Heinrich Himmler is mostly seen as the all-powerful organizer who coordinated the police apparatus that reigned over occupied Europe and who supervised personally the concentration camp system. But Himmler was also a thinker or, at least, he perceived himself as such, and he was especially concerned with moral issues. This article examines the role of ethics in Himmler's thinking. More specifically, it considers what sort of ethics it was and how the Reichsführer SS could rely on moral notions to legitimize (...) his endeavors and to make sense of extreme events in which he participated. From a normative viewpoint any claim to philosophical validity for this type of approach may be called into question, for the nihilism and denial of otherness were paramount in the instrumentalization of humans that led to genocide. (shrink)

This book purports that, given Operation Barbarossa's concept and scope, it would have been impossible without Nazi ideology, that we cannot understand it in the absence of its reference to the Holocaust. It asks and attempts to answer whether we can describe ideology without reference to ethics and speak about genocide while ignoring philosophy.

(1996). Servan and the birth of human rights. The European Legacy: Vol. 1, Fourth International Conference of the International Society for the study of European Ideas, pp. 515-519.

The twentieth century must be seen as the era of the political efficiency of biology, that is to say, of politics as bio-cybernetics. This provides the context in which a definition of social hygiene makes sense as bio-politics or as the practice of biologism through the power of politics. But the point is that social hygiene provided legitimacy to the Holocaust, insofar as it constituted an ethical framework that made sense, in some way, to a significant part of the ruling (...) elites of Germany. The Holocaust as a sanitary operation represented the ultimate consequence of social hygiene. In other words, there would have been no Holocaust without the theory and practice of social hygiene as a commonly accepted social and political phenomenon, and its “barbarity” had little to do with that of foreign cultures or ancient times. The Holocaust happened as the consequence of the unchecked development of social hygiene as political common sense in twentieth-century European culture. (shrink)

"This book deals with SS thinking, which did much to work out the ontological, anthropological, political, and ethical foundations of a theory for which the Holocaust would be the ultimate accomplishment." -- Publisher.