Extermination was chosen through routine bureaucratic procedures, not fanatic ideology.

Evidence

The most shattering of lessons deriving from the analysis of the ‘twisted road to Auschwitz’ is that – in the last resort – the choice of physical extermination as the right means to the task of Entfernung was a product of routine bureaucratic procedures: means–ends calculus, budget balancing, universal rule application. To make the point sharper still – the choice was an effect of the earnest effort to find rational solutions to successive ‘problems’, as they arose in the changing circumstances. It was also affected by the widely described bureaucratic tendency to goal-displacement – an affliction as normal in all bureaucracies as their routines. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 80

Categorization

• XREF: Goal-displacement and means-ends calculus directly prefigure the Weberian rationalization discussions in the Islamophobia field’s toolkit for state exclusion.

Related

• The Holocaust’s methods emerged from expert judgments on feasibility, not from Hitler’s orders. (similarity 0.81)
• Bureaucratic means-ends inversion sustained mass murder beyond its original purpose (similarity 0.80)
• Weber’s account of rational bureaucracy contains no mechanism excluding Nazi excesses. (similarity 0.79)
• Racist worldviews require modern bureaucracy to implement extermination (similarity 0.79)
• Bureaucracy’s essence is dissociating means from moral evaluation of ends (similarity 0.79)
• Victims’ rational conduct was engineered to serve their own destruction (similarity 0.79)
• The Holocaust was a product of modernity, not pre-modern barbarity. (similarity 0.78)
• The Holocaust combined long-festering social tensions with the rational instruments modernity created (similarity 0.78)