How Hitler killed the Devil

Apr 14, 2021 by

by Tom Holland, UnHerd:

In a world without God, the Führer is the ultimate benchmark of morality.

There is nothing either good or bad, the Nazis liked to insist, but thinking makes it so. Eichmann, interviewed in Argentina shortly before his abduction by Mossad agents, scorned the notion that there was anything evil about his role in the Holocaust. Far from repenting the deaths of six million Jews, he expressed regret that so many had survived the genocide. Just as it was the responsibility of a doctor to combat viruses, or a pest-control agent to eliminate vermin, so was it the responsibility of a good Nazi to defend the fellow members of his race from its most noxious and pestilential foes. To steel oneself for one’s duty, to suppress enfeebling notions of humanity, to keep always before one’s mind loyalty to blood: this, quite simply, was the right thing to do. What, then, was there for Eichmann to repent? “I cannot pretend,” he declared, “that a Saul has become a Paul.”

And even if Eichmann had pretended, what then? It would have made no difference. Once a Jew, always a Jew. Saul, by becoming Paul, had merely transmuted all that was most baneful about the Jewish conspiracy against the Nordic race into a more infectious, and therefore more lethal, form. Hitler, who traced the glories of ancient Greece and Rome to Völkerwanderung from the northern reaches of Europe, also attributed the downfall of classic civilisation to the virus introduced by Paul into the bloodstream of the Roman Empire. Its devastating effects had been evident ever since. Lethal variants had evolved. In January 1942, even as war was raging in the snows of Russia, Hitler placed Operation Barbarossa in the context of 2,000 years of history:

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