That’s what evil sounds like…
Like someone who could easily be a neighbor, friend, family member or even yourself?
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To express it less politely, official Nazi doctrine was that all Slavs were “Untermenschen”.
But conditions in Krupp workshops for the slave labourers would have been far worse. One thing that helped the Nazis lose the War (and was mentioned by the comparatively sane guy who ran the Baltic republics) was that starving skilled labour to death was not a smart way of maintaining efficiency.
Edit - Hitler forgot himself. Later in the War when a strategic appreciation produced by one of von Guderian’s staff suggested that the Soviet Union was again much stronger than the Germans realised, Hitler wanted him committed to a lunatic asylum.
After WW2 that officer was put in charge of assessing the Soviet threat to Germany. His job was so secret that it was illegal to take his photograph. [my citation for this is dead tree only, I’m afraid.]
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This song has been in my mind far too much recently. It was horrifying and depressing listening to it 15-20 years ago, when it seemed unthinkable that ordinary people you knew would commit atrocities, now it is even more so.
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His normal speaking voice is a rather pleasant sounding one, compared to the shrieking, electrically amplified voice in his rallies.
What I took away from listening to this whole 11 minutes:
This was no ordinary conversation.
Hitler was entrancing to people around him, as an interlocutor as well as a public orator. He was a verbal bully. One of the subtlest kind. Not brash loud talking and insisting that others wait their turn, but wielding his authority to speak instead of others, until they eventually quieted and he could go on at length. He did this a number of times in the audio. We can’t see who is there, but it’s at least 4 people were in that room trying to converse with him. It starts out as a conversation and then it turns into a monologue. Any time anyone has a finer point and tries to get a word in edgewise, he talks a little louder over their interjection, absorbs their point, and then …just keeps going.
When is the last time you could sit and, in a regular talking voice, go on for 8 or 9 minutes, essentially uninterrupted? When is the last time you were around someone who did this? You probably thought, maybe they should get their hearing aids checked?
There was nothing normal about this conversation at all, despite his candor about the German war effort. Clearly, he felt he was among friends or sympathetic listeners. But at no point was this a true conversation. It was an expository. Hitler wielded his dominance even among friends. If I had a friend like him, I’d be like, “Oh, not this guy again! Someone please turn up the music! Where’s the beer?”
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I find it difficult to believe that your whole point is based on the sound of Hitler’s voice.
Hitler was a man, and Nazis were people. Agreed. But “just” doesn’t enter into it at all as far as I’m concerned. Does “normal” apply to a man who orders the deaths of millions of innocent people or to the people who willingly carried out those orders and with great relish? If it did, then the guilty of this world would vastly outnumber the innocents.
I think you and I differ on what qualifies as being normal. If your point is that we should be wary of anyone because even seemingly “normal” people can be capable of great evil… then fine. I agree with that. We should be on our guard. But you won’t convince me that people who are clearly and demonstrably evil are the same as people who are clearly and demonstrably good. Ex: Trump and a Volunteer Social Worker are not anywhere near each other as far as their place on any scale of normalcy. Would you say they are?
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That description applies to the leadership and people of all of the imperialist nations of the 20th century.
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It also applies to all the neocon filth who’ve used, and continue to use, discredited Chicago-school bullshit as a fig leaf for class war.
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I think the point is that mankind has, and will continue to have, the capacity for great evil. This is the norm.
Hitler and “the Germans” are not a special case.
The only thing that keeps us a nation or a community from doing evil are strong, ethical, transparent, secular institutions.
EDIT: Some people were taking “us” too literally. No, I didn’t mean to include you, @anon89609066.
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They aren’t a special case in the sense that It Could Happen pretty much anywhere, and that once the system of oppression and genocide gets going, you don’t really need monsters to run it; ordinary people will adapt to the situation and commit acts of horror with nonchalance that they probably could never have imagined in themselves.
However, as I understand it, the Holocaust is a pretty special case as genocides go, for the sheer industrialized process of it.
The actor Bruno Ganz used this recording for working out his version of Hitlers voice for the amazing movie"Downfall" [the one that got co-opted for the never ending meme of Hitler ranting about x boxes]
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It was a big one, and the industrialised/bureaucratic administration made it worse, but it wasn’t unique.
Genocides are not at all unusual; they’re pretty much the drumbeat in the song of history. Industrialised genocide was not invented by the Germans; the Turks got there first, in 1915.
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There’s the Soviet mass purges and intentional starvation of Ukraine in the 1930s. There’s the Khmer Rouge genocide. There’s the Chinese Great Leap Forward which killed tens of millions. Without even getting into the various European religious purges or the European genocide committed in the New World.
How does “special case” apply in the context of the Holocaust? The Soviets didnt need to industrialize their mass killings. Likewise, with the Cambodians and the Chinese and the Turks. The Nazis used the tools they had available.
I agree the particular German methods were novel, but the underlying motivations were not. I think many look at those methods and somehow conclude that the motivations were also unique.
Or the killing of one in five North Korean civilians, or the Indonesian murder of half a million socialist peasants, or the global slaughter of colonialism, the centuries of slavery, Columbus’ total extermination of the Arawak, the near-extermination of Indigenous Australia, etc. etc. etc.
As I suggested upthread, mass murder is the fucking drumbeat of history.
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No, not the only thing. For me, the thing that keeps me from doing evil is… Myself. I don’t want to. I’m not thinking about any secular institutions when I say that, such as, “I don’t want to go to jail.” I think more along the lines of, “I’d never want harm to come to this person.” And that applies to strangers, people in other countries far away. Heck, aliens from planet Zorg. Life is so short, and already filled with pain, doubt and loss, and I would put myself in a position to ADD to that misery? No. Relieve some of it, if I can. Whatever I can do. Tread gently so that others have a chance to tread at all.
I don’t hear any of that in Hitler’s little monologue. I hear war this, war that. It’s sick. The world is full of those kinds of people, still. They must be exterminated. Just kidding. I don’t know how to get rid of them or get them to turn off that violent side, but we have to keep trying. And keep our gentler sides exposed to the world.
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I’m saying what I’m saying not just about me, but in general, too. Making a comparison between self and people at large. I think on one level, you are correct; secular (law) institutions keep us from doing great harm. I’m saying there are also more levels that society operates on simultaneously. Obvs not every individual within a society, or even that all societies are identical, but many things are going on together in this vast multiplicity. A deep moral compass is also at play for many people.
And this is the problem with most films about the holocaust, that the Germans are often portrayed as inhuman monsters rather than as real people doing terrible things.
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