Accounting and the dehumanisation of the Jewish ‘Other’

This chapter provides an introduction to the pivotal role of accounting as a practice to expedite the attempted annihilation of Jews by the German Nazis and the Italian Fascists. Accounting practices provided the means to help deny Jews of their humanity and individuality by reducing them to mere numbers, making them effectively invisible as prescient human beings. Accounting practices used especially by the German civil and military bureaucracies also provided a means for those indirectly involved in mass murder to later claim innocence and ignorance of the consequences of their actions. Thus, accounting was to have both fatal, genocidal and moral purposes in the service of those who orchestrated and carried out the Holocaust.