Did Hitler Say: "Jews Are Not People, They Are Animals"

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

Before I go to work explaining how dehumanization works, I want to make a preliminary instance for its importance. So, to go the ball rolling, I'll briefly talk over the role that dehumanization played in what is rightfully considered the single nigh destructive issue in man history: the Second Globe State of war. More than seventy 1000000 people died in the war, nigh of them civilians. Millions died in gainsay. Many were burned alive by incendiary bombs and, in the end, nuclear weapons. Millions more were victims of systematic genocide. Dehumanization made much of this carnage possible.

Let's begin at the finish. The 1946 Nuremberg doctors' trial was the showtime of twelve war machine tribunals held in Germany after the defeat of Frg and Japan. Xx doctors and three administrators — twenty-two men and a single adult female — stood accused of war crimes and crimes confronting humanity. They had participated in Hitler'south 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 Shine prisoners.

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

The defendants in this instance 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 still alive; a few of the survivors volition announced in this courtroom. But most of these miserable victims were slaughtered outright or died in the class of the tortures to which they were subjected ... To their murderers, these wretched people were non 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 human guinea pigs were deprived of oxygen to simulate high distance 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 and then, tying off the blood vessels, introduced bacteria to induce gangrene. Taylor described how men and women were fabricated to drinkable seawater, were infected with typhus and other mortiferous diseases, were poisoned and burned with phosphorus, and how medical personnel conscientiously recorded their agonized screams and violent convulsions.

The descriptions in Taylor's narrative are so 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 annotate raises a question of deep and fundamental importance. What is it that enables one grouping of homo beings to treat another group as 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 homo paves the way for atrocity. The Nazis were explicit nearly the status of their victims. They were Untermenschen — subhumans — and as such were excluded from the system of moral rights and obligations that demark humankind together. Information technology's wrong to kill a person, but permissible to exterminate a rat. To the Nazis, all the Jews, Gypsies and others were rats: dangerous, disease-carrying rats.

Jews were the primary victims of this genocidal projection. From the beginning, 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 as 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 will remain that way every bit long every bit peoples practise not find the strength to get rid of the virus." Both the death 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 High german army) were responses to what the Nazis perceived to be a lethal pestilence.

Sometimes the Nazis thought of their enemies equally savage, bloodthirsty predators rather than parasites. When partisans in occupied regions of the Soviet Union began to wage a guerilla war confronting German forces, Walter von Reichenau, the commander-in-principal of the High german army, issued an order to inflict a "severe but simply 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 U.k., and the The states). 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 agree with the Nazis' new vision of warfare, and to fight without granting the Soviets any mercy or quarter."

The Holocaust is the nearly thoroughly documented example of the ravages of dehumanization. Its hideousness strains the limits of imagination. And yet, focusing on it tin can be strangely comforting. It's all too easy to imagine that the Third Reich was a baroque aberration, a kind of mass insanity instigated by a small group of deranged ideologues who conspired to seize political power 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. Only these diagnoses are dangerously wrong. What'due south nigh disturbing most the Nazi phenomenon is not that the Nazis were madmen or monsters. It's that they were ordinary human beings.

When nosotros think of dehumanization during World State of war II our minds plough to the Holocaust, but information technology wasn't simply the Germans who dehumanized their enemies. While the architects of the Final 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'south Red Regular army. These pamphlets seethed with dehumanizing rhetoric: they spoke of "the odor of Deutschland's fauna 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 one German, impale another — at that place is zip more amusing for us than a heap of High german corpses."

This wasn't idle talk. The Wehrmacht had taken the lives of 23 million Soviet citizens, roughly one-half of them civilians. When the tide of the war finally turned, a torrent of Russian forces poured into Frg 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 journalist Giles McDonough:

East Prussia was the first German region visited by the Red Army ... In the course of a unmarried night the cherry army killed seventy-ii women and ane man. Most of the women had been raped, of whom the oldest was lxxx-four. Some of the victims had been crucified ... A witness who made it to the west talked of a poor village girl who was raped by an unabridged tank squadron from eight in the evening to nine in the forenoon. Ane human was shot and fed to the pigs.

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

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

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