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Editor's note: Hitler understood that "Nations Have the Right to Kill." This is the privilege of a great political leader. If the occasion demands it, a national leader will not regret "shedding the blood" of his own soldiers. Hitler took the logic of war a step further. If nations have the right to kill their own soldiers, why would Germany not also have the right to kill Jews, enemies of the German people?
War is the independent variable, genocide the dependent variable. For Hitler, the idea of genocide followed from the logic of warfare. Scholars have taken great pains examining the second variable. But the first variable remains unexamined/ Historians agree with Hitler that nations have the right to kill. They do not reflect upon this assumption.
In bringing the Holocaust into existence, Hitler was performing a critique of warfare.
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On June 5, 1943, Goebbels stated: “The laws of war are harsh. Millions of Germans today have to be ready to die on the battlefield.” Hitler declared that he was willing to send the pick of the German people into war “without regret for the shedding of valuable German blood.”
However, then Hitler reflected: “When I send the flower of German youth into the steel hail of war without feeling the slightest regret over the precious German blood that is being spilled, should I not also have the right to eliminate millions of an inferior race that multiplies like vermin?”
If Hitler as representative of the German nation had the right to send his own soldiers to die in the hell of warfare, why would he not also have the right to send Jews—enemies of the German people—to a horrific death? The logic of the Holocaust derived from the logic of warfare.
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