Comment by pinaceae | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pinaceae | Hacker News Reader

smart person, writing a long article full of facts completely missing the point.

the nazi efficiency is defined by the holocaust and is measured against the performance of the nazis against other organizations attempting the same. the article points out that it is inefficient to kill all these skilled workers - as if the author came from an alien planet not understanding that the extermination of the jewish race (and later the complete untermensch) was at the core of the nazi ideology. as for their other actions - any country can go to war, nothing special there.

other nations have killed more, more quickly (in percentage to overall inhabitants), but mostly within their own borders. nazi germany annexed territories and then went on to systematically exterminate a race. figuring out family trees, measuring pureness (ariernachweis) then either sending you off to the camps or the ostfront (my granddad was a beutedeutscher aka loot german, enough german to be sent to stalingrad).

visit some of the camps, mauthausen, treblinka, whatever - the fact that they went from shooting to exhaust fumes to zyklon B. the fact that they systematically went trough the possessions of the arriving victims, even harvesting gold teeth and hair from corpses. the fact that they wiped out approx. 25% of poland, uprooting a large population from europe, forever.

this and other facts make the nazis the most efficient genocide machine so far and hopefully forever. could they been more efficient? of course, modern nerds with no social consciousness could come up with even better ways, or to put it that way, imagine the nerd-energy behind google/facebook/amazon/HN moved from ad-click generation to a peoples extermination.

"Fellow students remembered him as studious, and awkward in social situations." - a quote about Heinrich Himmler. "We know that these clashes with Asia and Jewry are necessary for evolution." and that is Himmler laying it out, scientifically, clear.

Eh. You are the one missing the point.

“That Holocaust’s real awful, but the Nazi economic policies kicked ass!” is a common refrain you can hear from many, many people. Those people are not talking about the Holocaust, they are talking about the economy and jobs. It’s an argument that, I would argue, even made it into the mainstream. You won’t just hear Nazis regurgitating it. I would even argue that this, more than any other thing they could say, is the number one argument Nazis use to reel people in.

It isn’t true, of course. The linked article retells some fairly standard stuff which everyone who visited a (a bit more in-depth) class or seminar about German history during the Third Reich will know. Of course, only very few people visit those classes. (I know all this because during my last two years of school I was in a advanced history class in Germany – five hours a week – but even in Germany very few people will go that much into depth and considering how little I learned about, say, US history in school, the rest of the world has probably even less hope of ever learning this.)

There's reasons to think that a Keynesian program (even one which focused on war, not building useful infrastructure) could have ended up fixing a truly out-of-kilter economy.

But it only fixes medium term (~10 year horizon) problems. Once the monetary / investment system is fixed, Germany would have stalled. It suffered from massive brain drain (if you literally have Einstein, making him flee isn't a great idea). And totalitarianism isn't great for creating an innovative workforce, even if you can keep your population from fleeing.

If you are embarking on such a Keynesian program in a climate of general depression and lack of investment in other countries then you will enjoy generally low interest rates but you lose the ability to make short term investments and must make longer term ones.

In the case of Nazi Germany Hitler purposely took on massive amounts of debt to rearm the country. Any economic success was temporary and entirely dependent on the massive arms program. Not only was the Nazi state inefficient arms investment couldn't possibly have ever paid back the investment in borrowed money that created the Nazi military.

Yep, it's a variation of "at least they made the trains run on time," which itself is another fallacy.

>I would even argue that this, more than any other thing they could say, is the number one argument Nazis use to reel people in.

I'm sorry, could you clarify this? I'm hardly an expert, but I can't imagine that your average skinhead-type was drawn in by the economic allure of fascist state corporatism...

It’s not just Skinheads who are Nazis. And even Skinheads probably will think something along the lines of “when the Nazis were in power the economy was strong”.

Wow, what an egregious straw-man argument. The article sets forth its goal, to prove that violence aside the nazis weren't efficient, then proves that point. You're complaining that the article proves a point it explicitly didn't set out to prove.

That's pretty disingenuous.

This answer demonstrates a very narrow grasp of history. While about 11 million people died in the Holocaust, the Mongols HALVED the population of China from about 120 million to about 60 million. Not to mention completely erasing several races (such as the Persians) from the earth.

This tendency to have a very short term memory when it comes to these types of events does not serve us well when it comes to these types of discussions.

Genocide was not the Mongols goal. They did not pick some segment of China's population and decide they needed to die. They like the Romans where conquerors. And as all large civilizations have done so at some point there viewed less hardly, and perhaps with a little awe as they created the largest empire in history granted a short lived one.

Pol Pot is an example of the other archetype of mass murder. He killed 1/4 of his country's population in 3 years in truly horrific fashion. But, in doing so he caused great harm to his own country's economy. What separates the Nazis is they efficiently eliminated large segments of the population without destroying society. It's horrific but also demonstrates at a somewhat visceral level that a large chunk of society is not that important. If 3/4 of the worlds bankers died tomorrow not much would change, if 3/4 of the worlds farmers died tomorrow there would be huge issues.

Where would the farmers get capital then? I think it's misinformed to claim that bankers are less important than farmers. There are clearly huge issues in the world of finance, but banking does serve an important and legitimate function.

Where do you think bankers get capital.

From farmers and other business people. I'm not claiming businesses are unimportant, simply that bankers are (because they redistribute that capital as loans to potentially successful new enterprises).

A less snippy response is bankers are distributing the same finite pool of money so having twice as many bankers might make thing more efficient but it's not going to increase the available Capitol any time soon, ditto for having half as many bankers. Banking is important, but it's also highly automated.

So, settling the Jewish question was more than just killing the jews from one day to the other - the concentration camps were "just" the culmination of years of systematic persecution, beginning with boycotts in 1933, the anti-interracial marriage laws 1935, Kristallnacht 1938. In 1933, 533,000 jews lived in Germany, by the time WWII commenced, it was down to 214,000 - almost all of which were subsequently murdered.

The majority of the jews killed in the Holocaust were not German, they were from all the occupied territories, most notably Poland.

Endlösung didn't kill anywhere near 1/4th of the population - it killed 1/3 %, and that fraction had already been systematically marginalised.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Germany...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust#Victims_and_deat...

Exactly, the efficiency had little to do with the method of death, the methods where simply the an example of said efficiency. It's a twisted blueprint. First vilify them, second remove them from anything approaching important positions (collage professors etc), third separate them from society (concentration camps), and finally murder them site unseen. Of course each of those steps where rather complex but the specifics are less important than the overall process. Because, it take a huge number of people willing to do horrible things to create atrocities on that scale.

Arguably step one had been occurring for hundreds of years before the Nazi's rise to power, but they really pushed the envelope.

What I find fascinating is I suspect for a great number of the leaders they really where just looking for something to vilify at the start and things just snowballed. It was only latter in the process as this huge segment of the population because less necessary that the idea of killing them showed up. Something like mass sterilization would have been as effective if there idea really was a twisted form of eugenics and they had been forcibly sterilizing people there and even in the US. However, while the initial idea may have been slave labor they kept sending so many people to these camps that they needed a 'solution'.

The problem is that none of us agree what "Nazi efficiency" is.

E.g. Mao Zedong killed a much larger number of people through his policies than the Nazis did, but letting your own population starve is not defined as "efficiency", rather the opposite of it. The grandparent apparently thinks of efficiency as in technology/engineering, and nothing that the Mongols used to kill people sounds very advanced to us. The Nazis had a very distinct way of using technology and bureaucracy for evil IMHO. And the OP seems to think in terms of economic efficiency.

As the actual article points out, the idea of the Star Trek episode was to have the efficient economy minus the genocide, which I think points out that to at least some people the ideas are not inextricably linked. I don't think most people who say that they had a good economy are consciously also thinking "because they were so good at murder".

What you fail to see though is that the Holocaust in itself is part of a development process. It started with the Polizei-Bataillone and SD-units behind army lines, moved to widespread incarceration and ultimately to the erection of the first dedicated death camps in 1942 (Bełżec, Sobibor, Treblinka).

This hints at the fact that the Holocaust was far from "efficiently" organised and, to a degree, not pre-planned in its final form with the invasion of Poland in 1939. Instead, changing circumstances lead to a change in organisation and thus ultimately to the Wannsee conference and the final stage of the Holocaust.

Sorry, but you are the one who missed the point. The Nazi killing machine was hideously efficient. Nobody is contesting that. The article concerns, and debunks, an oft-repeated claim that the Nazi state as a whole was, violence aside, a ruthlessly efficient apparatus.

If the Holocaust was efficient there would not have been the unneeded cruelty, suffering and abuse. Just the termination of lives.

While it was industrialized it was far from efficient.

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