In the Name of Utopia: Social Engineering in the Third Reich

RM 217

As a result of the unprecedented destruction wrought by the Nazi party and Second World War, the vast majority of scholarship focused the Third Reich has centered on the military and political aspects of the regime. Consequently, fairly little attention has been paid to the astonishing breadth of the social agenda of the Nazi party’s so-called ‘New Order.’ This paper seeks to contribute to efforts to fill this void by analyzing the dystopian social policies of the Nazi party, as articulated by the powerful oligarch, and head of the German Labor Front, Robert Ley. Ley envisioned a future German Reich that combined a sprawling welfare state, state owned industry, social leveling, omnipresent domestic surveillance, and race-based collectivism. In his mind, society itself would be fully subsumed within the Nazi party. To properly understand the role of Ley, and the social agenda he advanced, this paper draws upon both the concept of corporatism, and my own previous research classifying Nazi Germany as a revolutionary totalitarian oligarchy.