It’s a truism that the term “Nazi”, certainly in the U.S., has been overused. The word, particularly over the past six years after Donald Trump was elected, has become in U.S. political discourse so casual a means of dismissing one’s political opponents or putting them beyond legitimacy that some obscurity has been cast over the word’s import, even if those to whom it is assigned may deserve the tag. While I do not mean to suggest that, whenever “Nazi” (or “Neo-Nazi”, which is just as hackneyed) is used - say, by those speaking of the Ukraine war or Trump supporters - the user is being thoughtless or not employing the term correctly, it is self-evident that “Nazi” has long been mouthed too much by those who do not necessarily have it clearly in mind who the Nazis were and what they tried to achieve, nor the heinous magnitudes that the moniker is meant to invoke (not just those of the Holocaust), at the cost of this important label becoming denuded.
Thus, my first aim here, mostly for myself (I am aware that none of what follows is news), after having recently been re-exposed to the Nazis in my reading of William Shirer’s book, the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, is to revisit the Nazis’ self-image, which Shirer has made easy. It is concise, singular, and vile, but I do believe that, in addition to those qualities, it tells us something unfortunately more general about the attitudes and ends of political power and the people who pursue it.
Toward the end of Shirer’s book, he discusses the Nazi’s so-called New Order. This wasn’t a plan per se, a la the Final Solution, but various shit piles strewn across the Nazi sewer that articulated in the Nazis’ own native tongue what they thought they were up to more broadly than did their thinking about “merely the Jews”. There is something about reading what these morally indecipherable ghouls believed, and being confronted so explicitly with the diseases in their heads that they thought were creditworthy moral ideas, that crystallizes their evil in a way that I do not think even wide knowledge only of what the Nazis did, or even above-average knowledge of the Holocaust, can quite convey. I suspect this is because we have, as of 2023, been exposed too much, though perhaps also too little, to the Nazis, given the vastness of their impact, how much they’ve been studied, and their enduring presence in American and world culture, to say nothing of the enduring moral reckoning they’ve imposed.
Thus, when we think of such organizations as, say, the Azov Battalion and other like right-wing outfits in Ukraine today, which are being supported full-tilt with billions of dollars from the U.S. and NATO, or when we fling the Nazi epithet with the aim of it being a mic drop, the following are the notions and personages to whom our thoughts should turn if they are to have the best chance of being effective in achieving the related ends of avoiding trivializing the Nazi’s crimes and preventing their successors from rising again (if it is not already too late to prevent that from happening).
The following quotations are all taken from Shirer’s remarkable book for which he is justly celebrated and deserves enormous credit to this day. We’ll start with Heinrich Himmler, the chief of the SS. Here is an excerpt of a speech he gave on October 4, 1943 at Posen, to a “confidential gathering" of S.S. men:
What happens to a Russian, to a Czech, does not interest me in the slightest[.] What the nations can offer in the way of good blood of our type, we will take, if necessary by kidnapping their children and raising them here with us. Whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death like cattle interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves to our Kultur; otherwise it is of no interest to me.
Whether 10,000 Russian females fall down from exhaustion while digging an antitank ditch interests me only in so far as the antitank ditch for Germany is finished:
Next, Hitler himself, via Martin Bormann, one of his scribes, on what to do with the Poles:
The Poles are especially born for low labor . . . There can be no question of improvement for them. It is necessary to keep the standard of life low in Poland and it must not be permitted to rise . . . The Poles are lazy and it is necessary to use compulsion to make them work . . . The Government General [of Poland] should be used by us merely as a source of unskilled labor . . . Every year the laborers procured by the Reich could be procured from there.
And what to do with the [Polish] priests:
[T]hey will preach what we want them to preach. If any priest acts differently, we will make short work of him. The task of the priest is to keep the Poles quiet, stupid, and dull-witted.
And the gentry:
It is indispensable that the Polish gentry must cease to exist; however cruel this may sound, they must be exterminated wherever they are . . .
There should be only one master for the Poles, the German. Two masters, side by side, cannot and must not exist. Therefore all representatives of the Polish intelligentsia are to be exterminated. This sounds cruel, but such is the law of life.
Now, Erich Koch, Reich Commissar for Ukraine, on March 5, 1943:
We are the master race and must govern hard but just . . . I will draw the very last out of this country. I did not come to spread bliss . . . The population must work, work, and work again . . . We definitely did not come here to give out manna. We have come here to create the basis for victory.
We are a master race, which must remember that the lowliest German worker is racially and biologically a thousand times more valuable than the population here.
And lastly, again, Martin Bormann, on July 23, 1942:
The Slavs are to work for us. In so far as we don’t need them, they may die. Therefore compulsory vaccination and German health services are superfluous. The fertility of the Slavs is undesirable. They may use contraceptives or practice abortion - the more the better. Education is dangerous. It is enough if they can count up to 100 . . . Every educated person is a future enemy. Religion we leave to them as a means of diversion. As for food they won’t get anymore than is absolutely necessary. We are the masters. We come first.
We often forget that Hitler didn’t do it all himself (no dictator does). He had help, virtually an entire society for whom the tenets of National Socialism were as willingly ingrained to one degree or another in them as in him, and without whom he could not have gotten as far as he did. On the other hand, it is doubtful that anyone other than Hitler then in Germany could have focused such attention and cultivated such commitment among so many of those whom he afflicted with his demonic obsessions but who were less talented and diabolically possessed. Some paradigmatic feature of all historical development, good and bad, is undoubtedly reflected in this relationship of the singular charismatic personage, who organizes public energy and directs its overall movement like a bellwether or lodestar, but who also is buoyed and directed by the movement thus inspired, in the same way that supply creating demand surely is only an interactive fact, which works only if there is at least an inchoate demand that had been waiting around for the supply to ignite it. Toward the better understanding of this chicken-and-egg quandary, Robert Jay Lifton once posed the idea of an “atrocity producing situation”, - as it were, the egg - but my money’s on the chicken as first, if not prime, mover.
I’d never claim to comprehend the Nazis’ “ugly assault on the human spirit”, as Shirer put it. I surmise that, like anyone else who has looked closely enough at the Nazis at one point or another and felt revulsion and contempt (needless to say, many have not felt such things), I have attempted to understand them and thought that I should try - because they’re dangerous? because they’re human? - while also strongly suspecting that the attempt is futile or that it’s a kind of moral trap. I’ve never seen anyone do better than Mel Brooks, whose movies conveyed succinctly that laughing at the Nazis is the best, if not the only, antidote to their festering psychic malignancy, or any subterranean tendency, which has been surmised to exist in every human breast, that might lead anyone at any point to respond favorably to similar putrescence. At any rate that part is beyond my range here.
Nonetheless, I believe I do understand something about the significance of the Nazi’s frank self-reflection set forth in the quotations above, and their clinical consciousness of the several classes of people they surveyed who they believed could become their rivals: the Nazi’s in this respect - and in this respect only - are not as singular as they’ve seemed. Indeed, their rank conceptions are merely (a) one version, though in extremis, of unchecked idealism in politics, which in their case took an extraordinarily evil turn, but which has had many instantiations before and after the Nazis; (b) a comprehensive catalog of how those in power think about how to maintain control, i.e., garden variety preoccupations among those who rule, and those who live to rule.
The victims of the views and plans that Shirer found happen to have been mostly Slavic people, mainly Poles (but also Russians), but such views and plans could be directed at anyone, of any race, nationality, or ethnicity, etc., as they have been, in one form or another, with more or less pestilential racism, throughout history. Moreover, all the notorious rulers of the world have commonly viewed the same categories of people who occupy particular social positions, and are sectioned off as potential threats in the Nazi rants above, in the same general light as the Nazis did: intellectuals and educated people (and the gentry) are a threat to the established order, and so must be eliminated, or at least not educated too much (let them only count to 100);1 the religious orders are there to lull people to sleep with whatever obscurantist hokum is on hand for the purpose (a counterpart to Marx's view of religion as the “opiate of the masses”); and the rest of the people, the toiling hordes, must do nothing else but work for their masters until they drop, never lifting their noses from the grindstone until they are replaced by the next generation of subjugated menials, never to be accorded a standard of living that would allow them to raise their expectations or sense of possibility. These, though one might be averse to acknowledge it, are historical constants. What made the Nazi’s different in this respect from any crazed Roman emperor or ordinary tyrannical regime that persecutes a population is the industrial scale, and the industrial nature, of the destruction they wreaked, having certain technological means at their disposal that past totalitarian governments did not have. But for their sheer cruelty and degenerate imagination, they are ultimately not unique. They are merely regular rulers, exemplars of impulses that are sufficiently prevalent among those who seek power within the political arena that they prove that democracy can never be dispensed with under any circumstances.
As Michael Parenti once put it:
There's only one thing. There's only one thing that the ruling circles throughout history have ever wanted, and that's everything. All the wealth, the treasures, and the profitable returns. All the choice lands and forests and game and herds and harvests, and mineral deposits, and precious metals of the earth. All the productive facilities and gainful inventiveness and technologies. All the control positions of the state and other major institutions. All public supports and subsidies, privileges and immunities. All the protections of the law and none of its constraints. All the services and comforts and luxuries and advantages of civil society, with none of the taxes and none of the costs. Every ruling class in history has wanted only this. All the rewards and none of the burdens. Their operational code is: we have a lot, we can get more, we want it all. And if you don’t know that, you’re in a sad place. If you know that and you don’t know anything else, you know more than if you know everything else and you don’t know that.
The “benefit” of the Nazis is that they make this fact clearest.
As Roger Freeman, Ronald Reagan’s education advisor when he (Reagan) was governor of California, said publicly in 1970: “We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. … That’s dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow to go through higher education.”