And people are dying by the millions.
That really began only in 1941, and
we can precisely date that this is the moment when mass killing of Jews began.
In the course of the 1930s a large number of Jews died,
but we are still talking about maybe a few thousand or hundred, few hundred.
It's very difficult to come up with numbers.
Now from 1939 to 1941, the Polish ghettos,
the ghettos in Poland, had among other purposes,
killing people, killing people inadvertently, so to speak.
Not feeding them properly, exposing them in circumstances,
but the Nazis knew that many of them would die, but this is one thing.
And this is all together different when you actually
begin to shoot people, shoot people by the thousands.
Now the Nazi undertaking.
It seems to me that the Nazi undertaking was not merely from the point
of view of humanity is something all together revolting, and
I'm sure that there is nobody here who would not agree with me.
But also, and this is, I like to emphasize, this was lunatic.
It was crazy, I mean the business was crazy.
The Nazis started the war with their magnificent army,
which was capable of doing blitzkrieg.
That is, well disciplined, well led armies move very quickly.
But that will last only for a few months.
The Nazis were not prepared for the war, which they actually fought.
The Nazis were not prepared for the war because they didn't have normal war aims.
One cannot imagine the Nazis winning the war because what would this have meant?
I mean, where are they going to stop?
Not only where are they going to stop,
but also they were not prepared for the war.
They were not prepared for the war,
which they should have foreseen that they would have to fight,
but the lunacy is that they were influenced by their own worldview.
What I mean by their own worldview is that Jews and Bolsheviks are the same.
The Bolshevik regime is bound to collapse,
just by, have to, just to give them a little push.
Well, this did not happen, because the Jews and
the Bolsheviks were not the same.
That is, your ideology makes it impossible for
you to look at the world as is, and
the examples of lunacy are all over, I mean really.
All right, you have this worldview according to which races differ and
the strong owes nothing to the weak, and
it is indeed the strong should eliminate the weak and what have you.
I think that Michael Thaler's lecture, his talk,
was really very important for us, for
our understanding of what we are talking here.
Namely his stress that we must put
the Holocaust Nazi Jewish policies
into the larger context of race,
of Nazi understanding of race.
But even if you accept the Nazi mentality of eugenics,
picking on the Jews from their own point of view was a bad idea.
I mean to activate, to bring about what they wanted to,
namely the glory of the German race and expansion of the German Lebensraum.
The way you go about it is not to kill a very valuable
part of your population who was completely unable,
incapable of doing any damage to whatever German aims were.