Churches: Supply of proof of non-Jewish descent
Justice Ministry: Elimination of Jewish lawyers; inheritance questions; divorce questions; regulation of names of enterprises
Party Boycott Committee: Boycott of Jewish enterprises
Party Chancellery: Participation of decisions involving the status of Jews
Reich Chamber of Culture: Dismissals of musicians, artists and journalists and barring of writers
Education Ministry: Elimination of Jewish students, professors and researchers
Propaganda Ministry: Suggestions to the press
Economics Ministry: Regulation for the acquisition of Jewish firms
Dresdner Bank and Other Banking Concerns: Intermediaries in takeovers of Jewish firms
Various Firms in Retailing, Wholesaling, Manufacturing, and Construction: Acquisitions of Jewish firms; dismissals of Jewish employees; utilisation of Jewish forced labour in cities, ghettoes and camps; contracting for measures of destruction such as supply of poison gas
Finance Ministry: Discriminatory taxes; blocked funds; confiscation of personal belongings; special budgetary allocations, such as clearing Warsaw Ghetto ruins
Foreign Office: Negotiations for deportations of Jews in foreign countries and of foreign jews in the Reich
Transport Ministry: Transports to ghettoes and camps; utilisation of forced Jewish labour; acquisitions of Jewish personal property
Armed Forces: Logistic support of killing operations in the occupied USSR; direct killings in Serbia and the occupied USSR; ghettoisation in the occupied USSR; discriminatory measures and deportations from France, Belgium, and Greece; regulation of forced Jewish labour in armament plants; employment of forced Jewish labour by army offices; transport questions
Municipal Authorities in the Greater German Reich: Movement and housing restrictions
Protektorat Administration in Bohemia and Moravia: Anti-Jewish measures patterned on those of the Reich
General Government in Occupied Central Poland: Confiscations; ghettoisation; forced labour; starvation measures; preparations for deportations
Ministry for Eastern Occupied Territories: Anti-Jewish measures patterned on those of the Reich
Reichskommissariat of the Netherlands: Anti-Jewish measures patterned on those of the Reich
Führer Chancellery: Staffing of the Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka death camps
Reich Security Main Office: Marking of Jews in the Reich; supervision of the Jewish communities; in the Reich and Protektorat; Einsatzgruppen killings in the occupied USSR; preparations of European-wide deportations
Main Office Order Police: Guarding of ghettoes, trains and camps; participation in round-ups and shootings
Economic-Administrative Main Office: Administration of Auschwitz and Majdanek (Lublin)
Higher SS and Police Leaders in Occupied Poland: Deportations to death camps;
administration of the Chelmno (Kulmhof), Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka death camps
Higher SS and Police Leaders in Occupied USSR: Shootings
All of these agencies combined to create the most systematic and industrialised act of mass murder ever carried out; each of these organisations’ contributions were essential to the process; hundreds of thousands of men and women, from Germany and occupied countries, took part in this process. Simply by reading this list, you will understand the absurdity of any suggestion that the organisation of the Holocaust was only known about by a centralised cadre of senior Nazi officials. But Hilberg’s wider intent here is for us to begin to think about how all of these agencies worked together, how their decisions interlinked. In fact, the challenge has become even more complex since Hilberg published this list in 1992, because, as we’ve just seen, the 1990s and early 2000s unearthed numerous levels of corporate complicity in the Holocaust, not known before. So, how are we to go about this challenge – of trying to understand the Holocaust in its systemic entirety?
*
There have been moments in researching and writing this work when I’ve been overwhelmed by the impossibility of this task. When I’ve sensed that to cover even a small proportion of the activities of a corporation like IG Farben would require an army of researchers. Or to understand, in its totality, the workings of a single company like Shell today would need years of additional work. There have been times when the sheer volume of available material becomes absurd, even paralysing. Last summer, when I returned from investigating the Auschwitz archives, my single (part-time) research assistant called me to the Wiener Library, having located the transcripts of the IG Farben trial which took place in Nuremberg from 1947 to 1948. At least he thought they were the transcripts – there were two volumes, each of around 800 pages, printed on thin paper in discouragingly small print. But, examining these further, it soon became apparent that these were merely selected extracts from the trial. The full transcripts ran to some 12,000 pages and were only available on microfiche at the Public Records Office in Kew. Just to deal fully with this single strand of research, and all the associated lanes and avenues that the court transcripts would then lead you down – only one of maybe forty or fifty extremely important strands of research into corporations and the Holocaust – would take perhaps six months of full-time study. I left the Wiener Library that afternoon with my head spinning. If I had half a dozen researchers for a year! … or maybe I could do it with five? But who would ever be able to fund such a level of enquiry?
However, it is not only a question of volume of material. I sometimes doubt whether our brains are wired to be able to grapple with the real meaning of power, the abstractions of vast economic and political forces. We may rationally be able to take in information, but can we actually understand the meaning and the wider implications of that information? As an example, in 2017 the NGO Global Justice Now published this information about the top hundred economies in the world, noting that sixty-nine of these – shown in capital letters in the table – weren’t countries, but corporations:
We may, rationally, be able to accept that Shell has a larger revenue base than the state of Mexico, or that Volkswagen’s income is greater than India’s, or that BP’s annual financial revenue exceeds that of Russia – but can we understand the political meaning represented by these figures? Our societies still talk in terms of ‘democracies’ and ‘elections’ as if these are where power is located, yet for the last decades power has moved inexorably away from nation states to the free market rampant – from governments and politicians to armies of totally unelected, and unaccountable, men and women. And how many of us could state, with any certainty, that we know the precise place where the nation state ends and the corporation begins? In a ‘public private partnership’, for example? Or even a transcontinental oil pipeline? The corporations’ power and the national governments’ power become entirely blurred. Corporations may talk about autonomy and independence from governments, yet, when they fail, they expect to be rescued, just as the banks were in 2008. How they elude the grasp of responsibility. How they bleed almost invisibly into the fabric of our societies. Can we see the wood for the trees?
*
I was turning such thoughts over and over in my mind yesterday morning when I heard the post arrive – a letter from J. on my doormat. A rarity these days to receive a handwritten letter from a friend. I take it out into the garden with my coffee. I read that his father’s been ill, and J. regrets the fact they never went on the walk through the Peloponnese that they’d often talked about doing, and now it’s too late. Then J. goes on to describe the Kent marshes, close to where he lives, and how glorious they are at this time of year, with the spring just taking hold. He writes that he’s been observing wood pigeons near the local railway, and, in particular, this curious display of behaviour: