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Communication Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Clemson University

2010

Holocaust Studies

Articles 1 - 1 of 1

Full-Text Articles in Communication

Deadly Discourse: Negotiating Bureaucratic Consensus For The Final Solution Through Organizational And Technical Communication, Mark Ward Sr Dec 2010

Deadly Discourse: Negotiating Bureaucratic Consensus For The Final Solution Through Organizational And Technical Communication, Mark Ward Sr

All Dissertations

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 …