The Nazi hierarchy was slow to comprehend the folly of slaughtering prospective slaves amid the national manpower crisis created by mobilisation of most of Germany’s population of military age. Adam Tooze has calculated that, in all, 7 million men of working age—notably Jews, Poles and Russian POWs—were killed or allowed to die by the Germans, most between 1941 and 1943. He describes the Holocaust as “a catastrophic destruction of labour power.” The Nazis in 1941–42 reasoned that their difficulties in feeding the German people were best assuaged by eliminating every unwanted mouth within their
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