Two of Germany's most provocative investigative historians examine the frightening role of young educated careerists in building the Holocaust's ideological and material infrastructure. Moving from the waning Weimar Republic to Auschwitz's fully operating gas chambers, "Architects of Annihilation" shows how the unthinkable technocratic "solutions" to Germany's wartime problems were not only thought but spelled out and implemented. Documenting the eager participation of some of the country's best and brightest, it rejects interpretations that identify only Nazi leaders as the perpetrators of the Holocaust.

For Hitler's thinkers--career-minded demographers, geographers, economists, civil servants, and academics in the Third Reich's think tanks and bureaucratic offices--Europe was a drawing board on which to work out their grand designs. They were encouraged to rationalize production methods, standardize products, introduce an international division of labor, and modernize and simplify social structures. Ultimately, their work on everything from food shortages to birth control led to the sinister plan to "adjust" the ratio between "productive" or "unproductive" population groups.

The ideas of these ever more radical and ideologically aggressive technocrats culminated in proposals that--using carefully guarded scientific and academic euphemisms--advocated state-directed mass extermination as a necessary and logical component of social modernization. And, not well known outside of Germany, these thinkers proposed not only one "final solution" but serial genocides, planned in detail to be carried out over several decades.

This groundbreaking and controversial account of Hitler's planners received widespread attention when it appeared in Germany. Now a masterful translation makes it available to an English-speaking audience for the first time.

During the first part of the twentieth century, German science led the world. The most important scientific institution in Germany was the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, including institutes devoted to different fields of scientific research. These researchers were not burdened by teaching obligations and enjoyed excellent financial and material support. When the National Socialists came to power in Germany, all of German society, including science, was affected. The picture that previously dominated our understanding of science under National Socialism from the end of the Second World War to the recent past - a picture of leading Nazis ignorant and unappreciative of modern science and of scientists struggling to resist the Nazis - needs to be revised. This book surveys the history of Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes under Hitler, illustrating definitively the cooperation, if not collaboration, between scientists and National Socialists in order to further the goals of autarky, racial hygiene, war, and genocide.

The book offers a history of the agricultural sciences in Nazi Germany. It analyzes scientific practice under the Nazi regime, Nazi agricultural policy and autarkic strategies as well as expansion policy in Eastern Europe. It also offers new insights into the Auschwitz concentration camp. It outlines the Nazia (TM)s comprehensive nutritional and agricultural research program intended to prepare Germany for war by raising productivity through scientific means, researching the relation between nutrition and performance at the edge of starvation, and restructuring the agricultural economy of the continent. The book reveals the relation between science and power in Nazi Germany beyond the usual dichotomy that paints scientists in Nazi Germany either as victims of oppression or as sadistic beasts. It shows the involvement of a high ranking scientific elite in the Nazi regime of occupation and looting of cultural goods in the occupied eastern territories a" largely for the sake of their own careers. The main audience the book addresses are students of history and the history of science, and anyone interested in the history of Nazi Germany.

A history of the agricultural sciences in Nazi Germany is presented in this book. The book analyzes scientific practice under the Nazi regime, Nazi agricultural policy and autarkic strategies, and the expansion policy in Eastern Europe. It offers new insights into the Auschwitz concentration camp and new perspectives on the cooperation between German elite scientists and the Nazi regime. The book goes on to dismiss the assumption that "Arian physics" were typical for Nazi Germany.

During the first part of the twentieth century, German science led the world. The most important scientific institution in Germany was the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, including institutes devoted to different fields of scientific research. These researchers were not burdened by teaching obligations and enjoyed excellent financial and material support. When the National Socialists came to power in Germany, all of German society, including science, was affected. The picture that previously dominated our understanding of science under National Socialism from the end of the Second World War to the recent past - a picture of leading Nazis ignorant and unappreciative of modern science and of scientists struggling to resist the Nazis - needs to be revised. This book surveys the history of Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes under Hitler, illustrating definitively the cooperation, if not collaboration, between scientists and National Socialists in order to further the goals of autarky, racial hygiene, war, and genocide.

A groundbreaking study of the numerous academics and technocrats without whom Hitler's crude anti-Semitism could never have been translated into a systematic policy of genocide. ARCHITECTS OF ANNIHILATION follows the activities of the demographers, economists, geographers and planners in the period between the disorderly excesses of the November 1938 pogrom and the fully-effective operation of the gas chambers at Auschwitz in summer 1942. The authors, both journalists and historians, argue that this group of intellectuals, often combining academic, civil service and Party functions, made an indispensable contribution to the planning and execution of the Final Solution. More than that, in the economic and demographic rationale of these experts, the Final Solution was only one element in a far-reaching programme of self-sufficiency which privileged the German Aryan population.