what did the nazis do to dehumanize the jews

Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others
Past David Livingstone Smith
Hardcover, 336 pages
St. Martin'southward Press
List cost: $24.99

Earlier I go to work explaining how dehumanization works, I want to make a preliminary case for its importance. And so, to get the brawl rolling, I'll briefly talk over the role that dehumanization played in what is rightfully considered the unmarried nearly destructive event in human history: the 2nd Earth War. More lxx 1000000 people died in the war, most of them civilians. Millions died in combat. Many were burned live by incendiary bombs and, in the end, nuclear weapons. Millions more were victims of systematic genocide. Dehumanization made much of this carnage possible.

Permit'south brainstorm at the end. The 1946 Nuremberg doctors' trial was the first of twelve military tribunals held in Germany after the defeat of Federal republic of germany and Japan. Twenty doctors and three administrators — 20-two men and a single woman — stood accused of war crimes and crimes confronting humanity. They had participated in Hitler'southward euthanasia program, in which around 200,000 mentally and physically handicapped people deemed unfit to live were gassed to death, 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 example are charged with murders, tortures and other atrocities committed in the proper noun of medical science. The victims of these crimes are numbered in the hundreds of thousands. A handful only are still alive; a few of the survivors will announced in this courtroom. Just near 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 flesh 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 fabricated to drink seawater, were infected with typhus and other deadly diseases, were poisoned and burned with phosphorus, and how medical personnel conscientiously recorded their agonized screams and violent convulsions.

The descriptions in Taylor'southward narrative are so horrifying that it's easy to overlook what might seem like 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 it that enables i group of man beings to care for another group every bit though they were subhuman creatures?

A rough answer isn't hard to come up by. Thinking sets the calendar for action, and thinking of humans as less than human being paves the manner for atrocity. The Nazis were explicit about the status of their victims. They were Untermenschen — subhumans — and as such were excluded from the arrangement of moral rights and obligations that bind humankind together. It'southward wrong to kill a person, but permissible to exterminate a rat. To the Nazis, all the Jews, Gypsies and others were rats: dangerous, affliction-conveying rats.

Jews were the main victims of this genocidal project. From the commencement, Hitler and his followers were convinced that the Jewish people posed a mortiferous threat to all that was noble in humanity. In the apocalyptic Nazi vision, these putative enemies of civilization were represented every bit parasitic organisms — every bit leeches, lice, leaner, or vectors of contamination. "Today," Hitler proclaimed in 1943, "international Jewry is the ferment of decomposition of peoples and states, just every bit it was in antiquity. It will remain that way every bit long as peoples exercise not detect the strength to go rid of the virus." Both the expiry camps (the gas chambers of which were modeled on delousing chambers) and the Einsatzgruppen (paramilitary expiry squads that roamed across Eastern Europe followed in the wake of the advancing German ground forces) were responses to what the Nazis perceived to exist a lethal pestilence.

Sometimes the Nazis thought of their enemies as vicious, bloodthirsty predators rather than parasites. When partisans in occupied regions of the Soviet Union began to wage a guerilla war confronting High german forces, Walter von Reichenau, the commander-in-chief of the German army, issued an lodge to inflict a "severe 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 of great britain and northern ireland, and the United States). Armed forces historian Mary R. Habeck confirms that, "soldiers and officers thought of the Russians and Jews equally 'animals' ... that had to perish. Dehumanizing the enemy immune German soldiers and officers to agree with the Nazis' new vision of warfare, and to fight without granting the Soviets whatever mercy or quarter."

The Holocaust is the most thoroughly documented example of the ravages of dehumanization. Its hideousness strains the limits of imagination. And yet, focusing on it tin be strangely comforting. It'due south all too easy to imagine that the Third Reich was a bizarre aberration, a kind of mass insanity instigated by a modest grouping of deranged ideologues who conspired to seize political ability and bend a nation to their will. Alternatively, it's tempting to imagine that the Germans were (or are) a uniquely cruel and bloodthirsty people. But these diagnoses are dangerously wrong. What's virtually disturbing virtually the Nazi phenomenon is not that the Nazis were madmen or monsters. It's that they were ordinary homo beings.

When we call back of dehumanization during World War II our minds plow to the Holocaust, just it wasn't only the Germans who dehumanized their enemies. While the architects of the Terminal Solution were busy implementing their lethal program of racial hygiene, the Russian-Jewish poet and novelist Ilya Ehrenburg was churning out propaganda for distribution to Stalin's Carmine Army. These pamphlets seethed with dehumanizing rhetoric: they spoke of "the odor of Germany'due south animal 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 lot kill i German, impale another — there is null more amusing for us than a heap of 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 war finally turned, a torrent of Russian forces poured into Germany from the due east, and their inexorable advance became an orgy of rape and murder. "They were certainly egged on by Ehrenburg and other Soviet propagandists..." writes journalist Giles McDonough:

E Prussia was the first German region visited by the Red Ground forces ... In the course of a unmarried nighttime the carmine army killed seventy-two women and ane man. Most of the women had been raped, of whom the oldest was eighty-four. Some of the victims had been crucified ... A witness who made information technology to the westward talked of a poor hamlet daughter who was raped by an entire tank squadron from eight in the evening to nine in the morning. One human being was shot and fed to the pigs.

Excerpted from Less Than Man by David Livingstone Smith. Copyright 2011 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin'south Printing, LLC.

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

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