Were the Nazis the absolute height of historical evil?

[TithonusSyndrome]

Basically, from day one in just about any country and culture I can think of, you get it drummed into your head by your peers, pop culture, and your elders that the Nazis were the Most Evil People To Ever Form A Government And Do Stuff To Other People With It. Obviously no objective measure of "evil" exists and your mileage is bound to vary, but - and this could just be me - whenever semieducated pundit dittoheads start offering their nebulous and tryhard editorials on some issue and they all end up using the same metaphor for something that represents the ultimate paragon of some quality or another, I become skeptical. Whether that's when their chorus of pinhead voices all starts chanting in unison about how America is the first place in the west where a descendant of slaves could hold top office or how it's the gold standard of freedom of expression, it only bolsters my doubts to find them untrue each and every time.

Obviously a lot of regimes and empires come to mind, but I lack the depth of understanding to evaluate them against the Nazis, and I am unsure about whether intent or results are more significant - obviously the Inquisition did not have access to industrialized forms of torture and mass murder, and the global population was smaller in their time, but by the same token, intent is notoriously hard to judge in cases like these. So I put it to those of you who might know better - if not the Nazis, then who were the most evil people to ever evil things up?

[MKSheppard]

The Nazis do come up on the top of a very short list -- because they tried (and came damn close to) executing a continent-wide program of ethnic extermination against specific groups -- and planned a future continent wide extermination program against the Russians once the East Was Won.

I mean; sure, you have people like the Mongols who would wipe out cities and stack mounds of skulls outside the cities; but the Mongols were pretty much pikers compared to the scale and sheer insanity the Nazis operated at.

As a "bonus", the Nazis knew that their entire program was totally morally evil -- and then went and did it anyway; while the Mongols were just doing things the way things used to be done in regards to pacification in the old old old days.

[Temujin]

As Shep said, they certainly make the short list. However, I think their (un)popularity is because the Nazis have been the poster boys for organized evil in the Western media for over half a century. All the books, movies, TV shows, video games, etc. have colored most peoples imaginations regarding them, leading to them to become the benchmark by which all other acts of evil are measured. And of course most people aren't that historically aware anyway, let alone aware of events happening right now in their own world (i.e., Darfur).

Not that I'm saying Darfur is comparable to the Nazis, but most people would probably be hard pressed to tell you where it was happening, let alone what was happening.

[Seggybop]

I mean; sure, you have people like the Mongols who would wipe out cities and stack mounds of skulls outside the cities; but the Mongols were pretty much pikers compared to the scale and sheer insanity the Nazis operated at.

Really? Didn't Genghis Khan basically depopulate entire countries? I recall that over 90% of the population of Persia was killed, and something like 60 million died in the aftermath of the invasion of China. Even though it's hard to rely on information from so long ago, if the numbers were even remotely close to that, then the harm caused by the Mongols was vastly worse than the Nazis in proportion to the total amount of humans alive. It's especially bad when you consider that the Nazis had all sorts of efficient technological means of killing people quickly, whereas the Mongols did it the old-fashioned way.

[Temujin]

I think the difference is more in what was done and why it was done. The kind of brutal conquest the Mongols engaged in was really no different than any other conquering army of the period, except in terms of scale and effectiveness. However, the Mongols didn't always just rape and pillage. Cities in their path were often given a chance to surrender. Those that did were treated leniently and peacefully incorporated into the empire, while those that did not were made an example of as Shep described. Also, under their rule, at least initially before the empire began to fragment, there was a lot more tolerance and a lack of persecution of differing cultures, religions, etc. for the time period, as well as the free exchange of knowledge and ideas. While in some ways they were perhaps more brutal, they were also less brutal in other ways.

Groups like the Nazis set out in a very deliberate and discriminatory manner to purposely oppress and cause the extermination of whole groups of people based on nothing more than a petty prejudice. Others like Stalin oppressed their own people, imprisoning and/or killing a multitude by a variety of means; and for no other purpose than their own sadistic desire for power and the oppression of all who may possibly oppose them. Instead of keeping a population in line by keeping them content, they seek to grind their people down under a proverbial boot heel because their own sadism and/or paranoia demands it.

Edit: This may be overly simplistic, but I think it does the job at clarifying the difference.

[K. A. Pital]

Others either lacked intent or the means to execute massive destruction on such a large scale as the Nazis. So yeah, they're pretty much high on the list. The Nazis also did it very fast, which has it's own shock value.

I wouldn't say the African ethnic massacres were "better" than the Nazi one, but they had one inferiority - they had less reach than the Nazis, only being able to fight very close to their own nation. The Nazi methods, coupled with the raw power of the Nazi Reich in Europe, could've efficiently depopulated entire nations, as already mentioned.

[Patrick Degan]

The Nazis transformed genocide into an industrial and scientific enterprise in addition to a political one. Meticulous records were kept not only of the numbers of prisoners exterminated and from which countries they came but also records on the expected profit-per-prisoner to be derived from slave labour before their work value ceased to exist and their industrial output per day, along with the value of hair, skin, and gold teeth to be extracted after they were killed, the expense of fuel for the ovens and of zyklon-B for the gas chambers, and methods to speed up the rate of killings on an assembly-line basis (an increasingly vital imperative in the latter months of the war). Scientific experiments were conducted as adjuncts to the extermination programme. The only reason the Nazi bodycount got no higher than it already had was because they ran out of time. The evil of the Nazi regime lies not in its bodycount but in how it executed in detail the annihilation of a whole people and the derivation of maximum profit from the effort.

No other regime in history carried out genocide according to such a malevolent design and reordered its entire culture along the lines of a moral inversion the way the Nazis did.

[Questor]

Patrick's point is a big part of why the Nazis seem so horrific to me. Its not so much the acts, but the horrific calculation involved. Everything was calculated and planned and recorded.

I don't know, it just seems like their evil wasn't just malevolence, but something more. Their victims were treated simply as a natural resource to be exploited until it was gone. They weren't even given the consideration that an animal would be. They were just there to be harvested.

[Johonebesus]

The Japanese were just as horrific in their attitude, if not quite in their scale.

My problem with the "Most Evil" label is that it makes them into super human monsters rather than just normal vile people taking advantage of modern technology. Hitler wasn't just a a mentally unstable crackpot who was saved from obscurity by the accidents of history, he was almost literally the Devil Incarnate. They weren't an example of what can easily go wrong in a modern society, for normal people aren't truly evil. As I recently said in another thread, this removes them from the historical and political discourse. When they are mentioned in political discourse it is by way of irrational ad hominem attacks on the opposition, but objective and apt comparisons are dismissed as exaggerated demagoguery.

[Juubi Karakuchi]

I have sometimes thought that the building up of the Nazis as the ultimate evil is a response to what Hannah Arendt famously dubbed the "fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil."

To make the Nazis cackling devils with pitchforks offers some limited relief from the horror of their actions, because it allows a degree of psychological separation, effectively providing a box into which the guilty can be sealed. Also, it allows a wider spiritual meaning to be attached to the victims and their suffering. It is easier to believe that they suffered and died as part of some Manichean battle between good and evil, than to see their fate as part of an impersonal, practically industrial process. There is comfort, however tainted, in believing that 'they were killed because they were good' or 'they did it because they were evil' or 'they hated innocence'. To say that 'they did it because they were ordered to' or 'they did it because they just didn't care' can seem like an insult to the dead, stripping them of mystique and meaning.

To me, there is one factor that has to be borne in mind along with the 'banality of evil', and that is self-preservation. The Nazi regime made it quite clear that dissent or disobedience would not be tolerated, and that severe punishment awaited those who did not obey. When one wrong word in the wrong ear can get you and possibly your family killed, why say anything? Why suffer all that for a bunch of people you don't even know? When the ignorant and naive say "that regime's horrible! Why don't they rise up against it!?" the answer is that they know what will happen to them if they do so. Burma and Zimbabwe are examples of this; governments without legitimacy or even competence, but still in power because they are willing to engage in appalling brutality to retain power. If people resist at all it is because they have little or nothing left to lose, at least in their own minds.

[Sinewmire]

In Small Gods Sir Terry Pratchett says the following:

There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.

That's the horror of the Nazis, to me. That all this can be done by state approval of apparently sane persons. The diary of the Auschwitz camp commander finds more to discuss in the vanilla ice cream served at lunch than the fate of the incoming detainees he neatly lists.

[speaker-to-trolls]

^You know that illustrates perfectly what Juubi Karachi just said about people demonising the Nazies, if you focus on weird shit like their occultism and off the wall pseudoscience you can claim they were completely separate from the rest of civilisation. The way they're described by many people they really don't seem human, you'd think they were all posessed by monsters from out of space or at the very least whipped up into madness by some cult leaders (and arguably that's true to an extent, but only some of them and not so much that they lost all their personalities). The truth is that, as was stated before, the Japanese did the same kind of experimenting in China, and the Soviets put people into concentration camps, even if they didn't do it on quite the same scale. The Nazies were extreme in what they did, but they weren't inhuman, they weren't outside of civilisation, they were just the worst of a (very, horrifyingly) bad bunch, but for some reason, maybe the simple shock of finding all the camps and the senselessness of why it was done (again, nothing new, just done on a bigger scale) they've become treated as some sort of alien monsters. It's ignorant and I think it's a way of ignoring the real horror and the reason things like this still happen.

I don't know if they qualify as the worst evil, for that you need to find some way of quantifying evil. Certainly the kind of organisation they applied to it and the fact that their entire ideology depended on killing huge numbers of people is horrifying, but then Pol Pot had the same idea, was the Khmer Rouge less evil because they were less powerful or had less infrastructure to apply to the task? I don't think so, I can say the Nazis were worse in terms of the harm they did, but I can't say they were more evil, because Pol Pot still did the evilest he could.

Night-Stalker, a quick question: Your statement implies, I don't know, some kind of demonic involvement or some kind of dedication on the Nazis part to some kind of belief system based on evil occult forces, why would this make anything they did any worse?

[Iosef Cross]

The Nazis are "special" because they were a group of a country that was very well educated and informed, part of an advanced industrialized civilization. Usually, the people of this background are pacific.

There were groups of people like the Nazis but they usually came from less advanced societies. The Nazis came from one of the most developed centers of modern western civilization.

[Iosef Cross]

The Mongols were brutal, and killed millions of people. In proportion they killed more people than the Nazis. But they were primitive warlords that killed people because everybody did. They weren't "evil" in the sense that they understood the concept.

The Stalinist regime in the USSR killed about the same number of people as the Nazis. However, the Soviet regime didn't kill people of other countries and most of their deaths were "accidental", not a product of conscious design.

[Iosef Cross]

Groups like the Nazis set out in a very deliberate and discriminatory manner to purposely oppress and cause the extermination of whole groups of people based on nothing more than a petty prejudice.

Actually, they (the Nazis) originally envisioned sending the Jews to Madagascar. Later they planned to use the Jews as construction slave workers for infrastructure projects in the conquered Soviet Union. However, after the failure of Barbarossa, they changed their plan again and decided to simply kill them all.

[Thanas]

I think it is pretty pointless to say that the Nazis were the absolute height of historical evil because it is pretty hard to find it out.

If one goes by the highest number of people affected by a single nation using means we today would find "evil", Great Britain takes that one easily, due to killing way more people than the Nazis (and being pretty damn racists as well) and being responsible for messing up even more people today.

If one looks at which nation brought down and destroyed more civilizations, than that one goes to the Mongols. Destroying Baghdad alone is a crime that cannot find any equivalent of today, no single city is as important today as Baghdad was back then.

However, if we go by the industrialized mass-killing, that one has to go to the Nazis. It is even more chilling because Germany had a reputation of being the most cultured state of its time before the Nazis took over.

That is why I think it is pretty pointless to make these threads of absolute height of historical evil, because it largely depends on how you define evil. Is it the act of killing? Is it the aftershock? How long do you take aftereffects into count?

Etc. pp.

[Iosef Cross]

If one goes by the highest number of people affected by a single nation using means we today would find "evil", Great Britain takes that one easily, due to killing way more people than the Nazis (and being pretty damn racists as well) and being responsible for messing up even more people today.

I would say that's absurd. The British empire was only just a typical colonial empire. They killed only the ones that revolted.

If one looks at which nation brought down and destroyed more civilizations, than that one goes to the Mongols. Destroying Baghdad alone is a crime that cannot find any equivalent of today, no single city is as important today as Baghdad was back then.

Yep. The Mongols were totally brutal.

That is why I think it is pretty pointless to make these threads of absolute height of historical evil, because it largely depends on how you define evil. Is it the act of killing? Is it the aftershock? How long do you take aftereffects into count?

One important aspect is the intention of the killer. Most killing was done as a means to a different end (like conquest). While the Nazis killed the Jews with the objective of achieving extermination.

[Thanas]

Night Stalker's LSD trip about demon women of the SS has been cut.

[Thanas]

If one goes by the highest number of people affected by a single nation using means we today would find "evil", Great Britain takes that one easily, due to killing way more people than the Nazis (and being pretty damn racists as well) and being responsible for messing up even more people today.

I would say that's absurd. The British empire was only just a typical colonial empire. They killed only the ones that revolted.

You know absurdly little about the brutality of the British empire, which was responsible for starving 29 millions of Indians to death, for the sake of profit. Heck, throughout one of the worst famines in history, the British Governor refused to make any stockpile available to the common people. Instead, he held a feast for 60.000 people while several million indians starved. I can provide a few chilling quotes if you want to read them.

The British administration in Kenya was also not that sqeamish when it came to killing other humans, see Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya.

[stormthebeaches]

29 million Indians starved to death? I know that British mismanagement lead to some nasty famines in India but I didn't know that the death toll was so high. Could I have a link?

[Thanas]

Sadly, I did not find the books online. But here is a link to some blog with commentary, which summarizes many of the source.

[Modax]

The scientific experimentation on chinese prisoners of war by the Japanese doesn't match the scale of the nazi holocaust, but I'm simply unable to fathom anything more sickeningly atrocious.

[stormthebeaches]

Sadly, I did not find the books online. But here is a link to some blog with commentary, which summarizes many of the source.

So about 24 to 29 million people died of famine in India over a period of 200 years.

[Night_stalker]

The scientific experimentation on chinese prisoners of war by the Japanese doesn't match the scale of the nazi holocaust, but I'm simply unable to fathom anything more sickeningly atrocious.

Thanks. I needed more nightmare fuel.

[K. A. Pital]

I would say that's absurd. The British empire was only just a typical colonial empire. They killed only the ones that revolted.

Thanas and others already covered the Indian famines and the brutality in other conquered lands; I'll only add that the behaviour of Britain in Ireland was likewise awful, and the Irish famine would add around a million dead to the toll of British mismanagement or, say, malevolent requisitioning.

While the Nazis killed the Jews with the objective of achieving extermination.

Not just the Jews alone; they intended to largely depopulate very huge territories. Jews, Slavs, from Poles to Yugoslavs to Russians, were under various degrees of threat, yet if the Nazi plans would've seen completion, few survivors would remain from these nationalities relative to the original population size.

The deaths from Nazi extermination campaigns were neither collateral, nor accidental, but a product of a conscious design and executed according to a plan. This is what separates them from the British Empire, USSR, USA and other large powers with a huge amount of deaths on-hand.