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PARTISAN REVIEW
instance, they had hungry and en'laciated concentration camp inmates carry
heavy stones to erect walls on one day which they made them destroy and
rebuild a day later. Such chicanery, especially in Mauthausen and
Flossenburg, literally worked many inmates to death. By 1944, when labor
shortages had become acute, some Jews also were sent to work in elite
German plants-among them Daimler-Benz, BMW, IG-Farben, Siemens,
and Steyr-Daimler-Puch-where they were given twelve- to sixteen-hour
shifts. If they held out, they nught escape the gas chambers.
Engel carefully analyzes the palimpsest of econonuc and political orga–
nizations in Austria at the time of the
Anschluss
as particularly favorable for
integration to Germany: low GNP, high unemployment rate, stagnant
economy, aftermath of the 1934 civil war. Germany also profited from
Austria's highly educated technical work force, its large reserves of gold
and raw materials, and its potential for the output of energy (alpine water
works), ores (for steel production) and arable lands. By linking all that to
financial information, he shows that the immediate order to surrender
Austrians' (and Jews') foreign assets saved the German state from bank–
ruptcy. That Austria's unemployment rate almost instantly fell from above
20 percent to 3.2 percent between 1938 and 1939, and that this also was a
boon to the consumer economy, accounts in part for much of the
Austrians' initial approval of the
Anschluss.
(As does the careful propaganda
by illegal Nazis in the years before then.) However, Germany gained much
from the (pressured) sale of enterprises at an unfavorable exchange rate
(and eventual conversion) of the Austrian Schilling to the German Mark.
For example, before the
Anschluss
8 percent of banking was in German
hands; in 1945 it had reached 83 percent. In the el ectro-technical indus try
it went from 19 to 72 percent; in the chenucal sector from 4 to 71 percent;
and in the production of machine tools from 7 to 54 percent. All of this
was accomplished with the help of forced labor.
These facts could not have been assembled without the disclosures of
the practices by Swiss banks in relation to Jewish assets, which raised the
hopes of forced laborers who also began to threaten, and even to initiate,
class-action lawsuits. That they organized such efforts, in turn, enabled
researchers to locate and question some of them. Moreover, due to the
recent availabili
ty
of records from the former Soviet satelli te states, and to
the globalization of the market, enterprises that previously were responsible
only to their local jurisdictions now may be sued under American law; and
when American subsidiaries or partner firms exist under a cloud, the value
of their stocks may fall. Therefore, some companies that previously refused
to own up to having profited from inhuman practices now admit their
deeds, though often arguing that they already paid these laborers' wages to
the state-and thus should not have to compensate the victims again.
