Free to Obey: How the Nazis Invented Modern Management

What if the rules of modern capitalism were written during the Third Reich?

Reinhard Höhn (1904-2000) was a commander of the SS, one of Nazi Germany’s most brilliant legal minds, and an archetype of the fervid technocrats and intellectuals that built the Third Reich. Following Germany’s defeat, after a few years in hiding, he emerged in the early 1950s as the founder and director of a renowned management school in Lower Saxony.

Höhn’s story wouldn’t be very different from that of many other prominent Nazis if not for the fact that a vast number of Germany’s postwar business leaders—more than 600,000 executives—were educated at his management school.

In this fascinating book, Johann Chapoutot, one of France’s most brilliant historians, traces the profound links between Nazism and the principles of modern corporate management, our definitions of success, and a concept of personal freedom that masks rigid hierarchical structures of power and control.

“One of the most gifted European historians of his generation.”—Timothy Snyder, New York Times best-selling author of On Tyranny

Johann Chapoutot teaches Contemporary History at the Sorbonne, Paris. He is the author of The Law of Blood: Thinking and Acting as a Nazi (Belknap Press, 2018) and Greeks, Romans, Germans: How the Nazis Usurped Europe's Classical Past (University of California Press, 2016).

Steven Rendall has translated more than fifty books from French and German, two of which have won major translation prizes. His translations for Europa Editions include Disturbance by Philippe Lançon (2019) and The Tyranny of Algorithms by Miguel Benasayag (2021). He is professor emeritus of Romance Languages at the University of Oregon. He lives in France.