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As the German nuclear industry geared up for the full-scale commercial use of nuclear power plants in the 1970s, it faced increasing public resistance and political obstacles. It reacted with public relation campaigns that were designed to convince skeptics of the reliability, safety and economic necessity of the technology. The material generated by these efforts sheds light on the rhetorical strategies and cultural encodings of an engineering culture under attack, revealing a disposition of technocratic assertiveness and presumption. A close analysis of brochures and pamphlets, including visual techniques of persuasion, also demonstrates some specifically German aspects of promoting nuclear energy. Scientists, managers and engineers invoked alleged lessons of the past, alluding to subtexts of resource anxiety and national autarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nazi technical thought was not uniform throughout the Third Reich, but rather dependent on the very different visions of Gottfried Feder, Fritz Todt and Albert Speer. Feder and his circle proposed a 'volkisch technocracy' that implied a radical socio-economic transformation of Germany unacceptable to Hitler and German elites. Thereafter, Todt's 'technopolitical' approach embraced the holistic 'spiritual revolution' of the regime - man, machine and nature in aesthetic harmony - and developed administrative tools to propagate it among German engineers and the broader public. Speer, however, jettisoned the regime's commitment to a specific Nazi technical ideology in favor of the war effort. The 'reactionary modernist' element in Nazi ideology, personified by Todt, disappeared as a result of to the war. The role of technology in Nazi thought is best judged by pre-war Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]