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Volume V · Page 981
| the peak of over 1,700 employees. He not only directed and administered the fiscal affairs of the entire SS but he was in charge of the administrative aspects of all concentration camps and was head of the tremendous industrial empire which the SS built up under Amtsgruppe W. It is obvious that his duties were not perfunctory or formal but that he was an experienced, active, and dominant head of one of the largest branches of the German military machine. Although he had no actual military duties in the field, he attained the military rank of Obergruppenfuehrer, which is equivalent to the rank of lieutenant general. |
| CONCENTRATION CAMPS |
| Three months after the outbreak of the war, Himmler ordered that "the supervision of the economic matters of these institutions and their application to work is the responsibility of SS Obergruppenfuehrer Pohl." The change in Reich policy by which concentration camps were converted from places of mere detention to places of productive free labor was announced in April 1942, and the ruthless plan of extracting from concentration camp inmates their last ounce of energy in furtherance of the Reich's war plans became operative. It became Pohl's task to implement this policy and to make it work effectively for the Reich. Neither Pohl nor the WVHA had anything to do with the commitment of inmates to concentration camps nor with their release, except by death. Neither Pohl nor any other member of the WVHA had authority to order the execution of concentration camp prisoners. Nor is there any evidence that he or they attempted to exercise any such prerogative. The order for executions originated between the Secret State Police and Himmler personally. The greater part of the task of procuring inmates fell upon the Security Police and the SD, although it is quite evident that the SS and the Wehrmacht in the field rendered no little assistance. Pohl's jurisdiction began when the inmates reached the gates of the concentration camps. Pohl has contended that the inclusion in WVHA of Amtsgruppe D, which was concerned exclusively with concentration camp matters, was more a formal than an actual subordination; and that this Amtsgruppe, under Gluecks and Maurer, continued to operate more or less independently of Pohl, taking most of their orders directly from Himmler. It is probably true to some degree that the heads of Amtsgruppe D, which had formerly been an SS Main Office, resented somewhat their subordination to Pohl and continued to look to Himmler for orders. The fact remains, however, that Pohl as head of the WVHA was the superior of Gluecks and |
