Regarding the Holocaust: Did this crime benefit the perpetrator's plans? Did they expect it to?

Great Debates
21

It’s doubtful Britain was the “premier power”. Probably had the best navy, and the best anti-tank trap (the Channel), but the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe were both ahead of the British Army and the RAF by 1939. That’s why the British relied so heavily on the alliance with France: the French Army and the British Army were both necessary to match German land forces. It was also a factor in the appeasement debate: Chamberlain and the British government realised they needed time to catch up to Germany.

The other point, though, in that Hitler seemed to expect that the British would join him, because they were Germanic (mongrel Germanic, in his view, but Germanic), and therefore a natural ally for Germany. Britain was also opposed to Bolshevism. He hoped that Britain would join him in the fight against the Slavic Bolsheviks, as a junior partner in an Aryan alliance.

That may have been the explanation for the “Stop” order in June of 1940. Hitler stopped his troops from attacking the retreating British forces, which helped the evacuation at Dunkirk. In theory is that he wanted Britain to see that he didn’t want to defeat them entirely, but co-opt them.

22

From a speech given by Heinrich Himmler to a group of SS leaders in Posen in October 1943:

(This is a selection from an approximately three-hour-long speech; however, ellipses represent pauses in Himmler’s speech, not omissions. Words in brackets and italics were added by the translators.)

Note especially the last two sentences. Himmler also went on to say that “We have the moral right, we had the duty to our people to do it, to kill this people who would kill us”.

Now, this is in a sense “propaganda”–Himmler, the big boss of the SS, is giving a motivational speech to a group of SS generals, high-level managers in the organization–but it’s not mass propaganda. It was definitely not for public consumption. (An audio recording of the speech was made, which happened to survive the war and fell into the hands of the Allies. It seems a safe assumption that Nazi leaders spoke with similar frankness on many occasions, in private conversations and even in [semi-]public gatherings like this one, but of course recordings of every speech someone makes or conversation he has won’t necessarily survive even when there isn’t a huge destructive war going on, and when those conversations and speeches aren’t about conspiracy to commit genocide.)

So, this is, presumably, what the highest echelons of the SS (itself the vanguard of the Nazi regime, and practically a state within the state) genuinely believed. The Nazis mass murdered the Jews because they hated the Jews; they hated the Jews because they believed the Jews were an evil “race” of “parasites” who betrayed and victimized the “Aryan race” the Nazis believed themselves to be members of.

23

'Eyes of Hate' Seen in Portrait of Nazi Politician by Jewish Photographer | PetaPixel These are 2 famous photos by Eisenstaedt of Goebbels. The first is before Goebbels finds out Eisenstaedt has Jewish ancestry, the second shortly after. The difference is remarkable. In the 2nd picture, the hate and distase is visceral. No doubt in my mind that to this man, Jews were scary and disgusting.

24

Many were actually practicing Christians, with Jewish ancestry. Some didn’t even know they had Jewish ancestry until the 30’s, when the Nazis had people “prove” their Aryan roots. The Germans, from the Nuremberg Laws, forced them to be classified based on the # of Jewish grandparents…Mischlinge, etc. It was obviously crazy. But Germany had gone crazy in the 30’s after the Depression, and they were open to Hitler’s ambitions, even if only a step at a time.

In Germany, Jews were as assimilated as a group could be. Those in the East were more isolated. The Nazis classified all of them as subhumans. And they were called “useless eaters”. It’s incredible that an advanced society could fall prey to that type of thinking.

25

If a group is set apart from their neighbors, then yellow stars are not required to identify them. The Nazi hated all Jews, but had an especial fear of the “secret Jew”, who could not be identified by any external sign.

26

Also keep in mind that German antisemitism goes back a long time and was unfortunately buried into the region’s psyche. Martin Luther himself was a rabid antisemite who wrote at length on the subject, though his followers weren’t unique in that regard.

Coupled with the aforementioned economic crisis, things then reached a flashpoint for an unscrupulous leader to leverage the bigotry to come to power.

27

They’d have to be clairvoyant to know this.

The earliest evidence for atomic fission came in 1939, from Lisa Meitner, Otto Hahn, and Otto Frisch. Hahn stayed in Germany. Meitner and Frisch fled. (But Metiner refused to work on a possible bomb at Los Alamos.) Fermi’s first atomic pile wasn’t until 1942.

In the 1930’s German science was the envy of the rest of the world. Losing the Jewish fraction would be a serious mistake but not one they could have predicted would come back to bite them. And the official line was that Jewish science (all of it, in every discipline) was wrong and inferior. By their lights they were improving the breed.

There was nothing rational about the Nazi hatred of Jews. Trying to find rational explanations is futile. Your doing so as with your quick embrace of lebensraum as a rational excuse will always mislead you from the irrational core of the mindset.

28

Attributing the Nazi death industry solely to antisemitism, though, ignores all the other millions of people targeted. The targeting of the Jews might have been irrational bigotry, but targeting of other groups was not.

29

Since Mein Kampf is widely credited towards driving Hitler’s – and therefore the country’s – mind-set, reading it can be an eye-opener.

Another way of looking at the question…using a scapegoat as a reason for a country’s problems allows a shift from the real reasons. If the Jews and gypsies prevent progress, getting rid of them would be desirable. Since this never happened as originally envisioned, we don’t know if it would have solved everything.

30

While antisemitism had deep roots in the past, it was also part of a weird kind of futurist or ultra-modernist view of the world. The Nazis, like the Italian fascists, believed that their ideas were cutting edge, based on their own interpretation of modern science and pseudoscience. The scientific movements like Darwinism was adapted to fit a new way of how to view humanity, which was essentially to make an analogy between ‘fit’ and ‘unfit’ groups of people, treating them as though there were species among humans. The fascists embraced ruthlessness in improving industrial efficiency and tried to apply it to humanity as well. As companies like Ford would show, industrialism worked best when it had an autocratic governance and each little cog in the machine doing exactly what his/her role was.

31

I’m fairly confident that the targetting of Roma was also irrational bigotry. Ditto homosexuals.

32

Also, disabled people. All seems to be rooted in the same goals of removing people that were seen as immediate threats and wastes of resources and to cleanse the gene pool of degenerate genes.

33

“Numerous people fell victim to the Nazi regime for political, social, or racial reasons. Germans were among the first victims persecuted because of their political activities. Many died in concentration camps, but most were released after their spirit was broken. Germans who suffered from mental or physical handicaps were killed under a"euthanasia” program. Other Germans were incarcerated for being homosexuals, criminals, or nonconformists; these people, although treated brutally, were never slated for utter annihilation as were the Jews.
Roma and Sinti (often called by the derogatory term Gypsies) were murdered by the Nazis in large numbers. Estimates range from 200,000 to over 500,000 victims. Nazi policy toward Roma and Sinti was inconsistent. In Greater Germany, Roma and Sinti who had integrated into society were seen as socially dangerous and eventually were murdered, whereas in the occupied Soviet Union, Roma and Sinti who had integrated into society were not persecuted, but those who retained a nomadic lifestyle were put to death."

https://www.un.org/en/holocaustremembrance/docs/FAQ%20Holocaust%20EN%20Yad%20Vashem.pdf

As far as “logic” goes, it should have persuaded Stalin in the 1930s that it was a really bad idea to purge the military of many of its best leaders (along with millions of other loyal citizens) when outside threats made such a course especially perilous. Logic is no match for crazed bloodlust.

34

And equally stupid for Pol Pot to kill anyone wearing eyeglasses.

Regards,
Shodan

35

I think we’re falling into the trap of “If something is evil, it must therefore be irrational.” If the Nazis wanted lebensraum and also considered certain peoples inferior and those people also had to eat food like anyone else, then there is a perfectly logical reason that they enacted the Holocaust. Less food consumed, less undesirable people around, more space for the superior race.

Doesn’t make it any less monstrously evil, but it makes rational sense.

36

No, they’d need to be sane. True, they had no way of knowing that nuclear research specifically would bear fruit, or that that fruit would prove to have such an overwhelming military application. But they were systematically classifying all of the progress in physics at the time as “Jewish science” and thereby rejecting it. Rejecting reality (which is pretty much the definition of insanity) always has consequences, and it was exceedingly shortsighted to think that nothing of significance would come from all of that “Jewish science”.

37

That’s something worth underlining. Most of the classic “Jewish” orthodox stuff was typically Polish and Russian Jews, not the German ones.

But probably more critical than anything else is that there had been a long-standing (i.e. since the Medieval period) tradition of virulent antisemitism in Europe. There were periodic persecutions and pogroms throughout history- the general refrain was that the Jews had killed Jesus, and that’s why they were being persecuted.

In reality, I suspect that some combination of that latent anti-semitism in the society, combined with the stereotypes of Jews as stingy and greedy, and another stereotype that they were unduly involved in tertiary sector industries like banking, law, etc… meant that they seemed like some sort of combination of soft targets with a lot of wealth to be seized, and with public opinion not historically being on their side. In other words, in light of the pre-war economic difficulties, the Jews made a perfect scapegoat for the Nazis.

That’s what set the stage. What makes it horrifying is that Germany, a mid-20th century modern, industrial nation decided to industrialize the process of ethnic cleansing and genocide. THAT’s what makes the Holocaust so terrible- it’s not the first genocide, nor even the first one of the 20th century. But it is the first one that a nation-state went about prosecuting as an industrial process.

IMO, the “WHY?” question is probably answered by a combination of craziness on the part of the Nazi leaders, combined with Jews being a convenient, more or less wealthy (in Germany anyway) scapegoat, and against whom the population was already pre-conditioned against to some degree.

Where my understanding breaks down is how they went from scapegoating them and persecuting them to outright state-managed industrial murder. It’s one thing if the SA runs around persecuting Jews, and the country makes it uncomfortable for them, or if they’re expelled outright via laws, but it’s another for them to make the leap to murdering them throughout the territories they had conquered or allied with. That part, I don’t understand, and I suspect it’s not a particularly rational or logical thing.

38

People are naturally genocidal. It stems from us existing in small tribal units competing over the same resources. As more complex societies formed, we did not lose our genocidal instincts. We naturally group and view those in the out-group as threats. Nearly every culture in the world has a history of genocide at some point in their past. Typically they took the form of kill all the men and turn the women into sex slaves and children into labor slaves, but unfortunately, genocide was a normal part of the human condition and despite our belief that modern western European countries are somehow civilized and beyond such things, Nazi Germany told us otherwise.

39

“They’d need to be sane” is saying that they needed to be rational. Rational is exactly what they weren’t.

The USSR also went through this purge of Not Invented Here science with Lysenkoism. That was equally irrational, but had similar roots in the belief that the type of new society being wrought had unique understanding and insight into the world. That cropped up again under Mao and Pol Pot and any number of African dictators. Conspiracy thinking blinds people to reality. Once it takes hold of a country’s leadership, the results are predictably dire.

40

Bump, I think that’s the eugenics. Previous forms of genocide were aiming at ethnocide . . .wiping out a people, a culture. There wasn’t the pseudo-scientific idea that it was the genes themselves that made someone subhuman. This wasn’t just in Germany: the US was forcibly sterilizing the “feeble minded” for the good of our genetic stock until the 70s. Forcible expulsion isn’t enough. They were eradicating what they saw as a plague. That is why children weren’t spared.