Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 The Argument
- 2 Ethnic Cleansing in Former Times
- 3 Two Versions of “We, the People”
- 4 Genocidal Democracies in the New World
- 5 Armenia, I: Into the Danger Zone
- 6 Armenia, II: Genocide
- 7 Nazis, I: Radicalization
- 8 Nazis, II: Fifteen Hundred Perpetrators
- 9 Nazis, III: Genocidal Careers
- 10 Germany's Allies and Auxiliaries
- 11 Communist Cleansing: Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot
- 12 Yugoslavia, I: Into the Danger Zone
- 13 Yugoslavia, II: Murderous Cleansing
- 14 Rwanda, I: Into the Danger Zone
- 15 Rwanda, II: Genocide
- 16 Counterfactual Cases: India and Indonesia
- 17 Combating Ethnic Cleansing in the World Today
- Works Cited
- Index
9 - Nazis, III: Genocidal Careers
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 The Argument
- 2 Ethnic Cleansing in Former Times
- 3 Two Versions of “We, the People”
- 4 Genocidal Democracies in the New World
- 5 Armenia, I: Into the Danger Zone
- 6 Armenia, II: Genocide
- 7 Nazis, I: Radicalization
- 8 Nazis, II: Fifteen Hundred Perpetrators
- 9 Nazis, III: Genocidal Careers
- 10 Germany's Allies and Auxiliaries
- 11 Communist Cleansing: Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot
- 12 Yugoslavia, I: Into the Danger Zone
- 13 Yugoslavia, II: Murderous Cleansing
- 14 Rwanda, I: Into the Danger Zone
- 15 Rwanda, II: Genocide
- 16 Counterfactual Cases: India and Indonesia
- 17 Combating Ethnic Cleansing in the World Today
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
The previous chapter treated my perpetrators as a statistical sample of individuals, abstracting them from their institutional environments. Yet to understand the process of Nazi genocide, we must investigate its institutions that constrained their members and the careers that they allowed them. Some see Nazi genocide as highly institutionalized, even bureaucratic. Baumann's famous linking of modernity and the Holocaust is in terms of technology and technical reason:
the choice of physical extermination as the right means to the task of Entfernung [removal] was a product of routine bureaucratic procedures: means–ends calculus, budget balancing, universal rule application.
(1989: 17)Feingold elaborates the argument:
The Final Solution marked the juncture where the European industrial system went awry.… Auschwitz [was] a mundane extension of the modern factory system. Rather than producing goods, the raw material was human beings and the end-product was death, so many units per day marked carefully on the manager's production charts. The chimneys, the very symbol of the modern factory system, poured forth acrid smoke produced by burning human flesh. The brilliantly organized railroad grid of modern Europe carried a new kind of raw material to the factories. It did so in the same manner as with other cargo. In the gas chambers, the victims inhaled noxious gas generated by prussic acid pellets, which were produced by the advanced chemical industry of Germany. Engineers designed the crematoria; managers designed the system of bureaucracy that worked with a zest and efficiency more backward nations would envy. […]
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Dark Side of DemocracyExplaining Ethnic Cleansing, pp. 240 - 278Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004