On the Normalization of Organized Brutalities

This book takes an organizational sociological perspective on the systematically carried out mass murders in the context of Nazi euthanasia in Hadamar. On the basis of numerous theoretically elaborated as well as empirically proven organizational mechanisms, it is shown how these illegal practices were "normalized" in an extraordinary way by and for the personnel, who were not trained or otherwise predisposed to murder. The acts thus became a legitimate expectation of action, while organizational involvement simultaneously possessed desolidarizing, demoralizing, as well as responsibility-relieving effects.

The author

Dennis Firkus, M.A., is lecturer at the Institute for Work and Employment Studies, Leibniz University Hannover, and part-time lecturer at Bielefeld University, Section Sociology of Organizations.

This book is a translation of an original German edition. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation.