Not surprisingly, these facts are enough, so far as the radical critics of the West are concerned, to put all of modern society in the Nuremberg trials’ defendants’ dock. Michel Foucault, one of postmodernism’s most prominent representatives, skillfully linked the Nazis’ eugenics obsession with its bourgeois mentality. According to Foucault:

Foucault viewed Nazism as one of the many incarnations of what he called “bio-power”: a form of political control whose main interest is the “administration of bodies and the calculated management of life.”¹² Bio-power manages and directs the biological processes of “propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, [and] all the conditions that can cause these to vary.”¹³ In other words, it is not content, like the old sovereign authority, with the right “to let live”; it seeks to control life entirely, “its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls.”¹⁴ According to Foucault, “bio-politics” appeared in the eighteenth century, and from its inception used life sciences and modern demographics to discipline institutions and regulate populations. Nazism simply brought this enterprise to its climax, actualizing the murderous potential harbored by modern bio-politics from the very start. “If genocide is indeed the dream of modern power,” wrote Foucault, “this is not because of the recent return to the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of the population.”¹⁵

The claim that genocide is “the dream of modern power” features prominently in a controversial essay by the German historian Detlev Peukert, “The Genesis of the ‘Final Solution’ from the Spirit of Science.” The text was first published in German in 1989, but gained renown with its translation into English in 1993.¹⁶ Peukert, a former member of the German communist party, claimed that the Holocaust was the inevitable culmination of the development of modern science. “What was new about the ‘Final Solution’ in world-historical terms was the fact that it resulted from a fatal racist dynamism present within the human and social sciences.”¹⁷ The aspiration of German physicians, biologists, and sociologists to establish a “clean” and “healthy” human society, purged of all “destructive” elements (such as Jews and handicaps), was intimately linked with the grandiose scientific desire to overcome death—if not that of the individual organism, then that of the collective body of the nation. According to Peukert, “The ‘death of God’ in the nineteenth century gave science dominion over life. For each individual human being, however, the borderline experience of death rebuts this claim to dominion. Science therefore sought its salvation in the specious immortality of the racial Volkscörper, for the sake of which mere real, and hence imperfect, life could be sacrificed.”¹⁸ The driving force behind the Holocaust, Peukert would have us believe, was not antisemitism but the corrupt soul of science.

Indeed, one need not look far to see that “Nazi science” was little more than pseudo-science, governed by a political and ideological agenda. National Socialism wished to lend itself a scientific aura, but its attempt to create an ideologically “pure” science, free of all “decadent” elements, gave rise to a hideous farce instead (“Soviet science,” nurtured by communist Russia, fared no better). The crimes of the Ahnenerbe and of the Frankfurt Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene (where Mengele and his colleagues received their training) were not the bitter fruits of an extreme scientific approach, for the simple fact that these institutions had no scientific approach. In her fascinating book The Master Plan, Canadian journalist and author Heather Pringle explains that the Ahnenerbe pretended to use exact scientific methods but was in fact concerned with creating myths: “Its prominent researchers devoted themselves to distorting the truth and churning out carefully tailored evidence to support the ideas of Adolf Hitler,” writes Pringle. “Some scholars twisted their findings consciously; others warped them without thought, unaware that their political views drastically shaped their research. But all proved adept at this manipulation.”²⁰ The institute’s first president, historian and philologist Herman Wirth, went as far as proclaiming in one of his lectures that “the time has now passed… when science believed its task was to search for the truth, such as it is. Now the task of science is to proceed with its prophecy, to awaken.”²¹ Not surprisingly, Nazi biological racism was far from conducive to serious scientific research. Any finding that did not coincide with the regime’s ideology was censored and concealed, whereas every notion that fit the official line—baseless and fraudulent though it may be—was investigated. In his voluminous study The Third Reich: A New History, historian Michael Burleigh notes:

As Burleigh is careful to stress, the ultimate answer to the charlatanic theories advanced by the Nazi regime was to be found in science itself—objective, rational, and impartial.²³ Credible scientific research exposed the falsifications, contradictions, and lies that fed the utopian eugenics vision and the preposterous myths propagated by Hitler and his minions. The confrontation between “traditional science” and “Nazi science” was never a struggle between two opposite and competing “narratives”—to use the fashionable postmodern jargon—but rather a clash between an uncompromising quest for truth and an unreserved surrender to falsehood.

The attempt to blame modern science for the crimes of the Nazis adds insult to injury, for it ignores the considerable contribution of science to humanitarian causes. Foucault and Peukert vehemently condemn the hygienic obsessions that paved the way to the Final Solution, but they never bother to mention the many scientific and technological accomplishments that served the very populations the Nazis’ racist ideology sought to eliminate. Modern medicine and biology have prolonged the life of the sick and the elderly, brought relief to the handicapped, battled hereditary diseases, purified drinking water in developing countries, and vanquished malaria and cholera—just for starters.²⁴ Hundreds of millions of people who would have been sentenced to sterilization or death by Nazi policy owe their lives to science—and to the countless petit bourgeois who practiced it. Only those hopelessly corrupted by the radical dogmas that run rampant in today’s humanities departments could classify this momentous humanitarian contribution as merely another calculated demonstration of “bio-power.”

 

“The Nazis’ mass murder of the European Jews,” writes historian Christopher Browning, “was not only the technological achievement of an industrial society, but also the organizational achievement of a bureaucratic society.”²⁵ The Third Reich’s death machine was indeed built on a colossal administrative system, one designed to manage all stages and organizational aspects of the extermination process, from the Jews’ concentration and isolation to the disposal of their remains and property. According to certain scholars, this bureaucratic dimension of the Final Solution is conclusive evidence of the Holocaust’s modern nature; moreover, they claim, it is an expression of the anti-humanist nature of modernity itself, taken by the Nazis to its logical extreme.

The discussion on the central place of bureaucracy in modern, industrialized society was launched by Max Weber, one of the founding fathers of sociology. Weber saw bureaucracy as an embodiment of the rationalization process that allows for a systematic, efficient, regulated, and calculated organization of the many aspects of modern life. In such a world, he wrote in 1920, “instrumental action” (zweckrationale), which seeks to assign optimal means to goals, takes precedence over behavior governed by traditions, values, and emotions. Bureaucracy, in which instrumental action finds its pure expression, has become a central element of the modern state, an organizational method “completely indispensable” for the needs of contemporary mass administration.²⁶ Weber recognized the supreme efficiency of this system, but at the same time argued that it imprisoned the individual in an “iron cage of rationality” and deprived him of his humanity: “No machinery in the world functions so precisely as this apparatus of men and, moreover, so cheaply…. Rational calculation… reduces every worker to a cog in this [bureaucratic] machine and, seeing himself in this light, he will merely ask how to transform himself from a little into a somewhat bigger cog…. The passion for bureaucratization at this meeting drives us to despair.”²⁷

Weber’s approach to the modern world was clear-headed and critical, yet not even he could have imagined the active role bureaucracy would play in the systematic murder of millions. The contribution of the administrative system to the Nazi regime was first discussed by the German legal and political theorist Franz Neumann in his book Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism.²⁸ But it was his student, Austrian-born historian Raul Hilberg, who exposed the full scope of the complex, elaborate, and meticulous bureaucracy that was involved in each and every stage of the Final Solution. In his monumental study The Destruction of the European Jews, Hilberg drew on a wealth of previously untouched archival material to turn the spotlight away from the Nazi leadership and onto the vast organization beneath it.²⁹ Hilberg described the Third Reich’s mass-murder operation as “an administrative process carried out by bureaucrats in a network of offices spanning a continent.”³⁰ This process was not run in a centralized or premeditated manner; rather, the bureaucracy that dealt with the Jewish problem “had no master plan, no fundamental blueprint, no clear-cut view of its actions.”³¹ Nevertheless, it advanced steadily and gradually—its measures becoming more and more extreme—toward the Final Solution. What ultimately led to Auschwitz, explained Hilberg, was the dynamic, sometimes chaotic, modus operandi of a system charged with the disposal of a certain group of people (the Jews) and forced to devise effective solutions to the many challenges and difficulties along the way. This argument was subsequently adopted by the functionalist school of Holocaust studies, which believes—contrary to the intentionalist position—that the annihilation of European Jewry was the product not of a monstrous ideological agenda, but of the “twisting road” taken by Nazi executives and executors of all ranks.³²