SS

The SS enters the book’s account as an institution implicated in the Holocaust and as the recipient of objections from representatives of industry and the German Army. Their protests expose a contradiction at the center of the author’s argument: the destruction of millions of Jews was not merely an extreme form of treating people as disposable labor, but a policy that also consumed human, economic, and military resources that other institutions considered usable.

The SS in the Account of the Holocaust

The SS is mentioned in connection with the extermination of Jews under Nazism. The book notes that representatives of industry and the Army repeatedly protested to the SS that the Holocaust wasted valuable human resources. The reference places the organization within the institutional setting of the camps while also showing that the killing policy was contested on practical grounds by representatives of other sectors.

The Conflict with Economic Utility

The protests serve as evidence against explaining the Holocaust solely through the logic of technological mobilization. From the standpoint of maximizing available labor and other resources, annihilating millions of people was irrational: they could have been put to work, and their destruction consumed resources that industry and the military regarded as valuable. The SS’s place in the passage makes visible the collision between extermination and those instrumental calculations; the latter did not prevent the policy, but registered its costs.

Heidegger and the Limits of Generalization

The book sets this historical specificity against Martin Heidegger’s treatment of the camps in his 1950 essay “Das Gestell.” Heidegger grouped the manufacturing of corpses in the camps with mechanized agriculture and the production of hydrogen bombs as manifestations of technological enframing. The author argues that this generalization obscures what made the Holocaust distinct: it cannot be adequately understood as simply another instance of reducing human beings to usable or disposable material. In this analysis, the references to the SS and the protests addressed to it help establish the gap between a broad account of technological violence and the historically specific project of extermination.