Moderator Note
Leo Bloom, your first post is both inappropriately snarky as well as verging on junior modding. It contributes absolutely nothing to the thread. You also have a habit of posting without having read the entire thread, which can result not only in overlooking moderator instructions as you have here, but also duplicating previous information. No warning issued, but don’t do this again.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
One might regard assassination attempts as high on the “SOBs to each other” spectrum. The people who heard Hitler’s speeches in the 1930s and were immediately moved to kill him, not sign up to his hot new party, were more ideologically consistent.
If some Nazis resembled “regular people” (who loved their families, neighbours, and adorable animals in between spouting nationalist slogans and abusing Jews), that simply goes more towards damning this supposed cohort of so-called regular people than absolving Nazis.
Back to the OP, enough examples have been given in this thread of Nazis deliberately undermining each other’s party membership, careers, and lives that the entire characterization in the OP seems accurate, except perhaps acting like they had a board up there all the time. I’m sure a few were perfectly capable of putting you at ease while plotting your downfall.
I am reminded of an audio book I recently heard written by a Jewish woman who hid in plain sight in Berlin during the war. (Underground in Berlin: A Young Woman’s Extraordinary Tale of Survival in the Heart of Nazi Germany by Marie Jalowicz Simon) Somehow she survived. There were so many striking moments. At one point she talks about the disconnect between the rising, animalistic hatred for Jews and kids continuing to be friendly kids. She had a friend who would take part in beatings or trashing or window-smashing, then come home and hang out with her Jewish friend (the author) as if nothing had happened.
In my opinion the Nazi’s unleashed an innate animal hatred that we all have dormant in us (and has re-emerged of late). And while the “philosophy” behind National Socialism may have been rational, on the day-to-day level there were many instances of non-rational and hypocritical behavior.
Oh, absolutely nothing rational about it, although Nazis (they did not invent this technique) were capable of the mental gymnastics necessary to think of themselves as such.
Even the Germans back then weren’t bad as a whole. Humans have some weird logic sometimes. My grandfather was shot down in an bomber over Germany during WWII. Some of the surviving crew, especially the officers, were executed on the spot right after they ditched the plane but my grandfather had an eye injury due to shrapnel so they just sent him in for treatment. Apparently, getting injured saved him from getting executed. He still came home at 6’3" and 90 pounds though and died at 55.
I didn’t learn until a few years ago that there were German POW camps in the U.S. - especially the South and one near my home town. They had a movie theater, got field trips into town to buy things, decent meals, sports and lots of other nice things. They weren’t even really fenced in because there was no place to go even if they did escape.
However, actual Nazi’s and regular German soldiers are two different concepts. The first is an ideology, the second were just young people ordered to do what they were told.
By *that *logic, that one Nazi that actually managed to do the deed was the most heroic of all!
I have to push back a bit on this “the Nazis were rational but amoral” bit. Maybe you could say that about Aktion T4–that it was cold-blooded, and cruel by our wishy-washy Judeo-Christian/secular humanist standards of ethics, but hey those people were “objectively” inferior somehow.
But the genocide of the Jews (and Roma) was only “rational” in the most narrow instrumental sense: If you accept the premise that Jews are an “inferior race” and somehow responsible for the problems of Germany and the world, then moving to kill them in as expeditious a manner as possible may be rationally justifiable.
But the initial premise is not only morally monstrous, it’s also factually untrue, and basically absurd. All the Nazi ideas about “races” were garbage.
Nazism did have a modernistic and pseudo-rationalist streak to it; Hitler himself reportedly sometimes said things like:
But there was also a strongly anti-modern, anti-rationalist, “Romantic” as opposed to “Classical” streak in Nazism (that you don’t find in orthodox Marxist-Leninist movements, however morally monstrous they usually were). The pop culture view of the Nazis running around looking for the Ark of the Covenant and the Spear of Destiny is an exaggeration (and probably applied more to Himmler than to Hitler, who likely thought that sort of thing was a nonsensical waste of time), but Hitler was reportedly an enthusiastic supporter of the “World-Ice Theory”, which I think tells you all you need to know about how fundamentally “rational” his worldview was.
I would argue the exact opposite. They were hyper-rational. Their presuppositions were flawed, but their logic was sound. It was their emotional centers that needed the work, not their reason faculties. They should have been saying, “This is abhorrent.” But disgust is not a reaction based on reason, but rather based on emotion. There’s a reason that pure rationality is not a good thing.
Very simplistically, they took a presupposition that humanity was flawed and the reason for that was because a subset of the people (not including themselves) were flawed. The goal of humanity was not to be flawed. From those basic presuppositions, everything else made logical sense. Horrible, destructive, logical sense. That’s why you fear the computers-not because they are illogical, but because they are too logical.
I think though that their “Romantic” nature comes directly from Nietzsche (of course one could argue that Nietzsche was himself irrational, but I don’t buy it.) The logic behind it was that Christianity had inherently weakened Northern Europeans. It was essentially a Jewish invention that forced Northern Europeans to deny their will for the sake of a slave mentality. They looked back then to a pre-Christian era as a way to return to this original strength before Jewish slave ideas infected Northern Europe. Their love of art was a similar thing. Nietzsche saw art as a pure expression of the will uncorrupted by Christian slave mentality and so should be celebrated and encouraged. Nazism embraced this Nietzschean view of history. Admiring these pre-Christian ideals was not to them being Romantic, but a rational return to ideals that produced strength.
Of course, if one of them became handicapped…you know…
I’m currently reading the Coming of the Third Reich/Third Reich in Power/Third Reich at War trilogy* by Richard Evans and he makes the point that the Nazi guards and administrators were so brutal and vindictive towards their prisoners because their own training was extremely vicious and cruel. And it was a system that spread out to encompass German society as a whole as time went on and the Nazi’s firmed up their grip on power. It was a political, cultural and social society built around a Darwinian survival of the fittest ethos resulting in a nation of brutalised people who did indeed often treat each other in an awful manner.
Another factor was that Hitler preferred to have subordinates in the Nazi party vie with each other and struggle for position, if someone wanted the top spot they had to find a means to remove the current incumbent and pretty much any means necessary were considered acceptable. After all if someone lost their post its because they weren’t strong enough to retain it anyway.
*highly recommended by the way, they’re an easy read with a lot of information and detail that I personally was unaware of before.
People have lived under various systems which create horrific results on a large scale and it doesn’t mean the people in the rank and file treat each other badly. Or in any case doesn’t mean they don’t follow rules in how to treat one another. I’m thinking of criminal gangs and extremist political groups that don’t make it into being states, or ones that sort of do (Islamic State), besides authoritarian/totalitarian regimes like Communist regimes, or rightist ones other than the Nazi’s.
Where that tends to break down though is near the core, and especially if there’s any doubt who is in charge (intra-Nazi killing in the 30’s, or in reaction to the plot against Hitler in 1944). But it’s pretty unremarkable if rank and file Nazi’s in military and civilian life by and large followed the standard behavioral codes of German military and civilian culture before and after the Nazi’s, toward one another, which I think in general they did, but the end result was still massive atrocities committed against (those considered) outside groups. That’s often how it works.
The German military in particular was regimented certainly, but had a culture that worked very well on most levels. The way officers were trained and interacted with one another and their men, and the attitudes of the men, was the main reason the Germany military, land forces in particular, was probably on average the most effective man for man and equipment for equipment of any major combatant in WWII. You can’t have that if the standard is constant back stabbing at every level as people take advantage of one another for personal motives without rules.
Again where that tended to break down was in the interface between general officers and Hitler, and in his inner circle of cronies. That’s where it could become a contest of not of competence but who was more malleable to Hitler’s sometimes correct but often disastrously wrong military ideas. That’s also where military goals intersected with very dirty political ones.
I don’t agree at all that the word “moral” applies to people who operate “properly” within their world view.
Since this thread is intrinsically Godwinized, I’ll go with Charlie Manson. He operated according to his beliefs, which included rape and murder. I would hate to think that someone would consider him moral.
A lot of Germans did what they considered right during WWII but did horrible things. They were not moral. As to these “Well, he was nice to his mother.” style comments about quite evil people being pleasant, etc. at times. So what? Was Charlie Manson raping and murdering every minute of every day? No. So pointing out those other times is pointless. Being moral is a 24/7 thing. You can’t be evil for an hour and then nice for 23 hours and say you were moral that day.
And this leads to the obligatory discussion of the banality of evil. So you are just a schub of a beauracrat. Going to meetings, issuing memos, reviewing reports, etc. It’s just that one of the memos says to ship off 400,000 Hungarian Jews to death camps. The appearance doesn’t scream “Evil!” but nonetheless there’s trainloads of evil going on there.
Note the early days of the Nazis and what kind of people were part of that. The Brown Shirts who rioted, disrupted other parties’ rallys, destroyed property, etc. These people worked under the direct control of the party bosses and later evolved into the SA and later became SS soldiers and officers. These type of behavior was at the core of the party throughout, with more and more people joining in.
And so treating others badly, having no morals at all, etc. was basic to what was going on in Germany. And there was no reason to limit this behavior to outsiders. Over and over there are multiple examples of brutal nastiness to each other.
I have mentioned my POW uncle many times here. He experienced firsthand the treatment of “average” Germans to starving, freezing prisoners on his black march. Farmers, townspeople, etc. were over and over deliberately cruel to them.
Meanwhile, back at the home farm two German POWs were living in the family house, eating at the family table, working on the farm, going into town for R&R, etc. The contrast between moral and immoral is obvious.
This gets us into some very heavy philosophical territory over the nature of morality. If you’re someone who believes in an objective morality (full disclosure-I am) then you’re right. A person’s or a group’s view of the morality of their actions has no bearing on whether or not those actions are moral. If objectively killing minority groups is a moral evil, then even if you think you’re doing the greatest thing in the world by doing it, it’s still evil. Your opinion on such things is unimportant.
On the other hand, if you don’t believe in objective morality, then you’re stuck with some form of subjective morality. In that case, things are far murkier. Culture and individual belief would factor strongly into any discussion of the morality of the action. You can create ‘pseudo-objective’ moral systems like say utilitarianism, but really all you’re doing is advancing your own opinion about morality and hoping that enough people agree with you to make it a cultural thing. In that case, if society comes to some vague agreement that killing minorities is a good thing, then perhaps it becomes a ‘good’ thing. You bring up how nasty people were to POWs, in a subjective moral system, maybe they were doing the ‘good’ thing by conforming to their culture’s moral code.
Charlie Manson, if he believed he was doing good was only doing evil in the context of the society that he lived in. If he lived in a different society, perhaps his actions would have been considered good. In a subjective morality, his real crime was having a difference of opinion with the bulk of society and not necessarily the action in and of itself. Of course, he could have felt that he was doing evil at the time and then at least he agrees with society that he’s evil, but someone from a hypothetically different society could be confused as to why his actions were punished and not lauded.
Again, I believe in an objective morality and that humans are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” but if you’re not one of those people, then things become more problematic. Nazis were Nietzscheans and we’ve had a long discussion about their ethics. In a subjectively moral system, it’s very difficult to argue that they are ‘wrong.’
You are giving the Nazis way, way too much credit. Even if Nazi thinking were not disingenuously twisted but somehow consistent and rational, indeed all manner of things may be made to follow logically from false premises. But the very inconsistency probably goes a way towards explaining why Nazis were so much at odds with each other and incorporated self-serving lies, bullshit and insanity into their version of fascism. Were Nazis more rational than other groups of fascists?
I am reminded of a recent debate thread in which it was asked whether it would be OK to use the results of past unethical experiments performed by Nazi scientists. The thing was, nobody could think of any such rigorous experiments; Nazi doctors were more into torturing people than the scientific method. Nazi “philosophy” is analogous.
And you cannot pin anything on Nietzsche (I’m not seeing the connection, except that some Nazis may have dropped his name at various points for rhetorical purposes), who was a genuine philosopher and also despised such people.
I think you’re wrong on that account. Nietzsche was absolutely adored by fascists. It’s true that Nietzsche despised anti-semitism and saw nationalism as a collective action that itself infringed upon the will, but to pretend that Nazis didn’t appropriate his philosophy is simply ludicrous. There are many, many, many attestations about Nietzsche throughout Nazi literature and propaganda. Nietzsche was required reading in Nazi schools. Nazi philosophers regularly quoted him and based their own philosophies directly upon his. Hitler himself gave gifts to Nietzsche’s sister and it’s obvious lifted concepts directly from his writings. Read Mein Kampf sometime and then ‘Geneaology’. There are whole passages that an uninformed reader wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Hitler borrowed phrases directly lifted from Nietzsche-Nazi talk about the ‘power of the will’ and slave races are all Nietzschean. And I totally get that Nietzsche has been on a rehab tour by his admirers for the last 70 years and that it was his sister’s fault or a misreading or any of dozens of other excuses, but the reality is that Nietzsche’s world was a world based on superiority and destruction and it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone when his ideas were used by the self-proclaimed superior to destroy.
Since this has now extended to a discussion of morality and philosophy, perhaps it’s better to move it to Great Debates.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
I’m not really equipped to debate the specific details of Nietzche’s writings, but the idea of a society taking a particular text and twisting it to justify inhumane social policies isn’t exactly unprecedented.
Right but I think the point you are responding to is somewhat off the topic. IOW the topic as I see it isn’t whether you’re a moral person if you drop in to check on your mom every weekend but are a Gestapo officer during the week. It’s whether or not Gestapo officers were a lot less likely to check in on their moms on the weekend than people not involved with a such a fatally morally compromised political system. And the answer is perhaps maybe, but I think that inference is probably a lot weaker if ‘Nazi’s’ is defined as the whole German military or the whole (majority) of civilian society which supported Hitler when things seemed to be going well.
Again, that’s not to sidetrack into whether the German regular Army was sometimes a vehicle for systematic Nazi atrocities, often in the East it was. It’s whether the people whose basic job it was to be soldiers were a lot less moral, even assuming an objectives standard, to their comrades and families, than say WWI German soldiers. I doubt that. Again if you focus on people near the core of the system, and especially during its periods of internal intrigue then yes, the least moral people had an advantage in such intrigue, but that would also be the case at the core of other similar (as in authoritarian/totalitarian) systems.
A big part of the meaning of the (overused) phrase ‘banality of evil’ IMO is that German society and institutions in the Nazi period were not that bizarre in general on the whole, as to how they functioned internally. Again, the Army would not have been as good as it was otherwise. 20th century armies could not function if the real motivation was fear of superiors or punishment, the role of initiative among small groups and their leaders was too great. Men had to believe in and relate to their officers as well as trust their comrades or it didn’t work.
I suppose internally, the Nazis weren’t any more backstabby than, say, the Plantagenets, Borgias or Medici or for that matter, the pre-Enlightement Roman Catholic Church.