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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35785 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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I think the largest point you're missing is that in the eye of the Nazis, time spent killing Jews was not a distraction from existential war, but a fundamental part of it.

The Prussian officer corps had inherited a pathological fear of franc-tireurs from their experiences in 1870-71 and 1914. Nazi and reactionary political thought emphasized the duplicity of Jews, their creation and fundamental enmeshing with Bolshevism. The planned invasion of the Soviet Union was meant from its conception to be a Rassenkrieg. The Bolshevik system was to be torn out root and stem, and all its mouthpieces and enablers with it. To this extent Jews were a fundamental security risk to rear areas and a existential threat to the Heer's design for a rapid victory: they would be the inevitable saboteurs, partisans, Bolshevik agitators. That was the threat the Einsatzgruppen formations were meant to combat. Only the liquidation of the adult male Jewish population would secure the rear areas and ensure German victory. (Later this objective would be expanded incrementally to include all Jewish individuals in the Soviet Union).

After the failure of Operation Barbarossa the nature of the killing of Jews shifted more to that of retribution than immediate security concerns, but again this was in concordance with a future vision of a Europe that was Judenfrei.

edit: you get a sense of the Nazi perspective on this in Himmler's October 4 (1943) Posen speech. An excerpt:

I want to also mention a very difficult subject ... before you, with complete candor. It should be discussed amongst us, yet nevertheless, we will never speak about it in public. Just as we did not hesitate on June 30 to carry out our duty as ordered, and stand comrades who had failed against the wall and shoot them -- about which we have never spoken, and never will speak. That was, thank God, a kind of tact natural to us, a foregone conclusion of that tact, that we have never conversed about it amongst ourselves, never spoken about it, everyone ... shuddered, and everyone was clear that the next time, he would do the same thing again, if it were commanded and necessary.

I am talking about the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. It is one of those things that is easily said. "The Jewish people is being exterminated," every Party member will tell you, "perfectly clear, it's part of our plans, we're eliminating the Jews, exterminating them, a small matter". And then along they all come, all the 80 million upright Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. [mockingly] They say: all the others are swine, but here is a first-class Jew. And none of them has seen it, has endured it. Most of you will know what it means when 100 bodies lie together, when 500 are there or when there are 1000. And ... to have seen this through and -- with the exception of human weakness -- to have remained decent, has made us hard and is a page of glory never mentioned and never to be mentioned. Because we know how difficult things would be, if today in every city during the bomb attacks, the burdens of war and the privations, we still had Jews as secret saboteurs, agitators and instigators. We would probably be at the same stage as 16/17, if the Jews still resided in the body of the German people.

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