In another thread a poster says that what Hitler did was only bad because of the time-historical texture. That if he has done what he did in the time of Mongols or Romans, we wouldn’t be judging him so harshly. What about instead of transporting him 1000-2000 years back we just look back 25-50 years.
What was so different with what Hitler did from what most of the European nations and the US either was doing or was attempting to do. Hitler did not invent the aggressive war method of expanding territory.
The main differences that I can find is the holocaust, and that’s not all that special either. How did it differ from what other nations had done or were doing?
Hitler had the poor taste of doing it in Europe rather than in Asia, Africa or the Americas.
The people exterminated were much whiter than usual.
He incorporated modern industrial methods, so it was the most modernized genocide at the time.
It wasn’t the largest genocide in history, it wasn’t even a successful genocide (jews, homosexuals and communists are still around), and it definitely wasn’t the last genocide. So why is he being singled out?
If that is referring to me let me make it clear; I didn’t say that what he did was only bad because of the historical context. I said that it only stood out because of the historical context; a thousand years ago he would have been just one more mass murdering tyrant among a legion of other mass murdering tyrants.
It was more recent than most such massacres. And the Jews and their sympathizers have managed to keep the world from conveniently pretending the Holocaust never happened; an unusual accomplishment.
Hitlers performance came pretty much at the beginning of post colonialism and certainly laid to rest that somehow white peoples were better than others in terms of morals and behaviour.
In fact, he pretty much undermined, or rather demolished the idea that in a modern state with modern media and communications, European derived nations were at least as venal,probably more so, than at any other time in history.
The Nazi values also did much to kill off the racist values of Darwinist social revisionism, eugenics and white supremacy.
Add to that, the Nazi state was essentially run by criminals, an organised nation of villains.
… and assisted willingly by large numbers of everyday German citizens.
If you take into account the insights from studies such as the Stanford Prison Experiment and Milgram Experiment, you’d have to conclude that even modern citizens of the USA (or any country) would blindly follow the orders of a charismatic leader.
I’m in the midst of reading yet another book about the Third Reich (The Third Reich at War - Richard Evans), and I’m again struck by the oddities that put Hitler and the Nazis into their own category.
The way that the instability of the Weimar Republic fed into the creation of a fascist state. This little object lesson scares the shit out of me, as a liberal democrat who occasionally sees Fox.
They were so amazingly illogical. Hitler actually believed all the racist and anti-semitic crap he promoted, and apparently so did the rest of the top dogs. It wasn’t some sort of realpolitik lie, or some made-up scapegoat for mass consumption. They focused on their genocidal agenda even when it was not in their best interests - They took over Slovakia as it was being invaded by the USSR and still rounded up over 10,000 Jewish people and send them to the camps.
They worked so hard at genocide, yet at the same time were not sure what they were trying to do with it. - For example, they were intent on killing people, but they would first put them in a camp and starve them. They would use concentration camp inmates on construction and other projects, yet not feed them enough to live, so their ability to do the job would drop off - the problems with the V2 were partly quality control - not surprising, as the rockets were made by malnourished slaves. It just made no sense.
Their leadership model was bizarre, yet they managed to create a nearly unstoppable army. Further, Germany is a tiny country, but they controlled most of Europe during the war, and came close to winning*. Probably the most bizarre aspect of the whole thing is that the German people allowed him to come to power, and to stay in power, and they followed him (more or less**) to the bitter end.
So, back to the OP, it isn’t just the enormity of the crime, it is also the many, many paradoxes and inconsistencies - in fact, the whole improbability of the thing happening - that keep Hitler and the Nazis at the top of the list.
Close in the sense of 'they controlled most of Europe, they could conceivably have taken Russia if things had a little differently - an earlier spring, less Hitler involvement in theater, blah blah. I don’t want to derail the thread with ‘how close were they?’.
** White Rose, Red Orchestra, von Stauffenberg. There were exceptions.
Why is this aspect bizarre? If you see the German populace as simply another Large Social Group, their collective action (or inaction) is quite predictable and normal.
Isn’t it logical to incorporate insights from the Bystander Effect into our assessment of the German people?
What evidence from group psychology would have us believe the Germans would have acted any other way?
And in the 1930’s I don’t think this set him apart. What was the average white Americans perception of the blacks at the time? What was the average Europeans opinion on the gypsies? How did the Japanese view whites? Or the Chinese or the Korean for that matter?
The Jim Crow laws were in effect in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s United States. And would be for 30 more years. Sweden had a “Government Institute of Racial Biology” which the “Swedish Organisation for Racial Hygiene” had created wide political support for. How could we possibly claim that Hitlers racism was exceptional at the time?
There were those right at the very apex of British society that agreed with many of the Nazi ideals.
Once the war was over, and we could see what this had finally become, it must have been a huge change and re-evaluation of beliefs and values.
WWII was more than just a military struggle, it was also a test of values, racism lost out, and the supposed self superiority of almost all the protagnists were called into question.
Japanese racism, antisemitism, rasicms across European people -untermenschen, even the class racism that stratified most nations at the time.
Hitler was the ultimate expression of all that twisted ‘logic’, the pseudoscience that had been falsely extracted from Darwins theories. It has to be said that Darwin was used to support an unsupportable idea of race, rather than the other way round, it was a perversion of what he had proposed.
It also showed how ideas translated across national boundaries, even the very worst of them, Hitler showed how lies could be propagated to convince ordinary people that great evil was justifiable.
Hitler pretty much destroyed our international notions of a collective good, of a civilisation that is continuously developing for the better, it brought us right out of complacency - we can go down as well as up.
That’s probably true. He stood out because most people believed that civilization had progressed way beyond the barbarism or cruelties of Attila or Nero. The Enlightenment, the advances of science, all led us to think that we were living in a far more civilized age.
Hitler let us know that it was not so, and that the trappings of civilization were only a thin verneer over barbarism. The fact that Hitler did his evil in Germany – land of music, of science, of poetry – made his atrocities all the more disturbing to our sense of complacency. Basically, we single Hitler out because we EXPECT the Spanish Conquistadors or the Roman Emperors to be brutal, cruel, mass murderers. They lived long ago, in an era of brutality and cruelty. We didn’t expect such brutality and cruelty from people living in the modern era.
That was an illusion that Hitler shattered, and we see continual evidence that we are not so civilized as we want to think, even 70 years later.
Because it was active racism instead of passive, academic, or decentralized racism. The Jim Crow laws, including segregation, were largely state laws and not federal ones being enforced by FDR. The Jim Crow laws were also designed to politically and socially marginalize blacks, not exterminate them, its tolerance for lynchings aside. Eugenics was a popular pseudo-science of some people in the 1930s-1940s. However, rather than use the excuse of eugenics to develop some kind of paternalistic and authoritarian “White Man’s Burden” that had carried some misguided mission to “civilize” the non-Western world, Hitler saw it as a license to raze and re-populate non-German lands. Hitler didn’t just regard the Jews as sub-human, he generally (with some exceptions) saw Slavs that way too.
The holocaust was that special; try to find another instance of extermination camps being set up for the sole purpose of rapidly mass murdering millions of people as quickly and efficiently as possible ala Auschwitz, Dachau, etc. Bear in mind that what Hitler is being ‘singled out for’ is what he accomplished largely in under 3 years in a war he lost. It was the very tip of the iceberg of what he intended to accomplish mass murder-wise; the majority of non-Germanic people west of the Ural mountains were to be eliminated to create Lebensraum for the expansion of Germanic peoples. Those not immediately murdered off were to be used as slave labor by German colonists.
A whole house in a day. By himself. And two coats too!
As for the OP. I think they have a point. Others have made some interesting points on various aspects, but I think the fact he did his evil on such a massive scale is a bit of a non point. Modern technology was what allowed most of it, which really has nothing to do with Hitler per se expect for the fact he was probably the first evil guy to have such access to the technology. IMO plenty of other evil badasses from times past would have been just a capable of such widespread mayhem had they had the technology of the time.
People in Rwanda had little problem killing people at approximately the same rate and they did it with machetes mainly. Admittedly, radio helped coordinate efforts and get things started at the same time. Instantaneous communications did it.
As a group psychology event it was on an unprecedented scale. Plus, as we look back on those times, it’s hard to get inside the head of an ordinary German. My first thought is that we currently have such a huge received concept of conspiracy and government distrust it is hard to image just going along with something the way they did. Then I find myself thinking of the Gore/Bush election.
Would we go along with it today? The US invaded Iraq under circumstances that make the Reichstag fire and it’s aftermath look almost logical.
This was well answered by Camus - Thanks Camus.
Lots of people were racist. Hitler created a state industry to kill people for their ethnicity. Also, most other historical mass killers were (for want of a better word) pragmatic. Your average terrifying steppe warlord wouldn’t kill you if you paid tribute and became a client state. The Nazis would kill you and take all your possessions if you were the wrong ethnicity, regardless of what you did.
Other modern technology also helped, like chemical plants, cement factories, railways, gas chambers, crematoria. They had to design some of these things from scratch. The amount of infrastructure and effort that was devoted to the Holocaust boggles my mind.
OKay, so here’s the begged question - Which historical figure would have been as bad as Hitler if he (or she) had had the technology to do so?