I found this Horn to be nervous, agitated, overflowing with zeal but also with frustration. He was an accountant, educated at the Stuttgart polytechnic university; when the war started, he had been called up by the Waffen-SS, but instead of sending him to the front, they assigned him to the WVHA. Pohl had chosen him to set up Osti, a subsidiary of the German Economic Enterprises, the holding company created by the WVHA to consolidate the SS companies. He was strongly motivated, but faced with a man like Globocnik, he couldn’t hold his own, and he knew it. “When I arrived, it was unimaginable…chaos,” he told me. “There were all kinds of things: a basket factory and carpentry workshops in Radom, a brush factory here in Lublin, a glass factory. Already, right away, the Gruppenführer insisted on keeping a work camp for himself, for self-provisioning as he said. All right, in any case there was plenty to do. All this was managed any which way. The accounts weren’t kept up to date. And production was close to zero. Which is completely understandable, given the state of the workforce. So I set to work: but then they did everything they could to complicate my existence. I train specialists; they take them away from me and they disappear God knows where. I ask for better food for the workers; they tell me there is no extra food for Jews. I ask them at least to stop beating them all the time; they give me to understand that I shouldn’t interfere in what isn’t my business. How is anyone supposed to work properly in such conditions?” I understood why Höfle didn’t much like Horn: with complaints, one rarely succeeded at anything. But Horn had a good analysis of the dilemmas: “The problem too is that the WVHA doesn’t support me. I sent report after report to Obergruppenführer Pohl. I keep asking him: What is the priority factor? The political-police factor? In that case, yes, the concentration of Jews is the main objective, and economic factors recede to the background. Or the economic factor? If that’s it, production has to be rationalized, the camps have to be organized in a flexible manner so that a range of orders can be dealt with as they come in, and above all the workers have to be guaranteed a vital minimum subsistence. And Obergruppenführer Pohl answers: both. It’s enough to make you tear your hair out.”—“And you think that if they provided you with the means, you could create modern, profitable businesses with Jewish forced labor?”—“Of course. The Jews, it goes without saying, are inferior people, and their work methods are completely archaic. I studied the organization of labor in the Litzmannstadt ghetto; it’s a catastrophe. All supervision, from the reception of the raw materials to the delivery of the finished product, is carried out by Jews. Of course there’s no quality control. But with well-trained Aryan supervisors, and a rational, modern division and organization of labor, we could have very good results. A decision has to be made about this. Here, I encounter nothing but obstacles, and I know I have no support.”
Obviously he was looking for some. He had me visit several of his enterprises, frankly showing me the state of undernourishment and poor hygiene of the prisoners placed in his charge, but also the improvements he had been able to introduce, the increase in quality of the products, which mainly served to supply the Wehrmacht, and the quantitative increase too. I had to acknowledge that his presentation was convincing: he did seem to have found a way here to reconcile the requirements of war with increased productivity. Horn, of course, was not informed of the Einsatz, at least not of its extent, and I took care not to speak of it to him; so it was difficult to explain to him the causes of the obstructions from Globocnik, who must have found it difficult to reconcile Horn’s requests with what he regarded as his main mission. But at bottom Horn was right: by choosing the strongest or most specialized Jews, by concentrating them and adequately supervising them, one could certainly provide a considerable contribution to the war economy.
