MANUFACTURING DEATH:
The Production of Corpses

Understanding Nazi Germany and the Final Solution begins with the following proposition: the fundamental purpose of the regime was to kill people. This was the bedrock.

Historians write about a multiplicity of variables. This is their job: to write books. However, seeking truth, the starting point is Hitler's ideology--and how he willed his ideology upon the German people.

World conquest, living space in the East, the desire to rid the world of unproductive and inferior people, the cleansing of the nation, etc., of course. But for Hitler the primary motivation was killing people.

The desire to kill accounts for 85% of the variance. The killing of Jews, of course, was where it all began--in Hitler's mind, and in reality. 

As Steven Katz (1993) put it:

Has there ever been a comparable example of so much disciplined planning and modern technological know-how, so much specialization and concern with efficiency, being harnessed and used solely to murder a noncombatant civilian population. An entire, sophisticated industry, and much of the energy of the German nation and its allies, were devoted solely to the production of corpses.
Lucy Dawidowicz in The War against the Jews (1976/2010) draws attention to the profound link between Nazi ideology and behavior:

The mass murder of the Jews was the consummation of Hitler’s fundamental beliefs and ideological conviction. The nexus between ideas and act has seldom been as evident in human history with such manifest consistency. Hitler’s ideas about the Jews were at the center of his mental world. They shaped his worldview and his political ambitions, forming the matrix of his ideology and the core of National Socialist doctrine. Few ideas in world history achieved such a fatal potency.

The Final Solution was undertaken as fulfillment of Hitler’s desire to destroy the Jewish race.

Raoul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews (1961-2003) describes the killing of the Jews as an “undertaking for its own sake;” an event “lived and lived through by its participants:”

The destruction of the Jews was not a gainful operation. It imposed a strain upon the administrative machine and its facilities. In a wider sense, it became a burden that rested upon Germany as a whole. 

The death camps were a massive institution created, organized and managed by human beings--whose fundamental purpose was to kill people. Steven Katz (1993) asks:

Has there ever been a comparable example of so much disciplined planning and modern technological know-how, so much specialization and concern with efficiency, being harnessed and used solely to murder a noncombatant civilian population, where a technology came into being and had its sole raison d’être the murder of a segment of one’s own and then one’s subject population?

An entire, sophisticated industry, and much of the energy of the German nation and its allies, were devoted solely to the production of corpses. Everything, from the making of trains to carry the victims, to the making of gas chambers to gas the victims, to ovens to burn the victims, to the communications that controlled the entire process, was the end product of a technologically advanced civilization which decided to turn its economy, as well as its inmost soul, over to manufacturing death.