The_Holokaust_-_origins,_implementation,_aftermath

GÖTZ ALY
in November 1938 there had been rivalries and clashes of competence between
the various agencies occupied with the Jewish Question, this changed
dramatically after 12 November 1938. Goering declared: ‘Once and for all I
prohibit any separate action. The Reich has taken the matter in hand.’
Thenceforth, anti-Semitic measures were co-ordinated by the Four Year Plan
apparatus; special responsibility devolved upon Erich Neumann, the State
Secretary for Exchange Questions and ‘special tasks of a general economic
nature’. The business of deportations and later extermination was transferred
to the Reich Main Security Office of the SS.
2. Developmental policy and demographic questions
The second phase in the economically motivated radicalisation of policy
towards the Jews began after September 1939 with the conquest and deliberate
territorial fragmentation of Poland. In the eyes of German economic planners,
Poland was underdeveloped and its economy both badly organised and starved
of capital. Above all, however, too many people derived their livelihood from
the land. The economy was characterised by subsistence agriculture: the rural
population satisfied most of its own demands for foodstuffs and consumer
goods, and in the villages barter rather than money was the normal means of
exchange, in other words it was ‘a system insufficient for rationalisation’,
basically impervious to the logic of capitalist penetration and exploitation. In
the minds of German, and indeed other international economists, Poland’s main
problem lay in rural overpopulation. A third of the population would be deemed
surplus to requirements should modern means of cultivation be adopted. The
‘surplus population’ was a ‘burden on the national economy’, or what Theodor
Oberländer called, ‘a symptom of socio-economic sickness’. Overpopulation
had nothing to do with the density of population, but was rather a question of
perceived deviation from an allegedly normal or ‘optima’ population.
The theory of optimum population had been developed at the turn of the
century by a number of economists with the aid of Paul Mombert’s theory of
diminishing returns, or what is known as the Mombert Formula. Mombert
(1876–1938) was Professor of Political Economy at Giessen until his compulsory
retirement as a ‘non-Aryan’ in 1933. His formula consists of a simple equation
which relates population numbers to economic resources. According to this
formula, F = P × L, food-supply (F) equals population numbers (P) times living
standard (L). This reductionist abstraction enables the ‘explanation’ of every
misrelationship between resources and living standards to be made in terms
of population figures, regardless of such factors as unemployment, lack of
capital or raw materials, absence of markets or low productivity and so forth.
Every type of economic crisis, including those occasioned by war, could be
redefined in terms of the ‘population question’.
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