EXB-205_Web

BERLIN AT WORK
| HUMAN RESOURCES |
FREE TO OBEY
In a short, erudite book recently published in German,
French historian Johann Chapoutot explains how a
former SS Oberführer shaped post-war West Germany’s
business elite, revealing the surprising modernity of Nazi
Menschenführung, as well as the “fundamental hypocrisy”
of modern liberal management. By Nadja Vancauwenberghe
“Obedience makes you
free, a short history
of management from
Hitler to the present”, by
French historian of Nazism
Johann Chapoutot,
came out in German in
late March (Propyläen).
When Reinhard Höhn kicked
the bucket in 2000 at the age
of 95, obituaries mourned
the great theoretician of modern liberal
management, the guru behind post-war
Germany’s economic success. Between
1956 and 2000, some 600,000 West
German bosses, managers and other
business leaders, from BMW to Aldi to
Colgate, attended his business school in
the Lower Saxony town of Bad Harzburg
and trained in the fundamentals of
successful management: participation,
delegation, autonomy,
responsibility. In fact, the
famous ‘Harzburg model’
was developed by Höhn as
he was working to solve
the Third Reich’s organisational
needs at the
Humboldt University’s
Institut für Staatsforschung
between 1939 and
1944. Oberführer Höhn
not only escaped post-war
justice and denazification;
he made a seamless career
transition into post-war
Germany, lending his
skills and expertise to the
new economic elite.
Gehorsam macht frei
(obedience makes you
free) reads like a parable:
through the incredible
career of one man whose
influence presided over two systems
often held as ideologically incompatible,
Chapoutot places the Third Reich
into the historical continuity to which
it belongs – within Germany, but also
within the wider context of liberal economic
history. In the end, Chapoutot
isn’t so much discrediting management
I was shocked by how
current the language
was. I had a little moment
of doubt. Was l
listening to a rabid Nazi
or was I in a business
school lecture hall?
practices through their potential Nazi
roots as he is exposing the duplicitous
essence of modern management.
What inspired this book about
the Third Reich and modern
management? For my last book, Das
Gesetz des Blutes (‘the law of blood’), I
had read the works of Reinhard Höhn
in the 1920s-1930s and come across
his second career. I thought it was
interesting that an SS general could
become a liberal-management guru in
post-war West Germany. It was quite
telling about our world.
But it was a text by Herbert Backe
that really caught my attention [Backe
was the radical Nazi technocrat who,
as minister of food, oversaw the
planning and implementation of the
starvation of millions following the
1941 invasion of the USSR]. It was a
pretty short and abrasive circular in 12
points aimed at the Third Reich’s civil
servants in the East. And what does
he say? He speaks of “performance”
and “mission”, asking them to show
“flexibility”, “agility”, “autonomy” and
“decisiveness”. I was shocked by how
current the language was. On the one
hand, there was the appalling racism
towards Untermensch Russians, colonial
violence, et cetera – which feels very
alien to us today. But on the other hand,
there was the familiar language of a
modern manager. I had a little moment
of doubt. I was wondering where I was.
Was I listening to a rabid Nazi or was I
in a business school lecture hall?
The French title, Libre d’obéir
(‘free to obey’), was already
intriguing, but the German
Gehorsam macht frei is a notch
more daring – even provocative.
Was it your decision to use a direct
reference to Arbeit macht frei,
the Nazi slogan at the entrance of
Dachau and Auschwitz? Actually,
it was a German journalist who’d read
the book in French and translated the
title like that. I thought it was very
good. It’s true: it’s daring and it may
seem a little shocking, but it’s relevant
as it translates very well the Nazi idea
of liberating man through work. The
expression “Arbeit macht frei”, which
for us has become the height of the
criminal cynicism of the Third Reich,
had a real meaning for the Nazis. In the
Nazis’ conception of the Germanic man,
what they call der germanische Mensch,
work realises the individual, creates a
world of civilisation and thus frees man
from nature. It’s a very common idea,
since Hegel, to say that man realises
himself through work, but for the Nazis
it only applied to the Germanic man.
Only he works. The other ‘races’ don’t
really work. This is something that is
repeated over and over again in the
newsreels of the time, which show the
populations of Poland or the East as
idle, negligent people who don’t work
and don’t maintain anything – an old
colonial stereotype that we still find in
attitudes about Africa, for example. So
only the Germanic man works and puts
others to work, and that’s part of the
reason why the Nazis were so interested
in the organisation of work and put so
much thinking into management – or
Menschenführung.
One of the surprising aspects
of your book is how modern
and liberal the Nazi approach
to management was – not at all
authoritarian as you’d expect
from a repressive regime. How did
that happen? In practical terms, you
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EXBERLINER 205