Summaries / Resúmenes - Studia Moralia

100 BRUNO HIDBERthe political, economic and financial levels. In order to function,such organization needed the kind of industry and personnelthat could adapt themselves to what Max Weber called the“criteria of modernity.” 14 That is, Auschwitz and all that itstands for required an anonymous bureaucracy, an efficientspecification of work and a division of labor, and a rigid separationbetween the public and private spheres. Ethical-moral considerations,if they still arose at all, were categorically shutwithin the private sphere. To achieve an “administrative massacre,”morality had to be substituted for by efficiency andfunctionality. “This ‘objective’ attitude – talking about concentrationcamps in terms of ‘economy’ – was typical of the S.S.mentality”. 15 In this way the institutions and organizations ofthe Holocaust took on the character of an all-inclusive industry,connected by thousands of links to industry in general. The“industrial” aspect became quasi-autonomous. Human beingswere massacred and the operative category was no longer thehuman person, but rather the technical functioning of the factoryand of everything it needed for the best possible results. In1943, it was decided that children would no longer be gassedseparately from their parents but burned alive instead, not toadd to the horror or suffering, but simply to increase the numbersliquidated and at the same time to cut costs. Such is theface of administrative massacre: cold, passionless, programmedand organized perfectly as an industrial enterprise. 16What is new in this atrocity and “non-quality” of evil isexpressed in a program of extermination of human beings inwhich the face of the human person is rendered invisible by thelogic and strategy of industrial, financial and bureaucraticfunctionality, carried to a sophisticated extreme. Already heresome of the more negative features of what will later be called“globalization” are emerging. In theological terms, what areemerging are “structures of sin”, which tend to hide andmillion Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust program, correspondingto 30% of the worldwide Jewish population in 1939 and 80% of all rabbisand torah scholars.14Rüdiger Safranski, Das Böse (München: Hanser, 1997), 271-272.15Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 69.16R. Ammicht-Quinnn, Von Lissabon bis Auschwitz, 200-202.