In her introduction, Anne Berg warns that reading this book will not be a comfortable experience, and it is most assuredly not. But it is a very important book to read. The totalizing Nazi approach to waste and recycling, Berg deftly shows, created a monstrous political economy that helps explain the very structure and infrastructure of Nazi genocide. As the book moves from the mundane (bottles collected by Hitler Youth) to the ghastly (corpses at Bergen-Belsen), it argues that a German obsession with the extraction of value from raw materials turned desire for efficiency into a machine for torture and mass death.
The book is structured around a double movement: First, a “zero-waste” economy was pursued in Nazi Germany with fanatical zeal, wringing value out of garbage through campaigns to eliminate useless “remainders,” whether they be potato peels or fat skimmed from sinks. Such attempts swelled into magical thinking with schemes to turn sewage into wheatfields and cellulose into sausages. The second move was to include certain groups of people deemed impure, parasitic, and unworthy of even life itself in the “waste” category. These “unworthy” humans—Jews, mentally ill, Roma, Slavs, and other “useless eaters”—became seen over time as direct sources of “raw material” that could be extracted and turned into value by stealing and repurposing both their material existence (from property to clothes, gold teeth, and hair), and by viewing their labor power itself as a value to be extracted. The ultimate result was a squeezing of every last ounce of labor value from slave laborers and concentration camp inmates while at the same time extracting material value from waste.
The book is divided into three sections, each with three chapters. The first three show how the Nazi waste regime took shape, connecting social norms around cleanliness, order, and thrift to state dreams of economic self-sufficiency and fantasies of racially pure communities. Long before war created an increasingly desperate scarcity economy, the Nazi state began to build an extensive bureaucratic infrastructure for managing waste (with positions such as the “Reich Commissioner for Kitchen Garbage”) and promoted technological innovations for waste-utilization. Since utilization involved hard labor (shredding rags, sewing cloth, stewing bones), it wasn’t long before vulnerable institutionalized populations were forced to perform this work to justify their keep and prove their value. At the same time, citizens were encouraged to participate in mass recycling campaigns that tipped into the absurd but solidified the Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community). Berg makes the important point that the seeming innocuousness of recycling and thrift allowed such efforts to enmesh citizens in the Nazi system.
The next three chapters show how war supercharged the Nazi obsession with turning waste into value. Astounding amounts of looted junk and scrap were garnered in Poland by “booty” units that trailed the advancing Wehrmacht, which were then “disassembled, sorted, stored, and loaded” (95) onto trains by slave laborers. As the front moved into the Soviet Union, a huge labor pool of intentionally starved Soviet citizens and POWs toiled in frigid winters to send scrap back to the Reich. While metal flowed westward along rails, the Polish textile industry was retooled to serve a Germany desperate for textiles due to economic mismanagement and wartime scarcity. Jewish ghettos became textile recycling and production sites often run by and for the SS until their liquidation. Increasingly, as Berg shows through the important example of the Ost-Faser company, waste products became the main source of raw materials for textiles; Jewish prisoners were given the macabre task of creating felt boots out of human hair from murdered Jews before they themselves died from exhaustion or hunger or were murdered in turn.
The last chapter in this section works like a hinge for the book by showing the growth of the concentration camp system as waste management infrastructure. The camps not only processed industrial amounts of waste materials using slave labor. They mixed labor for putatively productive ends together with labor for the expressed purpose of labor extraction as an end in itself, leading ultimately to death. One stayed alive only as long as one toiled, and the longer one toiled, the less likely it was one would survive. “Extracting materials at all costs and under any circumstances simultaneously served torture and salvage, both in performative and measurable terms” she writes (142), “[h]umiliation and torture were integral to shit work, waste labor, and recycling; over time, they attained the status of systematic practice.”
The last three chapters take the reader to the grim end, when the very things that most offended proper German sensibilities—a lack of hygiene, cleanliness, and order—became a daily reality amidst bombed out cities. Berg first examines the importance of soap in the moral economy of cleanliness and contrasts it against the manufactured misery of the camps. But under bombardment, cities began to overflow with rubble, uncollected garbage, flies, and corpses. Corpse disposal had been a major technical preoccupation for the SS in the genocide against the Jews. In a different register, it now became a problem for decimated German cities as well. By the final chapter, the themes of the book come together in a gruesome denouement at Bergen-Belsen, where mountains of shoes and secondary materials, shipped from the East in a fanatical last attempt to salvage salvaging, towered next to growing mountains of corpses. These two kinds of piles were the “raw material” from which, and from whom, value was extracted until there were no more dreaded “remainders.” But instead of being alchemically transformed into new war materiel, nearly all that remained at the end were piles of rotting materials, corpses, and rubble.
Berg shows how the dizzyingly nightmarish world of Nazi death has a surprising amount to do with fanatical obsessions with zero waste. Reading surviving documents together with corollary evidence, she reveals in new ways how firms intersected with, and grew out of, the party, military, and state apparatus, creating a waste-oriented web. Her narrative style is lively and engaging, adroitly weaving archival material, first person testimonies, and sharp analysis. Berg locates the Nazi case in longer histories of extractive politics that characterized colonialism and in mindsets and practices that extend beyond it. After the collapse of the Nazi regime, she finds ideological throughlines in the tropes of heroic rubble women (Trümmerfrauen) and rubble recycling (Trümmerverwertung), which “[anchor] fantasies of national renewal in collective performances of cleanup” (224). This excellent book demonstrates with unflinching clarity how waste practices enabled citizen and corporate participation in state policies aimed at the brutal extraction of loot and labor and created a system of extreme cruelty. In so doing, it provides a new vantage point for analyzing National Socialism and the Holocaust while reminding readers how dangerous it can become when fantasies of efficiency, resource extraction, and technocracy are coupled with ideologies of superiority.
