This post pretty much sums up why I disagree with Sasha:
[Money quote, but read the whole thing]: The Nazi goal wasn’t to take territory from Jews. It wasn’t to take resources from Jews. It wasn’t to destroy armed opposition to the German government. There was no underlying reason for it; the goal was to wipe out Jews. Worse, it was such an important goal for the Nazis that even while fighting a continental war for their regime’s survival, resources were diverted away from the war effort to continue the Holocaust. Is that different than merely killing people you come across? I think it is. I think killing for the pure pleasure of killing can be distinguished — and can be reasonably said to be morally worse — than killing to accomplish an end, no matter how evil the latter is.At least, unique. Now, I suppose some Nazis thought that by attacking the Jews they were launching a war on Bolshevism, but (1) my sense is that most just plain hated Jews, or were “just following orders”; and (2) this in itself is so twisted–the idea that there was some genetic link between Jewish heritage and Bolshevik tendencies, so that even a Christian with a Jewish grandfather who was a member of conservative political party was a Bolshevik threat–that it deserves a special place in the annals of human depravity.
UPDATE: Reader Nick Little asks a question beyond my competence to answer:
The uniqueness of the Holocaust is something I have struggled over for a long time. One element of your post, the war on Bolshevism, raises a question I think may be central to this. Did the Nazis hate Jews because they were the agents of Bolshevism, or did they hate the Bolsheviks because they saw them as the tools of international Judaism? My reading tends to point me towards the latter. The anti-Semitism seems so much deeper than the anti-communism.One reason for this you mention – that a politically conservative 1/4 Jew was still subject to extermination. Also, I don’t see even a short term
tactical agreement with Judaism along the lines of the Nazi-Soviet pact as being within the Nazi mindset. And the end of the war gives perhaps the best evidence – the focus on the Final Solution even at the expense of
armaments production and the logisitcal needs of the forces attempting to prevent the onslaught of the Red Army seems to point toward anti-semitism as beign the key motivator.
Comments are closed.