That left Maurer, the creator and head of the Arbeitseinsatz, now department D II in the WVHA organizational table. Actually, I could have done without the other visits, even the one to Liebehenschel. Standartenführer Gerhard Maurer, a man still young, without any diplomas but endowed with a solid professional experience in accounting and management, had been pulled out of obscurity from an office in the old SS administration by Oswald Pohl and had quickly distinguished himself by his administrative abilities, his spirit of initiative, and his keen understanding of bureaucratic realities. When Pohl had taken the IKL under his wing, he had asked Maurer to set up the D II in order to centralize and rationalize the exploitation of camp labor. I was to see him again several times afterward and to correspond with him regularly, always with the same satisfaction. Maurer represented for me a certain ideal National Socialist who, though he must be a man with a Weltanschauung, still has to be a man who gets results. And concrete, measurable results formed Maurer’s very life. Although he himself hadn’t invented all the measures set in place by the Arbeitseinsatz, he had out of whole cloth created the impressive statistical data collection system that now covered all the WVHA camps. This system he patiently explained to me, itemizing the standardized, pre-printed forms that each camp had to fill out and send in, pointing out the most important figures and the right way to interpret them: considered thus, these numbers became fungible, more legible than a narrative report; capable of being compared and thus conveying an enormous amount of information, they allowed Maurer to follow precisely, without leaving his office, to what extent his orders were implemented, and with what success. These data allowed him to confirm Liebehenschel’s diagnosis for me. He gave me a severe speech on the reactionary attitude of the corps of Kommandanten, “trained in the Eicke method,” competent enough when it came to the old repressive, police functions, but in the main, limited and inept, unable to integrate modern management techniques adapted to new requirements: “These men aren’t bad, but they’re just not up to what’s being asked of them now.” Maurer himself had only one aim in mind: to extract the maximum amount of work from the KLs. He didn’t serve me any Cognac but when I took my leave he warmly shook my hand: “I’m delighted that the Reichsführer is finally looking more carefully into these problems. My office is at your service, Sturmbannführer, you can always count on me.”
