Unfortunately, though we have some idea of how much deportations cost, we do not actually have records for Operation Reinhard. Although the concentration camps had an actual budget in the German economic records, we do not have records of budgets for Operation Reinhard, or for the other death camps. They may have been destroyed, they may have been lost, or they may have never existed at all. One reason for this, and perhaps the most horrible, may be that much of the killing was paid for by the Jews themselves. Blood money from wedding rings, gold teeth, the sale of clothes, hair, jewelry, trinkets, houses, and bank accounts, and from the labor of the condemned, was likely more than enough to pay for the cost of this industrial slaughter.

We now know that the most intense period of killing was in late 1942 (about 1.5 million people in 100 days, mostly by gassing based on a recent study by Professor Stone of Tel Aviv University). To look at the question of resources we must first look at how and when and where the killing took place. Almost all the Jews killed in the Shoah were killed during or after the summer of 1941 with the beginning of Operation Barbarossa. From this point until 1942 the killing was done primarily through shooting, at least 1.5 million people were killed this way. About two million people were killed in the Operation Reinhard camps (Sobibor, Treblinka, and Belzec). Between 1 million and 1.5 million people were killed in Auschwitz. The rest of the approximately 6 million Jews killed died in Majdanek, in Chelmno, in forced labor or concentration camps, ghettos, death marches, by shooting after hiding or escaping, in battle as partisans, or in dozens of other ways.

In the cases of deportation, the Jews themselves paid for their deaths through train tickets. In cases of mass shooting the homes of Jews would be pillaged, partially to pay for the cost of men and ammunition. In these cases locals were also often hired to assist with the killings, as they were less costly than a German soldier. Sometimes locals would kill their own Jewish populations with little to no prompting or payment by the Germans such as in the case of the Iasi Pogrom in Romania, or the burning of the Jewish community of Jedwabne. Throughout the Holocaust, Jewish wealth was stolen both prior to killing, and at killing sites. Jews were often told to bring there possessions with them on transports, and with the exception of one train from Greece, they paid their own way to the killing centers, they were forced to buy their own tickets to Auschwitz, and that money, and the money they had left in pockets or in bank accounts was then used to buy concrete to build the camps, the gas that was used to kill them and the fuel to burn their bodies, all while leaving enough to line the pockets of those who killed them, and to build weapons of war for the Wehrmacht.