The Business of Genocide

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The Business of Genocide: The SS, Slave Labor, and the Concentration Camps is a non-fiction book by Michael Thad Allen, published in 2002 by the University of North Carolina Press. It looks at how the SS ran the Nazi camp system as a business.

The book centers on the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office (WVHA), which controlled the camps and used prisoners as slave labor. Allen shows how the Nazis turned forced labor into profits by contracting with factories, managing budgets, and organizing labor across occupied territories.

By examining documents and records, the author explains how the Nazi system combined administration, industry, and brutality to carry out genocide. The book portrays the Holocaust not only as violence but also as an economy built on prisoner labor.