The 3rd general refused too. Paris was not demolished.
Consciously self-destructive? It can be argued that the order to invade Russia was the most-self destructive.
Very late in the war when it was clear even to Hitler that the war was lost, he ordered a scorched earth policy. Nothing of value was to be left for Germany’s enemies to use. Albert Speer quietly launched a campaign to prevent this, thinking there needed to be something left so Germany could rebuild.
Hitler’s reasoning was for all of these “last man” decisions was “victory or death”. And he believed a German who surrendered German territory did not deserve to live. Essentially, he believed that Germans no longer deserved Germany since they were losing it.
When I say Hitler wanted to “destroy the nations” of Poland and Russia, I mean destroy the peoples and their cultures, not the land, which he wanted, for Germans to live on.
Hitler did not hate Poles and Russians the way he hated Jews, but he despised them, as Untermenschen, “subhumans.” It was all part of his racial ideology. They were in the way of the German Herrenvolk, occupying land the Germans could use, therefore they needed to be killed or enslaved. It was like the traditional white American attitude towards the Indians, only much fiercer and much more systematic.
Expanding on your “last man” point, I recall that when he was a few hours away from his death, he was reported to have said that the German people all deserved to die because they had failed him. They were not strong enough and not capable enough to win the war. He blamed the loss of the war on the German people and refused to take any of the blame for the loss - despite all those insane decisions which were really the cause of the loss.
BrainGlutton, Thank you for your explanation.
On another tangent, I have always found it interesting that the Nazis managed to kill more people with their V2 rockets - not when they exploded on London - but during the manufacturing process in the underground factories.
I’m not sure what point to make about this. But it has always seemed very interesting to me that the overall process of construction was so inefficient that more people died by building the weapon that were killed as a result of the use of the weapon. That is just fascinating to me.
