Abstract
This chapter investigates how killing non-Aryans was justified from an individual viewpoint and before the international community. One’s ancestry can be understood as a matter of moral luck, but the Nazis saw Aryan ancestry as their entitlement. Nazis used the Aryan Protocol to classify persons of Aryan descent and non-Aryans. The defense of an exclusive Aryan right to life amounts to special pleading. Under the guise of eugenics Nazis engaged in the T-4 campaign, where they tested the efficiency of various types of mass murder on persons who were institutionalized. The realpolitik national posture of Germany positioned it to deny some members of society their basic rights including the right to life. In this instance the voice of the clergy and public did succeed in persuading the Nazis to cease the T-4 campaign of terror. Having acquired the expertise to kill in mass, Nazis officials directed subordinates to kill those they deemed to be enemies of the state like the Jews. The majority of subordinates willingly acted upon those orders rather than resisting and confronting ridicule or censure.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Genesis 4: 1–26.
- 3.
I Kings 21.
- 4.
Claudia Koontz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belnap Press, 2003), 331, note 2. Koontz says, “Among the ‘situationalists,’ four stand out: Hans Buchheim, Hans Mommsen, Richard Rhodes, and Christopher Browning. And among those who posit the existence of a uniquely German racism, Paul Rose, John Weiss, and Daniel J. Goldhagen have written most forcefully in recent years.”
- 5.
Tom Segev, Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends. 1st ed. (New York: Doubleday, 2010), 194.
- 6.
For a discussion of moral luck see Daniel Statman, Moral Luck (New York: State University of New York Press, 1993). An objector may claim that a theist would reject the notion that the Nazis were the product of moral luck. I, the author, acknowledge myself as a theist who embraces the Christian faith. As a theist I suppose happenstance and temporality are the outcome of divine creativity. However, I do not suppose this alters one’s mere finitude. One must be born at a specific time and place. Associated with that time and place are several systemic advantages or disadvantages that may count as one’s moral luck. I do not suppose belief in theism changes one’s moral luck. Furthermore, the theist and the non-theist may hold an individual accountable for how he or she values and acts upon that moral luck. For example, in the Good Samaritan parable (Luke 10: 30–37) it was the good Samaritan’s moral luck that he was born a Samaritan and not a Jew and had the opportunity to develop his talents and wealth as he did. Within the scope of his moral responsibility lay the possibilities of aiding the man who was robbed, ignoring the man who was robbed, or further abusing the man who was robbed. His choice to aid the man was not the Samaritan’s moral luck, but it was his exercise of his moral responsibility for doing good.
- 7.
Eric Ehrenreich, The Nazi Ancestral Proof (Indianapolis, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2007), 94.
- 8.
Ehrenreich, The Nazi Ancestral Proof, 94.
- 9.
Ehrenreich, The Nazi Ancestral Proof, 62.
- 10.
Ehrenreich, The Nazi Ancestral Proof, 106.
- 11.
Ehrenreich, The Nazi Ancestral Proof, 111.
- 12.
Koontz, The Nazi Conscience,105.
- 13.
Vivien Spritz, Doctors from Hell (Boulder, Colorado: Sentient Publications, 2005), 237.
- 14.
Spritz, Doctors from Hell, 237.
- 15.
Spritz, Doctors from Hell, 201.
- 16.
Spritz, Doctors from Hell, 203.
- 17.
Guenter Lewy, Perpetrators: The World of the Holocaust Killers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 79.
- 18.
Lewy, Perpetrators, 79.
- 19.
Pringle, The Master Plan, 240.
- 20.
Koontz, The Nazi Conscience, 8.
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Wilson, P.E. (2023). Self-Entitlement for the Chosen Few. In: The Degradation of Ethics Through the Holocaust. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30919-9_5
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