By which I mean how much did it cost Nazi Germany and its allies in monetary terms. The infrastructure needed to be built (or adapted), personnel needed to be assigned, death squads needed to be trained and armed. Has anyone done an estimation as to how many rescources were expended implementing the “final solution” ?
I have no idea, but are you asking in purely financial terms, or in strategic ones? Shipping cattle cars full of Jews to death camps may not cost very many Reichsmarks if one uses preexisting cattle cars and tracks, but it does preclude using the same equipment to send ammunition to the front.
On the financial front, presumably at least some of the cost was counterbalanced by ‘nationalizing’ the assets of Jews.
Well, I suspect the German gov’t also got to grab all the Jews stuff before sending them to the camps, and once in the camps the Jews and other inmates provided slave labor, so their is a positive side to the balance sheet as well. Given the wealth of some of the Jewish professional class in pre-war Germany, it seems conceivable that the Holocaust was a revenue neutral operation. Indeed, I remember reading that some elements of the German government were against the ‘final solution’ of mass executions because they wanted to keep the slave labor supply for the war effort.
Financial terms, I am aware that it took strategic resources away from the war effort.