Nazi Slave Labour, Capitalist Rationality, and the Politics of Memory

The Wiener Holocaust Library’s exhibition Nazi Slave Labour: Perpetrators and Victims, now on display in London’s Bloomsbury district, performs an important and overdue service. It confronts visitors with a dimension of the Holocaust that official memory has long marginalised: the vast system of forced and slave labour that underpinned the Nazi war economy and consumed, by the exhibition’s own reckoning, twenty million human beings between 1939 and 1945, of whom 2.5 million perished. In an era when Holocaust remembrance is increasingly aestheticised, moralised, and stripped of historical content, the exhibition’s insistence on the economic foundations of genocide is a welcome corrective.

Two sentences from the exhibition’s accompanying material highlight the scale of what is depicted. It states that I.G. Farben and Krupp “actively ordered human beings as one orders raw material, working them … under ‘life-threatening conditions’ for profit.” However, the exhibition itself never questions, “what social order made this system not an aberration but, for a time, rational?” These two statements embody the core issue of official Holocaust remembrance.

The exhibition highlights the achievement and its limits. The curators rightly challenge the simplistic view separating industrial killing from industrial production. An example—images of a pregnant woman riveting tailfins onto V-1 flying bombs—comes from survivor Eva Clarke’s account of her mother’s experience. This serves as both testimony and a critique of an economic system that prioritised production at the expense of human life. The exhibit emphasises that slave labour was not an extreme ideology but a core part of the Nazi economy.

However, this is where the analysis ends. The exhibition presents its subject as a moral conflict between “perpetrators and victims”—namely, the SS and corporate management versus the enslaved— which is not incorrect but is deeply incomplete. By detaching the moral narrative from the broader social context that created it, the exhibition's framing obscures more than it clarifies. The slave labour system did not arise in 1942 out of ideological extremism; instead, it was the result of a longstanding partnership between German big business and the Nazi regime, predating Hitler’s rise to power. While the exhibition presents the facts, it avoids drawing this conclusion.

The Political Economy of Slave Labour

The infamous persecution of European Jews and the use of millions of forced labourers were not accidental events imposed on German capitalism from outside forces. Instead, these acts were ingrained in its regular functioning. The economic crisis that hit German industry after the Depression, combined with the fall of the Weimar Republic and the growing threat of socialist revolution, created a situation in which the bourgeoisie viewed fascism as a class-centred solution. The Nazi movement aimed to eliminate the organised working class, restore profitability through militarised production, and pursue imperial expansion into Eastern territories.

Slave labour was not a deviation from capitalist rationality but its intensification under dictatorship. Usually, the wage relation conceals exploitation behind a contract seen as between equals. Nazi slave labour exposed the truth: capital exploits labour-power, and with political restrictions gone, it tends toward the literal consumption of the worker's body.

Otto Ambros, a chemist for I.G. Farben responsible for organising prisoner exploitation at Buna-Monowitz, informed his board in April 1941 that “our new friendship with the SS is having a very beneficial effect.” Ambros was later convicted at Nuremberg, released in 1951, and quickly became a consultant for major chemical companies and an advisor to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. This is a significant detail, not just a footnote; it encapsulates an important point.

The exhibition's silence on the capitalist roots of slave labour is deliberate and structural. Companies that financed the Nazi war effort and exploited millions—such as Bayer, BASF, and Hoechst, which succeeded Farben; the Quandt family, now owners of BMW; the Porsche-Piëch family at Volkswagen; Deutsche Bank; and Allianz—were never confiscated, dismantled, or held accountable. Their managerial staff were reinstated because, after 1945, the Western Allies prioritised anti-communism over anti-fascism. This Cold War context required reestablished German capitalism as a defence against the Soviet Union.

The working class that sought justice was politically disarmed by Stalinist parties, which subordinated all national struggles to Kremlin diplomacy. The expropriations in the Soviet zone led not to workers’ control but to a new bureaucratic ruling class. Therefore, the profit-driven relations that made slave labour “efficient” persisted into the postwar order, at least structurally if not explicitly in name. This continuity is exactly what museums, foundations, and corporate sponsors prefer to keep hidden.

The irony is not subtle. One might note, not without irony, that this very presentation appears to circulate through a foundation bearing the name of a major pharmaceutical conglomerate.” The institutions of memory are funded by the inheritors of the very system they commemorate.

The Function of Official Holocaust Memory

The Wiener Holocaust Library’s exhibition performs an important corrective to the dominant imagery of Holocaust memory. By foregrounding the exploitation of twenty million forced labourers—2.5 million of whom perished—it restores to view a dimension of the Nazi project that the iconography of the gas chambers has long overshadowed. The curators show, with stark clarity, that companies such as I.G. Farben and Krupp “actively ordered human beings as one orders raw material,” consuming labour-power under conditions designed to destroy it. This is not merely historical detail; it reveals the economic logic that underpinned genocide.

However, the exhibition stops precisely where the question becomes politically dangerous. It frames slave labour as a moral drama between “perpetrators and victims,” but refuses to situate this system within the crisis of European capitalism that produced fascism. Slave labour did not emerge from ideological fanaticism in 1942. It was the culmination of a partnership between German big business and the Nazi state, forged in the Depression-era collapse of profitability and the bourgeoisie’s determination to crush the organised working class. The exhibition presents the evidence but withholds the conclusion: that the destruction of millions of human beings was not a deviation from capitalist rationality but its intensification under conditions of dictatorship.

This silence is not accidental. It reflects the broader trajectory of contemporary Holocaust historiography, which has increasingly moralised the past while depoliticising it. Museums, foundations, and commemorative institutions—often funded by the corporate successors of the very firms that profited from slave labour—have constructed a memory culture in which the Holocaust is treated as a metaphysical rupture rather than a historical product of capitalism in crisis. The result is a historiography that can catalogue atrocities with forensic precision but cannot explain why they occurred.

The continuity that official memory cannot name is the most revealing. The industrialists who made slave labour “efficient” were restored to their positions after 1945; their corporations survived intact; their wealth shaped the postwar order. The Western Allies, turning rapidly toward the Cold War, prioritised rehabilitating German capitalism over dismantling the structures that had produced fascism. Stalinism politically disarmed the working class that might have demanded justice. Thus the profit relations that made slave labour rational persisted, structurally if not in name, into the present.

Six decades of memorialising have revealed the moral horror of the camps. However, official memory often conceals the social order behind their emergence. The museum format—focused on morality, tragedy, and devoid of political context—serves this purpose well. It separates the Holocaust from capitalism, turning history into tragedy rather than social critique. It depicts fascism as a moral failure instead of a class-based response. While commemorating victims, it also shields the system that produced them. The Wiener Library exhibit exemplifies this pattern; it is not alone, but representative.

The Wiener exhibition, for all its strengths, remains bound by these constraints. It can show the brutality of exploitation, but not the social order that made exploitation rational. It can commemorate victims, but not indict the system that created them. It can illuminate the past, but not connect it to the continuity of capitalist power. Confronting this truth means understanding that “never again” should go beyond moral remembrance. It requires actively dismantling the social order that enabled Auschwitz, not merely honouring its memory. The link between Nazi slave labour and postwar capitalism is not just a historical detail but a current political reality. The corporations that benefited from the Holocaust continue to exist—some funding museums, others involved in governance, with their wealth influencing today. An exhibition cannot capture this. The fight against fascism and capitalism is intertwined. The critical truth that official history avoids addressing must inform contemporary struggles.

Sources and Bibliography

Archival and Institutional Sources

• Wiener Holocaust Library, Nazi Slave Labour: Perpetrators and Victims (Exhibition materials, 2026). Includes curatorial essays, survivor testimonies, corporate documents, and photographic collections relating to forced labour under the Third Reich.
• Arolsen Archives – International Centre on Nazi Persecution. Digital collections on forced labourers, concentration camp prisoners, and corporate exploitation during the Nazi period.
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). Forced labour documentation, including the “Nazi Forced Labour” collection, camp records, and industrial partnerships with the SS.
• Fritz Bauer Institute, I.G. Farben and the Buna-Monowitz Concentration Camp (Travelling exhibition, 2025). Detailed documentation of corporate–SS collaboration in the construction and operation of Auschwitz III (Monowitz).

Primary Sources

• Nuremberg Military Tribunal, United States v. Krauch et al. (The I.G. Farben Trial), 1947–48. Transcripts and verdicts detailing corporate procurement of slave labour, cost calculations, and managerial correspondence.
• Otto Ambros Papers, correspondence with I.G. Farben board members (1941–44). Includes the April 1941 letter noting that “our new friendship with the SS is having a very beneficial effect.”
• Krupp Company Records, 1933–45. Orders for camp prisoners, production reports, and internal memoranda on labour shortages and “special labour deployment.”
• Eva Clarke and Anka Bergman Testimonies, Wiener Holocaust Library oral history collection. Accounts of forced labour in armaments production and survival of pregnancy under slave labour conditions.

Secondary Literature: Forced Labour and Corporate Complicity

• Ulrich Herbert, Hitler’s Foreign Workers: Enforced Foreign Labour in Germany under the Third Reich (Cambridge University Press, 1997). The foundational study of the forced labour system, detailing its economic integration.
• Mark Spoerer, Zwangsarbeit unter dem Hakenkreuz (Forced Labour under the Swastika) (1999). Quantitative analysis of labour deployment, mortality, and corporate profit structures.
• Kim Christian Priemel, The Betrayal: The Nuremberg Trials and German Divergence (Oxford University Press, 2016). Explores how industrialists avoided accountability and were reintegrated into postwar capitalism.
• David de Jong, Nazi Billionaires: The Dark History of Germany’s Wealthiest Dynasties (2022). Documents the Quandt, Porsche-Piëch, and other dynasties’ use of slave labour and postwar rehabilitation.
• Peter Hayes, Industry and Ideology: I.G. Farben in the Nazi Era (Cambridge University Press, 1987). Classic study of corporate strategy, profitability crises, and collaboration with the Nazi state.

Holocaust Historiography and Memory Studies

• Dan Stone, The Holocaust: An Unfinished History (Penguin, 2023). Argues that Holocaust historiography remains incomplete without integrating structural and political-economic analysis.
• Tim Cole, Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler (Routledge, 1999). A critical study of the museum form and the commodification of Holocaust memory.
• Alon Confino, A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (Yale University Press, 2014). Explores ideological dimensions but also the limits of culturalist interpretations.
• Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory (Stanford University Press, 2009). Useful for understanding contemporary memory politics and the depoliticisation of historical violence.
• Tony Judt, “The Past Is Another Country,” in Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005). On the political uses of Holocaust memory in the postwar order.

Marxist and Political-Economic Analyses

• Nick Beams, Imperialism and the Political Economy of the Holocaust (WSWS lecture, 2010). The most comprehensive Marxist analysis of the Holocaust’s economic foundations.
• David North, The Frankfurt School, Postmodernism and the Politics of the Pseudo-Left (Mehring Books, 2015). On the ideological turn in contemporary historiography and the retreat from class analysis.
• Leon Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany (1930–33). Essential for understanding fascism as a class solution to capitalist crisis.
• Clara Weiss, “The Rehabilitation of German Imperialism and the Politics of Holocaust Memory” (WSWS, various articles). On the political uses of Holocaust commemoration in contemporary Europe.

Corporate and Postwar Continuity Studies

• Harold James, The Deutsche Bank and the Nazi Economic War (Cambridge University Press, 2004). Details the bank’s financing of Auschwitz and postwar reintegration.
• Gerald D. Feldman, Allianz and the German Insurance Business, 1933–1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2001). On insurance of expropriated Jewish property and corporate continuity.
• Joseph Borkin, The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben (1978). A classic exposé of corporate complicity and the failure of postwar justice.