Action T4
It seemed clear to the Nazis (and to most Allies) that if the people they viewed as "unfit" weren't going to be useful on the combat front that didn't mean they should be left off scot-free.
They too must help the war efforts in some tangible way.
Perhaps by receiving less food, heat and medicine --- since they couldn't do useful war work or even simply breed more healthy future warriors.
The Nazis quickly parted company with many (but by no means all) Germans , Allied and Neutrals by deciding the unfit could really best help the war by being murdered --- to free up yet more food and more hospital attention for other "fitter" Aryans.
Action T4 - the secret - official - mass murders of all the unfit ended after a couple of years , under strong if muted protests from the general German public.
(It carried on - unofficially - throughout the war and beyond - as a secretive and unorganized effort supported by wink, wink silence from superiors.)
But this public protest only arose in strength with rumours that the Nazi eugenicists planned to start killing the elderly and the wounded soldiers of non-poor German families --- as well as those of the poorest German families.
This social animus against those unable to fight in combat seems to be universal and eternal.
Action 4F
And almost always, the strongest public anger does not spill over against those who are "fit but not at the front" (those in society with valuable special skills working in "deferred" jobs).
This is because they are society's bosses and able to make life miserable for any who dare to complain publicly.
"So you think your husky young Foreman should be at the Pacific Front do you ?"
"Well then how about you spending some time in the heat of Guadalcanal , Mr drill press operator !"
This implied threat from the powerful had hidden teeth - most men with deferred valuable skills knew that if enough women or blacks were trained to do their jobs, their deferment would end and they would be called up.
This, and not the general prejudice against women and blacks , was the real (if semi-secret) reason why white male worker protests against hiring women and blacks were so frequent and so violent.
So public anger had to be directed instead against the weakest , poorest and least popular members of society --- those 4Fs who came from poor and or minority groups.
They could be safely attacked without any risk that they, their families or their communities could successfully counterattack.
Most girls , just for instance , made it very clear that they won't be seen dating or flirting with those unfortunate teenager college boys with 4F cards.
Seventy five years later this very public rebuke to vulnerable teenage identities clearly still stings in the memoirs of these now elderly men.
Conscious anger mixed with much unconscious guilt in the minds of Allied society's most powerful who were not at the front in WWII (and who had also frequently evaded serving in combat in WWI as well.)
This is shown by the astonishing eagerness with which the Allied elites made the poorest and the weakest in Allied society (its metaphorical 4Fs) the unwitting subjects in endless dangerous medical experiments - as assayed in Eileen Welsome's book The Plutonium Files .
Or the eagerness with which they denied the poorest lifesaving medicines as a form of brutal eugenic triage.
I hope I am not seen as excusing the Nazis' actions but merely stating a historical consensus that the Nazis got even more brutal against the unfit as the objective and subjective conditions of the war worsened for them .
By objective I mean the evidence that in war years of bad European food harvests, they determined not to lose this war (unlike the first war) on the German home front - and so made others suffer more so that Germans continued to eat well.
(Ordinary Germans ate better in WWII than they had during the 1930s' Depression period - because of a government plan that enabled German soldiers to sent home food they bought openly and freely from other Europeans .
The Nazis secretly made it work financially for them by in effect creating hugely unfair currency exchange rates.)
By subjective, I mean when it seemed clear to the Nazis in the Fall of 1941 that they might not secure new living space in western USSR , they began killing all of Europe's Jews - not just some of the Jews in parts of Eastern Europe - as a new war objective they could easily reach, to justify all the German war dead.
I mention all this because we mustn't let the Allies off too lightly in these brutal eugenic sweepstakes.
They afterall invented most of the original eugenic dogma the Nazis picked up and ran with.
And the historical evidence indicates that the Allied eugenic actions got more brutal as the war worsened against them.
If the war had continued to worsen badly against them who can say if their 4F Action horrors might not have rivalled those of the Action 4T ?
Certainly, on the military front, the Allied record displays a despicable eagerness to see that the hapless 4Fs of the occupied lands and of the Axis suffered (by Allied bombings) before the 1As of the Allies did (by directly engaging the German troops on Western European soil).
But that squalid history is a post for another day ....
No comments:
Post a Comment