The relationship between dictatorship and technology has been one of the major themes at SHOT meetings, in Technology and Culture, and in the broader history of technology literature. The question as to whether dictatorships cripple the development of modern technologies or whether they enable the efficient allocation of people and resources in a way conducive to the development of modern technologies, has been and remains a crucial question facing historians, social scientists, and policymakers. (It should be noted that the term “dictatorship” will be used instead of the term “totalitarianism,” which presupposes total dictatorial control over society.) This session will place recent findings on Nazi Germany, Communist East Germany, and the Soviet Union under Stalin in the context of the larger historiographical debates and will attempt a systematic comparison of the three dictatorships with regard to technology.

Among the questions to be asked are the following: How successful was technological research and development under the respective dictatorships? To what extent was technology subordinated to larger goals, such as the waging of war, defense, and the Holocaust? What impact did this have on technological development? How were fascist and Communist conceptions of technological modernity different from those in the West? How did power relations and coordination of goals and methods develop in the interaction between industry, scientific community and state? What role did universities play? What were the motivations behind collaboration with the dictatorial regimes in question?

Michael Thad Allen’s study, The Business of Genocide: The SS, Slave Labor, and the Concentration Camps, demonstrates the importance of ideology as a motivating force behind the professional and technical decision-making of SS engineers working in concentration and death camps. Second, his work confirms recent research (for example at the Max Planck Gesellschaft) that points to a very cooperative relationship between industry, scientific and technical establishment, and the Nazi state. This body of research has done much to overturn the earlier thesis that Nazi science and technology was plagued by “polycratic chaos.”

Some recent works, such as those by Nikolai Krementsov and Alexei Kojevnikov, have argued that the Stalin era produced considerable technical and scientific achievements, despite brutal oppression. By contrast, Dolores Augustine and Scott Palmer argue in new monographs that considerable dysfunctionalities in major Soviet and East German engineering have been largely overlooked. Augustine sees a connection between problems in major technical programs and the growing suppression of autonomy in the engineering profession and at the universities and police state influence over decision-making in industrial research. Palmer has uncovered much evidence that the much-vaunted Soviet aviation program was not as successful as claimed.