6. Coercion and Vertical Trust in the Nazi Bureaucracy

This chapter compares the relative effectiveness of coercion and vertical trust in the Nazi Holocaust bureaucracy by examining historical data on the number of Jews who perished in Nazi death camps across Europe. Regression analysis presented here indicates that 99 percent of the variation in the number of Jews murdered across the countries of Europe is explained by the size of a country’s pre-war Jewish population, the logistical advantage held by Poland, where the most prolific death camps were located, and the modern theory of bureaucracy concept of vertical trust. Additionally, decomposition analysis suggests that the efficiency bonus provided by the use of vertical trust networks instead of coercion is almost 110,000 Holocaust murders per country.