At the center of the history of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were their policies of mass killing. The Soviets began first with terror during and after the revolution, the construction of a huge system of concentration camps, and then mass starvation. An organized political terror followed in the late 1930s. The Germans, after Hitler came to power in 1933, were most able to repress and then murder people defined as enemies, Jews above all, after they destroyed the states around them. Their greatest crime was the Holocaust, the deliberate murder of almost six million Jews; they also starved about three million Soviet prisoners of war to death, killed around a million people in "anti-partisan" operations, and murdered hundreds of thousands of Sinti and Roma and perhaps a quarter of a million people deemed to be disabled. These crimes were committed by human beings, often at very close range, so they raise questions about the political conditions that are necessary for mass atrocity, but also about how people did and can react to those conditions.
Welcome to the seventh lecture of my new lecture series, “Hitler and Stalin Today.”
This lecture is titled “How was mass killing possible?”
Below are the readings that go along with this week:
As always, thank you for engaging with these lectures. I hope you enjoy and consider sharing them.
Below are some more of my works if you’d be interested in reading:
First, keep the "undesirables" penned up in areas they can't escape from. Then either kill them outright or slowly starve them. It worked back then, and it's still working now.
Yes, and ordinary Germans went about their business. And, that's how it's done.