The Successive Stages of Hate-Perfection
1935 was the year Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany passed the "Nuremberg Laws" in the Reichstag. All German citizens whose veins throbbed with Jewish blood - even faintly, through having had a Jewish grandparent, were to be disenfranchised. The Nuremberg Laws incrementally stripped Jews of their professions, their businesses, their liquid assets.Eager Germans took advantage of the business end of things, while Nazi party officials took charge of the liquid assets. Jews were hauled off to concentration camps. The five-step progression of Nazi anti-Semitism proceeded, without a murmur of protest from the German population.
At each step of the progression, a momentum was assumed, violence increased dramatically, as the procedure was consolidated and eventually become business as usual. Nothing remotely out of whack at the violence and degradation thrust upon a helpless minority. A largely disinterested majority accepted the proceedings, and they became the order of an orderly society.
In 1933, marking the Nazi accession, the looting of Jewish shops, random beating of Jews, boycotts of Jewish business occurred. Followed by the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935. Krystallnacht, in 1938, brought the plight of German Jews into sharp focus. And in 1939 the mass arrest of 30,000 Jews, marking the initial systematic, systemic violence, rounding up of Jews, and the first mass detentions in concentration camps.
Those Jews possessed of wealth were permitted to pay a ransom to the Jewish state, which in turn permitted them to depart Germany, until 1939. In the year 1939 the price for leaving Germany was elevated to encompass the entire wealth in each individual Jew's possession. Followed by a procedure which saw Jews as hostages for world Jewry to amass a ransom of one and a half billion Reichsmarks.
A process interrupted by the invasions of Czechoslovakia and Poland, when negotiations were sundered. Then in 1940 all German and Austrian Jews were deported to ghettos, created especially for that containment purpose, throughout Poland, where the ghetto inmates became complicit through inhumane physical breakdown, in their own destruction, by dying from starvation and disease.
The "final solution" represented the last stage in the progression to achieving the ultimate revenge of the Ubermensch; the destruction of an inferior and pestiferous race of sub-humans. Following the invasion of Russia in 1941, concentration camp inmates were not merely detained indefinitely, but great sweeping plans were afoot for their annihilation - in orderly fashion, as befitting the German characteristic of all noted and accounted for.
Mass murder then became a full-time occupation, on occasion even side-lining the war that the Axis consortium was fighting with the Allied forces against fascist determinism. Of course Hitler had grand aspirations and he enslaved and incarcerated also "Christian sub-humans"; Russians, Poles, Romanians, Hungarians and Yugoslavs. Along with the mentally and physically deficient, Gypsies and homosexuals.
Enslavement meant exploitation for slave labour, while the mass murder side of things was entrusted to special task forces, Einsatzgruppen. Millions of Germans were tasked to depart to fields and factories, and to fight on the Russian front, while millions of civilians were shipped from occupied countries to work as slave labourers. Once too ill and feeble to continue working they were shipped to the purposeful-new concentration camps.
Along with Jews, used for slave labour were Russians, Frenchmen, Poles, Belgians, Yugoslavs, Dutchmen and other European nations - all of whom ended up dying horrible deaths from zealously heartless overwork, torture, starvation, and disease. Or the alternate: Jews, Czechs, Poles, Russians rounded up, marched to deserted areas, forced to dig pits, undress, and wait to be machine-gunned, falling into the pits they'd dug for themselves.
The Einsatzgruppen did their work with great passion for the Fatherland. But the process was seen as being too work-intense, insufficiently efficient, so Nazi scientists were urged to discover a solution. Thus was born an inexpensive, easy-to-produce solution: Zyklon B, hydrogen cyanide. A marvellously effective way to dispose of countless human beings relatively effortlessly.
A meticulous bookkeeper-snake-oil salesman who had risen steadily through the Nazi hierarchy was given the glorious task of achieving the final solution. Those dreary old concentration camps were modernized with the addition of new infrastructure, while additional and especially-trained camp attendants were brought on the scene of diabolic efficiency.
Chambers where Zyklon B gas could be administered built, resembling large shower rooms. The curious, and Nazi officials who wished to view the resulting efficiency could watch through special openings as naked men, women and children gasped, retched, their bodies turning bright pink, spotted with green, and became convulsed corpses, once they stopped their writhing agonies. Their destination then became the great, smoke-belching, stinking ovens.
The concentration camp industry developed grappling hooks to separate death-gripped entangled bodies. Technicians learned the best techniques for prying mouths open and removing gold fillings, while barbers shaved heads. The talented crews of dedicated technicians worked hard all week, and on Sunday they rested, and discussed their horror that Russians were killing German soldiers on the eastern front.
The barbarous acts of American forces dropping bombs on defenceless civilians in German cities were deplored. In Auschwitz 7000 Germans found reliable employment. Seventeen tons of gold collected; hair used in the manufacture of cloth and mattresses; ashes of fire- consumed bodies shovelled out of the great ovens used as fertilizer for German victory gardens.
Fatty acids salvaged to produce soap. A Danzig company came up with just the right formula: "Take 12 pounds of human fat, 10 quarts of water, and 8 ounces to a pound of caustic soda and boil for two or three hours, then cool." Methodical, efficient, faultless recycling during times of paucity. And in the process, long deliberated and planned with exquisite finesse, six million Jews were exterminated.
Why then, did these living, suffering sacrifices to hate, do nothing to help themselves? They endured the initial insults and assaults, confident that their trust in their country would not, in the long run, be misplaced. Their love for and belief in the country would save them in the end. This most civilized and culture-proud country they were so proud to be citizens of. They simply refused to believe the reality that surrounded them.
Until 1943, when it was really too late to mount any kind of reasonable resistance. And then, when Jews began to fully understand that the dread rumours were true, they were in no position to help themselves. There was some resistance. But the very minute that a Jew exhibited rebellion to his fate, the Nazis deliberately tortured a loved one. An infant torn in two before its parents; a child's head smashed against a tree, its remains given to its mother.
A young girl raped, then impaled on a bayonet while her siblings and parents were forced to witness the atrocity. Demonstrating a mass psychosis of murderous rage against a helpless population. All in the search for German destiny, the thousand-year Reich, the celebration of German perfection in human physiognomy and nobility of character. Their proud tradition and culture decreed no less.
There were a few rebellions, in a few of the death camps. The most notable of which was the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In a geographic area that could accommodate 50,000 people, 450,000 were stuffed tightly at times into the enclosed ghetto. Jews were stored there temporarily until such time as they could be expedited to the gas chambers of Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen, Maidanek, Auschwitz.
In January of 1943, with only 40,000 Jews left before being shipped out for annihilation, 7,000 of the inmates, through ingenious devices of smuggling in whatever weapons could be bargained for from partisans, amassing a cache of WWI rifles, machine guns, Molotov cocktails, the uprising was planned. When 800 storm-troopers entered the ghetto for the purpose of extracting inmates, ostensibly to work in factories, the Jews struck.
The battle raged on for three days, with the Nazis forced finally, to retreat. A German general was rushed to the scene at the head of a special combat group with artillery units. The Jews hurriedly established a maze of connecting tunnels through sewers, and bunkers, anticipating they might hold out for a week. Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary: "The Jews have actually succeeded in making a defensive position of the Ghetto.
"Heavy engagements are being fought there which led even to the Jewish Supreme Command issuing daily communiques. Of course this fun won't last long." Wrong. The resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto continued for six weeks. As disease and starvation continued to take their toll on the Jewish inmates, and as a mounting casualty rate from the artillery fire made its impact, the defense finally collapsed.
In the end, the Germans used more artillery shells in subduing the Warsaw Ghetto whose defence was mounted by a ragtag group of malnourished and ill young Jews than they did in the 1939 capture of Warsaw. Hitler awarded the general an Iron Cross. When the Chief of Operations of the German Armed Forces High Command, General Alfred Jodl, read the 75-page battle report he was beside himself with rage.
"That dirty, arrogant, S.S. swine! Imagine writing a seventy-five-page boastful report on a little murder expedition, when a major campaign fought by soldiers against a well-armed enemy takes only a few pages."
Labels: Anti-Semitism, Heroes and Villains, Social-Cultural Deviations
posted by Pieface @ Thursday, May 01, 2008
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