Zygmunt Bauman (1989) showed the importance of bureaucratic organization to the death camps in Nazi Germany. According to Bauman, the genocide was an extreme application of bureaucratic logic, with a system of rules, uniformity, impersonality, and technical efficiency. Bauman argues that the Holocaust, rather than being a specifically German problem, was the result of modernity and bureaucracy. Modernity and bureaucracy created unintended conditions that led to the demise of moral responsibility.

Yet moral responsibility and perception played their part in the Holocaust: while killing involved technical efficiency, uniformity, and impersonality, the methods of killing were reconsidered when it was found that shooting was perceptually stressful for those who had to carry out the killings. The Nazis therefore deemed shooting to be insufficiently ‘productive’, not only because of the increasingly large numbers of people to be killed, but also because it resulted in unavoidable levels of perceptual stimulation for those carrying out the killing. The Nazi regime therefore found its solution in the form of permanent concrete gas chambers, in which the perpetrators need not see, hear, or feel the human consequences of their actions (Russell and Gregory, 2005).

Is this a good example of the ‘ideal type’ of bureaucracy, governed by a formal set of rules and procedures that ensures that operations and activities are carried out in a predictable, uniform, and impersonal manner?