Sunday, June 10, 2007

Hitler. Holocaust.

Hitler
Hitler 280 Rudolf Hess on Hitler at the Nuremberg trials: “It was given me to work many years of my life under the greatest son whom my people have brought forth in their thousand-year history.” Bracher, The German Dictatorship [Rudolph Hess’s praise for Hitler at the Nuremberg Trials.]

Hitler 400 Three points: 1. As far as Hitler was concerned, World War I had never ended; 2. the acquisition of Lebensarum presupposed aggressive expansion; 3. totalitarian rule depended on a prepared mobilized community which diverted its internal conflicts to the outside. Bracher, The German Dictatorship [For Hitler, WWI never ended, expansion required aggression and Totalitarian rule diverted internal conflicts to outside conflicts.]

Hitler 408 Even in the final, eerily grotesque scene in the bunker of the bombed-out Reich Chancellery, the lost war moved [Hitler] only to the observation that the German people were not worthy of him or of the tasks put to them. Bracher, The German Dictatorship [When he lost WWII, Hitler thought that the German people had not been worthy of him.]

Hitler future 406 Hitler’s vision of post-war Europe in 1941-1942: Germanic empire stretching from Norway to the Alps, from the Atlantic to the Black Sea, linked by a gigantic network of highways. Berlin: gigantic world capital. 180 million Russians must die out. No procreation permitted. No education to prevent resistance. “In case of difficulties, the ghetto populations would be rounded up and liquidated by a handful of bombs...and the matter is settled.” Bracher, The German Dictatorship [Hitler’s vision of the future after WWII]

Hitler future 408 Tough and determined, even with catastrophe imminent, the Nazi leadership clung to its conviction that Russia must be destroyed, that the Slavs must be decimated, resettled in Siberia, and made into slave labor, and that the Jews must be exterminated. Bracher, The German Dictatorship [To the end, Hitler believed that Russia must be destroyed, the Slavs enslaved and the Jews exterminated.]

Hitler future 409 The new Europe, he [Hitler] had written...could come into being only through the hegemony of the best race and most powerful nation, just as ancient Rome had unified Italy; once that was done, Europe could hold up its head as a world power and face North America. Bracher, The German Dictatorship [Hitler saw Europe controlled by Germany as had Rome.]


Holocaust
Holocaust 430 Here we are faced by the completely impersonal bureaucratic “extermination” of a people classified as a species of inferior subhumans, as “vermin,” a problem which the farmer Himmler handled as though it were a biological disease. Bracher, The German Dictatorship [The extermination of the Jews was a bureaucratic exercise.]

Holocaust 11 Churchill: There is no doubt that this is probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world, and it has been done by scientific machinery by nominally civilized men in the name of a great state…. Conot, Justice at Nuremberg. [For Churchill, the Holocaust was the greatest crime ever committed in the world, with scientific precision by supposedly civilized people.]

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