In relation to comments made previously about the sense or sanity of doing it....and other comments about the camps themselves, and how Otto Frank survived...and slave labour...
the Nazis had since the mid-30s a way of utilising the camp labour resource. There was a wholly-owned company registered as the Deutsche Erd- und Stein Gewerk....the DEST...that organised the first concentration camp inmates inside Germany as forced labour and made it available to certain types of industry. Erd und Stein...clay(brick) and stone
- the first forced labour was used in quarries and clay pits and dirty nasty work like brickmaking and firing. With the outbreak of war, the DEST was expanded to use forced labour wherever it was needed, all over Occupied Europe - hence concentration camps....LABOUR camps, not death camps...springing up by the hundreds, even in the Channel islands.
What happened in 1942 with the Wansee Conference in Berlin was the movement of Germany's jews, and the jews from all over Occupied Europe and the East was systematised into the DEST organisation. Jews and others shipped to the camp complexes in the East were divided into those useful on arrival - teenage males, older males....and those NOT useful to DEST - women, the sick, children, OAPS, etc. These last were fed into the death camp system and got rid of - but the others were fed into the DEST system of forced labour in the factories springing up round the large camp complexes, like the Buna artificial rubber plants around Auschwitz.
Forced unskilled labour was gradually utilised in more and more German industry as the war progressed; Albert Speer and others worked "wonders" - from a logistical point of view for the Nazi war effort - in breaking down complicated industrial processes requiring highly skilled labour into a series of simple operations that untrained, unskilled workers could do by hand. It required far more forced labour to carry out these manufacturing tasks end-to-end than if carried out by time-served craftsmen...but that's what the Nazis had - vast resources of untrained, unskilled labour in the concentration camp system.
The DEST had a set of calculations that allowed the most work to be got out of a human male for the longest possible time for the least possible calorie intake. Slave workers would slowly starve, weaken and die across a three month period during which they'd be worked to death simultaneously - although those who worked harder, or seemed to have skills in some way suited to a task would get extra rations. For the labour pool wasn't THAT unskilled - opticians? doctors? dentists? Jewish craftsmen themselves? There were many german factories and industries that used slave labour that found, like Schindler, that it was better to preserve their more skilled and productive slave workers than simply work them to death rather than have to partly train a new intake
Which is how people like Otto Frank survived and were allowed to recover from illness etc. if possible.
It didn't wholly solve the Nazis' labour problem of course - German industry STILL needed hundreds of thousands of trained industrial workers etc. shipped in compulsorily from the Occupied countries....and we're back at the story of the thousands of Dutch workers who hid instead, with their families, the Onderduikers. In the end it went as far down as eventually transferring farm workers etc. from France and other nations to Germany as the Nazis mobilised the very last of Germany's manpower to fight.
the Nazis had since the mid-30s a way of utilising the camp labour resource. There was a wholly-owned company registered as the Deutsche Erd- und Stein Gewerk....the DEST...that organised the first concentration camp inmates inside Germany as forced labour and made it available to certain types of industry. Erd und Stein...clay(brick) and stone
- the first forced labour was used in quarries and clay pits and dirty nasty work like brickmaking and firing. With the outbreak of war, the DEST was expanded to use forced labour wherever it was needed, all over Occupied Europe - hence concentration camps....LABOUR camps, not death camps...springing up by the hundreds, even in the Channel islands.What happened in 1942 with the Wansee Conference in Berlin was the movement of Germany's jews, and the jews from all over Occupied Europe and the East was systematised into the DEST organisation. Jews and others shipped to the camp complexes in the East were divided into those useful on arrival - teenage males, older males....and those NOT useful to DEST - women, the sick, children, OAPS, etc. These last were fed into the death camp system and got rid of - but the others were fed into the DEST system of forced labour in the factories springing up round the large camp complexes, like the Buna artificial rubber plants around Auschwitz.
Forced unskilled labour was gradually utilised in more and more German industry as the war progressed; Albert Speer and others worked "wonders" - from a logistical point of view for the Nazi war effort - in breaking down complicated industrial processes requiring highly skilled labour into a series of simple operations that untrained, unskilled workers could do by hand. It required far more forced labour to carry out these manufacturing tasks end-to-end than if carried out by time-served craftsmen...but that's what the Nazis had - vast resources of untrained, unskilled labour in the concentration camp system.
The DEST had a set of calculations that allowed the most work to be got out of a human male for the longest possible time for the least possible calorie intake. Slave workers would slowly starve, weaken and die across a three month period during which they'd be worked to death simultaneously - although those who worked harder, or seemed to have skills in some way suited to a task would get extra rations. For the labour pool wasn't THAT unskilled - opticians? doctors? dentists? Jewish craftsmen themselves? There were many german factories and industries that used slave labour that found, like Schindler, that it was better to preserve their more skilled and productive slave workers than simply work them to death rather than have to partly train a new intake
Which is how people like Otto Frank survived and were allowed to recover from illness etc. if possible.It didn't wholly solve the Nazis' labour problem of course - German industry STILL needed hundreds of thousands of trained industrial workers etc. shipped in compulsorily from the Occupied countries....and we're back at the story of the thousands of Dutch workers who hid instead, with their families, the Onderduikers. In the end it went as far down as eventually transferring farm workers etc. from France and other nations to Germany as the Nazis mobilised the very last of Germany's manpower to fight.



