I have documented the claim that the reactionary modernist tradition was an important component of modern German nationalism, that it was pervasive within the conservative revolution in Weimar and in the cultural politics of German engineering from the 1870s to the collapse of the Weimar Republic. Before 1933, the Nazis were aware of the tradition and contributors to it. But what happened after the seizure of power? In this chapter I will present evidence suggesting that the reactionary modernist tradition continued up through the very end of the Nazi regime. It did not give way to rural nostalgia or postideological technocratic world views. This is not to say that Luddites and technocrats did not exist in the Hitler regime. Rather, the continuity of reactionary modernist ideology after 1933 was both more pervasive than these other views and more important in accounting for the primacy of ideological politics during the Hitler years. The irrationalist embrace of technology articulated by the reactionary modernists contributed to the mixture of deficient technical innovation and strategic miscalculation that characterized the Third Reich.

Development of a distinctive National Socialist view of technology began well before the seizure of power. At the center of all Nazi views on the subject stood a mythic historical construction of a racial battle between Aryan and Jew, blood and gold. Like the reactionary modernists we have examined so far, the Nazis combined anti-Semitism with approval of technological advance, which is important to note given the frequency with which anti-Semitism and generalized rejections of industrial society have been associated with one another.