Basically, the data is not applicable in most situations, because of the poor (extremely malnourished) condition of the subjects. For example, most people rescued from freezing conditions are in much better condition than the Nazi victims were, so their bodies protective actions, and their reaction to medical treatment are quite different from that of the bodies of the Nazi victims. Which makes most of the Nazi data pretty much unusable, because it’s just not relevant to most current situations.
Meh, big deal. The Nazis have a partially undeserved reputation for being monstrous beyond anything seen before or since. The reason I say partially undeserved is that they haven’t won the title on numbers, methods, or depravity. I think they captured our imaginations mostly because of shared history and culture, and it doesn’t hurt that they looked like 1930s midwestern cheerleaders and football jocks rather than “depraved yellow slant-eyed savages who had to be delivered from their own barbarity only two or three generations before the war” (hypothetical quotation in the vein of wartime propaganda).
The Russians beat the crap out of the Nazis on numbers, as do the Japanese by some estimates. If you go by per-capita murder, then Pol Pot would probably be a top contender; bonus points for training children to murder the older generation and each other without compunction if ordered to. The Japanese performed live vivisections and tested biological weapons on prisoners, just as nasty as anything Mengele did. And unlike the Japanese, the Germans never went on looting or rape sprees, nor had any credible reports of cannibalism, and didn’t have an official policy of forcing women in occupied territories into prostitution for their soldiers.
The Nazis didn’t have a monopoly on evil even during their “best” years, and there’s frankly nothing they did that other groups in history hadn’t done first and probably better, though maybe not on the same scale. The 20th century was a giant bloodbath, with the Nazis as no more than a top-billed act in one big, long festival of war and torture.
I know that other regimes commited terrible atrocities. And yet, the Nazis to date were the only ones to invent what were essentially murder factories - herd the people in, apply death method, cart out the bodies, incinerate, repeat. I just can’t wrap my mind around the inhumanity of that, and honestly I don’t really want to.
I can, unfortunately, see it as a potential space issue. If the door or chamber was just large enough to put in two prone adults you could then make the child climb in on top.
You’re right. the Nazis were by no means the only ones doing evil. But the reason the Nazi crimes get so much publicity is that the Nazis got so much publicity. The Nazis were the celebrity regime of the Axis. They spent a lot of time putting themselves in the spolight before and during the war. Like anybody on the cover of a tabloid, they discovered that the downside of publicity is that everyone is paying as much attention to the stuff you don’t want them to see as they are to the stuff that you do.
The Soviet atrocities were hidden away from even their own public for decades. The Japanese still just won’t talk about the war and getting them to admit having done any wrong is nigh on impossible. In what might be considered irony, the Germans have been the only ones decent enough to own up to having committed such evil.