Contrary to Senoy’s post, it was not a rational system that was “not noticeably cruel to one another”. This is an absurd statement.
If by ethical do you mean euthanising hundreds of thousands of sick, elderly or the economically unproductive?
This T4 Program (euthanizing the masses) went beyond their standard definitions of “desirable,” and people were killed based on the whims of a personal grudge or a covetous neighbor. It was actually deeply unpopular, however, and the Nazis were forced to hide it — which gives some indication that there were internal contradictions in their standards of ethics. This is but one small example.
I agree with Senoy. The Nazis were neither insane nor irrational (though some of them made terrible or poorly informed decisions). They were acting rationally, and that is the problem.
Nazi eugenics policies were highly rational. If anything, they were hyper-rational. It was an extremely utilitarian form of rationality that either (A) discarded moral or ethical limits or (B) reserved morality for those people who qualified by their own warped standards.
So from their perspective, they are saying: “We have a problem. We have millions of subhumans who are causing all manner of problems. What is the best way to solve that problem?” Well, if someone’s very existence is a problem the most expedient way to solve it is to see them killed or confined. This is exceedingly cruel and evil, but nonetheless a logical solution based on deranged premises.
The question of rationality needs to be de-coupled from the question of morality. The same problem confronts us today with North Korea. It is easy for us to say that the North Koreans are “insane” or “irrational,” but they are not. The fact that their goals and methods are evil does not change the fact that they are extremely rational actors.
Justin7, on the other hand, is definitely correct about their mass killings. They knew the general German public would be outraged, so they took careful measures to conceal their mass killings.
Senoy’s “They weren’t monsters (well, probably some were)” is mind blowing to me. Especially the qualifier “probably”. There is no probably about it. Look at Oscar Dirlewanger. He was a monster. So you can eliminate “probably“ right there. And then I would argue that anyone who joins a party whose stated goal is the elimination of whole groups of people, and actively supports the efforts to that goal, is a monster , no matter how rational their motivation might be from their point of view.
They liked art, except they burned the art they didn’t like. They took care of the poor all right, called them Arbeitsunwillige or Asoziale and sent them to camps ( not vacation camps!). And their focus on health included killing Lebensunwuerdiges Leben - anyone not perfectly healthy, including the blind, epileptics etc.
I don’t think there were more evil people in Germany in 31-45 than in other places, it’s just that most of them joined the NSDAP or found roles in the machine. The psychopaths were put in charge.
And they were mean to each other. There is a neat documentary where they lip read Hitler on silent films. At one point he is seen to comment on Goebbels ( arguably his #2) eating pork: “it is true what they say, they really do eat their own kind”. That’s sorta mean, right? Also denouncing each other to the Gestapo, killing a bunch of their comrades in the night of the long knives out of expediency - sorta mean, too.
I think that your problem is that you have an ethical system that emphasizes the supremacy of the individual. A fine ethical system to have and one that I myself follow. They did not share your ethical system.
Aktion T4 was not a deviation from their ethical system, but rather the culmination of it. Their ethics were largely informed from Nietzsche as we said before. Nietzchean ethics is all about strength and how the weak have manipulated the strong into believing that their actions are ‘evil.’ “On the Genealogy of Morality” is probably Nietzche’s opus on the concept. The idea that a society should support the weak and the inferior was to the Nazi’s via Nietzsche, simply a myth that the priestly caste forced upon the warrior caste in order to protect the weak (whom Nietzsche frequently called slaves.) Nietzsche saw history as a battle between Judeo-Christian ethical systems that protect the weak and ‘Roman’ (meaning pre-Christian) ethical systems that valued the strong. Whenever religion began to assert itself, he felt that a “Jewish slave mentality” oppressed reason and when reason reasserted itself, it was the strong who became ‘good.’
In Genealogy, Nietzsche polemicizes against all of the ills of society and ethical systems and in part lays the blame at the feet of inferior races, especially those who have migrated away from their homelands and the priestly caste for propping up the weak. The Nazis largely bought into this lock, stock and barrel. They saw the weak as a flaw with humanity that needed to be destroyed. Aktion T4 was the culmination of this. These people were seen as flaws in humanity or people who were of no more use to society. To them they were things that needed to be removed so that the rest of humanity could flourish. The idea that they were helpless and deserving of protection was considered a religious attack on the supremacy of the rightful heirs of humanity-the strong. The Nazis likened themselves to Zarathustras who were above Christian morality and would suffer for the sake of the world.
Thread timing dovetails nicely with current BBC Radio 4 podcast “Intrigue: The Ratline” about high-ranking Nazis escaping justice shortly after the end of the war. Includes detailed correspondence between Otto von Waechter and his wife that AFAICT discusses a lot of the personal interactions between the Nazi leaders.
I’m reminded of a photo I saw once, of a group of friends beaming happily on an outing. Based on the fashions of the women’s clothes, it was WWII-era. They were friends and co-workers. At one of the death camps. They weren’t obviously ghoulish. They weren’t obviously evil. If you didn’t know that they were staff at a camp, you’d have no idea by looking at them. And yet, they went to work every day guarding prisoners who were either going to be worked to death or efficiently murdered.
What was the phrase from the Nuremburg Trials, “The banality of evil”? Nazis were people, just like us, who made some very, very wrong decisions as a society. There but for the grace of God…
According to a fellow I worked with, Hitler was a charming fellow. This guy was German, had been a student in Berlin just before the war. He went to get rush seats at the Opera - available cheap to students just before curtain time. Pretty fancy too, they got the unoccupied VIP box seats among others. One day, Adolph and his entourage decided to attend last minute and they were bumped out. Hitler stopped them and had a short chat, apologized for the inconvenience of displacing them. SO, nice guy all around I guess?
Much like the communists or the Baath in Iraq, etc. - to get ahead in a professional capacity or for government jobs, many such societies put a premium on being a party member. So, not all party members were rabidly fanatical and lacking in empathy; but no doubt the mindset that engages in vicious politics (especially when that battle includes violence) probably were not nice people. The others were probably trapped by the mindset that bucking the system could have career and physical consequences. And I assume, there’s a selection process where the sadistic types gravitate to the jobs (like the brown shirt enforcers, the SS etc.) where they can indulge themselves with impunity, while the more empathic try to avoid those jobs.
Also, on a more mundane level, the Nazi’s were the side fighting the evil of communism encroaching on the fatherland. You can think of the hysteria of McCarthyism, and consider how the Germans felt. Russia was turned into a slave state only a few hundred miles to the east and its fellow travellers wanted to do the same to them. They had just been humiliated in a vicious war 15 years before and had their empire dismembered, and then a bout of hyperinflation, all during tumultuous and nasty political fighting. The Nazis were not the bad guys, they presented stability and order and a return to prosperity and strength after over a decade of problems. Until it was too late…
Remember the Wannsee conference and Final Solution came about because of “poor morale” in the troops on the eastern front. They complained they joined the army to fight for the fatherland, not to shoot women and children in the back of the head. You have to wonder how forceful the “complaints” would have to be to make the high command sit up and take notice. So not everyone thought genocide was a good idea. Yes, not all the regular army were party members, but a decent number likely were. Similarly, I read about how some concentration camp guards were beaten and killed by inmates during liberation, while others were actually protected from vengeful allied soldiers.
Probably was there because I think that it’s safe to assume that there were monsters in the Nazi party, but I am an imperfect judge of people and facts from 80 years ago. The possibility however remote exists that there were no monsters in the Nazi party, but the probability is against that. Probably some of them were monsters is a factual statement. I’m a believer in always leaving room for doubt. I am firm in my convictions, but acknowledge the possibility of my own myopia.
For your second point, if you joined a party whose stated goal is the elimination of Nazis and you actively supported that, are you a monster? I would posit that you are not-despite your goal of eliminating a whole group of people. There are probably tons of theoretical scenarios that we could invent in which elimination of a group of people is not a monstrous thing, we just believe that none of those scenarios applied to European Jews or other groups that Nazi’s deemed ‘undesirable.’
Dirlewanger was so fucked up that the Nazis sent him to a concentration camp - as a prisoner - at one point, although he was eventually released.
I think there were probably two kinds of Nazis, the “bureaucratic” kind and the “sadistic” kind. The bureaucratic kind were seriously just doing their job…that doesn’t make it right, it doesn’t absolve them of responsibility at all, and they deserved to be tried as war criminals for it, but that’s really all it was to them, a job, no different from cleaning up an office. Maybe it’s sociopathic, but not exactly psychopathic.
Didn’t the Nazis switch to gas chambers, camps and more impersonal means in part because the troops doing it in the field found it emotionally difficult?* If you think Jews & such are vermin or cancer, it shouldn’t trouble you to kill them anymore than rats or cancer cells. Nazis also considered merely creating a Jewish state to which to expel Jews and only decided to exterminate them in 41/42. Would you create a preserve for what you considered vermin?
The Holocaust and the Nazis are less a culmination of the French Revolution than a large scale version of one tribe wiping out another which has been going on for millennia, perhaps before we were homo sapiens sapiens. Don’t ancient texts commonly have some version of: “We killed all of them except the ones we made slaves/concubines and then we annexed/salted their lands.”?
It seems unique because of the numbers involved but that’s because there were more people to kill after European population took off and communication & transportation technology made it easier to coordinate on a large scale. The Tutsi genocide had about the same kill rate per day if I remember correctly.
As for the OP, “the meanest, cruelest, most angry and suspicious fuckers ever. Not just to Jews or the enemy, but even to each other.” were in the USSR in the 30s (although they had much less emphasis on Jews). I’m not sure the Nazis had anymore of those traits between themselves than other military dictatorships like Saddam Hussein’s. Stalin’s rise to power had been more contested by his peers and commie groups are known to be cats when it comes to falling in line. Hitler’s hold on power was internally more secure so he didn’t need to go as far as Stalin to maintain control.
*Einsatzgruppen - Wikipedia
A fundamental part of human social psychology is to divide everyone into “us” and “others.” A false premise in the OP is that there is some correlation between how people treat “us” versus how we treat “others.” There is no necessary correlation between how we treat people in the two groups. Most people will treat those within their in-group decently because they have to in order to get along. But it doesn’t matter how you treat those in the out-group (who often may be regarded as not even fully human). You can treat them with the utmost cruelty without social repercussions. Slave owners in cultures that practice it will often behave with civility and friendliness to others in their own class, while treating their slaves inhumanly. There is no reason to assume that Nazis wouldn’t have treated others in their own in-group decently, while simultaneous being SOBs to everyone else.
Some of the people who worked for Hitler - household servants, etc - said after the war what a nice, polite, generous guy he was. A real pleasure to work for!
Stalin could also appear warm, sociable, pleasant, and caring when he wanted to. So could Mao.
Psychopaths who rise to great power are usually highly skilled at manipulating the people around them. They didn’t rise to power from nothing by making everybody dislike them - exactly the opposite.
Nazis were not mythical creatures. They were simply regular people who believed what a bad leader told them. And part of Nazi propaganda was being proud of being civilized and intelligent. And there WAS a lot of civilization and intelligence in Germany in the 1930s, it just got used for corrupt purposes. I have met people who joined the party in the 1930s, either from social pressure or because they believed Hitler’s speeches at the time. It was a political party, an ideology, not weird beings from outer space. We still elect bad leaders today.
And people don’t necessarily have to like them, either, though that helps. Simply being impressed or awestruck can be enough to convince people to go along.
You might want to tone that down a little, despite your impressive reference.
Also, you might want to be more selective in whichever thread you care to throw that into. I look forward to your illuminating posts in every thread where Nazis are mentioned. Also Indians, also war, also England.