Reviewed by: Architects of Annihilation: Auschwitz and the Logic of Destruction Michael Allen (bio) Architects of Annihilation: Auschwitz and the Logic of Destruction. By Götz Aly and Susanne Heim, trans. A. G. Blunden. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003. Pp. 378. $29.95. Few books have had as much influence on Holocaust studies as Götz Aly and Susanne Heim's Vordenker der Vernichtung, published in 1991 by Fischer Verlag. That book has an almost untranslatable title: Vordenker might be roughly rendered as "pre-meditators of genocide" but it also connotes "predecessors," even "forefathers." Aly and Heim were referring to those who laid the intellectual groundwork for the genocidaires of the Nazi regime. Now their book is available in English, under the title Architects of Annihilation, at a time when the new scholarship that Vordenker der Vernichtung helped to inspire has largely corroborated it. [End Page 449] Before 1991, much scholarship depicted Germans' detachment from and indifference to National Socialism, focused on "resistance," or identified an "anti-modernism" in Nazi ideology. Institutional histories presented dimly fathomable bureaucratic institutions filled with "technocratic" functionaries. There was a consensus that "ordinary" Germans had become tools in the Holocaust only unwittingly, and that modern organizations and technology had compelled them to do so even as Nazi ideologues remained implacably opposed to modernity itself. Aly and Heim exposed the middling echelons of the Nazi intelligentsia who actively assisted the regime. The English title is therefore misleading, for the authors do not really address architects; this is merely a metaphor. They do tell of academic research institutes that dotted Germany and its colonies in the East. Architects took part in these alongside geographers, sociologists, historians, economists, and other specialists. They worked in interdisciplinary teams and prepared reports on the ideal population densities necessary for the German transformation of Europe. In the process, they treated native peoples of Poland and the Soviet Union like so many chits in a vast shell game. It is illuminating to read Aly and Heim's work in conjunction with contemporary history of technology and business. In his 2002 book Why the American Century? Olivier Zunz describes an "institutional matrix" that was peculiar, in his mind, to the rise of modern America. By this he means the interpenetration of academic research, corporations, and the state. Only in America, he argues, did academicians at all levels depart from traditions of "pure research" and place their creativity at the disposal of corporate development or civil service. For their part, American corporations turned more extensively than anywhere else to the pursuit of knowledge-based industries. Last, more so than in the class-bound civil service bureaucracies of Europe, the United States government took a leading role in facilitating the interconnection between the two. What many people deride as the "military-industrial-university" complex, Zunz argues, deserves a closer look. Where else does one find Ivy League sociologists working with both the military and Fortune 500 companies on the invention of survey research as the basis of modern advertising and consumer product development? That improbable fusion did take place in the first half of the "American century," from 1900 to 1950. But, for all that this was unique, Zunz does note that Germany displayed the most similarity to the United States of all European countries. As Wolfgang König has shown, Germany developed technical and commercial schools in a multilayered web, tightly coupled to all levels of industrial research. Germany had indeed invented the modern polytechnic school in the late nineteenth century. Meanwhile corporations such as Bayer and BASF practically invented the corporate research laboratory. Professors sent their recent Ph.D.'s to staff the management of knowledge-based corporations, and corporations funded the professors' research. [End Page 450] Interconnections between civil servants, bankers, and corporations are also well known. By the eve of the First World War this institutional matrix had catapulted Germany to the foremost rank among industrial powers. Thus Aly and Heim, along with Ingo Haar, Michael Fahlbusch, and others who have come after them, demonstrate that German scientists and social scientists in the Third Reich developed intensifying connections between modern institutions of state, industry, and the production of knowledge. They...