Kühl, S. (2025), Führung und Gefolgschaft - Management im Nationalsozialismus und in der Demokratie, Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag.

In this book, Stefan Kühl shows that early management models resembled today’s management fashions: they promised employee empowerment, autonomy, transparency, higher motivation, lower turnover, and a stronger sense of belonging. The Harzburg Model, developed by Reinhard Höhn in the early Federal Republic of Germany, claimed that only its system of decentralisation and cooperative leadership could adapt organisations to a volatile environment. It combined delegated responsibility with managerial goal-setting: employees were to act like mini-entrepreneurs within clearly defined areas, while managers set goals, monitored results, and avoided micromanagement. This was a change from authoritarian command to rule-based delegation backed by formal hierarchy.

Before and during the Nazi era, community and people were fused into a vague but emotionally powerful ideal that many political groups used. Under the Nazis, however, the term community became strictly racial: the national community was defined through blood and race, excluding Jews, people labeled as racial aliens, disabled people, and others. Ethnic racism targeted those deemed racially different, and eugenic racism targeted those considered biologically inferior, even within the so-called German race. This ideology legitimised sterilisation, violence, and ultimately extermination.

The Nazis believed community must be lived in small groups like the SA, SS, the Hitler Youth, camps, and workplaces. These groups instilled unity, obedience, and shared purpose. Work was framed as spiritually meaningful, a service to the whole, elevated by Hitler’s leadership. Informal community spirit was valued more than formal rules, which Nazis dismissed as so-called Jewish bureaucratic thinking, even though in practice hierarchy and coercion remained central.

Reinhard Höhn, an important Nazi legal theorist, abandoned the rhetoric of racial community after 1945 and recast his leadership ideas as a modern management system: leadership in relation to the employee. He changed from informal, organic community expectations to formalised, bureaucratically defined responsibilities. Employees received autonomy within fixed delegation areas; managers set goals and controlled achievement. Responsibility could not be returned upward. This relied on purpose-programming: managers defined what was to be achieved, workers decided how. Hierarchies persisted, but the style of leadership changed from personalised authority to impersonal, rule-based oversight.

Like earlier management fashions, Höhn contrasted his model sharply—but not aggressively—with older authoritarian styles: absolutist, patriarchal command structures in state, military, family business, and early industry. He argued this old style was outdated in a dynamic modern environment that required employees’ thinking and involvement.

Such contrasts were not new; criticism of authoritarian leadership had existed since the early 20th century in both the U.S. and Germany. Yet Höhn reused similar rhetorical moves he had deployed in the Nazi era—now stripped of völkisch content.

Höhn’s goal-based management emerged simultaneously—but independently—from Peter Drucker’s Management by Objectives (MbO). Both decomposed the organization into a hierarchy of aims, with each level responsible for its own goals. Both saw goal-steering as a way to combine individual initiative with organizational alignment. Both used the stonemason-parable to show how meaningful purpose motivates performance. Drucker’s ideas became globally influential; Höhn’s Harzburg Model faded, largely because Drucker integrated goal-management into flexible, culture-oriented, value-driven ideas, while Höhn clung to a formalistic, rigid system not adaptable to later trends. Also, Drucker wrote in English, and Höhn’s Nazi past made his work unattractive internationally.

From the 1970s, U.S. management imported into Germany a new enthusiasm for organisational culture—again celebrating community: culture as glue, organisations as families, tribes, clans, value communities. Leaders were expected to provide vision, moral example, emotional intelligence, and service—essentially a rebirth of charismatic, communal leadership, now called transformational leadership. This reactivated older ideas of community ("Gemeinschaft") from both Weimar and Nazi-era factory community, though without their racist content. Organisational culture became a new management dream of steering employees through informal norms, shared values, and collective identity.

After 1945, millions of former Nazis entered the new democracy. Social expectations of self-consistency made abrupt ideological change difficult, yet public confrontation with their past was politically dangerous. A broad social silence about personal Nazi involvement emerged; this actually helped stabilize democracy: by avoiding constant reminders of past Nazi commitments, former Nazis could reinvent themselves as democrats instead of defending their old positions. This was a tacit deal: former Nazis could rise in the new state as long as they publicly adhered to democratic norms and avoided any revival of Nazi ideas. The risk of exposure disciplined them into loyal democratic behavior. As former Nazis aged out of elite positions in the 1960s–70s, it became possible—and safe—to scrutinise their careers. Later generations could criticise the past loudly without personal cost.

Conclusion

Management fashions, Nazi ideology, postwar leadership models, and modern organisational culture all recycled variations of two recurring ideas:

• Formal, goal-based, hierarchical control
• Informal, community-based, value-driven cohesion

These two logics—formality vs. community—were combined, repackaged, ideologically charged, abandoned, revived, and marketed across a century. Reinhard Höhn’s career illustrates a change from racial-community ideology to formal managerial rationalism. Postwar Germany allowed such transformations through a strategic public silence about individuals’ Nazi pasts.