German Army

The German Army is invoked not through a history of its structure or operations, but in two arguments about institutional authority and the logic of mass violence. Its representatives’ reported objections to the Holocaust concern the destruction of people who could have been used as labor; elsewhere, the Army serves as an example of an organization governed by command rather than politically grounded authority. The book’s account thus marks a limited but significant distinction: objection to a policy on grounds of utility does not, by itself, amount to a political challenge to the system that carries it out.

The Army and the logic of resource use

In discussing the Holocaust, the book notes that representatives of industry and the Army repeatedly protested to the SS that the mass killing was a waste of human, economic, and military resources. Millions of people who might have been made to work were instead killed. The point is not that the German Army opposed the Holocaust as a matter of principle: the evidence specifies a practical objection, framed in terms of the loss of a potentially usable workforce and other resources.

This example complicates any account of Nazi violence as simply the efficient mobilization of everything available for military or economic ends. The Holocaust is described as irrational from that standpoint, since it consumed resources and destroyed labor that could have served other purposes. The Army’s reported protests expose a conflict between the regime’s exterminatory policy and calculations of utility, without establishing that the institution rejected the policy’s underlying political order.

Command authority and political power

In a separate discussion of power and violence, the Army appears alongside the Church and the school as an organization run by direct, nonpolitical authority: an order of command that is not itself grounded in political authority. The book classifies such authority as violence rather than political power in the strict sense. This is a conceptual distinction, not a further account of the German Army’s conduct in the Holocaust.

The two references therefore describe different dimensions of the institution. In the first, Army representatives assess state policy through its waste of labor and resources; in the second, the Army exemplifies a form of command authority. Neither reference supplies a broader institutional history, and the practical objections reported in the first do not warrant treating the Army as a principled opponent of the Holocaust.