This chapter explores the Nazi administrative apparatus as a limit case study of the modern trajectory traced above. I show how various aspects of Nazi administration embody the modern compulsion for compression, calculation, and circulation. This tripartite schema is the operative logic of the Third Reich and results in an orientation towards the world that is logistical.

With their book The Nazi Census, Aly and Roth shed light on a hidden administrative history of National Socialism that had a direct and profound influence in shaping and implementing the Holocaust as an historical event. Their extensive archival research addresses a blind spot in conventional histories of the Third Reich, the fact that ‘hardly anyone has ever […] questioned how people were reduced to an entry in a registration, or how bureaucratic abstraction de-humanized individuals and transported them to a new reality— namely, death.’ In rare instances that statistics and other techniques of administration appear in histories of the Reich, they are typically regarded as secondary to, either, ideas in the minds that dreamed up the camps, or ideological positions that materialized as Nazi state policy. In such cases, administration is reductively conceived as a tool by which humans translate their ideas into reality. Or it is dismissed as the detritus of a vast mythicideological apparatus articulated via more conventional, literary forms of writing and rhetoric. The infrastructure of Nazi administration—including fields like statistics and forms like lists—is elided as noise in the archival channel from which conventional narrative and causal histories of the Third Reich are written. Edwin Black points to Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of European Jewry as a paradigmatic example that, though it outlines the bloodshed and violence mandated by bureaucrats, pays little mind to the specific practices, forms, and methodologies that structured such decisions. ‘In fact, the crucial minutiae of registration are barely mentioned in any of thousands of books on the Third Reich.’