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From: Never to Forget: the Jews of the Holocaust (1991). Milton Meltzer (p. 73). “By the end of the winter of 1941-42, more than 90% of the Jews trapped by the Germans east of the Soviet border were dead. The extermination of men, women, and children did not disturb Hitler:
Nature is cruel. Therefore, we, too, may be cruel. If I don't mind sending the pick of the German people into the hell of war without regret for the shedding of valuable German blood, then I have naturally the right to destroy millions of men of inferior races who increase like vermin.
The same quote translated in Joachim Fest’s HITLER: (1973/2002):
Nature is cruel; therefore, we are also entitled to be cruel. When I send the flower of German youth into the steel hail of the next 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?
Jews in the death camps symbolized the oppressed German soldiers. Hitler enacted a demonstration of the abject condition of the soldier, conveying the German soldier’s experience in the First World War. The Jew in the death camp enacted the experience of the German soldier in the First World War: abject submission; obedience unto death.
If Hitler had this “right” to destroy his own soldiers--was endowed with this right as leader of a great nation--did he not also have the right to send Jews to die? Hitler reflects: “If I can send my own German soldiers to die, why can’t I also send Jews to die ?”
Because we repress the sacrificial meaning of warfare, we find the Holocaust “incomprehensible.” We insist that the Holocaust is incomprehensible because we don’t acknowledge the truth: that nation states kill their own soldiers.
As soon as we acknowledge this truth, then the “logic of the Holocaust” becomes simple. Hitler could kill Jews because he could kill his own soldiers. Hitler understood this: he made it explicit. He was reducing the state’s right to kill to a “reductio as absurdum.”
This is the true meaning of the Holocaust: a “reductio ad absurdum” of the idea that nations can send their own citizens to die; making a mockery of the idea that it is “sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.”
Jews symbolized the loyal Nazi in its negative form. Himmler said to the SS-man: “Your lives do not belong to you, but to the Fuehrer and the Reich.” One could say the same thing about the Jews. Their lives did not belong to themselves, but to the Fuehrer and the Reich.
From MEIN KAMPF (1925), Chapter V: The World War: If the best men were dying at the front,” Hitler said, “The least we could do was to wipe out the vermin.”
Translation: “If I am allowed to sacrifice my own soldiers and to kill enemy soldiers in battle, then surely society gives me the right to kill the enemies of the German people, the Jews. Like Erich von Falkenhayn and Paul von Hindenburg and Eric von Ludendorff, who sent millions of German boys to die in battle and continued to be highly respected, I too can initiate a war and send millions of German men to die…without regret for the shedding of valuable German blood. And if I can send my own men to die without regret, then surely no one will object if I send the mortal enemies of the German people, Jews…to their deaths.”
Hitler observes in Mein Kampf that while for four-and-a-half years our “best human materials was being thinned to an exceptional degree on the battlefields, our worst people wonderfully succeeding in saving themselves.” WHY DO THE BEST DIE WHILE THE WORST LIVE? was the source of his rage. For “each hero who made the supreme sacrifice,” Hitler says, there was a “shirker who cunningly dodged death on the pretense of being engaged in business that was more or less useful at home.”
Rather than protest against killing, he extends the logic of killing, and thus the entire thing becomes reductio ad absurdum. If soldiers can be killed, then mental patients can be killed, and gypsies can be killed, and Jews can be killed, and of course Poles can be killed, as well as the soldiers of the Soviet Union. Once we recognize that a nation is KILLING IT’S OWN SOLDIERS, all else follows. But we don’t want to hear or know the first part of the syllogism. We want to believe that nations are “good,” in spite of all the evidence to the contrary.
The phrase "reductio ad absurdum“ or "reduction to absurdity” is a term from the field of logic: “The proof of a proposition by showing it to be an obvious falsity or self-contradiction or self-contradiction, or the disproof of a proposition by showing its consequences to be impossible or absurd when carried to a logical conclusion.”
This is the deepest meaning of Hitler and the Holocaust: Hitler was trying to demonstrate the destructiveness and stupidity and futility of warfare by carrying its logic to a bizarre conclusion. The Holocaust was the consequencee of the absurd logic of warfare, that is, of the idea that a nation has the right to take the lives of human beings.
Hitler says, “If I can send my own German soldiers to die, therefore I can send anyone to die.” The nation-state owns “the right to death:” has the right to take the lives of its own soldiers. Therefore, the state has the right to kill anyone. Indeed, if the soldier is the best a nation has to offer, and is sent to die in battle, then of course a nation would have the right to send to die people that are not the best; that are the worst a nation has to offer.
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