A Working Implement of Nazi Bureaucracy
Manufactured in 1939 by the Olympia Büromaschinenwerk AG at Erfurt, the DM 1 was Olympia’s full-size standard office machine of the late inter-war and wartime period — the workhorse of ministries, regional administrations, military offices, and party apparatus throughout the German Reich. The present example carries the SS-rune (Sig-rune doublet) on a dedicated key with the matching type-bar fitted to its segment: a configuration produced to special order for the offices of the Schutzstaffel and its subordinate bodies, where the rune was required for letterhead, rank designations, unit names, and the day-to-day documentation that constituted what later scholarship has called the bureaucracy of genocide.
This is a working machine — serial number 335773, full QWERTZ keyboard with German diacritics (ä, ö, ü), original metal ribbon spools — offered for acquisition by institutions and individual researchers for whom an authentic, period-correct, period-tooled artifact is needed in place of a modern reproduction or digitized surrogate. Survival of SS-keyed machines in original, unaltered, mechanically operative condition is limited; this copy retains both the keytop and the type-bar, the two elements most often removed or replaced in the post-war decades.
Object Record
- Object
- Standard full-size office typewriter, mechanical, four-bank, segment-shift
- Maker
- Olympia Büromaschinenwerk AG, Erfurt (Thuringia, Germany)
- Model
- DM 1 — Olympia’s full-size standard office machine of the late 1930s
- Serial Number
- 335773
- Year of Manufacture
- 1939
- Country of Origin
- Germany (Third Reich period)
- Keyboard
- QWERTZ, German layout, with dedicated SS-rune (Sig-rune doublet, ᛋᛋ) key
- Type Slugs
- Matching SS-rune type-bar fitted to the segment; standard German diacritics ä, ö, ü present
- Mechanism
- Type-bar / segment-shift, two-color ribbon system, original metal ribbon spools
- Weight
- approx. 37.6 lbs (≈ 17 kg) — non-portable office machine
- Operational Status
- Working — types on all keys; ribbon to be replaced by the buyer
- Condition
- Good overall for age and use. Some surface rust spots; missing the transparent paper-bail / disk window and the paper stop; rear adjustment screw damaged. All keys, type-bars, escapement, carriage return, line spacing, and shift function correctly.
- Provenance
- German private holding; consigned for academic and institutional sale
Selected Views
Research Context
The SS-keyed standard typewriter is a recurring object in the material-culture historiography of Nazi administration. Although the SS-rune was not added to the standard DIN keyboard, German manufacturers — Olympia, Continental, Mercedes, Torpedo, and Adler among them — accepted special orders to fit a dedicated key and a matching type-bar in place of an unused or rarely used position, supplying the SS, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the Gestapo, and adjacent offices with machines capable of producing the runic doublet in a single keystroke. The resulting documents — duty rosters, transfer orders, correspondence on letterhead, transport lists — appear throughout the documentary record reproduced in the trial archives of the IMT and the subsequent Nuremberg Military Tribunals, in the holdings of the Bundesarchiv (notably NS-series), the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Yad Vashem, and the international archival cooperation at Bad Arolsen.
“The death camps and the killing units could not have functioned without the typewriter. The bureaucracy of genocide was a paper bureaucracy, written in offices, on machines whose keys had been altered for the task.” — paraphrasing the central argument of Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews, since echoed in the material-culture studies of Nazi office work.
Original SS-keyed machines matter to research that surrogates cannot serve: study of the manufacturer’s segment-replacement practice, comparison of period-correct type slug profiles with documents of disputed provenance, forensic typescript identification, and the museum-pedagogical task of presenting an authentic implement of state-organized persecution alongside the documents it produced. Olympia DM 1 examples in working condition, with both the keytop and the matching type-bar still in place, are uncommon in the post-war record, where many such machines were stripped, rekeyed, or destroyed.
Appropriate Use
This machine is offered for, among other uses:
- University and seminary courses on the bureaucracy of National Socialism, the history of the SS, and the material culture of dictatorship;
- Museum and memorial-site (Gedenkstätte) collection building and exhibition — including working demonstrations of period office practice;
- Archival and library acquisition as a documented specimen of Olympia Erfurt wartime production with SS-runic adaptation;
- Forensic and codicological research, including comparative type-slug analysis for documents of disputed provenance;
- Doctoral, post-doctoral, and independent research in administrative history, technology studies, and Holocaust studies;
- Private researchers, freelance historians, and documentary filmmakers pursuing monograph, article, exhibition, or film work.
It is not offered for ideological, celebratory, or decorative use, and it is not offered for re-issue of period letterhead, simulation of historical documents, or any form of reproductive output that could be mistaken for an original. By completing an order, every buyer — institutional or individual — accepts these conditions of use together with the seller’s Terms & Conditions.
Legal & Ethical Framework
Under German law, the use and distribution of symbols of unconstitutional organizations — including the SS-rune (Sig-rune doublet) — is regulated by §§ 86, 86a StGB. Section 86 (3) StGB — the so-called Sozialadäquanzklausel, applicable to § 86a by reference — expressly exempts conduct serving “civic enlightenment, the defense against unconstitutional endeavors, art or science, research or teaching, reporting on contemporary events or history, or similar purposes.” The jurisprudence of the German Federal Court of Justice (BGH) has consistently affirmed that original historical objects supplied for research, archival, educational, and museum purposes fall within this clause, and that the documentary character of an unaltered period artifact is materially different from the renewed propagandistic use of the same symbol.
Shipment and buyer vetting are handled in line with that framework. Placing an order constitutes the buyer’s binding acceptance of the seller’s conditions of sale — including confirmation that the acquisition serves research, educational, documentary, archival, or scholarly purposes in the sense of § 86 Abs. 3 StGB and comparable provisions (e.g., Austria’s Verbotsgesetz 1947). Individual scholars and private researchers are expressly included alongside institutional buyers. The seller reserves the right to decline any order that does not meet these criteria, and reminds buyers in jurisdictions outside Germany and Austria that the import, public display, and onward circulation of such artifacts may be governed by additional national rules.