Economic and cultural plunder and forced labour

Plunder was not a single act of taking property. It moved through identification, legal or administrative seizure, inventories, valuation, storage, transport and final allocation or sale. The ERR, Dienststelle Westen and Möbel-Aktion applied those stages to Jewish art collections and household contents, while Sonderkommando Künsberg removed archives, records and cultural property across occupied Europe under an expanded diplomatic and intelligence mandate.

Robert Scholz, Kurt von Behr and Walter Andreas Hofer illuminate different parts of the cultural-property chain: specialist selection and exchange, the western furniture-confiscation apparatus, and market intermediation for Göring's collection. Eberhard von Künsberg's written target instructions identify a separate military-diplomatic route of seizure. Their profiles preserve object-specific provenance problems and do not treat every confiscation or work in a collection as one person's act.

Banks, the WVHA and industrial groups connected finance to prisoner and forced labour. Karl Rasche supported credit to SS enterprises, Georg Lörner supervised supplies and enterprises using prisoners, and Paul Pleiger sought labour allocations. At IG Auschwitz, Heinrich Bütefisch joined board responsibility, negotiations with the SS and mining ventures using prisoners. The judgments retain important limits, including acquittals on particular counts and the distinction between a managerial decision and every abuse at a plant or camp.

Resettlement policy tied expulsion to labour control and property administration. Herbert Hübner's signed instruction retained expelled Poles as labour, while Wilhelm Keppler helped organise the Deutsche Umsiedlungs-Treuhand as a corporate mechanism for property taken from those displaced. Reading these records together shows economic agency without assigning every transaction by the RKFDV, SS, a bank or an industrial concern to its highest-ranking official.