I think the difference was primarily industrialization. It potentiates all forms of the exercise of power. Tribal genocide isn’t a particularly modern phenomenon. Genghis Kahn, Attila, the Israelites themselves in the lands of Elamites, and the Egyptians, the early Caliphates, and century long wars among new world tribes on both continents.
Us, and them. It’s the only differentiation necessary to create the desire to eliminate them. Twentieth century technology created the greatest increase in many human activities. As a species we have always used tribal justification for murder. We just got a lot better at it.
Tris
Planetary sterilization remains slightly out of our technological reach. So far.
I agree with this. People are capable of tremendous cruelty, but that doesn’t make people insane or illogical in the ways that we ought to understand those terms.
In my view, the Stanford prison experiment and the Milgram experiment showed that normal people who are completely lucid can do things that are absolutely disgusting. I’m not enough of an amateur psychologist to understand why so many people can do bad things – is it a weakness in every person? a weakness in society? a primal level of hate that sublimates under certain circumstances, but only for some people? – but I strongly disagree that the reason boils down to a psychological condition of being unaware of reality in the manner of a mass psychotic breakdown, or as the OP put it, that people are unintelligent.
I tend to think that there’s something scary inside of us that can be drawn out by authority, and everyone possesses an inherent ability to rationalize their own actions, no matter what they are. But we can call still call those actions evil, to be sure. Nazi were evil.
Since everyone in this thread has some varying opinions and seems genuinely interested in this, may I strongly recommend Peter Hayes’ phenomenal book Why? Explaining the Holocaust. Basically, Hayes argues that this:
Along with this:
was that foundation of the Holocaust.
Not true—or at least, not in the beginning, amazing as that may seem to us today. The “end and the goal” was the Final Solution, which began with Operation Reinhard in late 1941. The “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” was very much a means to an end—it’s right there in the name. Recall that before Wannsee, there was the Madagascar Plan, something fully endorsed by Hitler and Eichmann. Before that (and before the war, so before eastern European Jews had come under German control) Germany simply wanted the Jews gone. I’m sure you’ve heard of the St. Louis debacle. That was not an isolated indecent. Recall that Albert Einstein was among the German Jews expelled from the country when Hitler rose to power. (or more accurately, was not allowed back in after he had visited the US in 1933.)
Hitler rose to power in 1933, and as Hayes points out, the Nazis spent the next ~5 years determining what level of persecution against the Jews they could get away with without triggering the ire of the German population in general. The principal goal of Nazi leadership as late as 1938 was to speed up the process of driving the Jews out of the German economy and then out of the country altogether—. The mass murder of Jews didn’t really begin until the Einsatzgruppen started using mass killings as a way of dealing with Jewish civilians in occupied territories following Operation Barbosa.
Interestingly, Hayes argues that the Final Solution was just that: the final way of addressing what the Nazis saw as a problem that did not require mass extermination. "as late as May 1940, Heinrich Himmler called ‘the bolshevist method of the physical annihilation of a people… un-German and impossible.’ " (Hayes, 86.) The Jewish question became more of a “problem” with Hitler’s war successes early in 1941. The number of Jews the Nazis became responsible for multiplied and Hitler begins to see them as a threat. On page 88 Hayes discusses how Hitler saw the Jews in the East as a threat to his advancing army and the reality that the United States would probably enter the conflict against him meant that the Jews “no longer had any value as hostages whose fate could be used to pressure the Allies or intimidate other Jews abroad.” According to Hayes this allowed any “restraint toward the Jews” to fall away. Hayes continues to say that there was a combination of “impatience, frustration, and hubris” that allowed Nazi leaders to proceed more radically against the Jews. While early policy may have been to hold off and win the war before they addressed the “Jewish Question” these circumstances allowed them to begin before they won ultimate victory.
The actual “eliminationist strategy” doesn’t appear to really take hold until the Wannsee Conference—indeed, I’d argue that the whole point of the Wannsee Conference was because the Nazi’s had not fully embraced genocide before that point. Additionally, not only did the Wannsee Conference kick off the Final Solution, it specifically addressed Jews in countries either under German control or that Germany hoped would be under their control (i.e. the USSR) soon.
The Wannsee conference was held in January 1942. This was almost 9 years after the Enabling Act which gave Hitler dictatorial powers (March 1933).
Hitler had always blamed the Jews for WWI and claimed that if war would come again it would once again be the Jews’ fault. Going back to the Hayes book, he even calls the progression of the Holocaust “mission creep” on page 326. The war gave the Nazis an excuse and the cover needed to carry out the Final Solution. However, the mass murder of Jews was not part of Hitler or the Nazi party’s original platform. This isn’t to say of course that Hitler didn’t want Jews exterminated —indeed, he called for just that in Mein Kampf, but it was not part of Nazi party ideology when the party first rose to power.
One thing that’s fascinating is that Waller argues that the Nazi’s looked for unquestioning loyalty — not madmen or wannabe killers, but people who would not question following any orders given to them.
The Einsatzgruppen, for instance, were not comprised of Leopold and Loeb types, but rather older (or very young) men who were unfit for other types of service. They had been indoctrinated for years with the idea that anti-semitism was just another form of pest control. They were then given a chance to serve their country… as mass murderers. Thy jumped at it not because they all wanted to slaughter Jews but because they wanted to serve their country and were willing to follow orders.
Seriously scary shit when one stops and thinks about it.
Jews were not just scientists, but also were a strong part of the German economy. The Jewish accountants and all the managers. I read once how German industry suffered from their loss.
It’s been a while since I read it, but it’s the story of a reserve German MP battalion (a unit of roughly 500-600 or so men) that participated in the rounding up and mass shooting of Jews in Poland.
It’s particularly chilling in that the unit was composed of middle-aged working-class draftees, who weren’t Nazis or anything like that- literal “ordinary men”. It’s kind of like some sort of real-life amalgam of the Stanford Prison and Milgram experiments in some ways.
There was a very interesting line of dialog in a Holocaust movie many decades ago (perhaps Playing for Time?) that touched upon this. Some prisoners that were kept alive at Auschwitz to entertain the camp soldiers (and thus were witness to a more of the atrocities) were arguing this very topic:
“The soldiers here are just monsters, it’s that simple.”
“No, you’re missing the point. They’re not monsters, but rather just ordinary people like the rest of us - who are doing monstrous things.”
Think about all the other people of Europe like the French, Dutch, and especially the Poles who also rounded up Jews.
Remember that scene in “Schindlers List” where the Polish Jews are being lead away and the ordinary Poles are screaming “Goodbye Jews” and throwing mud at them.
Then after the war when some survivors came back they were sometimes killed when they tried to reclaim their homes and property.
Eastern Europe was absolutely rich in antisemitism. Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states…they were full of collaborators, people who worked with the Nazis in the killing machine. In Eastern Europe, Jews lived a more segregated life in many parts. They had their own settlements, called the “Shtetl”, which were small villages and markets throughout Eastern Europe. I think this contributed to the hatred, this idea of the Jews being “the other”. None of that “shtetl” living was present in Germany or in Western Europe. So, some places, like Switzerland, Sweden and Denmark, were either “neutral” or they protected their jews from the Nazis. Of course, it only helped some. Many Jews from Western Europe was also hated, and they were eventually killed, too.
The “stab in the back” myth really took root after the German defeat in WWI:
Hitler inflamed the passions of Germans by telling them that they were good people who could not have possibly lost the war, indeed the Allies never made it into German territory, but their soft and corrupt leaders nonetheless signed the Treaty of Versailles., while back at home in support of the war effort, these leaders were enriching themselves while the Jews, Catholics, and Gypsies had divided loyalties and did not do enough to help Germany win the war, or worse yet, self dealt to themselves and their communities at the expense of Germany.
Germany seemed to be content with simply stripping those that were the ire of its hatred of their civil and political rights and leaving well enough alone except for the leaders. However, their successes early in the war made this impractical. You cannot have hundreds of thousands of Jews in conquered territory and leave enough of a rear guard to keep an eye on all of them. And even if you could, why waste that manpower on those people instead of just killing them?
The short version was that it was an appeal to ethnic pride that got WAAAY out of hand due to the charismatic nature and fanaticism of Adolf Hitler.
The fundamental central tenet of Nazism is the concept that peoples are in constant conflict. The conflict between nations (nations can mean nation states or, more pertinently, nations of ethnic peoples) is an eternal feature of humanity and is the true purpose of the apparatus of state. The Nazi regime existed to fight those conflicts, both internally and externally. Killing Jews was a fundamental purpose of the government, because the German people were in conflict with all other peoples, always. Had they succeeded in eliminating the Jews, they would have finished off the Roma, and then moved on to the Slavs, and then someone after that.
A Nazi state was destined for genocide and war; it’s why Nazism existed.
Similar to the KKK manifesto. It tries to justify hostile action against races other than white people for a similar argument, that conflicts between races are an aspect of nature.
I suppose what makes it so insidious is the idea isn’t overtly wrong. A certain amount of bias towards people that look differently from ourselves does seem to be more or less hardcoded in.
I think that the idea of constant conflict is an important element of Nazism/fascism to understand. The Nazis worldview was that the the world was a jungle. People are out to kill us, so we need to kill them first before they can succeed – like prides of lions and packs of hyenas competing for territory on Serengeti. It’s a world based on competition.
What’s important to understand beyond Nazism, however, is that the competitive worldview - the idea that countries live to compete with each other - predated Nazi Germany. It was the world in which Nazism was born. Colonial competition and nationalism from the late 19th Century led to massive militarization that culminated in WWI. The post-WWII order was replacing a world based on competition with one based on cooperation.
Simple.
Germany in the 1920’s and 1930’s WERE a horridly oppressed people, being punished willy-nilly by (mostly) France , using the very unfair Treaty of Versailles as an excuse for, frankly, pure piracy.
This oppression created anger.
This anger needed someone to blame. They could blame the French, but could not actually do anything about them.
They could not blame themselves, after all who ever blames themselves for their troubles.
So they focused their anger into self-pride, and disdain for the “other” ethnic groups. Mainly the Jews (because they were generally more economically powerful) and the Gypsies (because eww! Gypsies)
Let’s also lump in mental defectives, and deviants, because they detract from this self-pride image. You did NOT want to be gay, or autistic, or even have a genetic physical defect in Nazi Germany. Bad, bad things happened to those, worse than and well before the persecution of the Jews began.
So they elect a new, dynamic leader who speaks to their anger and disdain, and fuels both to quite silly levels. And by belittling others, they feel a bit better about themselves.
Once they are in power, and the speeches continue, of course they declare the “others” to be subhuman, and get rid of them. Blame them for your troubles!
It was an almost inevitable result of their own oppression, lashing out to hurt others. Rather blame the root cause, that warped Versailles Treaty. And blame the way the US and UK leaned over backwards to allow the Germans to do their own thing, because they felt guilty about that same unfair Treaty.
Germany should not have been punished for WW1, to the extent that the Versailles Treaty did. This directly created the environment that fostered Hitler’s rise to power, and the social attitude that led to the Holocaust.
Denial was a river that ran through Berlin. And there are still people today who buy into the nonsense that the Versailles Treaty created Nazism, forgetting that the Germans imposed much harsher terms on Russia (and on France back in 1870).
*"The German Empire, having imposed a Carthaginian Peace on the new Bolshevik government of Russia in March 1918, winning virtual control of eastern and south-eastern Europe, had overextended its resources. A last German attempt to break the stalemate in the West failed abysmally, and when the Allies’ counter-offensives of August and September 1918 broke through the trenches and the Hindenburg Line the German war effort went into free fall. The Reich’s military leadership instructed the government to seek peace, and this it did on the basis of the ‘Fourteen Points’ that had been put forward by American President Woodrow Wilson on 8 January 1918.
The Allies, after intense and often acrimonious debate among themselves, agreed to conduct peace negotiations on the basis of the Fourteen Points and the further condition ‘that compensation will be made by Germany for all the damage done to the civilian population of the allies and their properties by the aggression of Germany by land, by sea and from the air’…
Peace negotiations, which commenced in Paris on 18 January 1919, lasted for five months. The Germans were presented with the Treaty in the dining room of the Trianon Palace Hotel at Versailles on 7 May. The allies had included in the 440 articles of the Treaty a clause – Article 231 – stating Germany’s moral and legal obligation to accept responsibility for the damage inflicted on civilians by its aggression. Having assigned unlimited German theoretical and moral responsibility, however, Germany’s liability in practical terms, as contained in Article 232 of the Treaty, was much narrower. Nevertheless the German chief negotiator, Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, the physical epitome of the stereotypical Prussian aristocrat and just as arrogant, used the opportunity to produce what today we would call ‘fake news’ – or what traditionally went under the term ‘manipulation of documents’.
Having been handed the Treaty he immediately announced that Article 231 assigned war guilt to Germany, something he vehemently denied. So began the litany of ‘fake news’ surrounding the Versailles Peace. The newly formed German government in Berlin soon joined the chorus of news falsifiers, claiming that the Allies were imposing a ‘hunger blockade’ upon Germany threatening hundreds of thousands of children with starvation. In fact, though the Allies and the Germans did quarrel about the delivery of food, there was no such blockade. There certainly was undernourishment among the population at large, not just among children, but this was the result not of a ‘hunger blockade’ but of the German war leaders’ food distribution policy over the preceding four years, favouring as it did the soldiers at the front at the expense of civilians, whose food rations throughout the war were kept barely above subsistence level.
The ink on the Treaty was scarcely dry when English economist John Maynard Keynes provided his ‘alternative fact’ account. In his much-cited The Economic Consequences of the Peace Keynes, whose sympathies for the Germans were matched by his dislike of the French, predicted a disastrous economic future for Europe. Ten years after the war had ended none of his dire prognostications had come to pass; in fact the European economy had largely recovered. This changed with the collapse of the New York stock market in September 1929. Germany in particular sank into total economic chaos, but not due to the Versailles Peace; it was because the German budget had been financed with United States loans.
To establish that the ‘war guilt’ article was based on a falsehood became an integral part of Weimar Germany’s historical and political thought-process. Obviously if the Treaty was grounded in the assumption that Germany had caused the war, proving that assumption wrong would remove the very foundations of the Treaty itself. Not that Germany’s attempts to invalidate the war guilt article were crowned with much success. The publication of 40 volumes of diplomatic documents under the pretentious title Die Grosse Politik der Europäischen Kabinette (The major policies of the European Governments) failed to establish war responsibility. A further investigation commissioned by the Reichstag did indeed show that the Austro-Hungarian and German Empires had led Europe into the war, but the study was duly shelved by the German Foreign Office before it was discovered twenty years after the World War II by American scholars."*