Katz_NaziEngineers-1
Using the reading provided by Eric Katz, “The Nazi Engineers: Reflections on Technological Ethics in Hell″ Format: One page, double-spaced, 12-point Times New Roman or Arial font, 1” margins, and left-justified Your header should be one line at the top Use the first 2/3 of the page to briefly summarize in your own words the content, addressing the: -author’s thesis -what evidence the author used (specific sources) -and how the evidence informs his or her argument Finish the last 1/3 of the essay by explaining what ideas you find most insightful or valuable, and why
The Nazi Engineers: Reflections on Technological
Ethics in Hell
Eric Katz
Received: 19 May 2010 / Accepted: 31 August 2010 / Published online: 16 September 2010
� Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010
Abstract Engineers, architects, and other technological professionals designed the
genocidal death machines of the Third Reich. The death camp operations were
highly efficient, so these technological professionals knew what they were doing:
they were, so to speak, good engineers. As an educator at a technological university,
I need to explain to my students—future engineers and architects—the motivations
and ethical reasoning of the technological professionals of the Third Reich. I need to
educate my students in the ethical practices of this hellish regime so that they can
avoid the kind of ethical justifications used by the Nazi engineers. In their own
professional lives, my former students should not only be good engineers in a
technical sense, but good engineers in a moral sense. In this essay, I examine several
arguments about the ethical judgments of professionals in Nazi Germany, and
attempt a synthesis that can provide a lesson for contemporary engineers and other
technological professionals. How does an engineer avoid the error of the Nazi
engineers in their embrace of an evil ideology underlying their technological cre-
ations? How does an engineer know that the values he embodies through his
technological products are good values that will lead to a better world? This last
question, I believe, is the fundamental issue for the understanding of engineering
ethics.
Keywords Engineering ethics � Nazi engineers � Holocaust �
Ethics and technology
E. Katz (&)
Department of Humanities, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ 07101, USA
e-mail: ekatzhome@aol.com; katze@njit.edu
123
Sci Eng Ethics (2011) 17:571–582
DOI 10.1007/s11948-010-9229-z
Introduction
Begin with this fact: engineers, architects, and other technological professionals
designed the genocidal death machines of the Third Reich. The death camp
operations were highly efficient, so these technological professionals knew what
they were doing: they were, so to speak, good engineers. As an educator at a
technological university, I need to explain to my students—future engineers and
architects—the motivations and ethical reasoning of the technological professionals
of the Third Reich. I need to educate my students in the ethical practices of this
hellish regime so that they can avoid the kind of ethical justifications used by the
Nazi engineers. In their own professional lives, my former students should not only
be good engineers in a technical sense, but good engineers in a moral sense.
In this essay, I examine several arguments about the ethical judgments of
professionals in Nazi Germany, and attempt a synthesis that can provide a lesson for
contemporary engineers and other technological professionals. How does an
engineer avoid the error of the Nazi engineers in their embrace of an evil ideology
underlying their technological creations? How does an engineer know that the
values he embodies through his technological products are good values that will
lead to a better world? This last question, I believe, is the fundamental issue for the
understanding of engineering ethics. It is a question, perhaps, that is unanswerable.
One terminological clarification before I begin the argument. In this essay I use
the broad term ‘‘technological professionals’’ to refer to those professionals who
design, create, and use technologies, technological products, and technological
artifacts. Included in this class of professionals are engineers, architects, and specific
kinds of industrial managers. These professions are similar to the professions of
medicine and law, in that they not only employ specific technical expertise but they
also provide a significant social role and purpose. I do not include various types of
technicians who mainly deal with the operation, installation, and repair of
technological products.
The Nazi Doctors and the Concept of Doubling
First consider the Nazi doctors. Although physicians are not technological
professionals as I have stipulated them above, an analysis of the Nazi doctors
provides a useful starting point for an understanding of the possibility of moral evil
in technology. In his groundbreaking account of Nazi physicians, Robert J. Lifton
proposed the concept of ‘‘doubling’’ as a psychological explanation for the behavior
of the medical professionals associated with the worst aspects of the Third Reich:
the T4 euthanasia program, the coercive and inhuman medical experiments, and the
operations of the death camps (Lifton 1986). Lifton asks the question, how could
well-educated professional people act in such horrific and immoral ways, and his
answer is that they created for themselves two selves, two personalities, each of
which would control different aspects of their lives. For Lifton, what he calls
‘‘doubling’’ is ‘‘the division of the self into two functioning wholes, so that each
part-self acts as an entire self.’’ Thus ‘‘an Auschwitz doctor could, through doubling,
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not only kill and contribute to killing but organize silently, on behalf of that evil
project, an entire self-structure…encompassing virtually all aspects of his behavior’’
(p. 418).
Lifton differentiates doubling from the more common notions of ‘‘split’’
personalities and psychic numbing, by which the Nazi doctors could suppress their
feelings in relation to murder. The doubled personalities are holistic, in that they are
full functioning selves adapting for a year or more in an environment that is solely
organized around killing (p. 420). In short, nothing is being suppressed by the
doubling agent; rather the feelings and beliefs are being transferred to another fully
functioning self. Thus, the Nazi doctors were able to avoid guilt ‘‘not by the
elimination of conscience but by what can be called the transfer of conscience. The
requirements of conscience were transferred to the Auschwitz self, which placed it
within its own criteria for good’’ (p. 421)—in this case, the basis of proper behavior
within the killing system of the death camp: e.g., ‘‘duty, loyalty to group,
‘improving’ Auschwitz conditions, etc.’’ Thus an alternative or doubled self can live
in a different world, an alternate reality, with its own set of rules and ethical
conduct. The Auschwitz doctor does not deny reality, for he is ‘‘aware’’ that he is,
for example, performing selections in the killing process, but he repudiates ‘‘the
meaning of that reality.’’ As an Auschwitz doctor, he does not believe that the
selection process is murder. In addition, his original self repudiates and disavows
‘‘anything done by the Auschwitz self’’ (p. 422). Through doubling then, the Nazi
doctor is able to perform evil acts without believing or feeling that he is doing
anything wrong.
The key to this situation, in my view as a philosopher and not a psychiatrist, is the
establishment of a moral universe that is radically different from the moral universe
of everyday reality. This is the context in which Lifton’s doubled self will operate.
The doubled self does not perceive his actions as evil, because they are in agreement
with the standards of the new reality. Lifton claims that although each individual
Nazi doctor had his own style of doubling, ‘‘in all Nazi doctors, prior self and
Auschwitz self were connected by the overall Nazi ethos and the general authority
of the regime’’ (p. 425). Nazi ideology created a new reality. This is then more than
an issue in psychology; it is, rather, what we might call an issue in
moral ontology.
The moral agent comes to believe in a radically evil universe as good. One must act
with self-justification in this radically evil context. Later I will return to the ideology
of the Nazi worldview as it performs this ontological function of creating a new and
evil reality for moral action—but now we must turn to the ideas and actions of
technological professionals in the Third Reich.
Albert Speer and Technological Neutrality: Rebellious Ethics
Consider Albert Speer, who began as Hitler’s architect and rose to the highest level
of the Nazi regime as Armaments Minister; eventually he was in charge of the entire
industrial system of Germany. As an architect, Speer is a technological professional,
similar to an engineer, and thus he provides a useful case for the study of Nazi
technological ethics. Speer was also the highest Nazi not killed during the war or
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executed after it; he was imprisoned, and wrote his memoirs (Speer 1970). This
personal history is an essential resource for examining the moral ambiguities of the
Nazi regime—even granting the fact that we must assume that everything Speer
wrote after the war was self-serving to a significant extent.
Speer endorses a position of technological neutrality as the explanation for his
evil acts. He claims that he was a pure technocrat unconcerned with ethical and
political tasks. In commenting on his lack of concern for the virulent anti-Semitism
of Hitler and the regime, he writes, ‘‘I felt myself to be Hitler’s architect. Political
events did not concern me…The grotesque extent to which I clung to this illusion is
indicated by a memorandum of mine to Hitler as late as 1944: ‘The task I have to
fulfill is an unpolitical one. I have felt at ease in my work only so long as my person
and my work were evaluated solely by the standard of practical accomplishments’’’
(p. 112). Let us put aside the fact that in 1944 the supposedly ‘‘unpolitical’’ practical
tasks of Speer involved control of the entire wartime economy. The point is that
Speer is attempting to create a distinct technological and practical realm that can be
considered as separate from the realm of political and moral value. Technology is
morally and politically neutral. As only an architect, involved with the design and
creation of buildings, urban plans, and other artifacts, Speer cannot be concerned
with the political and moral value of the things he produces for the master he serves.
If we adopt Lifton’s perspective in our analysis of Speer’s technological ethics,
we can see a kind of doubling effect. Note in the quotation above that Speer only
feels at ease in his politically neutral work, as if he had a second technological self:
‘‘so long as my person and my work were evaluated solely by the standard of
practical accomplishments.’’ But Speer’s rationalization goes well beyond the
existence of some kind of psychological doubling and into a critical evaluation of
the nature of the technological professions. In explaining how his managerial style
led to the renewed success of the armaments industry, Speer notes that he had
placed technical people in control of his various programs: ‘‘I exploited the
phenomenon of the technician’s often blind devotion to his task. Because of what
seems to be the moral neutrality of technology, these people were without any
scruples about their activities’’ (p. 212). It is not just Speer the architect who is
unconcerned with political and moral values; all technological professionals,
embedded in a world of neutral technological artifacts, are blind to the normative
dimensions of their work and their products.
In my previous work, I have claimed that Speer’s rationalizations are a prime
example of Langdon Winner’s account of the ‘‘traditional’’ view of the neutrality of
technology, viz., that in any normative analysis of technology the design and
creation of a technological artifact must be separated from its use (Winner 1986;
Katz 2005). I will return to that discussion in the conclusion of this essay. Here I
want to argue that the traditional view of the neutrality of technology is also an
example of moral ontology, i.e., the creation of a particular moral universe. By
making a clear and hard distinction between the design/creation and the use of a
technological artifact, we are essentially establishing two normative realms.
Obviously, there is only one physical artifact, but its meaning, and its subsequent
value, will be different when examined in the two different spheres of reality. From
the perspective of design, we will examine a gun, for example, in light of those
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various characteristics that make it an efficient gun—weight, balance, ease of use,
etc. But from the perspective of use, we will examine the gun in light of the
purposes and goals of the gun, and the attainment (or not) of those goals—shooting
a hunted animal, defense of a home, killing an enemy combatant, etc. There are two
different sets of meaning and value for the gun, for the artifact. Thus, two normative
realms are created when we adopt the traditional view of the neutrality of
technology; this is, again, an expression of moral ontology.
How do the Nazi engineers fit into this picture of moral ontology? The designers
of the crematoria ovens are a good example. The industrial furnace company of
Topf and Sons was a major developer of the efficient multi-person crematorium
ovens used at the SS controlled concentration camps. These ovens were originally
planned for the prisoners who died from ‘‘natural’’ causes—malnutrition, disease,
overwork, or punishment. As historians Jean-Claude Pressac and Robert Jan van
Pelt recount this story, beginning in the late 1930s, the design and construction of
the ovens for the camps were significantly different than crematoria furnaces built
for commercial funeral establishments (Pressac and van Pelt 1994). First, the ovens
lacked any conventional aesthetic features, since there would be no family of the
deceased to witness a ceremonial burning of the corpse. But more importantly,
innovations in furnace technology permitted higher capacity and more efficient
burns in the ovens, so that ovens could be designed to hold two or more bodies at the
same time. There was no need to preserve the integrity of the individual ashes; there
would be no bereaved family collecting the remains. Throughout the history of the
design and construction of the crematoria ovens that were eventually to be used at
Auschwitz and Birkenau, we find ever-increasing chambers for the incineration of
corpses, from two to three to a double-furnace with four chambers each. The more
efficient capacity for the ovens was a necessary requirement for the implementation
of the Final Solution. The increased capacity of the ovens meant that the SS could
handle the increased load of the direct killing operations.
From the perspective of the moral ontology of the traditional view of a neutral
technology the engineers who designed and built these ovens could focus solely on
the design problems with little or no regard for the ultimate uses of the artifacts.
Engineers from Topf and Sons even came to Birkenau to deal with technical
problems, such as the cracking of the smokestacks and uneven heat transference in
Crema IV. Beyond the furnaces, there were serious problems with the ventilation
and exhaust systems that were required for operational gas chambers. In all of these
activities, professional engineers from Topf and Sons or the SS used their best
technical expertise to create the necessary technological artifacts. These technical
professionals seem to be following the dictum of Speer that the technician has a
blind devotion to his practical task, without any concern for moral scruples.
Although Speer himself as far as we know had no connection to the Auschwitz
killing center or any of the other death camps—Speer was sentenced at Nuremberg
only for crimes related to the slave labor camp at the Dora-Mittelbau missile
works—he provides a defense of his actions, and implicitly a defense of the actions
of any technological professional involved in morally questionable projects. Speer’s
defense has two parts. First, he claims that in totalitarian political systems isolation
and secrecy prevent a technological professional from being aware of the
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applications of the technology (pp. 112–13). But in the second part of his defense
Speer cunningly refuses to use this isolation as exculpation for his guilt. Instead he
blames the traditional evaluation of technology as neutral. ‘‘It is true,’’ he writes, ‘‘I
was isolated. It is also true that the habit of thinking within the limits of my own
field provided me, both as an architect and as Armaments minister, with many
opportunities for evasion’’ (p. 113). Thus he claims that he should have known
about the evils of the Final Solution, and his moral failing is that he did not
overcome his self-imposed isolation from political events. Speer clearly accepts the
traditional view of the neutrality of technological artifacts by acknowledging that
one could simply think and act ‘‘within the limits of [one’s] own field,’’ that is, one
can ignore the political and moral realities of the technological project with which
one is engaged. He is morally guilty because he did not escape the limitations of his
technological thinking.
Legal scholar Jack Sammons has called Speer’s position the endorsement of
‘‘rebellious ethics’’ (Sammons 1992). According to Sammons, one adopts the
position of ‘‘rebellious ethics’’ when one claims that to be ethical one must rebel
against the expectations and practices of one’s profession. Indeed, for Sammons,
this ‘‘is the dominant paradigm for the ethics of our professions.’’ It means that ‘‘as
ethical people…we must stand apart from our professional roles in personal moral
judgment of them’’ (p. 77). Clearly, this is the narrative that Speer tells us in his
memoirs. Sammons calls it the position of the ‘‘Pure Technician…the expert who is
not accountable beyond his area of expertise. His technique, he claims, is morally
neutral and he asks to be judged only by whether his means are the most efficient
ones toward whatever end is given to him’’ (p. 79). But the role of the pure
technician leads to moral corruption, as we become consumed, as Speer and the
Nazi engineers, with the task at hand regardless of the human cost. The only way to
avoid this moral corruption, according to this paradigm, is to separate ourselves
from our profession: ‘‘we must consciously maintain a personal and psychological
detachment from our professional roles’’ (p. 80).
The position of rebellious ethics then is clearly connected to the moral ontology
that I have been developing here: there are two separate moral realms, and it is the
task of the ethical technological professional to avoid being captured by the realm of
moral neutrality. He can accomplish this by a kind of doubling, or re-asserting his
personal moral self in rebellion against the demands of his profession. But Sammons
rejects the paradigm of rebellious ethics, and with it, Speer’s defense of his moral
failure. For Sammons, Speer did not fail as a moral person because he failed to rebel
against his professional role; rather he failed as a moral person because he failed
in his professional role as an architect. It is a deeper integration with one’s
professional role that can provide a person with the moral resources to resist the evil
practices of technology (p. 81).
What does this further integration mean? Sammons argues that the various
technological professions provide us with moral guidelines that are built into the
very nature of the profession itself. Architecture, for example, should be based on
the idea that we are constructing built environments for human beings to live fuller
and more creative lives, not buildings or cities that oppress and dominate the human
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spirit. Sammons notes that Speer’s only moments of ethical insight were when he
saw the morally evil directions of Hitler’s ideas about architecture:
As an architect, Speer began to see in Hitler’s obsession with huge
dimensions, his ‘‘violation of the human scale,’’ his lack of proportion, his
lack of concern for the social dimensions of architecture, his use of
architecture as only an expression of his strength, and the pomposity and
decadence of the style, a dictator bent on world domination for the sole
purpose of his own glorification (pp. 82–83).
Thus, for Sammons, architecture itself ‘‘offered Speer a truer perspective on Hitler;’’
it was in thinking about architecture that he could have developed the moral vision
to see what Nazism really was (p. 83). Speer then is not a Pure Technician who
failed as a moral agent because he did not rebel against the neutrality of technology;
rather he is a Failed Architect, and his moral failure is that he rejected the positive
human goals of his craft in the pursuit of money, fame, power, and self-glorification.
The good architect, as well as any good technological professional, must find within
the profession the moral principles that can provide the foundation to pursue one’s
technological goals.
Integration and Ideology in the Nazi Engineers
Regarding moral ontology, Sammons’s rejection of the model of rebellious ethics,
with its argument for the further integration of ethical and professional values,
suggests that there are not distinct moral realms. Technological practice and ethics
exist together in a unified worldview. But what if this unified moral ontology is
itself evil? The work of historian Michael Allen provides us with a disturbing
answer to this question (Allen 2002). Through his analysis of SS industrial policy,
he argues that among SS managers and engineers there was a convergence between
professional goals and political values. Nazi engineers believed that what they were
doing was good: there was no need to rebel against the pure technique of their
profession, nor was there a need to find another ground of value to resist the evils of
Nazism.
Allen’s claims are based on the lives of 39 members of the elite SS engineering
corps under the directorship of Hams Kammler, the Chief Engineer of the SS—a
number comprising two-thirds of the elite corps (p. 159). Here is the story of Kurt
Wisselinck (pp. 7–11), the Chief Factory Representative within the SS to the
German Workers Front or DAF, which had replaced all German labor unions once
the Nazi Party seized power. His mid-level managerial position was situated at the
confluence of several conflicting political power centers within the Third Reich: the
SS, the DAF, the WVHA (the SS Building Division), and thus we might expect that
the decisions Wisselinck made would tend to favor a particular bureaucratic
allegiance. But what Allen discovers instead is that Wisselinck acted according to
strict ideological principles, even when this ideology worked against the interests of
major constituencies. The primary example is Wisselinck’s handling of misconduct
at the SS Granite Works of Gross-Rosen. What was the misconduct? Not, one might
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suppose, that the prisoner-laborers were being worked to death; rather the problem
was that the clothing of the Jewish prisoners was not being distributed to SS
manager-trainees, and that one of the cooks was favoring the prisoners by giving
them extra potatoes in their rations. The extra potatoes, of course, could mean the
difference between life and death for the slave laborers, but more importantly, from
the perspective of the SS business operation, the extra rations would make more
efficient and productive workers. The managers at Gross-Rosen even complained
that Wisselinck’s presence was impeding the efficiency of the factory operations
(pp. 8–11).
Wisselinck did not care about the success of the business operations. For him, as
we learn in a memo he wrote to himself after his return from Gross-Rosen, the main
point was the furtherance of Nazi ideology. He wrote: ‘‘The business undertakings
of the Schutzstaffel [SS] are the best means to breathe new life into National
Socialist ideals, to let them become reality…Our example must spur other
corporations forward to emulate us in order to see the growth of a happy, satisfied,
and happy Volk’’ (pp. 9–10). Wisselinck is emblematic of the professional manager
and technocrat within the Nazi regime, where consensus was built because of a
shared ideology. The Nazi business and technical operations were efficient because
‘‘ideals, individuals, and institutions reinforced each other’’ (p. 11).
Allen considers five main ideas as the basis of the shared ideology of SS
managers and engineers (pp. 12–16): (1) the SS were the vanguard of a New Order
that would ‘‘remake Europe in its own image’’; (2) a commitment to the Führer or
leadership principle; (3) a commitment to producing authentic German culture and
values through the operation of business and technology, rather than a commitment
to profit or wealth (the latter goals were obviously ‘‘Jewish’’); (4) a fascination with
modern technological organization, as represented by Fordism and Taylorism; and
(5) biological racism and anti-Semitism. Whether these five principles are the sum
total of the SS Nazi ideology is, of course, not the issue for me. Historians can
debate the precise number of Nazi ideals and their relative importance. For my
argument, it is only necessary to acknowledge that something like this set of
principles existed as the basis of a Nazi worldview. Taken together, these principles
form a coherent ideology, and indeed, as I indicated above, the basis of a distinct
moral ontology.
What this means is that the members of the Nazi SS engineering and
management corps shared a set of overarching values that informed all of their
decisions and actions. As Allen writes: ‘‘Ideology facilitated operations precisely
because the maintenance of consensus never needed to be a heated topic of daily
declarations and contention. It had become a matter of their collective identity as
engineers of the New Order’’ (p. 164). In short, these technological professionals
believed in what they were doing. In Allen’s wonderful description, they ‘‘were
the model citizens of a murderous regime’’ (p. 5). The Nazi ideology was their
moral stance regarding the world. Thus there was no need for the psychological
process of doubling; their personal worldview and the Nazi worldview were
identical. This conclusion has important implications for the ethical evaluation of
technology.
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Conclusions: Normative Values and the Engineering Project
We have reached a very dark place. Let me review the argument before I arrive at a
conclusion. When we consider the actions of technological professionals in the Nazi
regime, we are drawn to the traditional view that the creation of technological
artifacts is ethically neutral, and that only the use of these artifacts should bear a
normative analysis. This view of technology can provide a Nazi engineer with a
rational basis for the disavowal of guilt, and indeed, for a declaration of moral
purity. It is almost identical to the psychological process of doubling which Lifton
claims to have discovered in his analysis of the Nazi doctors, or to the model of
rebellion against the ethics of the Pure Technician that Speer (belatedly) espouses in
his memoirs.
Sammons has suggested that the correct alternative to rebellious ethics or
Lifton’s doubling is the further integration of personal and professional morality,
rather than its separation. The technological professional should embrace the ethical
foundations of his profession, for in those principles the professional can find the
resources to resist the unethical or destructive forces that may corrupt or subvert his
ideals. Architecture creates built environments for the betterment of human life;
engineering creates technological artifacts for increased efficiency, comfort, and
convenience. But what if the engineer or technician does not see the cultural and
political forces that guide the profession in a particular historical context as a
corruption or subversion? What if the architect sees coherence between the political
values of a murderous regime and the ideals of his profession? This is the lesson we
learn from Allen’s analysis of the SS engineers and industrial managers. A synthesis
of Allen’s analysis and Sammons’ argument leads us to the following conclusion:
for these technological professionals there was no need to rebel against one’s
professional technological ideals; there was no need to claim that technology is
ethically neutral. In the Nazi regime the technology served both the purposes of the
state and the ethical values of the technological professionals.
The technology of the Nazi state serves as a prime illustration of Winner’s thesis
that artifacts embody political and social values (Winner 1986). Winner criticizes
the traditional view of the neutrality of technology by casting doubt on the strict
separation of the ‘‘making’’ (which includes design and creation) and the ‘‘use’’ of
technological artifacts. If this separation has any normative weight, it would permit
the traditionally minded engineer to claim that his task—design and creation, i.e.,
making—is ethically neutral, and that he is thus blameless in any potential evil uses
of the artifact. But Winner argues cogently that the distinction of making from use
has no normative significance. The distinction rests on an overemphasis of the idea
that technology is a mere tool of human activity. Winner borrows a phrase from
Ludwig Wittgenstein (who was making a claim about language) as he argues that
technological artifacts are ‘‘forms of life.’’ Technologies become embedded in
human life. Technological artifacts profoundly restructure and reshape human life.
Winner writes: ‘‘As they become woven into the texture of everyday existence, the
devices, techniques, and systems we adopt shed their tool-like qualities to become
part of our very humanity’’ (p. 12). This more robust idea of the role of technology
in human life requires a more comprehensive method of evaluating the value of
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artifacts and technological systems. Once we realize that technologies alter human
life we will see that they are not neutral tools but value-laden systems that create
new forms of human reality. Technological artifacts actualize particular moral
ontologies.
Winner has a shorthand phrase for this view of technology: for him, ‘‘artifacts
have politics.’’ But I view Winner’s conception more broadly to include ethics and
social and cultural values—for me, all of these values are embedded in
technological artifacts and systems from the moment of their creation. We can
see this from a practical point of view by examining the idea of ‘‘purpose.’’ Any
technological artifact must have a purpose before it is designed and created. Without
such a purpose, there would be no reason to create the technology. But purpose
implies a value; there are no neutral purposes. Thus the traditional separation
between the making and the use of a technology cannot be the basis of a distinction
in the existence of normative value. Normative value is omnipresent, in the initial
conception and design of a technology, as well as its creation and use.
Here is the crux of the analysis of the Nazi engineers. For the technological
professionals who believed in the Nazi ideological worldview, the design of
technological artifacts and systems was a means to advance the values of National
Socialism. Purpose and design went together. There was no possibility of neutrality,
no possibility of what Speer called ‘‘the technician’s blind devotion to his task.’’
These technicians, these engineers, obviously believed in their task. Return to the
historical narrative of the crematoria ovens at Auschwitz–Birkenau. The increased
capacity of the internal oven chambers and the design that obviated the need for
maintaining the integrity of the remains was a clear indication that the ovens would
be part of a technological system of mass murder. Could this be a neutral design that
was simply mis-used by evil concentration camp administrators? Such an idea is
laughable. Pressac and van Pelt (1994) clearly address this point in their history of
the design of the gas chambers and ovens. It was during the planning phase of the
new building at Birkenau, which would supplement the existing unit already
operational at the Auschwitz main camp, that ‘‘slowly the men in the WVHA [the
SS Building unit] [began] to associate the ‘final solution of the Jewish problem’
with the capacity of the new crematorium’’ (p. 216). Moreover, at an important
engineering meeting on 19 August 1942, at Auschwitz, the chief engineer from Topf
and Sons and a leading smokestack expert met with the SS engineers. They
discussed the special actions and special works that would be necessary for these
new buildings at Birkenau. As Pressac and van Pelt conclude, ‘‘it was clear to all
participants in this meeting that crematoria IV and V would be involved in mass
murder’’ (p. 219). In short, the engineers did not design a neutral artifact; rather,
they knowingly created a technological system for the purpose of genocide. The
technological system would solve a crucial political and social problem of the Nazi
regime, and further what the SS engineers believed to be a necessary improvement
in human life.
What does this mean for us and for our students who will be future engineers and
technological professionals? If all technological artifacts have values embedded
within them, then whatever engineers create will embody a particular set of
political, ethical, social, and cultural norms and ideologies. I know that my
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engineering students fervently believe that the things that they will create will lead
to a better world. But they also believe—somewhat paradoxically—that the artifacts
that they create are value-neutral until they are used, that it is the end-user that bears
the ultimate responsibility for the ethical value of the technology. How does this
study of the Nazi engineers help the ethical development of my students, future
engineers and technological professionals?
There are two issues here: (1) the idea of the value-neutrality of technological
artifacts; and (2) the embodiment of positive social values in technological artifacts.
Regarding the first issue, clearly the study of the history and ideology of the Nazi
engineers reveals to my students that the idea of a value-free technology is an
illusion. By reviewing the narrative of the creation of the Nazi death camps they
learn that technological artifacts are not value neutral, since they can be created
solely for the purpose of fostering genocide. Thus the second issue comes to the
foreground: how can they know that the technologies that they create embody
positive social values that will improve the world? Perhaps they—and we—are in
the grip of a misguided ideological worldview that embodies values fundamentally
detrimental to human life. Many environmentalists and critics of consumerism, for
example, might make this claim. Similarly, many critics of weapons development or
ancillary technologies such as robotics and artificial intelligence might also. Our
technologies may be leading to the death and destruction of more human life and
even of the earth and its natural processes. How can we know?
We thus arrive at what I called above the most fundamental question for an
understanding of engineering ethics: how does an engineer know that the values he
embodies through his technological products are good values that will lead to a
better world? I cannot answer this question in a satisfactory way. A proper answer
would bring us to the fundamental question of all ethical thought: how do I know
that my actions lead to the good? But philosophy’s failure to answer these
fundamental ethical questions does not mean that the study of the Nazi engineers is
useless. It is true that I cannot present my students with an answer to the
fundamental question of engineering ethics. But I can show them, following the
argument of Sammons, that their chosen profession embodies an ideal of social
value that can be used as a moral guide. The danger, as revealed by the historical
analysis of Allen, is that the ideal can be perverted by corrupt political and social
ideologies. To live and work as ethical engineers, my students must be aware of the
political and social goals that are served by their technological products. I can thus
claim that if we remain in the thrall of the traditional view that the design and
creation of technology is ethically neutral, then we will be repeating the mistakes of
the Nazi engineers. We will be like that exemplar of Nazi technological efficiency,
Albert Speer, who chose to ignore the entire political and social context of his
professional tasks. To avoid the technological ethics of Hell we must always
consider the normative purposes of our technological projects.
Acknowledgments An earlier and much shorter version of this essay was presented at the 2010 Forum
on Philosophy, Engineering, and Technology at the Colorado School of Mines, 10 May 2010.
The Nazi Engineers 581
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References
Allen, M. T. (2002). The business of genocide: The SS, slave labor, and the concentration camps. Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Katz, E. (2005). On the neutrality of technology: The Holocaust death camps as a counterexample.
Journal of Genocide Research, 7(3), 409–421.
Lifton, R. J. (1986). The Nazi doctors: Medicalized killing and the psychology of genocide. New York:
Basic Books.
Pressac, J.-C., & van Pelt, R.-J. (1994). The machinery of mass murder at Auschwitz. In Y. Gutman &
M. Berenbaum (Eds.), Anatomy of the Auschwitz death camp (pp. 183–245). Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Sammons, J. L, Jr. (1992). Rebellious ethics and Albert Speer. Professional Ethics, 1(3–4), 77–116.
Speer, A. (1970). Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Winner, L. (1986). The whale and the reactor: A search for limits in an age of high technology. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
582 E. Katz
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- The Nazi Engineers: Reflections on Technological Ethics in Hell
Abstract
Introduction
The Nazi Doctors and the Concept of Doubling
Albert Speer and Technological Neutrality: Rebellious Ethics
Integration and Ideology in the Nazi Engineers
Conclusions: Normative Values and the Engineering Project
Acknowledgments
References