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Comment by cluckindan | Hacker News Reader

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"If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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To be clear, I'm personally of the "nazis need to be punched in the face" mindset, but I still love this quote. Life is nuanced and people are complex. Even Solzhenitsyn knew.

As a side-note, you can have a sense of honor, or even consider yourself a good person, and nevertheless murder pregnant women and children as part or your day job. They key is to not consider them as human beings or, alternatively, to consider that you're somehow doing it for their own good, e.g. by saving their soul.

Nazis (and Imperial Japan, and Crusaders, and plenty of others throughout history) made this possible at large scale by spending years of propaganda dehumanizing the "other".

Sadly, we're seeing a trend of doing the same alongside political lines these days. It's not yet as bad as Mein Kampf, but it's very, very worrying.

> consider that you're somehow doing it for their own good

I was surprised to read about Fritz Haber, the man who catalyzed nitrogen fertilizers and other "nice" things like mustard gas, that he was convinced that mustard gas is the humane solution for ending the war. Since WW1 would end faster from his perspective he was saving lives.

Almost perfectly mirrors the view that people dropping atomic bombs on Japan had.

Both horrible weapons, one used mainly on the battle field, the other on cities packed with civilians. Both deployed with the same "we're actually saving lives" attitude. Today only one is considered an atrocity almost everywhere in the world. The other still gets the same explanation as it did 8 decades ago.

Which one is considered an attrocity? I'd argue both.

I agree. But even as recently as last year almost half of Americans still believed dropping the nuclear bombs was justified, with half of these people being convinced that using them on cities was the best thing to do [0].

[0] https://thebulletin.org/2024/08/what-do-americans-really-thi...

There’s probably some truth that many normal soldiers fighting for nazi germany were not aware of the full extent of the horrors at the time. I suspect many just ignored the evidence and believed they were in a traditional war like 1914, or colonial wars of the late 19th century.

Certainly when Germans were shown the concentration camps after the war they wouldn’t believe the evidence in front of them. They didn’t want to think about it during the war either.

Theres no excuse now of course.

It’s sickening that with the increased support of the far right across the west being so apparent today, that it’s the 80th anniversary of Auschwitz today.

If you get bitten by flying bug, that's it. No escape.

I would love to live a carbon-neutral live, but giving up on flying - no way. An easy choice compared to those at war.

Bader willingly reentered the airforce, putting his life at risk, just to be able to fly.

On the German side, to get to fly at least prentend to be a Nazi. Without that, no flying.

Sacrifices have to be made to get airborn.

People are different from person to person and are complex and make different / sometimes even conflicting choices.

We see this when it comes to "meeting your heroes" too.

The "soldier's honour" normally came from the Wehrmacht, professional army officers & soldiers who were very different (and considered themselves very different) to the SS divisions whose leadership were little more than Nazi sadists.

The wehrmacht happily collaborated with SS units or engaged in actions such as https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zambr%C3%B3w_massacre or https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciepiel%C3%B3w_massacre

“Germany“ in the larger sense were the bad guys. And in the top ranks of the party there plenty of individuals who were definitely evil. But the regular military - from the foot soldier up to the generals - were just regular people fighting a war. They were no more or less cruel or honorable than their British counterparts.

Remember that the holocaust only started 3 years into the war (after this operation) and its extend was not widely known on either side of the war; and any country takes great care that any war they are engaged in is framed as a just cause

> Remember that the holocaust only started 3 years into the war

Kristallnacht was a year before the start of the war. The mass murders of Polish intelligentsia started immediately upon the invasion of Poland in 1939. Auschwitz received its first prisoners in the spring of 1940. While the formalizing of the "Final Solution" was a bit more than three years into the war (January of 1942), that is very disingenuous place to claim the holocaust "began".

Depending on how exactly you categorise Nazi atrocities, Aktion T4 (September 1939) could be considered the start of the Holocaust – putting the start point at 0 days into the war.

Maybe I shouldn't have written holocaust but "systematic mass-murder of all Jews". I assumed the intended meaning would be clear, but in retrospect I can see how it might offend. And I am open to arguments that this predates the "Final Solution" by up to six months, putting us closer to two years into the war.

But before that while there were events where thousands or tens of thousands were killed, the general policy was to intern people in camps. And while that is horrible enough to our modern morals (precisely because of the Nazi precedent) it was less abhorrent to people of that time. Otherwise the US would have hardly put Japanese-Americans in camps

No the policy was extermination of the Jews. Babi Yar, the destruction of Vilna, the murder of nameless villages now lost to us all took place from the very begining.

Both the straight and twisted path interpretations acknowledge that Hitlers intention was the destruction of European Jews, and that the Nazi state carried it out with little resistance with the fact widely, unmissibly known.

Please just delete both this whole comment and your "3 years into the war" paragraph as long as there is still time.

As an austrian it's clear you don't fully know what you are talking about.

It's ok to get something wrong sometimes, it's never ok to double down and start arguing because of it. Especially if the topic is the Holocaust!

> the general policy was to intern people in camps

This is so wrong it hurts.

All the people in the camps were still meant to soon die there, we are not talking refugee camps here. Comparing these to US Japanese Internment camps is quite troubeling too.

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