Carceral Recycling: Zero Waste and Imperial Extraction in Nazi Germany
Carceral recycling—a system of camp-based waste labor—was instrumental to the Judeocide. Tracing the connections between resource fetishism and ideas about cleanliness, this article shows that waste utilization lay at the heart of a destructive matrix that exploited camp and prison labor in the service of racial purification and imperial expansion. The Nazi regime imagined itself as resource poor and spaceless and accordingly mined junk and people rather than land in a desperate attempt to close the energy cycle and squeeze annihilative capacity out of forced labor and waste products. As an extreme form of securitization infrastructure, the landscape of prisons and camps manifested the Nazi paranoia about the existential threat that Jews and biosocial others supposedly posed in distinct locations of forced labor and murder. An extraction machine, the camp complex served a crucial economic function in an empire that did not distinguish between junk and jewels. Grounding this story in the history of carcerality, imperial extraction, and discard studies, this article draws attention to the dynamic relationship among ideas about cleanliness, security, and order that firmly ground the Nazi system of plunder and murder in the trajectory of Western imperialism and its enlightened rationality.
The American Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 3, September 2024, Pages 919–950, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae164