By most accounts the Nazis were a pretty evil bunch.
I wonder how bad they really were though.
I certainly don’t want to play the role of apologist here. However, knowing that history is written by the winner, I wonder how much the Nazis have been demonized and how bad they really were.
I remember reading that the concentration camp idea is actually English in origin, and the Nazis borrowed it.
I wonder about what’s going on in Kosovo, Sarajevo, what’s occured in Russia, what the U.S. did to the Indians and blacks, what the Chinese do to themselves, and I wonder why the Nazis are at the top of the heap.
Were the atrocities committed by the Nazis genuinely worse than those commonly committed by other countries/groups?
To use the term “concentration camp” for Treblinka is a euphemism, like “resettlement in the East” is a euphemism. British concentration camps in the Boer War, and American concentration camps for the Japanese-Americans during WWII, did not include facilities for the assembly-line style mass murder of human beings (room-sized gas chambers) and the disposal of the bodies (industrial-strength crematoria).
What MEBuckner said. “Concentration Camp” simply means that people are rounded up and imprisoned. What the Nazis ran were Extermination Camps. Now, genocide has been the policy of many people throughout history. The Nazi innovation was applying industrial processes to genocide.
They were about as advertised- completely corrupt, evil, and beyond the pale when it comes to “civilized” warfare. A whole host of international laws sprang up as a result.
The question I have though, is why the communists get off scot-free; they collectively (no pun intended) are responsible for at least as many deaths, and a crushingly brutal regime to boot. There seem to be, even today, a number of apologists for communism which is inexplicable.
Yes, I would have to agree with MEBuckner… the ethnic cleansing bit was what set them apart. Plus the Nazis were meticulous record keepers! They kept track of the entire operation. I’m sure there have been atrocities committed since Adam bit the apple, but only the Nazis could take it to such a high art and make sure that all the i’s were dotted, t’s were crossed and nouns were capitalized. A lot of group effort went into the extermination camps. The logistics of murdering over 6 million people must be staggering! Trains to schedule, zyklon B to order, gold teeth to pull!
Your question reminded me of something I read in Apt Pupil by Stephen King:
“Oh, I know how the Americans distorted that,” Dussander muttered. “But your own politicians make our Dr. Goebbels look like a child playing with picture books in a kindergarten. They speak of morality while they douse screaming children and old women in burning napalm. Your draft resisters are called cowards and ‘peaceniks’. For refusing to follow draft orders they are either put in jails or scourged from the country. Those who demonstrate against this country’s unfortunate Asian adventure are clubbed down in the streets. The GI soldiers who kill the innocent are decorated by presidents, welcomed home from the bayoneting of children and the burning of hospitals with parades and bunting. They are given dinners, keys to the city, free tickets to pro-football games” he toasted his glass in Todd’s direction, “only those who lose are tried as war criminals for following orders and directives.”
While I don’t see that paragraph as a defense for the Nazis, (I’ve heard/read accounts of tattoos being removed from “prisoners” and sold as souvenirs, gold removed from teeth and made into souvenir jewelry, etc.) I do think it is cause to take a closer look at ourselves rather than finger point. I should also note that not all soldiers were “welcomed” home.
It is absurd to ask such a question in a forum such as this one. Read up about the Holocaust and you will able to decide how severe it was, as compared to other atrocities. Snappy one-post answers will not cover the field.
Reminds me of the old joke:
Q. How’s your wife?
A. Compared to who?
>> Comparatively speaking, how bad were the Nazis?
Well they were pretty bad but they also have had a lot of bad press for the last half century. But in numbers killed and attrocities they do not take the cake. Both the Soviet and the Chinese communist regimes have killed much greater numbers of their own people (which in my mind adds a degree of badness). The Japanese did pretty much the same stuff all over Asia but, because they did it to other Asian people we seem to care less. More recently you have the Khmer Rouge, Yugoslavia, a number of wars in Africa…
So the answer to your question is that, comparatively speaking, the nazis were about average when compared to other similar historical events. They just got bad press.
The Nazi’s can’t hold a candle to Stalin in terms of raw numbers.
In 1932-33 Stalin managed to off some 10 million peasants via famine or executions. Russia lost on the order of 25 million people by the war’s end (over 8.5 million soldiers and nearly 17 million civilians). Obviously Germans had a lot to do with that but I believe Stalin managed to kill off a lot more on his own than Germany ever did. For comparison Germany lost around 7 million people (almost equally split between civilians and soldiers) and the United States lost around 300,000 (practically all soldiers).
I think what set the Nazi’s in a whole category unto themselves was the stated goal of genocide against the Jews and then the very methodical way they went about it. Stalin was an equal opportunity murderer basically taking out anyone who was opposed to him which somehow seems less offensive than the attempted systematic extermination of a race.
It is interesting to note that Time Magazine had Hitler as their 1938 Man of the Year and Stalin as their 1939 and 1942 Man of the Year. Go figure…
Not too get too far off topic, but I don’t think you will find too many apologists for Stalin. Even the pinkest of the pinkos acknowledges that Stalin was Bad News with a capital “Bad”. When American commies found out about Stalin’s brutality, they were aghast, not supportive.
What you will find, is people who still dig communism, which is a very very different thing than Stalin and co.'s brutal totalitarianism.
I think what made the Nazis so bad was that it was such a modern genocide. It came complete with lab coats, text books and youth groups. It was not your run-of-the-mill slaughter of enemies that is the terrible but common byproduct of war. It was a very civilized approach to absolute evil. For so long we thought that we were making “progress” towards a better society. We believed that science would bring salvation. Nazism shook the foundations of modernism. It proved that our methods and means were not really better than the old ones. Suddenly brutality wasn’t restricted to those underdeveloped nations that never had things together in the first place.
Whenever Time does something like that, they have to reiterate their criteria for “Man of the Year”. They are simply recognizing the individual that had the most influence on events for that year, not making a value judgement about the nature of that influence. In that sense, Hitler certainly deserved the 1939 award. The Ayatollah Khomeini got it one year, too.
Nearness in history, and the industrialization of the process of genocide make the Nazi regime particularly noticable. I’m not sure the greatest excesses of the Romans or Babylonians were any less reprehensible. They merely lacked the technological base to do it with such extreme efficiency.
Re US and the Indians: I once saw a comment that I thought very appropriate - there have been greater instances of genocide, but there has never been a greater instance of a government behaving with total CONFUSION towards a subjugated people. The United States simply could not make up its mind how in hell to deal with the Indians, treating them as subject peoples one minute, autonomous nations the next, and vacillating between isolation and assimilation so wildly as to make a total pig’s breakfast out of the whole thing.
As a total percentage of population exterminated, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge are very much in the running, if not the champs, in the modern era. Which led to the weird experience of Cambodia/Kampuchea being relatively ( very relatively ) much better off after being invaded and briefly conquered by Vietnam.
Bt nothing approaches the coldly methodical approach to genocide that the Nazi’s took. They may not set the record for sheer butchery, but they do set the record for creepily evil analytical slaughter. But this is very much IMHO.
Tamerlane ( Damn new password keeps tripping me up . Stupid crackers. )
As a total percentage of population exterminated, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge are very much in the running, if not the champs, in the modern era. Which led to the weird experience of Cambodia/Kampuchea being relatively ( very relatively ) much better off after being invaded and briefly conquered by Vietnam.
But nothing approaches the coldly methodical approach to genocide that the Nazi’s took. They may not set the record for sheer butchery, but they do set the record for creepily evil analytical slaughter. But this is very much IMHO.
Tamerlane ( Damn new password keeps tripping me up . Stupid crackers. )
What Tamerlane, MEBuckner, Lemur866, Falafel Waffle and even sven said (hope I didn’t miss anyone): the nazis were post-industrial totalitarians, and they enlisted an entire Western European population to methodically carry out the horror. The evil wasn’t an aberration, it was banal (as Hannah Arendt described it), average, and demonstrated to a shocked world how many “normal, work-a-day” people lack the ability to make moral judgments when this would threaten their comfort and the status quo.
Actually, the Bolsheviks were pretty bad even before Stalin. (Sorry Olentzero, but I HAVE to do this!) Lenin pretty much set up the whole firing squads, the secret police, the gulags, etc etc. He was pretty blood thirsty as well.
I think also, alot of people associate communism with the USSR and Cuba and China. NOT that I’m a fan of communism, but it’s a THEORY, and not necessarily workable in a real situation. What you HAD in the Soviet Union was simply a dictatorship, that was supposed to be the “Worker’s Paradise”, but it was hardly that.
Also, alot of what the Soviets did was over time…Hitler did it in such a short time.
However, I think to reduce things to sheer numbers ruins the whole argument. I don’t think it’s about HOW many, but what the reasons were, what the regime was like, etc etc. That is why, in my mind, that we had quite a lot of bloody dictators-like Mussolini, Hitler, Noriega, Pinochet, Stalin, Khomeini, Hussein, etc etc.
What pretty much everyone has said, with a vigorous restatement of what I’ve previously contributed on this topic in other threads (is the GD search function still active???).
Emphasis on: 1) policies of deliberate extermination 2) bloodlust involved and enjoyment of same 3) savagery as explicit national policy, and 4) the fact that these atrocities were committed by a modern, “civilized” Western government, many of whose citizens willingly, even eagerly threw themselves into bestial behavior.
It takes a lot to measure up to the Nazis, and I’m afraid that most of the pretenders don’t have what it takes.
Those two particularly get my goat. The bastards decided that the state should dictate how the science of genetics was defined and how it should be researched, and began re-writing the history books to match their own perverted, baseless ideas.
These acts are evil, in the most basic sense.
The biological profession was completely redirected toward proving that which could not be proven (because, it turned out, it was wrong). I believe part of the impetus for using humans as research subjects grew out of the fact that the asinine beliefs of the Nazis couldn’t be proven though other means. As a result, science began to cause suffering, injury, and destruction: evil. If I remember correctly, post-war biologists and physicians who examined the Nazis’ research on human subjects discovered much of the data was fudged to back up the party line. Many people will tell you that’s evil, too.
Historically, a generation of youths were carefully schooled in a history which would make even your ignorant high-school American kid laugh out loud. It was a history based on theories of hate and superiority, of dominance and submission. Those little bastards in the Hitler Jugend turned sixteen and seventeen in 1944, just in time to fanatically support their evil regime in a way that no normally educated kids ever would. They fought to the death, and probably took more American kids with them than the totality of their own numbers, in part because they believed they were superior and in the right. The historical teachings of the Nazis were flat out wrong, and they were designed that way to further an evil agenda. Worse still, it actually came to fruition, however briefly. I shudder to think what a Third Reich might have been like had they delayed war until 1945, as originally planned.
In short, much of the Nazi regime was based on the inherently dishonest premise that if you believe it enough, it will come true, particularly if you intimidate, liquidate or expel those who would dare stand up for reason. That’s evil, plain and simple.
Let me suggest, if it hasn’t been done already, that the worst thing about the Nazi’s was that they were efficient. Lots of other governments had tried to do what the Germans did from 1936 to 1945, but they did it in a pretty random, hit and miss manner. The Germans, on the other hand were organized and made an industry out of murdering people who might challenge their power and people who they just didn’t like for one reason or another. Even more horrifying, they made it pay.
Attila the Hun’s massacre of non-nomads (i.e. killing anything that didn’t move–literally)
Genghis Khan’s slaughter of over 6 million civilians in 60 days. (Pre-gunpowder)
The genocidal extermination of Neanderthal Man by our own ancestors. (Don’t tell me we might have interbred; the rest of this thread shows damn well what humans are capable of)
My first point, the Americans (US) had concentration camps as well. I’m not talking about the Japanese internment (bad), but the Indian Reservations. Now that I think about it, what do you call the slave plantations? Work camps? I will admit that the plantations were much stabler deals than the Nazi work camps.
My second point is that the reason the Nazis were so bad (in our, western, view) is that they were a lot like us. I can’t put forth a well informed argument about why the Nazis were so bad using objective measurements, but I can make this observation about the subjective reason. Culturally, the Germans were/are quite similar to the citizens of the allied nations during WWII. Especially the USA and Great Britain. It is really scary to confront the idea that someone quite similar to you is capable of such terrible thing.
I, personally, am very disturbed by the thought that I am not much different from a Nazi. I think most people in the USA and other Allied nations think of the Nazis as pure evil (or at least get exposed to this idea). We know people who faught against them (or know people who know people who faught against them). Undoubtedly a good part of the reason we think of Nazis as really evil as opposed to other people who have committed atrocities is because the Nazis still have a strong presence in our thoughts. If you looked closely at some of the actions and words of the Nazis, you would probably find things that you agreed with. They may have been jerks and they may have been involved in some pretty terrible things, but they still could be good parents (in their way) and loving husbands (at times).