Bureaucracy Reading III: Ian Kershaw's "'Working Towards the Führer.' Reflections on the Nature of the Hitler Dictatorship"

I apologize for the delay in continuing this series: the combination of a heavy dose of breaking news and a looming feature have kind of eaten up my time over the past couple of weeks. For those of you just joining us, this is the third in a series of posts on classic readings about how bureaucracy works. The first was on DiMaggio and Powell's "The Iron Cage Revisited," the second on James Q. Wilson's Bureaucracy. This week, I want to talk about Ian Kershaw's "'Working Towards the Führer.' Reflections on the Nature of the Hitler Dictatorship" (JSTOR access required, apologies).

While both of the pieces I've written about prior to this impressed me because they placed things I'd noticed through observation and reporting into coherent, systemic accounts of why bureaucracy works the way it does, Kershaw's piece does the opposite, deconstructing common ideas about a very famous bureaucracy. It feels somewhat odd to think of the Nazi government in the company of the bureaucracies in democratic countries I've read about in other works. But once I got past that conceptual obstacle, it makes a lot of sense as a frame of analysis. I think most of us, when we think about the Nazi regime think of an extremely high degree of coordination, systemic action, and centralized coordination. The plans required to carry out the Holocaust, and to coordinate a massive, multi-front war effort at the same time are extremely detailed, complicated and interactive. The extensive records of the Holocaust required a major bureaucratic effort.