Accounting for the Holocaust: Enabling the Final Solution reveals how accounting practices allowed the attempted annihilation of Jews by the German Nazis and the Italian Fascists to be carried out with machine-like efficiency and devoid of any moral considerations.
This largely hidden aspect of the Holocaust will allow a wide range of readers, both academic and across many sectors of the general population, to understand how the systematic murder of more than six million Jews was expedited by accounting practices and the information that these produced by allowing the humanity of those killed to be denied when they became mere numbers in a process. Readers will gain a new understanding of how the enactment of the scale of the Holocaust was made possible by the way in which accounting practices as technologies of death were used to reduce Jews to a life without value. The numerical calculations, techniques, and reports that constitute accounting practices allowed the systematic murder of Jews to be drained of any considerations that would imply that the numbers and costings were related to prescient human beings. These technologies of death also allowed those who managed and organised the murder of Jews to absolve themselves of the actual killings.
1. Accounting and the Dehumanisation of the Other
2. Accounting for
the Final Solution
3. Accounting and the Jewish Spirit: Justifying Jewish
Persecution
4. Popular Culture and Totalitarianism: Accounting for Propaganda
in Italy under the Fascist Regime (19341945)
5. Accounting for Jewish
Financial Death
6. The Expulsion of Jews from the Accountancy Profession in
Fascist Italy
7. Accounting for the Nazi Aryanisation of German Banks
8.
Accounting and Expropriation of Jewish Property in Fascist Italy 19391945
9.
Accounting for the Fossoli Concentration Camp
10. The Culpability of
Accounting in Perpetuating the Holocaust
11. To Live or to Die: Experiences
of Jewish Accountants and Auditors in Italy 19381945
12. Knowing the
Holocaust
Warwick Funnell is Emeritus Professor of Accounting and Public Sector Accountability at Kent Business School, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK.
Michele Bigoni is a Reader in Accounting at Kent Business School, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK.
Erin Twyford is a Senior Lecturer in Accounting at the University of Wollongong, Gwynneville, NSW, Australia.