1. Mass Death and Contemporary Civilization
The WWI generals let hundreds of thousands die. Stalin disposed of many. Europe had excess population. p. 21 "We are more likely to understand the Holocaust if we regard it as the expression of some of the most profound tendencies of Western civilization in the twentieth century.... Properly executed, extermination is the problem-solving strategy least likely to entail unanticipated feedback hazards for its planners."
2, Bureaucratic Domination
p. 27 "The same meticulous care that goes into the manufacture of a Leica or a Mercedes was to be applied to the problem of eliminating the Jews. ... It was only possible to overcome the moral barrier that in the past had prevented the systematic riddance of surplus populations when the project was taken out of the hands of the bullies and delegated to bureaucrats."
p. 29 "The land of the Reformation was also the land where bureaucracy was able to create its most thoroughly secularized, rationalize, and dehumanized 'achievement,' the death camp."
p. 31 "The culture that made the death camps possible was not only indigenous to the West but an outcome, albeit unforeseen and unintended, of its fundamental religious traditions."
p. 33 "They were perfectly consistent in demanding that the deportees be made stateless before being transported to the camps. They also understood that by exterminating stateless men and women, they violated no law because such people were covered by no law."
3. The Modernization of Slavery
p. 42 "The same tendencies toward rationalization, secularization, and disenchantment that are expressed in both Protestantism and capitalism are also expressed with far less ambiguity and contradiction in the Nazi camps."
p. 46 "Regrettably, few ethical theorists or religious thinkers have paid attention to the highly significant political fact that the camps were in reality a new form of human society. Only when the doomed inmates were kept alive for a time did the new society develop.
p. 47 "Auschwitz was both a slave-labor and an execution center."
4. The Health Professions and Corporate Enterprise at Auschwitz
p. 61 "As Weber could not have foreseen the ultimate potentialities of systematic domination given twentieth century technology, neither could Marx or Engels have foreseen the extent to which terror could replace all other incentives in human exploitation."
p. 65 "it was possible for respectable business executives to participate in and profit from a society of total domination and a venture involving the murder of millions of defenseless human beings without losing their elite status in one of the most advanced modern societies."
p. 67 " ... merely carries to a logical conclusion operational attitudes and procedures that are everywhere predominant in the working of bureaucracy and modern corporate enterprise."
5. The Victims Response" Bureaucratic Self-Destruction
p. 77 "...tha the best and most selfless Jewish leaders presented no greater obstacle when the Nazis took over their communities than did the most opportunistic raise some terrifying questions about the potentialities of bureaucratic domination."
6. Reflections on A Century of Progress
p. 79 ".. a society of total domination creates a world of the living dead that can serve as a prototype of a future social order, especially in a world confronted by catastrophic crises and ever-increasing, massive population redundancy."
p. 90 " .. no theologian has attempted to deal with the problems implicit in the g=fact that the Nazis probably committed no crime at Auschwitz.
p. 91 " We atr sadly forced to conclude that we live in a world that is functionally godless and that human rights and dignity depend upon the power of one's community to grant or withhold them from its members.
p. 92 "It is an error to imagine that civilization and savage cruelty are antitheses. ... Both creation and destruction are inseparable parts of what we call civilization."
p. 97 "Is there not a measure of madness in a system of technological rationality that first produces masses of surplus people and then holds forth extermination as the most 'rational' and pratical solution of the social problems the pose?"
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