Abstract
This chapter compares the relative effectiveness of coercion and vertical trust in the Nazi Holocaust bureaucracy by examining historical data on the number of Jews who perished in Nazi death camps across Europe. Regression analysis presented here indicates that 99 percent of the variation in the number of Jews murdered across the countries of Europe is explained by the size of a country’s pre-war Jewish population, the logistical advantage held by Poland, where the most prolific death camps were located, and the modern theory of bureaucracy concept of vertical trust. Additionally, decomposition analysis suggests that the efficiency bonus provided by the use of vertical trust networks instead of coercion is almost 110,000 Holocaust murders per country.
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Notes
- 1.
Mixon and King (2009) do not include this variable in their analysis.
- 2.
Adding to this advantage is the fact that Poland was home to well over three million Jews at the beginning of World War II, far eclipsing the Jewish populations of those European countries to its west.
- 3.
Mixon and King (2009) do not designate Slovakia as a minor Axis country. Following Mixon and King (2009), countries reporting fewer than 50 Jews killed as part of the Holocaust are omitted from this analysis. This precluded the use of Bulgaria and Finland, each of which reported fewer than ten murders.
- 4.
- 5.
The average pre-war Jewish population in the coercion countries is 562,392, while that for the vertical trust network countries is 507,651.
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Mixon, F.G. (2019). Coercion and Vertical Trust in the Nazi Bureaucracy. In: A Terrible Efficiency. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25767-5_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25767-5_6
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