ABSTRACT
What destructive ideas, then, ultimately cohered as social realities through the
communications of the SS gas van bureaucrats? Because ideas and ideologies are
historical rather than natural-although the dominant interests in organizations
would wish it to appear otherwise-then an answer to this question must excavate
the historical discourses that formed the ideologies. Such is the kind of broad
inquiry that Kynell and Seely (2002) advocated for employing historical methods
in technical communication research, an inquiry that broadly explores historical
contexts and interpretations while generating a framework for gathering data
and evaluating their relevance so that the analyst can identify patterns, construct
a narrative, and advance an interpretation. Piecing together a narrative of the
Sonderwagen program can provide a working set of facts from which to con-
textualize the murders. Even more, the exercise permits the cultural critic to
historicize that which had become the naturalized “common sense” of the Sipo
Technical Matter Group, exposing axioms that, because they broadly and uncon-
sciously resonated among the Group’s competing interests, enabled members
to produce texts that could become boundary objects and temporarily bridge
intraorganizational differences.
