Clemson University TigerPrints All Dissertations Dissertations 12-2010 Deadly Discourse: Negotiating Bureaucratic Consensus for the Final Solution through Organizational and Technical Communication Mark Ward sr Clemson University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/all_dissertations Part of the Communication Commons Recommended Citation Ward sr, Mark, "Deadly Discourse: Negotiating Bureaucratic Consensus for the Final Solution through Organizational and Technical Communication" (2010). All Dissertations. 644. https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/all_dissertations/644 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations at TigerPrints. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TigerPrints. For more information, please contact [email protected]. DEADLY DISCOURSE: NEGOTIATING BUREAUCRATIC CONSENSUS FOR THE FINAL SOLUTION THROUGH ORGANIZATIONAL AND TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION _____________________________________________________ A Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of Clemson University ______________________________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design ______________________________________________________ by Mark Lee Ward, Sr. October 2010 _____________________________________________________ Accepted by: Dr. Steven Katz, Committee Chair Dr. Donald McKale Dr. David Novak Dr. Sean Williams 1 ABSTRACT The Final Solution was largely accomplished in eleven months; its executors, the Nazi SS, faced the constant problem that as killing and plunder escalated so did internal competition and corruption; and the SS deliberately cultivated an intensely competitive and polycratic organizational culture that fit the Nazi worldview of life-as-struggle. By tying these three observations together—that the Final Solution was punctuated, entropic, and polycratic—the problem arises: How did SS organizational communications manage, just barely long enough, to create a temporary social reality that regulated the internal contradictions of its genocidal project and fragmented bureaucracy? This study contends that through its organizational and technical communication—the outwardly normal and communally validated regime of formatted documents, official stationery, preprinted forms, filing codes, organizational nomenclature, and bureaucratic catchphrases— competing SS personnel found a common frame of reference to socially construct rules for temporary cooperation. Thus, their documents became boundary objects (Star & Griesemer, 1989; Wilson & Herndl, 2007) which bridged competing organizational interests within the rhetorical community (Miller, 1994) of desk-murderers. To explore this thesis an evidentiary sample of surviving documents is selected from a single but representative SS bureau, the Security Police (Sipo) Technical Matters Group that administered the mobile gas van program. The documents are analyzed according to Longo‘s (1998) cultural research methodology for technical writing in which texts are examined in their historical and cultural contexts and then analyzed as discourse, followed by an interrogation of how the texts have been ordered by their analysts for ii purposes of study and the analysts‘ relationships to the text. The organization of this project follows this methodology as Chapter 1 introduces the problem; Chapter 2 provides an historical narrative of the gas van program and its antecedents; Chapter 3 reviews the integrative aspects of the Group members‘ national and institutional cultures, and the differentiating aspects of their organizational culture and its various subcultures; Chapter 4 describes the biographies and postwar testimonies of the Group‘s principal actors; Chapter 5 introduces and describes the documents themselves; Chapter 6 offers an analysis, grounded in Miller‘s (1994) concept of the rhetorical community, of the documents‘ textual and visual rhetorics; Chapter 7 provides a discourse analysis of Group members‘ use of linguistic resources; Chapter 8 explores various postwar orderings of the lengthiest and most notorious of the gas van texts, prior to and including Katz‘s (1992a) introduction of the document into the technical communication literature; Chapter 9 interrogates how subsequent analysts within the discipline have ordered the text and what this may reveal about their relationships to it; and Chapter 10 elaborates possible implications for communication ethics. The research problem is answered with the claim that, rather than understanding the Final Solution only as the operation in extremis of Weberian bureaucratic rationality, the desk-murderers may be viewed as a rhetorical community that held chaos at bay through boundary objects—their documents—that deployed metaphors, narratives, and genres onto which competing interests could project their own interpretations while constructing temporary spaces of cooperation. iii DEDICATION To my wife Donna and her unfathomable love and to the Six Million and their unfathomable loss iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The author wishes to acknowledge the invaluable contributions of Steven Katz, who not only chaired the dissertation committee but became mentor, counselor, critic, colleague and friend; Donald McKale, David Novak and Sean Williams, members of the dissertation committee who provided both rigorous critique and ongoing encouragement; Victor Vitanza who, as director of the Ph.D. program, gave me a chance and then guided and mentored me to make the most of it; the many Ph.D. faculty members of the English and Communication Studies Departments who helped guide specific aspects of my research throughout my course of study; Katherine Hawkins and Summer Taylor who supervised my teaching and encouraged me to discover productive synergies between research and pedagogy; the many others, including fellow students, journal editors and reviewers, and conference paper reviewers and respondents, who gave of their time to comment on aspects of my project; my children Mark and Laura, their spouses, and my mother Carolyn who have offered constant encouragement and support; and most of all, my wife Donna who lovingly, unstintingly, and joyfully entered with me into this adventure and, in ways both large and small, made it possible. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page TITLE PAGE ............................................................................................................... i ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................ ii DEDICATION ........................................................................................................... iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ........................................................................................... v LIST OF TABLES ................................................................................................... viii LIST OF FIGURES .................................................................................................... ix CHAPTER I. Can Genocide be Regulated? ................................................................ 1 An Ontological Shift ................................................................. 1 Revisiting the Final Solution ..................................................... 7 Sample, Method, and Chapter Organization .............................16 The Importance of the Study ....................................................20 II. From Darwin to Death Wagons ...........................................................22 Origins of European Anti-Semitism .........................................22 The Rise of Racial Anti-Semitism ............................................33 Development of the Gas Vans ..................................................38 Operational Challenges in the Field .........................................43 III. The People‘s Community ....................................................................47 Organizations as Open Systems ...............................................47 Unifying Principle of Institutional Culture ...............................50 Aspects of SS Organizational Culture ......................................59 Lines of Organizational Authority ............................................68 German Bureaucratic Document Protocols ...............................72 IV. The Participants and Their Motives .....................................................78 Personnel of the Gas Van Program...........................................78 Individual Relationships and Motives ......................................91 vi Table of Contents (Continued) Page V. Documents for Destruction ................................................................ 107 Setting up the Analyses .......................................................... 107 Introducing the Documents .................................................... 115 VI. A Community of Killers .................................................................... 133 Constructing the Rhetorical Community ................................ 133 Protean Metaphors and a ―Safety‖ Narrative .......................... 139 Discovering Organizational Genres in the Texts..................... 147 Visuality in the Rhetorical Community .................................. 155 VII. Discourse of Death ............................................................................ 182 What Discourse