This is Part II of my paper, originally presented as a Keynote talk at Fordham University. 

CLICK HERE FOR A LIST AND DESCRIPTION OF MY LECTURES AND PRESENTATIONS.

CLICK HERE TO READ MY PAPERS AND ESSAYS PUBLISHED ONLINE


NATIONS KILL A LOT OF PEOPLE:
Denial of the Destructiveness of Civilization: Part II

The trauma of Germany's defeat in the First World War motivated Hitler to enter politics. He sought revenge and to reverse the outcome. If he became national leader, he would wage another war—and things would turn out differently. Or perhaps Hitler sought to initiate another war because he believed that the sacrificial dying of the First World War had been insufficient. He would bring about an even more monumental episode of sacrificial slaughter.

We will omit the story of Hitler's rise to power and fast-forward to when he became Chancellor of Germany and Fuhrer—a dictator with absolute power. Immediately, he began fantasizing about war. Hitler understood that another war would require—like the First World War—the sacrifice of millions of German soldiers. But why should this deter him? Had not Ludendorff and von Hindenburg become national heroes in spite of the blood bath over which they had presided?

If Germany and its leaders had no compunctions about sending millions of German men into battle in the First World War, why should he hesitate to do the same in a Second World War? Was he not Commander-in-Chief of the army of a great nation? In a series of conversations with Herman Rauschning (1940) in the mid-thirties, Hitler declared that it was his duty to wage war "regardless of losses."

"We all know what world war means," Hitler said. "We must shake off sentimentality and be hard. Some day when I go to war I shall not hesitate because of ten million men I shall be sending to their deaths." Preparing for the slaughter of his own men, Hitler foresaw or predicted events that in the future he would bring to fruition.

The essence of Nazism was fanatic devotion to Hitler and Germany. The most important organizations in Nazi Germany took an oath of absolute allegiance and obedience.  Hitler Youth at age 10 swore that they were "willing and ready to give up their lives" for Adolf Hitler. Upon entering the army, German men vowed that as courageous soldiers they would be prepared to offer their lives "at any time." While the oath of the SS-Man included his vow to be "obedient unto death." Young German men, in short, agreed to die when Hitler and the German leadership asked them to do so. 

In September 1939, Hitler launched the war he had been dreaming of, attacking Poland. In June 1941, Germany attacked the Soviet Union. As the attack against the Soviet Union began, General von Rundstedt asked his soldiers to emulate the examples of their brothers in the First World War and to "die in the same way," to be unswerving and obedient and to go "happily and as a matter of course to his death." Like the Turkish leader Kemal, von Runstedt was asking his soldiers—not to fight, but to die.

By late 1941, German soldiers already were beginning to die in massive numbers. Hitler's prophecy about the sacrificial death of millions of men was coming true. German soldiers went into battle and fulfilled their vows to be obedient unto death. They went like sheep to the slaughter. 

The Holocaust began—not in the gas chambers—but in the towns and villages of the Soviet Union. As the German army moved Eastward in late 1941 and early 1942, they were followed by the Einsatzgruppen or mobile killing units. Jews were dragged from their homes, brought into fields—and shot. Often they were compelled to dig ditches and buried en masse in gorges that bear an eerie resemblance to the trenches of the First World War.

It is estimated that a million-and-a-half Jews were killed in the Soviet Union before the death camps became operative. Hitler professed to be undisturbed by the murder of men, women, and children, proclaiming:

If I don't mind sending the pick of the German people into the hell of war without the slightest regret for the spilling of precious German blood, then I naturally also have the right to eliminate millions of an inferior race that breeds like vermin.

This statement reveals the meaning of the Holocaust. Hitler seemed to be saying: "If I have the right—as military leader of a great nation—to send the best Germans to their deaths, why do I not also have the right to order the deaths of Jews—mortal enemies of the German people?" Why should German soldiers be required to sacrifice their lives while Jews get off scot-free?

We have noted that Hitler believed Jews had evaded their duty to die for Germany in the First World War. Virtuous German soldiers had sacrificed their lives, but selfish Jews had not. Hitler was determined that this next time it would be different. Once again, German soldiers would die for their country—this is what war is about—but this time Jews would have to die too.

In the First World War, German soldiers were transported to battle in cattle-cars: the same kind of trains that transported Jews to the death camps. Historian Denis Winters notes that after a stint at base, the railway lines took German soldiers to the front: "To a generation with visual memories of the railway lines running into Hitler's death camps," Winters observes, there is "something disconcerting about the imagery of this journey from the base camp. Soldiers went in wagons of the same type, forty of them in each wagon, kit hanging from hooks in the roof. Death was a high probability for both generations of travelers in these cattle cars."

It is disconcerting to realize that just as Jews were sent in cattle-cars to die in the Holocaust, so German soldiers had been sent to die in identical cattle-cars. Was Hitler trying to tell us something? Was he attempting to say: "Just as the German government sent me and my comrades to be slaughtered in the First World War, so I—as representative of the German government—will send Jews to be slaughtered." Hitler reasoned that if Germany had been willing to kill its best people, it also had the right to kill the worst people: Jews, the nation's racial enemy.