Free Army of Evil: A History of the SS by Adrian Weale

bejustified, budgets formulated and fiscal probity maintained to the satisfaction of both the civil service and the party. Pohl, drawing on his long experience in naval administration, succeeded in achieving all of this. In addition, he established relationships between his office and the various departments and ministries on whom the SS depended for its budget: the party treasury, the Finance Ministry, the Ministry of the Interior, the Army Ministry and so forth. Among the first SS recipients of state funding were the Special Purpose Troops being formed at various locations around Germany. Later, following Himmler’s appointment as Chief of the German Police in 1936, a much wider range of SS activities was brought under the umbrella of state support, including running the concentration camps. 8
    In the last months of 1934, Himmler had launched the SS’s first “corporate venture” when he founded a publishing house—the Nordland Verlag—which went on to produce a wide range of ideological tracts, training manuals, propaganda texts and novels. 9 This was followed by a porcelain factory—Allach Industries—which produced commemorative plates and figurines as well as symbolic items, like “Yule candlesticks,” that were presented to SS families; a photographic studio; and even a company that produced electric bicycle lights. None of these ventures was intended to be profitable; instead, they were founded to demonstrate the superiority of the SS order and to act as cultural showcases. 10
    Meanwhile, the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps determined to make the camps economically productive. Part of the motivation for this was the shortage of materials and workers for the reconstruction projects that Hitler and his favourite architect, Albert Speer, were developing. An obvious answer seemed to be to force concentration camp prisoners to quarry stone and make bricks, cement and other materials. 11 However, the SS had no experience in managing building projects or indeed any other type of business. This was highlighted by the large financial losses incurred by several of the businesses, particularly the German Earth and Stone Works, which operated brick-makingplants and stone quarries at Buchenwald, Neuengamme, Sachsenhausen, Flössenberg and Mauthausen. This failure was a source of acute embarrassment to Himmler. His solution was to create a new Main Office that would allow Pohl to control all of the businesses and then develop them to generate profits for the SS. Accordingly, in April 1939, the
Verwaltung und Wirtschaft Hauptamt
(VuWHA—Administration and Business Main Office) was set up, with Pohl combining his former tasks of chief administrator and treasurer with two new roles: control over all of the SS’s construction projects and business enterprises. However, the Interior Ministry was concerned that state funds might now be diverted towards SS businesses, so another new Main Office—“Budget and Buildings”—was established to deal with funding and administration, while the VuWHA concentrated on the business side. 12 Pohl recruited young, idealistic, professional managers and engineers to turn around the businesses. They did this by welding the large pool of available, cheap (effectively slave) labour to modern management techniques.
    Inevitably, utilising manpower from the camps required ever-closer relations between the VuWHA and the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps, which was now led by Richard Glücks. Between 1939 and 1942, a new hierarchy of administrators was created within the camps to manage SS production and the outsourcing of prisoner labour to private industry. The logical conclusion of this came in February 1942, when the VuWHA, the Household and Budget Main Office and the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps were merged to create the
Wirtschafts und Verwaltung Hauptamt
(WVHA—Business Administration Main Office). This gave Pohl and his staff direct control over the concentration camps and