Eliminating millions of people systematically is no small feat. The nazis had to simultaneously optimize for multiple objectives such as speed of elimination, cost, negative externalities, etc.
Each individual elimination had a monetary cost and time cost. How do you maintain massive throughput? The holocaust is not just limited to camps. You have to build the train systems to get the prisoners there. How do you get the prisoners to the train station? Prisoners are scattered throughout the country in hiding. If you want high throughput, you are going to have to use transportation that moves prisoners in bulk, but that doesn't make sense when you are going out to a field just to catch one prisoner. So it becomes a tradeoff between finding an inexpensive way to capture all prisoners and moving them around. Perhaps did they use a hierarchical system to be able to use the most optimal modes of transportation for each situation, i.e. gather prisoners using inexpensive police cars at once place, then bulk transport them to the train station using trucks, then use the train station, etc. And then what about using pre-existing infrastructure for the war? Certainly the train stations are busy transporting supplies and troops to the front lines. How will you organize the train schedules to avoid disrupting the war effort? There are so many different levels of optimization you can do here.
Then what do you do when you are at the camps? There are lots of useful things you can extract from a prisoner. You can make them work in factories for you, or you can directly extract materials from their body and recycle it. You need to keep prisoners fed if they are going to work, but it doesn't make sense to work everyone given that some people are going to be ineffecient at factory work. How do you create a screening system? How do you determine the optimal meal amounts? What nutrtion to keep in the meal? There are so many different layers of optimization. And then the actual exterimination - how do you create a fast system to eliminate everyone? You need this system to work nearly 24/7, if not faster. You can engineer it on the machine level, but you can also make wide, sweeping changes to the entire process. What method of elimination do you use? Gas chambers? Firing squad? Starvation? Each has its own tradeoffs. How do you dispose of bodies fast enough? So many questions.
The mere thought of being a bureaucrat overseeing the holocaust and answering all these questions and optimizing the whole process makes me feel so... I don't know the right word, excited I guess?
Each individual elimination had a monetary cost and time cost. How do you maintain massive throughput? The holocaust is not just limited to camps. You have to build the train systems to get the prisoners there. How do you get the prisoners to the train station? Prisoners are scattered throughout the country in hiding. If you want high throughput, you are going to have to use transportation that moves prisoners in bulk, but that doesn't make sense when you are going out to a field just to catch one prisoner. So it becomes a tradeoff between finding an inexpensive way to capture all prisoners and moving them around. Perhaps did they use a hierarchical system to be able to use the most optimal modes of transportation for each situation, i.e. gather prisoners using inexpensive police cars at once place, then bulk transport them to the train station using trucks, then use the train station, etc. And then what about using pre-existing infrastructure for the war? Certainly the train stations are busy transporting supplies and troops to the front lines. How will you organize the train schedules to avoid disrupting the war effort? There are so many different levels of optimization you can do here.
Then what do you do when you are at the camps? There are lots of useful things you can extract from a prisoner. You can make them work in factories for you, or you can directly extract materials from their body and recycle it. You need to keep prisoners fed if they are going to work, but it doesn't make sense to work everyone given that some people are going to be ineffecient at factory work. How do you create a screening system? How do you determine the optimal meal amounts? What nutrtion to keep in the meal? There are so many different layers of optimization. And then the actual exterimination - how do you create a fast system to eliminate everyone? You need this system to work nearly 24/7, if not faster. You can engineer it on the machine level, but you can also make wide, sweeping changes to the entire process. What method of elimination do you use? Gas chambers? Firing squad? Starvation? Each has its own tradeoffs. How do you dispose of bodies fast enough? So many questions.
The mere thought of being a bureaucrat overseeing the holocaust and answering all these questions and optimizing the whole process makes me feel so... I don't know the right word, excited I guess?
