Mengele sewed living children together.
I believe you’ve hit it right on the head. The efficiency of the whole business was what gave it it’s horrific, cold-blooded quality. And maybe the Nazis were stopped before they could rack up the same numbers as the Commies, but you can believe there would have been a lot more if they’d had the time.
You find me some physical evidence that this is the story let me know.
Marc
I have to say, I think that’s what does it about the Nazis-they were COLD.
Most people killed out of passion, and hatred-yes, but sort of a hot-blooded, rage filled hatred.
The Nazis were COLD about it. They just sort of processed it, like an assembly line. It was done so efficiently, like cattle. Like machines. It wasn’t human. Humans can be bloody and violent…but this-this was different. It was methodical. Planned out.
BTW, how could the German people NOT speak out? Simple-fear. You never knew who was a spy, and who wasn’t. There were rumors…but you didn’t talk about it. Very effective.
I think that the Nazis were incredibly evil – everyone is reminded of the six million Jews killed, but they also slaughtered another three million or so other “undesirables”, including Gypsies and non-Jewish Poles. (That hits close to home for me – I had relatives there and then who changed their names in the hope of avoiding the Nazi axe.) And I agree with the posters above who say that the real horror is that these Nazis were so close to us in culture and sensibility and time. It’s the thought that someone you might correspond with or talk to on the phone could so easily and cold-bloodedly assent to genocide that seems so horrible.
But I also have to agree that they were not alone. As noted above, Stalin killed more that the Nazis, and they were his own people. The Japanese killed huge numbers of Chinese (read about the Rape of Nanking, and realize that this was not the only such incident). Earlier in the century there was the genocide of Armenians by the Turks, and more recently the events in Cambodia. And, yes, similar and worse events have occurred throughout history. As cartoonist/historian Larry Gonick has noted "How many cultures even have a word for ‘kill every tenth person’ (= ‘decimate’)’.
But just to keep things in perspective, events like this are not unknown in the history of the United States, either. I understand that German POWs during the Second World War were in some cases starved and treated worse than what I’ve seen depicted in The Great Escape and Stalag 17. The Confederate prison stockade at Andersonville sounds as bad as the Nazi death camps. The accounts of Army butchery during the Indian Wars sound as cold and callous as the Nazis – read Dee Brown’s ** Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee** – Soldiers boasted of making handkerciefs out of scrota, and justified killing children and infants because “nits make lice”. The US attitude toward the native american people often seems like genocide. I’m not picking on the US here – look at the behavior of any conquering Western power or colonizer. But inhumanity seems to be a world-wide phenomena.
[list=A]
[li]Within a few years of our arrival in a given area, Neanderthal Man vanishes fron that area’s fossil record.[/li]
[li]Intense competition for resources (food, et al) during an Ice Age.[/li]
[li]Superior weapons on our part.[/li]
[li]The historic record of the basic territoriality of Man, in all times & places[/li]
[li]Various examples of Human bones found in H. Sapiens sites that have been split to extract the marrow.[/li]
[li]Neanderthal skulls with wounds consistant with damage caused by stone weapons, dating from roughly the era of Neaderthal/H. Sapiens contact[/li]
[li]Everything that the events in this thread reveals about Human Nature.[/li]
[/list]
Evidence isn’t going to get much better than this, due to a lack of writing in the era in question. No Neolithic newspaper stories, sorry.
Sorry Boid, fraid this doesn’t fly.
As far as i recall there is little to no evidence of direct neander/modern man conflict. Marginalization by chance, outcompeted for scarce resources, yes. Wholesale slaughter? No. I rather dislike the cheapening of the word by applying it to circustances which in the end are not genocide.
The sad truth was that they did speak out on certain atrocities. Public opinion had stopped the early killing of the mentally disabled by the state.
One has to understand that in the first five years of the Nazi seizure of power their hold was not absolute. They were still subject to the army and public opinion.
In those Early years the public just did not care enough about the Jews to speak out against the anti Semitic laws the Nazis created, nor did they do anything while their fellow Germans were slowly and methodically stripped of their rights.
Many knew based on Hitler’s writings and party speeches that the ultimate aim was not merely the expulsion but also the eventual extermination of Jews.
For many years after the war many Germans claimed to have detested what the state did but could do nothing but the truth was many didn’t want to do anything.
That apathy doomed millions.
The frightening thing about the whole Nazi regime (to me, at least) is the ‘herd mentality’ and the way masses of people gradually set aside their morality and went along blindly for the ride (killing several million human beings in the process). It’s disconcerting when you see how seemingly ‘normal’ most of the Nazi party actually were (and are). People are most dangerous when they are in a group. Groups are easily swayed… individuals are not. There were countless Germans who were against the Nazi agenda, and those who simply ignored it until they couldn’t any longer. Not all Germans were the ‘demonic’ Nazis portrayed in popular culture… in a way, it’s easier for us to dehumanize them (much the same way they dehumanized the Jews)… because to see them as human beings only brings the fact closer to home: the fact that we, as humans, are not incapable of such monstrosity. Let’s hope that humankind can learn from this, and prevent it from ever happening again (although history is already repeating itself and mass-genocide is occurring around the globe).
Comparatively speaking?
All in all, they were not as bad as some have been before their rise and since their fall. The only reason we know a lot about it is because it happened during a time of wide spread international communication and right at a time where most of the advanced nations considered themselves ‘civilized’ and everyone was in his ‘place.’
The Romans could have given them tips on how to mass slaughter more efficiency and the Jews have not been the only race/religion/peoples genocide has been attempted on. However, the Jews are the first to not only fight back, but keep the fight going after the war, and to go after those who helped the killers by being ‘selectively’ neutral. Plus, in olden times, any looted treasures were gone. You could ask for them back, but you’d probably have to fight the vanquished victor to get them. Here the Jews are using a universal legal system to gain the return of their possessions, which others feel they have a right to keep.
Based on old rules of war, they do, but these are not old times anymore.
The Nazi’s were not the baddest of the bad, but close to the most professional, and their quick rise to power in a ‘civilized’ world was and still is, stunning. We should not be surprised though, because Sadaam has done the same, so have the other dictators, including Castro. I think they learned from Hitler. Cuba was nearly as astonishing as Germany because Cubans were not still one step above dessert squatting nomads like in the middle east, where the Iyotola Kihlmany (sp) started the feces flying and where a centuries old Holy War between Jews and Muslims is warping progress and views for generations.
The Cubans were further along than Arabia in ‘being civilized’ and were not corrupted and forced to advance by the arrival of much money and unearned technology. They just had a corrupt dictator, who Castro ousted, then filled in for and happily slaughtered all who opposed him. He was a freedom fighter, who got corrupted himself by power.
Nu, nobody’s mentioned the Crusades yet? Feh!
Tragic and evil though they were, the Crusades paled in comparison to the massacres conducted by the governments of Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse Tung and Pol Pot, or even by Mongolian bandit leader Chang Hsien-Chung. Look under “Crimes: Mass Killings” in Guiness Book of World Records for details. (Note that even though these were governmental acts commanded by the aforementioned regimes, the book still refers to them as crimes.)
http://www.str.org/free/commentaries/apologetics/comparisons/realmurd.htm
Nazi atrocities were carried out under a thin veil of scientific progress using a bastardised version of Darwinism and Eugenics(which was quite the thing in the thirties).
Strangely Stalin used Darwinism too but it never was taken seriously, being a paranoid maintenance of power, as most atrocities throughout history were.
So IMHO its the use of ‘science’ which had led us up until then out of an age of ignorance and then dragged a nation straight back into it, an educated nation, a civilised nation, people just like us.
Its the perversion of absolutely everything that made modern man what he was, right down to breeding of children for specific roles in society.
In some ways then it is more than the killings, it’s the whole package, the political philosophy, social engineering and the use of industrial methods, and it was all documented with such loving pride as if to be glorified as an achievement, as much as many things about the Nazis this is high in my list and makes their evil ways unique.
Well, Stalin and the Stalinist Soviet Union embraced Lamarck more than Darwin. Lysenko was a strong Lamarckian, and he enjoyed state support.
Individually, I do not think the Nazis were noticeably worse than their predecessors or their followers. I do not think it takes a fundamentally worse kind of moral rot to burn a woman alive for witchcraft than to hang a Jew for sleeping with an “Aryan.” I do not believe that the minds of the U.S. soldiers who shot children at Sand Creek look noticeably different inside from the minds of the 2nd SS Panzer division soldiers who burned French peasants alive at Oradour-sur-Glane. I don’t know what it takes for an SS officer to suffocate a roomful of naked screaming people with Zyklon B, but it takes the same thing that it took for an NKVD officer to go calmly down a line of tied-up Polish prisoners and shoot each one in the back of the neck. I firmly believe that the mind of a murdering Nazi fanatic differs very little from the mind of any other kind of murdering fanatic.
But collectively, the Nazis have a pretty good claim to be the most evil group in history. The only other groups that comes even close to them in terms of number of innocent and defenseless people murdered by deliberate state policy are the Bolshevist communists and Genghis Khan’s Mongols. And there are good arguments why the Nazis were worse than either. Of the Khan, it can be said that he was a savage man from a savage time, born of a culture that had never learned gentle ways, while the Nazis came from a highly advanced, civilized, refined nation whose people arguably ought to have known better. Of the Bolshevist Communists, who probably killed even more innocent noncombatants than the Nazis, it can be said that their tyranny was spread out over many decades and in several different national governments, while the Nazis managed to almost match them for bloodshed through only a single government and in just 13 years. It can also be said that the Bolshevists were less implacable than the Nazis; if you didn’t “hoard” goods, didn’t defend your property, didn’t speak out against the regime, didn’t cling to “bourgeois” privileges, and if you otherwise conformed to their tyranny, you at least had a chance to live. With the Nazis, the Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, and other untermenschen had no chance to conform. You were either of das Volk, or you weren’t, and if you weren’t, you were dead. No plea, no argument, no repentance could save you.
Another particularly repugnant aspect of Nazism is the sheer mindlessness of its cruelty, the active striving to submerge reason and intellect and elevate the basest emotions above them. Let this anecdote from Primo Levi, a survivor of Auschwitz, illustrate:
I don’t think that science should be considered the main culprit here, Casdave. The Nazis were driven primarily by national pride and vengeance over the loss of WWI and the privations that followed. And people have always looked for resons to believe their group is superior to others; certainly anti-semitism didn’t begin with Darwin.
I agree the there were some aspects in which Darwinism (which in this context is defined as the ideology of embracing ‘survival of the fittest’ rather than the science of explaining evolution) played a role, but there was so much more going on. (i.e. ‘stabbed in the back’, ‘bolshevism’, etc.)
I’m not sure what you’re talking about here, but in any case, breeding has been going on for millenia.
Having just finished the Political Economy of Human Rights volumes 1 and 2, by Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman, maybe we should take a look at America a little harder.
Masterminding fascism, genocide, economic hegemony, economic collapse… sends a shiver down my spine. The Nazis happened half a century ago, this is now.
Actually, ignore my last post. I always get a bit idealistic when I have hear of injustices, no matter how inevitable. People are swine.
From this site: ( http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/Holocaust/What_makes_the_Holocaust_unique.html ):
Well if you want some numbers, I’m surprised no one has mentioned Matthew White’s Atlas of the 20 Century at http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/20centry.htm
It can make for some cold reading. Here are some specific subsections of the site.
Comparison of Hitler, Satalin and Mao- http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/tyrants.htm
30 Worst Atrocities of the 20th Century- http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/atrox.htm
Worst Wars- http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/war-list.htm
Detailed war list- http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstats.htm
Detailed list of ‘megadeath’ events- http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstatx.htm
My personal opinion is that the nazis are considered the epitomy of evil for good cause. In sheer numbers the only ones who come close are Stalin and Mao (and perhaps several other ancient individuals but numbers on the Huns and Mongols are questionable at best). In efficiency they are unparalleled. However as several people have pointed out there are similar events across history. The nazis gain their unique status due to an unhappy combination of group will, the technology and infrastructure to carry it out that almost no one else has had.