Great points, yet I’ve the issue is seeing something clearly enough. There are misinterpretations concerning “Hitler”, but it’s the over application that stop the right information for getting out and prevents reasonable comparison from being made to other European or American atrocities. The idea this was the worst genocide and conflict—is that really true. It appeared that way to me for decades, and I’m someone who saved my wages from my teenage years from Burger King so I could take a field trip after 11th grade with my German class to visit Dachau. My uncle, my mother’s older sister, did escape Germany as a boy in 1933, sent out by his parents who were Jewish and Russian, not a good combo. I’ve studied many films and books on the subject, and the atrocities you open with are “excellent” stories of normalized horror.
Yet, I’ve recently though of places like the Congo, a country that didn’t exist before the 1884-85 Berlin Conference, where the Europeans drew all the political borders we see today over the existing African nations there, then went on to conduct the largest continental scale invasion and occupation ever perhaps, though perhaps comparable to that of British India. In this new Belgium Congo, King Leopold turned it into a giant concentration camp, killing off upwards of 15 million Black Africans, fear more than Hitler, and chopping of millions of hands of millions children to force the fathers and mother to work on this giant rubber plantation. That went on for 20 years. The butchery is masked by “Hitler.” The British forced labor and conduct led to an estimated 100 million deaths in India through deliberate starvation by one estimate as I recently published on Medium.
Additionally, the Nuremberg laws did not call for the mass industrialized slaughter of Jews, if you read that Wiki entry carefully. Those laws called for the segregation of Jews into forced labor camps, and they deliberately emulated the laws made in South Carolina, Mississippi and so on in the South to not just segregate but to make labor camps. More than 60 percent of German Jews like my uncle left Germany by 1938 leaving “only” some 266,000 German Jews, who were then rounded up. Instead, the previous Jews and other repressed “ethnicities” came from neighboring countries ro were prisoners, captured and turned into forced labor, or slaves. Their labor was used to lift Germany out of severe poverty and to make Hitler into a billionaire.
This isn’t to day the Holocaust didn’t happen. The January 1942 conference outside Berlin was when the Final Solution was planned and “cooked up.” That was followed by the 6.2 million Jews and others incinerated on the mass industrialized scale you point to. But in April 1945, the allies found 7.4 million slaves still in the concentration camps. The scale shows that the original reason for collecting all these mostly Eastern Europeans, that like over 13.5 million, was to generate slave labor and wealth, as Belgium, Britain, Spain, France, Portugal had already done, some starting the 1400s, to enrich by enslavement of humans. Hitler collected his from Eastern Europe rather than from Africa as the Portuguese and British had done, rather than going to Africa to enslave as the Belgium (and British) had done. In other words, the scale of the atrocity is far vaster than “just” Hitler, white the purpose of it was the same—enrichment by ethnic enslavement.
You’re writing is wonderful and crisp as always, even though the subject is depravity. My point really is just that the intense focus on “Hitler as the ultimate evil” hid a recent European history of depravity just as vast and large, destructive and profoundly disturbing, which has allowed the neighboring Western “allied” countries to emerge as “victorious” and garnering much sympathy for what Hitler did to them, instead of being held accountable for the large atrocities they historically committed. And my other point is to see The Downfall or Den Unterfall, a truly intense recent German film on Hitler’s last days. Remarkable acting by Bruno Ganz. We all to focus on this subject though and widening the comparisons to other atrocities doesn’t diminish what was done but only deepens it I’ve found.