Engineers and modern managers in the SS : the business administration main office (SS-Wirtschaftsverwaltungshauptamt) / Michael Thad Allen

In February of 1942, SS General Oswald Pohl amalgamated several lesser offices into the Business-Administration Main Office (Wirtschaftsverwaltungshauptamt or WVHA). Pohl had long managed an array of SS industries, and as war became grim the chief of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, ordered him to convert the expanding concentration-camp system into an industrial plant capable of contributing to war production. The office also contained an elite corps of civil engineers who used prison labor to build underground production facilities for high-tech weapons like the V-2 rockets. A history of the WVHA offers a unique location in which technical competence and extreme ideological commitment came together in modern engineering and management, including their involvement with the institutions of genocide. This dissertation explores the genesis, development, and activities of the WVHA combining narrative history of the institution and a social profile of the SS officers who built this office and, with it, their own careers.