reading

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Introduction

Notes

1 Beyond “Ordinary Men” and “Ordinary Germans”

1.1 The failure of easy answers
1.2 From the search for motives to the presentation of motives
1.3 The motivation of organization members
Notes

2 Identification with the Goal

2.1 The formation of an antisemitic fictional consensus
2.2 How ideological indoctrination secured an antisemitic fictional consensus
2.3 From “impassive acceptance” to “active participation”
Notes

3 Coercion

3.1 Forced recruitment and barriers to exit
3.2 Avoiding the membership issue in coercive organizations
3.3 The limits of leeway
3.4 The freedom in coercion
Notes

4 Comradeship

4.1 The pressure of comradeship and the formation of informal norms
4.2 Levels in the formation of comradeship
4.3 How are comradeship norms enforced?
4.4 Mobilizing comradeship by granting leeway
Notes

5 Money

5.1 The function of regular remuneration for the battalion members
5.2 Legalized enrichment through the dispossession of the Jewish population
5.3 Enrichment beyond official forms of remuneration and reward
5.4 The functionality of misappropriation
Notes

6 The Attractiveness of Activities

6.1 Inhibitions against killing and organizational strategies for overcoming them
6.2 The production of motives: dehumanizing the victims
6.3 An organizational culture of brutality
Notes

7 The Generalization of Motives

7.1 The different ways of presenting personal engagement
7.2 Managing one’s self-presentation
7.3 The separation between goals and motives
Notes

8 From Killers to Perpetrators

8.1 The legalization of the state’s use of violence
8.2 Using violence in the gray zones of legality
8.3 The shift in the concept of law under the Nazis
8.4 Facilitating killing by legalizing it
Notes

9 The Normality and Abnormality of Organizations

9.1 Beyond the notion of “abnormal organizations”
9.2 The expansion of zones of indifference in organizations
9.3 Understanding organizations: conclusions
Notes

Appendix: The Sociological Approach and Empirical Basis

Notes

Archives

References

Index

End User License Agreement

First published in German as Ganz normale Organisationen. Zur Soziologie des Holocaust, © Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin, 2014

The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International – Translation Funding for Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers & Booksellers Association).

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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0293-6

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kühl, Stefan, author.
Title: Ordinary organizations : why normal men carried out the Holocaust / Stefan Kühl.
Other titles: Ganz normale Organisationen. English
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA : Polity Press, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Description based on print version

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Ordinary Organizations

Why Normal Men Carried Out the Holocaust