Free to Obey : How the Nazis Invented Modern Management

What if the rules of modern management were written during the Third Reich?

“A brilliant, stereotype defying study.”-Les Temps

What if the rules of modern management were written during the Third Reich?

SS Commander Reinhard Hohn was one of Nazi Germany's most brilliant legal minds, an archetype of the fervid technocrats that built the Third Reich. Gone into hiding after 1945, he survived unscathed and re-emerged in the 1950s as the founder of a management school.

His story wouldn't be too different from that of other prominent Nazis, if not for the fact that the great majority of Germany's post-war business leaders were educated at his school. Is this a coincidence? Or is there a link between the forms of organization of Nazism and the principles of corporate management?

At the core of Hohn's vision was the concept of freedom, as freedom to obey orders from above-to carry out one's mission no matter the cost.

About the Author

Johann Chapoutot teaches Contemporary History at the Sorbonne, Paris. He is the author of The Law of Blood: Thinking and Acting as a Nazi (Belknap Press, 2018) and Greeks, Romans, Germans: How the Nazis Usurped Europe's Classical Past (University of California Press, 2016).

Dimensions (cm): 18.0 x 12.0