In the UK, bookkeeping usually means financial record keeping, but no matter.
No it's often used idiomatically to mean any kind of records or count. As in the above example.
That is a possible reason, but it is quite possible to prepare consolidated accounts, as any multinational corporation does. I'm not sure what the German practice on consolidation was.
No such consolidated accounts have shown up despite more than 65 years of research since they would be extraordinarily interesting to historians. There is a balance sheet from 1944 showing gains to the Reich from occupation costs and Clearing, but closer examination reveals that some of the transfers aren't even registered in that balance sheet.
For example, the Generalgouvernement gave up a Wehrbeitrag to the Reich of 1.49 billion RM by spring 1944, but this only counts the money which actually crossed the border; there was also a trade deficit registered in Clearing of 3.525 million, while the combined Nazi authorities - civil administration, police and thus the SS, plus Wehrmacht plus railways and other agencies, were also funded
locally within the GG's internal budget to the tune of 9.3 billion RM.
Each institution involved in these transfers would have had internal accounts; Heinkel ran a factory in Budzyn which had to pay out in zloty while transferring products to the Reich as exports, seeking payment in RM. The same for every other business, but also the same for every state institution which crossed borders, including the SS/Police.
The problem from the perspective of the Reich Finance Ministry was retaining oversight of central appropriations versus local appropriations. The Reichsrechnungshof - one of the functional equivalents of the office for budget management in the US today - certainly toured the occupied territories and found gross examples of waste and corruption in many institutions,
including SS commands.
That single offhand remark does not demonstrate an absence of budgeting.
The entire letter demonstrates an absence of what we would regard as properly organised budgeting. 'Geld spielt keine Rolle' is a quote from Krosigk's famous 'Osthyaenen' letter in which he accuses the Ostministerium and other agencies in the occupied eastern territories of massive waste, inefficiency and a lack of proper communication with the RFM.
The Reich Cabinet last met before the war, the Reichstag was a rubber-stamp institution, the basic systems of government were demonstrably breaking down and degenerating within the Third Reich.
Compounding the problem was a distinct reluctance on the part of the regime to raise the tax burden in wartime, so that by the end of the war, there was a significant rise in inflation within Germany proper despite the best efforts of the finance planners to export as much inflation to the occupied territories as possible - which worried them nonetheless/
When Hilberg says 'no budget' he is referring quite clearly to the kind of Budget that is given a capital B, that has been agreed properly by a process of coordination. No such coherent coordination existed in the Third Reich, because it was organised on a polycratic basis and expanded under wartime conditions into a multinational empire of occupation.
This stands in stark contrast to the USSR, where Gosplan continued to function with proper budgeting and centralised
financial planning, under the direction of Voznesensky. There simply wasn't a Voznesensky figure in the war planning of the Third Reich.
It is unlikely that a large bureaucratic organisation could function without financial controls. The Germans introduced a new system of accounts in 1938, to improve financial control, so they were not indifferent to it.
Financial controls are a different matter to a 'Budget'.
Quite, they all had budgets. As Enoch Powell said, power devolved is power retained. You say "there were exceedingly few units whose exclusive task it was to deal with the Final Solution." I find that a noteworthy statement.
Police battalions were rotated from frontline duty (actual combat) to garrison duty to antipartisan duty to carrying out anti-Jewish actions. All it took was to order a paramilitary or even military unit to murder the Jews of a specific locality and they then spent 1/365th of their activity that year wiping out an entire community. Or they were ordered to deport Jews from specific districts and took a month or two months to do so. Then they went back to harvest protection duty or whatever.
So how on earth could their involvement in the Final Solution be 'budgeted'? The costs of maintaining a police battalion would be the same no matter what, varying only in terms of purely logistical expenditures of fuel and ammunition. And once the police battalion had removed the Jews from a specific district in 1941 or 1942, then they spent the rest of the war having virtually nothing to do with the Holocaust.
The same with the Gestapo or Sicherheitspolizei commands, who spent a lot f time pursuing resistance movements or other enemies, and only had to supervise "short, sharp shock" actions in the vast majority of cases. Only a few of the larger Stapoleitstellen had substantial Jewish desks who had prolonged serial deportations to organise, eg in Berlin or Vienna. They drew on other manpower to get their jobs done, in between other tasks.
It also shouldn't be difficult to remember that the KZ system was similarly multifunctional. Auschwitz continued to function as a KZ for political prisoners, mainly Poles, throughout its existence. It was
also a labour camp complex. It was in a continual process of construction, which was justified to the relevant authorities such as the Speer Ministry, who had the ability to choke off building supplies, in terms of its contribution to the war effort and production.
The reason to co-locate a destruction function on a production and construction site was to benefit from the economics of location; it was infinitely cheaper from a practical as well as financial perspective to ship the same groups to the same site, sort them out, and lose the costs in a much larger project. The crematoria, which were built x 4 for no other purpose than to carry out the Final Solution, were the single largest construction cost in the budget for Birkenau. But as a proportion of the total costs of constructing Birkenau they were not significant.
It was largely self-financing then, OK, I can see that.
Yes and no. The Final Solution turned a global profit for the Nazi regime because of the plunder of Jewish property and the exploitation of Jewish labour. But the profits were mostly realised in other fiscal territories to where it was carried out. The financial authorities on a district level in the Reich oversaw the expropriation of most of the wealth that German Jews might have possessed, long before the SS robbed the same Jews of their last money, jewellery or gold teeth. Auschwitz almost certainly did not turn a unit "profit" despite shipping out quite large quantities of valuables and despite hiring out quite substantial numbers of forced labourers to private and state owned businesses.
The Nazis charged their Axis allies transportation costs when handing over Slovakian or Croatian Jews; Slovakian Jewish property flowed into the Slovakian exchequer, but the Slovaks then were burdened by a large Clearing debt with the Third Reich. In the French case, the costs of deportation were simply dumped onto the military administration's claims for occupation costs, and the local SS budget was thus not affected since the Wehrmacht paid in the first instance, followed by the French taxpayer and consumer. Meanwhile, the household contents were shipped by a staff under Rosenberg to the Reich for auction, raising further money for the Reich, and also requiring vastly more trains to move than were required for the people being deported.
This is an incomplete picture, but no matter.
Of course it is incomplete. The works on finance in the Generalgouvernement run to many thousands of pages.
There seems to be some confusion here, as costs are not included in balance sheets, but in income and expenditure accounts. But again, no matter.
The confusion is yours, to ignore the inverted commas around 'balance sheet'. Globocnik's report on the economic aspects of Aktion Reinhard is not an actual accountancy balance sheet. It simply states costs i.e. expenditures and then notes income.
My point was that 11 million RM costs for setting up Aktion Reinhard excludes an awful lot of items. The figure almost certainly pertains to the cost of constructing the facilities and a few other incidental expenditures. The evidence indicates that the SS men continued to be paid directly from Berlin by T4.
The 11 million RM figure clearly doesn't include the railway costs of deporting Jews to the camps, or the costs of 'hiring' the Ordnungspolizei and Sicherheitspolizei units who carried out the deportations and accompanied the trains to the camps.
So I would expect the civil administration accounts to show costs for deportations and the SS to show freight costs. The Ostbahn could net the amount out or show it as a through cost. This leaves the relationship between the civil adminisration and the SS a bit unclear.
The Ostbahn was a wholly owned subsidiary of the GG civil administration, and the number of Jewish transports even in 1942 at the peak of the deportations was not vast. The task of the Final Solution was fully known to the GG civil administration and even organised by some Kreishauptmaenner with barely any SS involvement at all. Thus, one would expect that the costs of deporting people were as you speculated, borne by the civil administration and effectively lost in the mix.
There are very few surviving records from the Ostbahn, but the few that do survive show that goods trains carrying construction materials to and from the Reinhard camps, as well as trains carrying plundered property to the Lublin sorting depots, were registered as Waffen-SS trains in order to secure transport permits, which also would have applied to the KZs as a whole since they were formally part of the Waffen-SS. One expects that the "SS" paid for the freight costs but whether this was then merged via the Waffen-SS into Wehrmacht expenditures within the GG is entirely unclear.
There was a very marked duality within the Lublin SS commands; Globocnik had original small-b budgetary authority for Majdanek which was a WVHA-IKL command and thus, part of the Waffen-SS, but seems to have lost this by the time the Reich Finance Ministry drew up the SS budget and itemised Majdanek's staff in late 1942. The Trawniki camp was administratively under SSPF Lublin until August 1943 then became a WVHA camp for a while, then reverted back to SSPF Lublin.
The IVa, Verwaltungsfuehrer, of SSPF Lublin, Georg Wippern, answered in turn to a WVHA command structure going back up to HSSPF in Krakow, and thus to Oswald Pohl. In any case, the WVHA was tasked with receiving and transferring all property from both Auschwitz and 'Lublin', as well as some other territories in the occupied Soviet Union, and the WVHA was Waffen-SS. And precisely because of the WVHA having responsibility for the property side of Aktion Reinhard, the freight costs of moving property from Treblinka to Lublin may not have come from SSPF Lublin at all.
All this was fairly typical for the SS/Police and indeed the Nazi regime. Convoluted chains of command and lines of administrative authority were the absolute norm.
A very good study which deals with much of the above is Jan-Erick Schulte, Zwangsarbeit und Vernichtung, on the WVHA.
They wouldn't be in a position to demand payment without keeping financial records.
the distinction between general financial records an a Budget with a Capital B has already been dealt with. There are very large numbers of surviving payment demands or account sheets from KZs indicating how many days were worked in a month for which firm and giving a RM cost. There is a fair amount of such information for Monowitz, to name but the most obvious example.
These payments would have then been swallowed up in the Abt IV sections of each KZ, which oversaw payment of salaries and most associated costs, and which received transfers from elsewhere to make sure the pay packets of the guards were delivered on time, no different to the Wehrmacht.
"Absorbed in the Reich's coffers" is also a bit vague.
It depended on the type of valuables. Gold, jewellery and foreign currency went to the Reichsbank which was under the Reichswirtschaftsministerium. The RWM had responsibility for overseeing their trade or issue. Any gold, jewellery or foreign currency that was not stolen by SS men in the camps went to Germany. Those were high-value items and generated specific regulations from the WVHA regarding their disposal. There are transport orders showing shipments of such valuables being taken to Berlin. The issue was of obvious interest after the war and came up at Nuremberg for example, in conjunction with the case against Walter Funk.
Saying the Reich's coffers is just a casual way of saying the Reichsbank. Those valuables were centrally processed.
Local currency, however, mostly went to other bank accounts controlled by the SS and was then probably recycled into local expenditures. In 1945, when the Poles liquidated the Kommerzialbank AG Krakau, they found an account of the SS-Wirtschafter of HSSPF Ost, marked 'Sond. Kto. R II', with 6.6 million zloties left in the account. This was the same account that was paid into by SS agencies participating in Aktion Reinhard.
One source indicates that 8.9 million RM made it to the Reichsbank from Lublin, mainly consisting of 6.25 million RM worth of foreign currency,which badly needed to be used in trading with neutrals. Globocnik's total figure was 178 million RM, and this included the valuables and cash taken by regional SSPF commands during the deportations, who had to pay them to Lublin.
The stolen goods would have to be turned into cash (sold) or distributed. I have never heard any description of this happening, strange to say.
Try reading more books. The subject is addressed repeatedly, eg in Martin Dean, Robbing the Jews; Ingo Loose, Kredite fuer NS-Verbrechen, on banking in occupied Poland; or Goetz Aly, Hitler's Beneficiaries, which contains a wealth of data even if the conclusions are not widely accepted.
Stolen clothing and personal effects were simply disbursed on a charity basis by the SS largely to ethnic German resettlers in the Warthegau. It wasn't generally sold. Household goods from western Europe were sold via a Rosenberg Office agency; in Poland they were sold locally to Polish neighbours by the civil administration. Properties were expropriated by local trustees or the local authorities who then rented them out, eg in the occupied Soviet Union 'Jewish flats' were being rented out by town authorities and used to offset administration costs, while in Poland this was the responsibility of the Haupttreuhandstelle Ost. Cash went into bank accounts.
Gold, jewellery and foreign currency went to the Reichsbank, but in some rare cases the gold was used locally. Many kilograms of Jewish gold from Salonika was used in occupied Greece to help stabilise the drachma in 1943 during the hyperinflation there. The niceties varied depending on the status of the territory - the Nazis were nothing if not inconsistent in how they oversaw occupied Europe.
Bank accounts were liquidated within the relevant local financial system and the monies credited to other accounts. Businesses were taken over by the HTO in Poland or 'aryanised' elsewhere, most being liquidated. Stocks, shares and financial instruments were taken over where relevant by financial authorities and disposed of accordingly. Indeed large numbers of formerly Jewish owned stocks and shares were traded in the Netherlands during the war.
Again, this is a bit vague on the income side, the only thing you can pay into a bank account is cash.
No, this bank account also took in gold and jewellery for safe-keeping; it seems that when this was sold i.e. valued properly the money was credited back to the same account. Sonderkonto 12 300 was not simply the bank account of Sonderkommando Kulmhof but also cleared through many other costs and gains of the Holocaust in the Warthegau. It helped finance the clothing sorting depot at Pabianice and interacted with parallel sorting operations inside the Lodz ghetto, which then disbursed used clothing w/o payment.
As for quicklime, in a war with so many victims, civilian and military, there would be a huge demand for it. It doesn't look good though, admittedly.
13 tons in a single delivery in June 1942? To a camp which received at most 145,000 deportees in this phase, and then only reaching the final total in September 1942? Which was located very close to the ghettos of the Warthegau and received no long-range transports? Having received multiple shipments earlier than June 1942?
I need hardly add that there are quite a few other documents relating to Chelmno, including a blatantly explicit document stating baldly that 97,000 had been gassed in the gas vans used there. Deniers say that is a forgery, but the arguments are feeble, and are rendered even more feeble when one finds that the same site received masses and masses of quicklime, as proven by an entirely separate set of files.
It is noteworthy, though the massacre was preceded by a military advance, so ammunition might need to be replenished in any case.
The movements of the relevant police formations are crystal clear from almost daily reports in this phase, as are their operations. HSSPF Russland-Sued wasn't near the front and wasn't fighting at the front. It also wasn't having to cope with large-scale antipartisan operations which might have required large ammunition deliveries, because there was much less such activity in Ukraine than elsewhere, and because we know where the units were.
The deliveries of ammunition arrived immediately before it is known that e.g. two battalions took part in a 'blocking action' in Kiev, which is known from RSHA reports to be Babi Yar. That is already 3 separate German sources, and there are many others since the Wehrmacht also reported on the action separately. As with Chelmno, there is no way to advance a convincing forgery argument which can account for all the pieces of documentary evidence. The ammunition delivery is recorded in an entirely separate set of files (of the Generalquartiermeister) to the local Wehrmacht records of the 454th Security Division which talk about the action, never mind records of the 113th Infantry Division whose engineer battalion blew up the sides of the ravine to cover over the mass grave. The RSHA and Police reports are in separate files too.
It's a fair certainty that Mattogno will not think to look for the discussion of these sources in the publications which have mentioned them, because he has hitherto shown zero awareness of the literature on Wehrmacht-SS cooperation during Barbarossa, even though that literature is absolutely enormous.
I agree that the different pieces of evidence need to be put together, though my experience is that when you try to go beyond the evidence it is easy to make mistakes.
All historians have to infer from evidence and use abductive reasoning to arrive at conclusions. You are trying the exact same procedure of inferring - "ammunition delivery, must have been near the front" - but forgot to take into account where the units were in relation to the front. So in the process of abduction, that possible inference can be ruled out completely.
The fact that we have other sources stating baldly what actually happened in Babi Yar needs to be remembered. A delivery of ammunition the day before we know Babi Yar began would most logically be for the Babi Yar action. One cannot pretend the other sources don't exist or assume they were forged and then invent a fanciful explanation for why so much ammunition was delivered.
