bboc/11_Of_the_origin_of_wars.tex

\chapter[Of the origin of wars]{Of the origin of wars and a paroxysmal form of capitalism}

\chapterauthor{Pierre Durand}

We like to forget, nowadays, to quote Jean Jaurès who affirmed that capitalism carries within it war as the cloud carries the storm.
And one might add that this truth is even more blatant when capitalism took the political form of fascism. To stick to the Second World War and its prodromes, it is indisputable that fascist capitalism was the origin.
Mussolini attacked Ethiopia and Albania, Hitler seized Austria and Czechoslovakia, militarist Japan attacked China and the Soviet Union, Franco, aided by Germany and Italy, established his power against the Republic. 
In a final stage, Hitler started the world war by attacking Poland.

We will probably never know with mathematical precision how many deaths the world killing caused. In all likelyhood fifty million or so from Asia to Europe and Africa, about twenty million of them belonging, civilian or military, to the Soviet Union that can hardly be accused, in this case, of being responsible. 

It was in the general context of this world war that the crudest and most exterminating expression of capitalist exploitation appeared: that to which the concentration camp workforce in the Nazi camps was subjected.
Hitler's \enquote{KZ} originally aimed to remove from the rest of the German population political opponents who were treated so harshly that a very large number of them died between 1933 and 1940.
Subsequently, the SS, who were the guards of the camps, used their prisoners to earn some money by making them work in companies belonging to them, mostly quarries.

From 1942 onwards, the major German war industry trusts demanded that the excessive mobilization of the traditional labour force be compensated for by an intensive use of concentration camp labour.
Various arms factories appeared inside the camps themselves, and outside in \enquote{kommandos} where the way of life and death did not yield in any way to that of the \enquote{KZ} on which they depended — sometimes it was even worse — companies dependent on all branches of big industry: aviation, chemicals, metallurgy, mining, etc. The inmates worked there day and night. They were slaves who could be worked at will. Their lives belonged to the SS, without restriction or limit.

However, as one historian has written, \enquote{We must not fall into the trap. The Nazi \enquote{KZ} and their \enquote{kommandos} did not resurrect the ancient economy.
The manufacturers of V2s, rifles and aircraft, which employed the inmates by the hundreds of thousands, did not belong to a world alien to capital movements, the stock exchange and consolidated balance sheets.}\footnote{Dominique Decèze, \emph{L'esclavage concentrationnaire} (Concentrationnary slavery), FNDIRP, 1979.}.

The grand master of the industrial exploitation of the KZ detainees was a direct deputy to Himmler, head of the SS and all the police, SS General Oswald Pohl, head of the Supreme SS Office of Economic Administration, the WVHA, which he created on 1 February 1942.
It was from Pohl's directives that will be organized what Hitler's minister of justice, Otto Thierak, called \enquote{extermination through labor}.

The principle is relatively simple. The concentration camp workforce must provide such added value that it covers the costs of its maintenance by the SS and ensures the greatest possible profits for the operating firms, which range from the largest (Krupp, Siemens, IG-Farben Industrie, Messerschmidt, etc.), to the smallest — even artisanal type. To satisfy the demands of the industry, the SS rented prisoners to it at a wage price much lower than that of free labor. To remain a beneficiary itself, it must therefore reduce as much as possible the maintenance costs of detainees (food, clothing, housing). Pohl puts his experts to work. They discover that the break-even point corresponds to an average life span of inmates of about eight months.
It is then enough to replace them with the living, the number of which is not lacking in the conquered countries, under various pretexts\footnote{The activity of Pohl and his services was brought to light at the Nuremberg Trials.}.

It is interesting to compare these theoretical calculations to reality. We then see that between 1942 and 1945 — a relatively short period — the average length of life of concentration camp inmates was about 8 to 9 months\footnote{The extermination of Jews and Gypsies in the gas chambers is a different logic. It should be noted, however, that a number of people belonging to these categories were also used as labour at Auschwitz and other such camps from the end of 1942.}.

We will not dwell on the question of Nazi gold stolen from the Jews of Europe and transiting, in particular, through Switzerland, to be \enquote{laundered} and used to buy war material for the Wehrmacht. Here too, it is a traffic carried out according to the strictest capitalist rules.

Less well known is the participation of firms, considered estimable, in the German economy during the war. The British newspaper \emph{The Guardian} published in December 1997 a study by a researcher specializing in the study of the genocide of the Jews.
His name is David Cesarani. Studying what happened in Hungary during the war, he is led to evoke the name of Wallenberg. It is known that Raoul Wallenberg managed to save many Hungarian Jews from death and that he mysteriously disappeared, in the USSR, it seems, after the war.

Cesarani refers to the work of a group of Dutch researchers who studied the Wallenberg case. They made some interesting discoveries. The Wallenberg brothers were Swedish bankers and industrialists who had set up between the two wars with German industrialists a cartel that controlled 80\% of the European market for ball bearings supplied by the firm SKF. Brothers Jacob and Marcus Wallenberg's bank, ENSKILDA BANK of Stockholm, worked closely with SKF, which continued to trade with Nazi Germany throughout the war.
By 1943, SKF had even increased its exports to Germany by 300\%. In 1944, SKF supplied 70\% of all bearings needed for the Reich war industry.
General Spaatz, who was responsible for the bombing, complained that \enquote{all our aerial action (against the German factories) was becoming useless}.

Swedish banks are said to have, at the same time, \enquote{laundered} \$26 million worth of gold looted by the Nazis. The ENSKILDA bank is said to have bought from Germany between 5 and 10\% of a total of 350 to 500 million guilden of securities stolen from Dutch Jews.
This collaboration with Hitler's Germany was brought to light in the aftermath of the war and the Wallenbergs saw their property in the United States frozen. SKF, still linked to the Wallenbergs, then turned to the USSR, which had great needs for ball bearings, and granted it significant credits. As the \enquote{Cold War}  developed, the US stopped all aid to the Soviets and threatened to make public the collaboration of Swedish banks and industry with the Nazis.
Cesarani concludes that Raoul Wallenberg was undoubtedly a victim of these dark intrigues which, by providing Hitler with strategic equipment, caused blood to flow between 1939 and 1945.

\rauthor{Pierre Durand}

Pierre Durand, former Deportee-Resistant to Buchenwald, is a specialist in deportation, author, in particular, of \emph{La Résistance des Français à Buchenwald et à Dora} (Resistance of French people in Buchenwald and in Dora), 2nd edition, 1991, in sale in au Temps des Cerises.