No, not really. Let’s say that the population of Poland was thirty million people and ten million of them were farmers. You could, in theory, kill off ten million non-farmers without it having any effect on food production - the ten million farmers who were working before are still alive and working on their farms. But now instead of there being thirty million Poles to be fed, there are only twenty million. So enough food to feed ten million people is theoretically available to be sent to Germany.
This was the theory anyway. In practice, the Nazi program drove farmers to cut down their production to basically subsistence levels. Why would they produce more food if it was just going to be seized by an occupying army? And the Germans found their ability to force food production was limited. As you note, they couldn’t easily threaten to kill farmers as a means of raising food production - that would have been too obviously counter-productive for even the Nazis.
Obviously it takes a special set of circumstances and most people don’t just lapse into mass murder at the drop of a hat or we would have no civilisation to speak of. There are also examples of soldiers refusing to kill and the military has to go to some effort to get soldiers into that frame of mind. The Nazis delegated the work to special units in order not to expose the regular soldiers to the psychological stress.
However, I am sure no leadership, bent on genocide, had much difficulty finding people with the right psychopathic traits to do this work. But ordinary joes? I don’t buy that. The circumstances have to be quite hysterical, or we would all be fearful of stepping out of our door.
Most of Eastern Europe was in a low state of development - the majority of the population was involved, directly or indirectly, in agriculture. I don’t think you could murder off 20% of the population, however chosen, and not have a detrimental effect on production.
However, that’s besides the point: the Nazis did not massacre based on usefulness to agriculture. Even if it was theoretically possible to manage killing off “inessentials” so as not to harm production, that wasn’t their plan. If you were Jewish, you died. If you were in a village associated with partisan activities - you died. Increasingly, you died on the whims of local Nazi commanders.
Hitler was laying the groundwork for genocide in 1923. Nothing in his writings proposes that anyone be eliminated as a non-producing consumer of food.
I see the appeal of a claim that either Hitler or the Nazis might have looked on the reduction of the Slavs and Jews as a way to avoid famine for the Ubermenschen, but like the proposed rationales of killing Jews to take their wealth or killing Jews and Slavs to prevent uprisings, I do not see any actual historical evidence for it.
[Quote=Hitler]
But the result will be that one day existence in this
world will be denied such a people; because man may
certainly defy the eternal law of the will to continue, but
nevertheless revenge will come, sooner or later. A stronger
generation will drive out the weaklings, because in its ulti-
mate form the urge to live will again and again break the
ridiculous fetters of a so-called * humanity’ of the indi-
vidual, so that its place will be taken by the ‘humanity’ of
Nature which destroys weakness in order to give its place
to strength.
[/QUOTE]
By defaming the Jewish people and declaring that they were, universally, parasitic criminals bent on destroying the Aryan “race,” he seeded the idea that they should have no rights to live among the Germans. While Mein Kampf does not explicitly call for the eradication of the Jews, it firmly establishes the notion that Jews are undesirable and should be eliminated from (German) society. [
In the times of the Holy Roman Empire, Jews were faced to convert into Christianity, leaving Judaism behind in order to get assimilated. This was of course necessary for the preservation of the Catholic Roman identity and the survival of their culture. Naturally, many Jews rejected this notion and thus were killed/tortured/exiled. Some were left though and their allowance to stay had a sole, diabolic and well-pllaned reason. They were enforcedly employed as taxes collectors…
So they had to collect taxes from people, and guess what, people don’t like to pay taxes, hence they disliked the Jews and saw them as people who took away their hard-earned money that would be never recovered… This was to create pressure to the Jews, who rejected converting and to get them assimilated.
It was also the first major step which created the base of anti-semitism in Europe. Today, still signs of anti-Semitism in Christian Democrat Europe is visible, thus we can say Romans did a good job indeed.
“The times of the Holy Roman Empire”? That thing lasted for a hella long time. You gotta be specific.
Also, “the first major step”? Not really. One might as well argue that Christianity itself was the first major step, or else Matthew 27:25, specifically.
Also, “Christian Democrat Europe”? What is that?
Also, “Romans”? That word is usually used to refer either to the, y’know, Romans, or else to from people from Rome (the city). It is never used to mean people from the Holy Roman Empire - which, as the quip goes, was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire.
Aye, that he was. And the king of Spain is called, among other things, the “king of Jerusalem.” But when you refer to people from Spain, you don’t call them Jerusalemites, do you? Same here.
Anyway, this is all wildly off-topic - sorry about that.
Interesting tidbit of info … I read an article on this, and his bizzare stalking of her (fortunately for her, she never knew about it at the time). Imagine being stalked by … Hitler!
Turns out she wasn’t Jewish though - only had a Jewish-sounding name. A pity, that.
It’s the usual cite, but have you looked at studies such as the Milgram experiment (and derivatives)? Ordinary joes can be persuaded to do terrible things with little provocation.
It may seem difficult for you to believe, but the ability of humans to engage in slaughter is pretty well established. “Ordinary Joes” are, typically, the ones who do it. In the Tutsi/Hutu conflagration, nearly an entire people turned on their “kill” switches and set out to make it happen. There is no evidence that the Armenian genocide undertaken by Turks in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was carried out by psychopaths. In fact, unlike Nazi Germany, where all sorts of armchair psychologists have waded in on the subject of the (in)sanity of Hitler, Mengele, Eichmann, Himmler, and others, no one ever couches the slaughter by the Turks in terms of sanity or madness.
Note that the two authors to whom I pointed earlier, Darren Wilson and Daniel Goldhagen strongly disagreed with each other on just how it could happen, but both of them agreed that the massive murders were carried out by “ordinary Joes.”
