Did Hitler Say Jews Are Not People They Are Animals

Less Than Homo: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others
By David Livingstone Smith
Hardcover, 336 pages
St. Martin's Printing
List cost: $24.99

Before I get to work explaining how dehumanization works, I want to make a preliminary case for its importance. So, to become the brawl rolling, I'll briefly hash out the role that dehumanization played in what is rightfully considered the single most destructive result in human history: the Second World War. More than lxx one thousand thousand people died in the war, virtually of them civilians. Millions died in combat. Many were burned alive by incendiary bombs and, in the finish, nuclear weapons. Millions more were victims of systematic genocide. Dehumanization fabricated much of this carnage possible.

Permit's begin at the finish. The 1946 Nuremberg doctors' trial was the first of twelve military tribunals held in Germany after the defeat of Deutschland and Japan. Twenty doctors and 3 administrators — 20-two men and a single woman — stood accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity. They had participated in Hitler's euthanasia programme, in which around 200,000 mentally and physically handicapped people accounted unfit to live were gassed to decease, and they performed fiendish medical experiments on thousands of Jewish, Russian, Roma and Polish prisoners.

Principal prosecutor Telford Taylor began his opening argument with these somber words:

The defendants in this case are charged with murders, tortures and other atrocities committed in the name of medical science. The victims of these crimes are numbered in the hundreds of thousands. A handful only are all the same live; a few of the survivors will appear in this courtroom. But most of these miserable victims were slaughtered outright or died in the course of the tortures to which they were subjected ... To their murderers, these wretched people were not individuals at all. They came in wholesale lots and were treated worse than animals.

He went on to describe the experiments in detail. Some of these homo guinea pigs were deprived of oxygen to simulate high altitude parachute jumps. Others were frozen, infested with malaria, or exposed to mustard gas. Doctors made incisions in their mankind to simulate wounds, inserted pieces of broken glass or wood shavings into them, and so, tying off the blood vessels, introduced bacteria to induce gangrene. Taylor described how men and women were made to potable seawater, were infected with typhus and other deadly diseases, were poisoned and burned with phosphorus, and how medical personnel conscientiously recorded their aching screams and violent convulsions.

The descriptions in Taylor'southward narrative are and then horrifying that it's piece of cake to overlook what might seem similar an insignificant rhetorical flourish: his comment that "these wretched people were ... treated worse than animals". Just this comment raises a question of deep and fundamental importance. What is information technology that enables one group of human being beings to treat another grouping equally though they were subhuman creatures?

A crude answer isn't hard to come by. Thinking sets the agenda for activeness, and thinking of humans as less than human paves the way for atrocity. The Nazis were explicit nigh the status of their victims. They were Untermenschen — subhumans — and as such were excluded from the system of moral rights and obligations that bind humankind together. It's wrong to impale a person, but permissible to exterminate a rat. To the Nazis, all the Jews, Gypsies and others were rats: dangerous, illness-conveying rats.

Jews were the chief victims of this genocidal project. From the beginning, Hitler and his followers were convinced that the Jewish people posed a deadly threat to all that was noble in humanity. In the apocalyptic Nazi vision, these putative enemies of civilization were represented every bit parasitic organisms — as leeches, lice, bacteria, or vectors of contagion. "Today," Hitler proclaimed in 1943, "international Jewry is the ferment of decomposition of peoples and states, just as it was in antiquity. It volition remain that way as long as peoples do not find the strength to get rid of the virus." Both the decease camps (the gas chambers of which were modeled on delousing chambers) and the Einsatzgruppen (paramilitary death squads that roamed across Eastern Europe followed in the wake of the advancing German army) were responses to what the Nazis perceived to be a lethal pestilence.

Sometimes the Nazis thought of their enemies as cruel, bloodthirsty predators rather than parasites. When partisans in occupied regions of the Soviet Union began to wage a guerilla war against German language forces, Walter von Reichenau, the commander-in-chief of the German language army, issued an order to inflict a "astringent but just retribution upon the Jewish subhuman elements" (the Nazis considered all of their enemies as part of "international Jewry", and were convinced that Jews controlled the national governments of Russia, the United Kingdom, and the Usa). Military historian Mary R. Habeck confirms that, "soldiers and officers idea of the Russians and Jews as 'animals' ... that had to perish. Dehumanizing the enemy immune German soldiers and officers to hold with the Nazis' new vision of warfare, and to fight without granting the Soviets whatsoever mercy or quarter."

The Holocaust is the most thoroughly documented example of the ravages of dehumanization. Its hideousness strains the limits of imagination. And all the same, focusing on it tin be strangely comforting. It's all also easy to imagine that the 3rd Reich was a bizarre aberration, a kind of mass insanity instigated past a modest group of deranged ideologues who conspired to seize political power and bend a nation to their will. Alternatively, it'southward tempting to imagine that the Germans were (or are) a uniquely cruel and bloodthirsty people. Only these diagnoses are dangerously incorrect. What'due south about disturbing well-nigh the Nazi phenomenon is not that the Nazis were madmen or monsters. Information technology'south that they were ordinary human beings.

When we call up of dehumanization during World State of war II our minds plough to the Holocaust, simply it wasn't only the Germans who dehumanized their enemies. While the architects of the Last Solution were decorated implementing their lethal program of racial hygiene, the Russian-Jewish poet and novelist Ilya Ehrenburg was churning out propaganda for distribution to Stalin's Blood-red Army. These pamphlets seethed with dehumanizing rhetoric: they spoke of "the smell of Germany's creature breath," and described Germans as "two-legged animals who have mastered the technique of war" — "ersatz men" who ought to be annihilated. "The Germans are not human beings," Ehrenburg wrote, "... If you kill 1 German, kill another — there is nothing more amusing for united states than a heap of High german corpses."

This wasn't idle talk. The Wehrmacht had taken the lives of 23 million Soviet citizens, roughly half of them civilians. When the tide of the state of war finally turned, a torrent of Russian forces poured into Germany from the east, and their inexorable advance became an orgy of rape and murder. "They were certainly egged on past Ehrenburg and other Soviet propagandists..." writes announcer Giles McDonough:

East Prussia was the outset High german region visited by the Crimson Ground forces ... In the course of a unmarried night the red regular army killed seventy-two women and one man. Almost of the women had been raped, of whom the oldest was eighty-four. Some of the victims had been crucified ... A witness who made it to the west talked of a poor hamlet girl who was raped by an entire tank squadron from 8 in the evening to nine in the morning time. One homo was shot and fed to the pigs.

Excerpted from Less Than Human being by David Livingstone Smith. Copyright 2011 by the writer and reprinted past permission of St. Martin'south Press, LLC.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2011/03/29/134956180/criminals-see-their-victims-as-less-than-human

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