Comparatively speaking, how bad were the Nazis?

Great Debates
41

Have to do what, indicate your disagreement with the Bolsheviks by concocting half-truths and/or outright falsities?

sigh Guin, I know how you feel about the Russian Revolution, but justifying repeating the same damn things you’ve said a hundred times before by saying you “have to” cry out against the injustice of it all just doesn’t cut the mustard any more.

Yes, there were firing squads and the secret police (CheKa) after October 1917. But they weren’t directed against the Russian population as a whole - they were directed against the people who wanted to restore the unstable bourgeois democracy of February, or push the clock even further back. Ddoes the name Kornilov ring a bell? Class warfare is never a pretty thing and to renounce the measures necessary to defend a new society from the old simply because they are violent is tantamount to suicide. Your precious Nikolai the Bloody used the same measures to repress challenges to the society he ruled, but to reinforce a backwards and reactionary society.

The gulags never existed under Lenin. There were prisons, certainly, but they were nothing like the slave labor camps that came into existence under Stalin.

Having said all that, back to the subject.

The Nazis, unlike anyone else in Scylla’s OP, were fundamentally a political expression of the sharp rise in class struggle across Europe in general and in Germany specifically. The extermination of the Jews was not their only goal, although that became their primary focus after they gained power. At the beginning they offered themselves to the German industrialists and the military as the only solution to the rising working class challenge stemming from the instability of the Weimar republic. Their intent was to make Germany safe again for capitalism by thoroughly smashing the organized working class.

While I do not believe that the other atrocities listed by Scylla are any less horrific, no other group that carried out these actions were portrayed as “enemies of democracy” like the Nazis were. They were (and I hope they remain) a unique combination of political and racial terror.

42

Olent, my sources come from people who lived in Russia, whose families lived there, during the time of the Revolution. (I was simply teasing-I thought you had gotten over the whole thing by now…)

Yes, Lenin did INDEED establish the gulags. NO, he wasn’t as bad as Stalin, but he wasn’t a saint. And let’s not bring the whole Nicholas vs. Lenin thing into this debate. Nicky wasn’t a perfect tsar, but on the whole, the succeeding regime of the Bolsheviks was much much more oppressive. (Much of it has to do with the personalities of the individuals, which we’ll save for another time).

Besides, I am not one for monarchs-I would say that things would have been much better had Kerensky been able to sustain control. You remember Kerensky, right?

Firing squads, secret police, same trappings of Tsarist Russia. Kill, maim, torture the opposition. But no, you’re right, Lenin was no Hitler, but he was no humanitarian. Hell, even Gorky thought he was a little extreme at times, if I remember correctly.

Look, the whole system was bad, I’ll grant you. Had Nicholas’s grandfather lived a little bit longer-he was about a week away from granting a constitution when he was killed-perhaps things could’ve been different. There were too many factors, and Russia has always been a violent country. However, to deny that Lenin was a brute is denying history. Facts are facts.

43

Thank you ever so much for posting those links. I think I’ll go slash my wrists now.

44

You think that is depressing. It gets worse when you realize it only has numbers for the past century. Man’s inhumanity to man is nearly incomprehensable. Even if we do grant the Nazis a special spot in hell, they still have plenty of neighbors.

45

I think even sven was the closest so far on this one. Germany was/is a modern nation, with intelligent, civilized, ethically mature citizens. While most other perpetrators of genocide could be described as ignorant/uneducated/primitive/etc., germans are just like other white people. The Holocaust reminds us not of what men were capable of, not what less advanced cultures are capable of, but of what WE ARE capable of.

Even in this thread, some words attract my attention like neon signs. Monstrous. “Set aside their morality”. Inhuman. Swine. Evil. We all use these words to separate ourselves from what the Nazis remined us of.

These were not swine who did this.
These were not “monsters” who did this.
These were not exceptionally “evil” people who did this.

The Holocaust was commited by humans. Civilized, educated, modern humans. Rather than compromise their morals, they reasoned a morally acceptable (to them) motivation for genocide. The german public didn’t protest much about the Holocaust because they approved (“The army’s killing millions of jews? Good! I fucking hate those money-hoarding heathens!”). They were not compromising their humanity; rather, they were following it. Animals don’t kill their own kind like we do. Genocide, therefore, is a purely human act, and we hate ourselves for it.

We simply refuse to accept the facts: Humans are not nice people. We slaughter one another routinely. We thought we had risen above that sort of thing, but the Nazis pointed out that we haven’t. We may never progress beyond genocide. We are violent. We are selfish. We will do what we need to do to survive. To top it all off, we pretend this isn’t true. We think that hating the Nazis and dismissing them as “evil, inhuman monsters” will make us saints.

The Holocaust is a glimpse of the truth about our very nature, and we hate the Nazis for it. After all, the truth hurts.

I’ve always found the phrase, “Man’s inhumanity toward man” to be flawed. It should be “Man’s humanity toward man”. It’s an uglier statement, but it’s more true.

46

[slight hijack]

There is certainly debate over what knocked off the neanderthals, but active genocide by our ancestors is one side I’ve yet to hear. And, to pick only one of your assertations, unless you’ve made some scientific advance the rest of us are missing out on, you’re wildly out of touch here.
[/slight hijack]

I don’t have time to do the poking around just this moment, but I recall reading a claim while researching the colonial impact on the genocides in Rwanda/Burundi that the genocide in Burundi (1972, I think) is right up there in terms of effeciency (number of people/amount of time). I’ll see if I can’t dig some numbers up on that later.

-ellis

47

I cannot agree with this entirely. Granted, humanity’s record of carnage is appalling, and would be appalling even without the Nazis and the Holocaust. But the fact is that the average person, unless he goes to war, goes through his entire life without killing anyone or trying to kill anyone. Murder is not a common human behavior like, say, sex, work, or joking. (This is especially clear when you consider that more than half of all humans are females, who kill other humans about ten times less often than males do). The Nazis really did do something that most of us have never done. Probably most of us could be forced to gas a roomful of children (I would much rather die than do that, but I’m fairly certain I could be physically tortured into doing it), but most of us would not do so willingly, as the Nazis did.

It only takes a handful of cold-eyed killers to perpetrate a Holocaust. That sort of person constitutes a minority in every society. The Nazis did not transform Germany into a nation full of homicidal killers each of whom would have strangled a Jew with their bare hands. What the Nazis “accomplished,” if I may use that word, was to lull the German people into pliant acceptance while the psychopathic minority did the butcher’s work. It is quite horrible enough that most of us can be convinced to shrug our shoulders and say, “So what?” while genocide is going on (as the whole world has done with regard to Cambodia and Rwanda). But that is not the same thing as saying that most humans are actually willing to go out and exterminate other people themselves.

48

This is not nearly as clear-cut as you suggest, and is in fact the subject of much debate among historians.

49

One aspect: Germany was considered the height of modern culture and civilization. The world’s most noteworthy musicians and philosophers and scientists were German. Berlin was where the elite wined and dined and danced. And Western society has long worked under the assumption that “progress” (in science, art, music, literature, education, etc) was good.

The Nazis showed us that “progress” and civilization has no bearing on morality.

Yes, Stalin was brutal, but no one viewed Communist Moscow as an apex of civilization. No one thought Ghenghis Khan’s hordes represented “progress” in art, music and literature. Ditto with the other mass-murderers cited in this topic.

What makes the Nazis stand out, IMHO, is not necessarily the sheer numbers (as though it was a competition for simple brutality), nor the cold-bloodedness, but the shock to the belief system of the world: that these atrocities were carried out by the people who stood at the pinnacle of Western Civilization and all it stands for.

50

IMHO, the Nazi evil was as bad as any seen ever. Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot and others have committed genocides and were so evil someone with a moral compass should not try too hard to rank their acts, but there appears to have been no evil thing that the Nazis did not do as policy.

Incidentally, in the early 1980s I knew of some American communists who were Stalinists. They simply denied the accuracy of reports of his conduct. I’m sure they are still around somewhere, after all, there are neo-Nazis.

51

Just in case anyone cares…

Matthew White’s Atlas gives the Burundi genocide of 1972, Tutsis killing Hutus, as accounting for 5% of the population (130,000 out of 2.65 million). He also lists it as occurring from 1972 to 1973, while this site states that the killing took place during April and May of 1972, which fits better with what I remember. I’d assume White’s continuation into 1973 represents the “mop-up,” if you’ll forgive my callousness.

Five percent of your population in two months ain’t too bad. But, according to White, it’s not even close to most “efficient.” The Herero War in South-West Africa took out 38% of the population (75,000 out of 200,000) in four years, 1904-1907. Brought to you by those ever-loving Germans.

I’ll leave you all to ponder those morbid facts. The Herero link is to a site other than White’s.

-ellis

52

I don’t know how you can argue whether “sewing live children together is more hideous that cutting holes in babies for rape” evil is evil. I can’t argue that the Holocaust was worse than any other wholesale slaughter either.

Can we agree that above a certain “limit” evil is to the infinite degree?

53

The Nazis did not originally seize power–they got their foot in the door when Hitler was appointed Chancellor (after being defeated for President) under the Weimar Republic. I think the fact Adolf Hitler could lawfully and peacefully be appointed head of government in a republic makes us in the West that much more likely to be horrified over the Nazis–unlike the Soviet Union, China, or Cambodia, this happened in a system that at least superficially resembled our own.

54

After much thought, yes. Just as Pluto and Andomeda are optically at infinity, so those two you mention are beyond any concept of…anything. There are literally no words.

55

My thinking in this regard is very similar to Max the Immortal.

I just want to add that for most people in the Western cultures, Hitler has shown that we are quite willing to look the other way in order to preserve our social status, economic status or just our pleasant trouble free lives. By and large we know right from wrong, but we have families you know. By and large we are cowards, and I make no distinction between the British, German, American, French or Dutch people in that regard. Sure, those who didn’t directly live under Hitler’s rule went to war against Hitler, but not to stop the crimes against humanity, but rather the preservation of their own lifestyles at the expense of young men. Don’t forget that anti-Jewish sentiment was quite prevalent in all the democracies,fleeing Jews were turned away from their borders, but the anti-semitism was very discreet. (we can tolerate that, because it doesn’t challenge us)

So now we are embarrassed. We want to disassociate ourselves from this man who exposed the composite ugliness of our cowardly nature.

I would like to make another point with regard to South Africa. For years a discreet policy of Apartheid was carried out by the British. No one in the western democracies really complained. Then the Africaaners entrenched the policy in law. Such flagrant racism was an embarrassment to the Western democracies. Never as far as I can tell has an embargo/boycott been so successful in turning a bad situation around. Aside from Hitler’s Germany, we look at South Africa as the prime example of a racist state, and smugly pride ourselves in having a hand at overturning it. We can now rest. Yeah right. Look at all the other racist conflicts that are occurring in the world today. But they are perpetrated by people that don’t look exactly like us and therefore we cannot be implicated. As far as I can tell, no boycott/embargo exists against a state for ethnic policy except perhaps Yugoslavia.

The ironic thing is that for mankind in general both situation addressed above have probably led to a much improved outlook for the future as we have been humbled and have a better understanding of each other and ourselves.

56

I think I heard somewhere that Hitler could completely paint a 2 bedroom apartment in 1 day. That’s some painter!

57

They were very bad, mainly because they fought a war against us and lost.

Now, if they had won, well that would have been a different matter.

58

No, it’s not that simple. There are many people that the forces of the United States government have fought against, and none of them, not even the slave-owning Confederate States of America, are as universally reviled as the Nazis. Many opponents who fought the U.S. armed forces and lost, such as the Sioux and Seminoles, are lionized today. You don’t see Aguinaldo’s Filipinos being held up to universal contempt and odium. You don’t even hear the Kaiser’s government from the First World War exposed to anything like the vilification that’s heaped on the Nazis.

Likewise, winning the war is not an automatic ticket to good reputation. The Vietnamese communists won the war America fought with them, and while they had some sympathizers in America then and still have now, they are not in very good odor with most Americans.

The Nazis have an evil reputation because they were evil. Losing the war didn’t help them any, but it was not the main reason they were vilified.

59

Bombing cities is ok is it ?

Lets fire bomb japan because they bomb our ships.
The nazis / japs shot unarmed soldiers but we bombed unarmed women and children.

60

I don’t know even how to reply to this, but I can say that my great-great-grandmother and grandfather were not unarmed soldiers. They would have fallen into your second category.