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GERMAN OBEDIENCE
Written by Alexander Kimel - Holocaust Survivor.
Hitler was a power addict with a Messianic fervor. After gaining power Hitler established a pyramidal Power Structure, the population was divided into many layers, with each layer required to show total blind obedience to their superiors, in exchange for privileges and power over the underlings. Terror - Obedience - Privileges, were the stick and carrot of the power structure. Blind obedience was enforced with terror; compliance paid with privileges. At the top of the Pyramid stood the Fuhrer, under him directly the top clique of the Nazis; Goering, Goebbels, Himmler, etc. Below them the Reich's Ministers, the Top SS leadership, etc., then came the functionaries of the Nazi Party, the governmental officials, the German People, and below the conquered Western Nations like Frenchmen, Danes, Norwegians, and below the Slavic people considered by Hitler as Sub- humans, and at the bottom were the Jews.
In a democratic society the power of the politicians is limited by the division of power and the rights of the ruled protected by the judiciary process. In a totalitarian regime the rights and freedom of the people are removed, and a tremendous pool of power created, to be exercised by the Fuhrer and the variety of sub-Fuhrers who exercises power in his name. The power is like an aphrodisiac, the more you have the more you need it. Power hungry individuals gravitated toward the Nazi regime.
In a democratic society there exists a check and balance system, based on the division of the government into legislative, executive and judiciary branches and in addition the power is diffuse to different levels of governments, federal, state and local. In Nazi Germany, the power system was set up to concentrate all the power in the hand of the Fuhrer. Various branches of police, party and government institution were checking and counterbalancing each other to assure that the will of the Fuhrer is implemented without deviation.
The Nazis Revolution was based on the theories of Social Darwinism developed by a mediocre, third grade philosopher - Chamberlain, who took Darwin's theory of the development of the species and adopted it to human societies. The basic difference between the behavior of animals and human lies in the fact that animals are guided by instinct in satisfying their need for food and procreation. Animals follow instincts to secure the survival of the individual as well as the survival of the species. The humans do have a graduated scale of needs, the basic need for security of life, food and shelter and higher needs connected with the ego satisfaction.
Man is guided with conscience, empathy, feeling of belonging, and a whole range of feelings that control his behavior. The role of religion is to adjust the behavior of people to make it humane to differentiate from the behavior of the animals. It is the role of religion to teach man social responsibility, to limit the level of violence, to protect the proverbial "orphans and widows", to provide the basis for law and order.
Marxism assumed that people are basically consumers, and satisfaction of their material needs, is the only thing they need for happiness. There is no place and need for idealism and spiritual life. But man does not live on bread alone and the outcomes of those misguided assumptions were proven disastrous. Nazism assumed that the lives of the people are governed by the laws of natural selection, like the animal world. The strongest, the more brutal people survive. Strength was equated with violence and brutality. Spiritual and intellectual needs of human nature were denied completely. Nazism assumed that people behaved like animals and in consequence treated people like animals, denying them individualism, ability to make they own decisions on matters pertaining to their own life.
Social Darwinism was adapted to the human society by treating men like breeding animals. The theory called the blond, blue eyed humans a superior race, so the Germans were induced to breed along those lines. Himmler established breeding farms where German girls were impregnated by the blue eyed, blond SS men, to give birth to a child for the Fuhrer. In the animal world the sick and handicapped animal is unable to feed and is killed by the predators, the Nazi established an euthanasia program under which about 500,000 German handicapped, and cripples were gassed or starved to death.
kimel@systec.com
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