Notes
Excellent tome on The Final Solution, focusing (of course) on Auschwitz, the foremost concentration camp in The Third Reich, if one counts by the number of dead. Rees has researched the subject for many years, and even facts from the 21st century are included here. Apart from the sheer chronological dealings, Rees exemplifies, factualises and explains everything in lay-person terms, going to great extent to bring out the humanity of it all, i.e. how humans are at their worst and best in a variety of ways, before, during and after WWII. A must-read, as a brilliant accommodation to the likewise brilliant BBC TV series.
Recent research has demonstrated that such shocking documents do not represent a thought process that was merely expedient; there existed a strand of intellectual thinking within the Nazi movement that saw such population reduction as economically justified. Working to a theory of ‘optimum population size’, Nazi economic planners could examine any area and work out, simply from the number of people living there, whether the land would produce a profit or a loss. For example, German economist Helmut Meinhold of the Institute for German Development Work in the East calculated in 1941 that 5.83 million Poles (including old people and children) were ’surplus’ to requirements. The existence of this surplus population meant ‘an actual erosion of capital’. The people who constituted this excess population were ‘Ballastexistenzen‘ - a ‘waste of space’. At this stage such economists had not followed their own logic through - they were not calling for the physical ...
The only certainty for members of the SS was the fundamental rightness of the orders they were given. If a superior ordered someone to be imprisoned, someone to be executed, then - even if to the individual ordered to carry out the sentence the judgment appeared incomprehensible - the order must be correct. The only protection against the cancer of self-doubt in the face of orders that were not immediately explicable was hardness, which therefore became a cult throughout the SS. 'We must be hard as granite, otherwise the work of our Fuhrer will perish', said Reinhard Heydrich, the most powerful figure in the SS after Himmler.
In the process of learning how to bury emotions like compassion and pity, Hoess absorbed the sense of brotherhood that was also strong in the SS. Precisely because an SS man knew that he would be called upon to do things that 'weaker' men could ...
I also encountered something more frightening as I travelled around these newly liberated countries, from Lithuania to the Ukraine and from Serbia to Belarus: virulent anti-Semitism. I had expected people to tell me how much they hated the Communists; that seemed only natural now. But to hate Jews? It seemed ludicrous, especially since there were hardly any Jews in the places I was visiting - Hitler and the Nazis had seen to that. Yet the old man in the Baltic states who had helped the Nazis shoot Jews in 1941 still thought he had done the right thing 60 years ago. And even some of those who had fought against the Nazis held wild anti-Semitic beliefs. I remember the question one Ukrainian veteran put to me over lunch. He was a man who had fought bravely for the Ukrainian Nationalist partisans against both the Nazis and the Red Army and been ...
Additional information
- Pages: 400
- ISBN: 0563522968
- EAN: 9780563522966
- Binding: Paperback
- Publisher: BBC Audiobooks