS. Their projects included designing and
constructing the concentration camps and gas chambers, building
secret underground weapons factories, and brokering slave laborers
to private companies such as Volkswagen and IG Farben.
The Business of Genocide powerfully contradicts the
assumption that the SS forced slavery upon the German economy,
demonstrating that instead industrialists actively sought out the
Business Administration Main Office as a valued partner in the war
economy. Moreover, while the bureaucrats who oversaw Holocaust
operations have often been seen as technocrats or simple "cogs in
the machinery," the book reveals their ideological dedication, even
fanatical devotion, to slavery and genocide in the name of National
Socialism.