ABSTRACT
This study, which began by suggesting than an ontological shift-from a per-
spective that views “The Final Solution” in monolithic terms as a symbolically
composite crime, to a perspective that sees the genocidal program as a contingent
event of a polycratic, entropic, and punctuated nature-might open a door to
new insights. Since then, we have explored how the gas van administrators of
the Nazi SS manifested the three dimensions of integration, by what they shared;
differentiation, by the various subcultures they inhabited; and fragmentation, by
their need to forge temporary and issue-specific consensus amidst organizational
change, confusion, and ambiguity. Through Longo’s (1998) cultural research
methodology we then charted the integrative elements of the killers’ shared
historical context and national and institutional cultures, the differentiating ele-
ments of their organizational culture, and the fragmenting elements of their indi-
vidual biographies and motivations. The methodology led us next to interrogate
how the texts of the Sipo Technical Matters Group constituted a discourse that
constructed a rhetorical community, their documents functioning as boundary
objects that drew upon narrative, metaphor, genre, and language to bridge their
competing interests and create a temporary space for exchange. We then took
the final steps called for by the methodology in looking at the ways subsequent
analysts have imposed orderings on the Nazi gas van texts for the purposes of
their respective studies and discovered that the Just document, the lengthiest of
the corpus, has functioned as a boundary object among technical communication
scholars, thereby revealing much about the discipline’s relationship to the text.
