ABSTRACT
What are we to make of the horrifying documents we have just encountered?
A functionalist ontology would tell us that individual mindsets are superfluous,
that organizations are driven to optimize results, and thus organizational com-
munications must privilege clarity and accuracy because they are instruments to
achieve the collective purpose. But why, then, do all the writers employ recurrent
euphemisms about “special vans,” “special missions,” and “special treatment”?
(In time, references to “special vans” were simply shortened to “S-vans.”) Why
did Rauff couch his letter on the gassing of concentration camp prisoners within
the context of a medical “procedure”? Why did Becker refer to Jewish victims as
“prisoners” and their mass murder as “executions”? Why did the men of the
Sipo motor pool take such obvious pains to avoid mention that the “cargo” and
“load” carried by their vehicles was, in fact, human? That the language served to
distance these killers from their crimes is obvious and has been long remarked
upon by historians. But if the language distanced these bureaucrats away from
the import of their actions, did their discourse-through the boundary objects it
produced-also draw them toward a common identity and construct for them a
shared coherent reality?
