 rendered it possible—was normal; ‘normal’ not in the sense of the familiar, of one more

specimen in a large class of phenomena long ago described in full, explained and
accommodated (on the contrary, the experience of the Holocaust was new and
unfamiliar), but in the sense of being fully in keeping with everything we know about our
civilization, its guiding spirit, its priorities, its immanent vision of the world—and of the
proper ways to pursue human happiness together with a perfect society.” (Bauman,
Modernity and the Holocaust, 8)
 “The light shed by the Holocaust on our knowledge of bureaucratic rationality is at its
most dazzling once we realize the extent to which the very idea of the Endlösung was an
outcome of the bureaucratic culture.” (Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 15)
 “The choice of physical extermination as the right means to the task of Entfernung [of
Jews] 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. The very presence of functionaries charged with their specific tasks led
to further initiatives and a continuous expansion of original purposes.” (Bauman,
Modernity and the Holocaust, 17)
 “Bureaucracy is intrinsically capable of genocidal action. To engage in such an action, it
needs an encounter with another invention of modernity: a bold design of a better, more
reasonable and rational social order—say a racially uniform, or a classless society—and
above all the capacity of drawing such designs and determination to make them
efficacious. Genocide follows when two common and abundant inventions of modern
times meet.” (Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 106)
 “Amazing how frightened those few men with the rifles were; how conscious of the
brittleness of their mastery over human cattle. Their power rested on the doomed living in
a make-believe world, the world which they, the men with rifles, defined and narrated for
their victims. In that world, obedience was rational; rationality was obedience.
Rationality paid—at least for a time—but in that world there was no other, longer time.
Each step on the road to death was carefully shaped so as to be calculable in terms of
gains and losses, rewards and punishments.” (Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust,
202)