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Hitler's statement below foreshadows the Final Solution:
| Hitler (Mein Kampf, 1924): “If at the beginning of the War and during the War twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers in the field, the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain.” |
If German soldiers had died in the First World War, so Jews should have died as well. If German soldiers had been killed by poison gas attacks," so Jews too should have been “held under” poison gas.
The logic of genocide followed the logic of warfare. Warfare is the occasion in which soldiers perform the “work” of dying for a nation-state.
Why should Jews be exempt from the work of dying? As German soldiers died at the behest of Germany in the First World War, so Jews would be required to do the same. The Holocaust replicated the First World War, Jews substituting for German soldiers.
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