Anne Berg's "Empire of Rags and Bones"

Anne Berg is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of On Screen and Off: Cinema and the Making of Nazi Hamburg.

Berg applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Empire of Rags and Bones: Waste and War in Nazi Germany, and reported the following:

The Page 99 Test proved to be a poor fit for my book. Page 99 provides framing and background information rather than provide a sense of the role of waste and recycling played in the Third Reich.

Page 99 of Empire of Rags and Bones provides an overview of the infamous General Plan East, the plan for the occupation and colonization of the Soviet Union drawn up in anticipation of the Nazi invasion.

The experiences gathered in Nazi occupied Poland served as a guide. Given the vast expanse of Soviet territory the regime was determined to mine and gut the so-called subsidy zones and develop the so-called surplus zones to extract food stuffs and agricultural products for their own needs.

Of particular interest here is both the unequivocally genocidal intent of the plan and its anticipated differential treatment for agriculturally developed areas. Essentially, the General Plan East provided not only an “economic blueprint” but an environmental categorization of Soviet territory. The main goal was to “develop” the agriculturally fertile regions of the black earth territory in Ukraine. In order to satisfy the needs of the Reich and its occupying forces across Europe from grain reserves in Ukraine, the regime anticipated the deliberate starvation of millions of populations in the more industrialized northern regions, the so-called forest zone, around Moscow and St. Petersburg.

As becomes clear over the rest of the book, even the "colonial development" envisioned as part of the General Plan Ost, ultimately resorted to mining people and the land for secondary and inferior materials. Nazi Germany was a waste regime. It imagined Germans to be a people without space, strapped for essential resources, encircled by powerful enemies and threatened by degeneration from within. Accordingly, Nazi Germany developed an economic rationale that understood waste utilization as resource production. Neither “green” nor driven by environmental stewardship or care, the regime expressly linked waste avoidance and recycling with the politics of internal purging and imperial expansion. Labor extraction was key to the regime’s imperial agenda. The proliferating complex of ghettoes and camps that extended across Nazi-occupied Europe, became a crucial node in the regime’s waste management infrastructure. Under horrendous conditions, prisoners recycled the remnants of war and genocide, they processed waste and secondary materials on an industrial scale, they turned rags and textile wastes into uniforms for the Wehrmacht and German police formations, they disassembled military equipment, sorted metal junk, decommissioned munitions, recycled old shoes, and turned human hair into felt boots for the German army. In this fashion, the Nazi regime squeezed labor and material from subjected populations, attempting to close the raw material cycle and power the war machine to final victory. In the end, the regime suffocated in the glut of the very materials that were to guarantee its economic viability.

Learn more about Empire of Rags and Bones at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue