THE TECH EXAMEN
Lindsay Sanneman, FASPE
Introduction
What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing. - Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me all around them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry. He said to me, “Mortal, can these bones live?”
Ezekiel 37:1-3
Our FASPE trip took us to many sites that speak to and memorialize professional involvement in the Holocaust. We visited the locations of early wartime atrocities, such as a forced labor camp, a euthanasia center near Berlin, and critical logistical and operational hubs like the House of the Wannsee Conference, where Nazi officials devised the Final Solution. Our journey culminated in a visit to Auschwitz, the ultimate symbol of the Third Reich’s genocidal regime.
Throughout this process, we reflected on key questions facing professional lawyers, business owners, and engineers who contributed to the design and operation of these sites. For example, we discussed the engineers of Topf and Sons, which was founded in 1878 as a developer of heating systems and crematoria1. Under the Nazi Regime, Topf pivoted to meet the needs of the regime, and, rather than designing crematoria that enabled dignified interment preparations for grieving families, Topf engineers optimized ovens to maximize throughput and minimize conspicuous odors. Some engineers, such as Kurt Prüfer visited Auschwitz throughout the design process, going beyond the minimum design requirements to exceed required specifications2. How did so many regular professionals, many of whom seem to have been motivated by mundane career ambitions, perpetuate such an atrocity?
The shift from “business as usual” in the post-WWI economy to the "death economy" of WWII did not take place overnight. An economic downturn and national shame in the wake of Germany’s defeat in WWI slowly eroded German people’s trust in the Weimar Republic3. Once the Nazis came to power in 1933, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, helmed a powerful apparatus that provided convenient scapegoats. People who were already on the margins of society were increasingly portrayed as dangerous “others” who posed risks to the dominant Aryan race4. This situation allowed for the slow development of more extreme circumstances: first, forced labor camps filled with criminals and prisoners of war became broadly socially acceptable. Next, mass euthanasia of disabled or terminally ill persons, while unsettling to many, was normalized during the war. Finally, most Germans looked the other way as the Nazis undertook the systematic extermination of an entire race of people.
While top Nazi leaders like Goebbels served as thought leaders in German society and helped shift public opinion towards willful ignorance or even positive acceptance of the Holocaust, tens of thousands of regular citizens needed to passively or actively collaborate to make these atrocities possible. Over the course of the Nazi period, it became easy for career-motivated non-ideologues within the professions to either slip unquestioningly into support of the state or to convince themselves that their small, indirect, or ethically neutral role within the mass-murder machine exonerated them from any culpability. One extreme example is Albert Speer, a leading architect within the regime who was ultimately responsible for the entire German industrial system. After the war, Speer claimed that he was a “pure technocrat unconcerned with ethical and political tasks” despite serving as armaments minister throughout the Third Reich5.
Learning about professionals like Speer and the Topf engineers left us with more questions than answers: could things have been different, and if so, how? Who had the power to recognize the potential for change and actually make it? How could this power have been wielded effectively? Finally, and most importantly, how can we prevent ourselves in our own modern professional contexts from falling into similar traps?
From Nazi Germany to Modern Tech: The Power of Reflection
As a technologist, I was particularly struck by the similarities between the stories of certain Nazi professionals and my own experiences. Engineers at that time, like engineers and technologists today, had the power to design and shape the world around them, either towards human flourishing or hyper-optimized exploitation and death. Engineering and design choices now, as in WWII, can either help or hinder systems of oppression. As technologists, we must be mindful of the power we wield if we hope to prevent new technologies’ harmful applications from proliferating.
It has become all too easy to reassure ourselves that the technology we build is, at worst, morally neutral and that any given technological innovation cannot be good or bad in itself. In this view, only its applications have moral value. At the other extreme, the techno-optimist narrative of progress promises that technology can solve all problems and that the rising tide of innovation ultimately lifts all boats6. In other words, as long as we invest in technological innovation, economic prosperity will increase, and its benefits will be shared broadly. However, the reality is that every technology is designed and deployed with specific ends in mind and within complex socio-technical contexts. All technological development is rooted in fundamentally political questions7. History has demonstrated time and again that the degree of shared economic prosperity resulting from technological innovation depends on choices about what is developed and how. Broadly shared prosperity is by no means guaranteed.8
As modern technologists, it is not enough for us to accept narratives of progress or tech neutrality at face value. Uncritical approaches to technological development can prevent the broad sharing of societal benefits. Without critical assessment of our work, we can be blinded to the ways that new technologies reinforce existing systems of exploitation and marginalization or even produce novel ones. Our best approach, then, is to critically and continually reflect on what we are creating,
Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics (FASPE) promotes ethical leadership for today’s professionals through annual fellowships, ethical leadership trainings, and symposia, among other means. Each year, FASPE awards 80 to 90 fellowships to graduate students and early-career professionals in six fields: Business, Clergy, Design & Technology, Journalism, Law, and Medicine. Fellowships begin with immersive, site-specific study in Germany and Poland, including at Auschwitz and other historically significant sites associated with Nazi-era professionals. While there, fellows study Nazi-era professionals’ surprisingly mundane and familiar motivations and decision-making as a reflection-based framework to apply to ethical pitfalls in their own lives. We find that the power of place translates history into the present, creating urgency in ethical reflection. Each month one of our fellows publishes a piece in Memoria. Their work reflects FASPE’s unique approach to professional ethics and highlights the need for thoughtful ethical reflection today.
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1 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Topf and Sons: An “Ordinary Company”.
2 Liberation Route Europe. Biography: Kurt Prüfer.
3 Doris L Bergen. War and genocide: A concise history of the Holocaust. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009.