Newsgroups: alt.revisionism Subject: Holocaust Almanac: Bach, Beethoven & Bedlam - Nazi Schizophrenia Followup-To: alt.revisionism Organization: The Nizkor Project, Vancouver Island, CANADA Keywords: Archive/File: places/germany/program.07 Last-Modified: 1994/12/10 "Perhaps it is for the psychiatrist rather than the historian to fathom the schizophrenic behavior of Nazi leaders and their menials, who could dispassionately participate in the systematic murder of men, women, and children, discharge their grisly tasks mechanically, and then return home to a devoted family, to spend the evening listening to the recordings of Bach or Beethoven without a further thought to the lives that they had just destroyed. The mystery of such behavior, endlessly repeated, has bewildered the world. If, when defeat was imminent, the officials made efforts to eliminate evidence of the brutality and the mass killing, they were not motivated by any sense of guilt or shame. Their paramount concern was to avoid the physical proof of crime. In Renaissance England, the headsman who wielded the ax on Tower Hill was always masked, unknown to victim or spectator. He customarily lived across the English Channel under an assumed name, and was sent for on occasions that demanded his professional skill. In the Nazi heyday, not only misfits but men and women who belonged to a people renowned for preeminence in science and in the arts reacted with righteous indignation when they found themselves in the prisoner's dock. In an interview with Professor Yehuda Bauer of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, I discussed the Nazi rationale for the Final Solution. I asked for his reaction to the explanation most commonly offered, that the Nazi ideologues did not think of themselves as executioners. They were not killing human beings; rather they looked upon Jews with the detachment of butchers who slaughtered cattle. Bauer agreed that many of the Nazis had indeed come to equate Jews with expendable beasts of the field. But he added that many of the Nazi policy makers were obsessed by a devil theory. To them the Jews were not merely non-human: they were anti-human. Their very existence threatened the healthy growth of the human species, particularly the supreme Aryan model. Hitler's ruthless war on them was intended, once and for all, to rid the world of the sinister force that had threatened and corrupted every generation. Compassion for Jews was a fatal weakness. The grace of a twenty-year-old girl, outwardly lovely, intelligent, was really a snare to lull and divert. The infant, curled up in a mother's arms, was a cunning disguise. When a child's head was smashed against the wall of a gas chamber, it was like stepping on a cockroach. On this premise, Bauer noted, there was no evil in the teachings of the notorious anti-Semites of history. In Nazi eyes, Luther, Voltaire, Houston Chamberlain, the authors of the forged `Protocols of the Elders of Zion,' to identify only a few, were performing the highest kind of public service when they warned the world about the mortal danger of tolerating the Jews. They were exposing the lethal presence of mankind's most destructive enemy.<24> Such views carry stunning implications for the future. They emphasize that there were fanatics loose in our nuclear world whose monomania could threaten all civilized values. Such men may never again have the opportunity to enslave and liquidate whole peoples. But in the eternity of their twelve-year Reich, the swastika came within a millimeter of blocking out the sun. In little more than a decade of Nazi domination, they created scores of Auschwitzes and Treblinkas and Maidaneks. Who could believe that Hitler, the Voice of Destruction, would have stopped after the elimination of the Jews, that he would not have continued with his attacks to extend the Final Solution to other "subhumans" whom he regarded as cattle or bacilli?" <24> Interviewed at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, November 29, 1979 TOTAL JEWISH LOSSES IN THE HOLOCAUST Polish-Soviet area 4,565,000 Germany 125,000 Austria 65,000 Czechoslovakia 277,000 Hungary 402,000 * France 83,000 Belgium and Luxemburg 24,700 Holland 106,000 Italy 7,500 * Norway 760 Rumania (excluding Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina and Northern Transylvania) 40,000 Yugoslavia 60,000 * Greece 65,000 ------------------------------------------ 5,820,960 Statistics Compiled by Yehuda Bauer of Yad Vashem * May be underestimated Extracted from--------------------------------------------------- "THE REDEMPTION OF THE UNWANTED", Abram L. Sachar (New York: St. Martin's/Marek, 1983. -----------------------------------------------------------------
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