Cruelty

Hitler clearly lays out in his Mein Kampf his true feelings for the Jewish race. As Declan says in his post, Hitler believes that the Jew "whose striving for world domination will be ended by his own dying out." Well isn't that ironic, by the Jew's own dying out- more like Hitler making them die out by murdering them in mass numbers. In tonight's reading, I didn't get a sense that the slaughter was solely done in order to reach this "final solution," but actually it was done for the enjoyment of the process as well. A lot of the killing was done in "face-to-face encounters outside the camps. Jews and other victims were not simply killed. They were tortured, beaten, and executed publicly while soldiers and other onlookers recorded the executions with cameras"  (961). The point of this slaughter was not just death- but terror! Hitler believed the Jews to have a "bestial cruelty" and therefore he viewed them as subhuman. Well, when i am killing a bug (i realize it's not an animal- but it is alive) i don't try and make it suffer so i can hear the screams of the dying bug. I kill it as a kind of cleansing- but i don't want to torture the bug. As if the killing of millions of Jews and gypsies and Russians wasn't enough, Hitler had to bring even more pain by making their deaths and journeys absolutely miserable. Life in the ghetto's meant starvation and disease; life in the concentration camps meant starvation, disease, humiliation, torture, and ultimately death. One woman describes Auschwitz to be "hell on earth"where the sun didn't represent life or hope, but rather "destruction." When people did try and rebel in Auschwitz and Treblinka- the rebellions were "repressed with savage efficiency" (965). In one instance in the Warsaw ghetto, a group of 1000 jews banned together with a tiny arsenal of gasoline bombs, pistols, and ten rifles- only to be destroyed. The Nazis burned the ghetto and executed/deported everyone who was left. "Some 56,000 Jews died" (965). 

I can't justify Hitler's actions. I could try- but i'd fail. Hitler wanted to create a "New Europe" that was "safe for ethnic Germans and their allies and secure against communism" except that he wanted to build this new europe "on the graveyards of whole cultures" (965). Hitler didn't realize or care that he was destroying the diversity of whole cultures and races with their own heritage. But these peoples were still humans- they were not subhuman. They were my ancestors and i don't view myself as subhuman. What would it have been like if i had been alive in the 1940's, if i had lived in Russia or Poland or Romania (where my mom's family is from) would i still be alive to this day? Probably not. That is what scares me. Hitler wiped out between 4.1 and 5.7 million Jews- in a matter of years- and he doesn't even care because he believed he wasn't doing it for a good cause. If that's the case then why couldn't he have just slaughtered everyone in the least painless way possible? Why torture them, punish them, starve them? WHY?