In Nazi Germany, the destruction of large human masses was placed on a technological, industrial basis. The death conveyor, passing hundreds of thousands and millions of people through the concentration camps, worked flawlessly. The Nazis very quickly realized that it was possible to earn money from the mass murder of prisoners.
The origin of the system
The first concentration camp was Dachau, which opened on March 22, 1933. Adolf Hitler, who had just become German Chancellor, needed to strengthen his positions and in places for the maintenance and re-education of political opponents. However, those who violated the criminal law or did not fit into the Aryan standards were also imprisoned in the concentration camp: drug addicts, mentally ill, homosexuals.
As the need for a final solution to the Jewish question and in connection with the influx of prisoners of war captured in the wars unleashed by Hitler with the countries of Europe, a system of concentration camps began to form. Everything was thought out to the smallest detail - from the supply of "material" by rail in echelons, quick sorting, to the destruction of prisoners and the hiding of corpses.
Prisoners were used for medical experiments, both of practical military importance and satisfying the most unbridled and sick fantasies of the "experimenters". There is evidence that the prisoners were forced into prostitution. Some "art lovers" from the camp authorities selected prisoners with unusual tattoos and collected objects from their skin.
The Federal Ministry of the Interior of Germany published in 1967 a report according to which 1,634 concentration camps and their divisions operated in the occupied territories. There were no concentration camps in Germany itself.
According to statistics, 18 million people passed through the concentration camps, of which 11 million were killed.
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The figures are confirmed by the professor of the University of London Nikolaus Wachsmann in the book "History of Nazi concentration camps".
Make money from kills
From places of detention unwanted by the regime and their destruction, concentration camps since 1939 have turned into "self-supporting enterprises", the transition to economic rails is accelerated in 1941. Profit becomes paramount. Forced labor of prisoners is used in manufacturing, agriculture, mines and mines.
At first, the nutritional norms were calculated so as to support life in a free labor force: in the early 1940s, 2.8 kg of bread, 5 kg of potatoes, 400 gr. meat, 200 grams of fat, 100 grams of cottage cheese or 50 grams of cheese, 80 grams of sugar, 100 grams of marmalade, 150 grams of cereals, 225 grams of flour, 84 grams of coffee substitute. The situation worsened in 1944, they began to save money on prisoners, some categories stopped feeding at all.
Mikhail Myagkov, a member of the Academic Council of the Victory Museum, director of the Russian Military Historical Society, calculated that the profit from one concentration camp prisoner reached 1,630 Reichsmarks, together with the cost of killing and disposing of it.
What did the income come from? First of all - gold: jewelry and dental crowns. Only Auschwitz gave 8 tons of gold, and no one knows how much "concentration camp gold" is in Germany's gold reserves, estimated at the end of the war at $ 400-500 billion.
However, the Nazis did not disdain shoes, outerwear, suitcases and even glasses of the destroyed people - all this was stored and then sent to Vaterland for further use by the civilian population.
Soap was brewed from the corpses of the prisoners, which was confirmed by the research of the Institute of National Remembrance of Poland, conducted in 2006. An analysis was carried out of the soap that appeared at the Nuremberg trials.
A rather sophisticated way to make money on prisoners was carried out in Sachsenhausen. It brought together former bank workers, engravers, printers, painters, chemists - for the manufacture of counterfeit British pounds. They were needed not so much to undermine the UK economy as to cover Germany's needs for hard currency. Contrary to the American film Counterfeiters, criminals were not involved in the operation. According to MI-5, in 5 years, 134 million pounds of counterfeits were issued, which is about 10% of the total then world turnover of the British currency.
Konstantin Baranovsky