"a Nazi's work is never done"

I know, I know, the phrase is usually "a woman's work is never done".

It refers to the repetitious nature of traditional women's work done in the home .

Woman know well its endless cycle of cleaning house, shopping, cooking, cleaning up dishes, washing clothes, washing children and ironing hubbie's clothes ---- on and on.

And then start it all over again the next day ---- and for all the days, weeks, months, years and decades after that.

Futile --- like trying to sweep back the ocean.

But the Nazi men self-selected for themselves the sort of work normally reserved for women in a very real sense when they took on the task of keeping both 'the home' of Germans and the German Volk 'family' 100% pure and 100% clean --- free from any sort of human 'germs'.

And it would have been a task that would never ever have stopped, even if Nazis had won the war and they had killed off all the world's Jews.

A new bogeyman would have been invented, to blame, to fear and to seek out and kill.

Meanwhile even if the Aktion T4 had killed all the defectives and even if the concentration camp system had killed off the 'politicals' and the 'asocials', each new generation would just breed some more, to be once again hunted down and killed.

And smelling out all the mixed babies created by illicit sex in dark corners, between Germans and forbidden races and ethnicities - between dark haired pure Germans and impure blonde Poles - oh don't get me started on that one says Himmler.

As G&S once sang, a compulsive obsessive mass murderer's lot is not a happy one.....

Eugenics' biggest failure

By the start of WWII, the Nazis, guided by the best eugenic advice in the world, had unerringly separated the great Germanic civilizations into the wheat and the chaff ---- and by then either forced the chaff into exile or had had them murdered.

And in the seventy five years since, what have these former great civilizations ever produced - besides the cuckoo clock ?

The human ability to accurately predict winners and determine the universally and eternally 'right' answers is very limited.

Be the predictors being yesterday's Himmler or today's hot new geneticist.

For untutored geniuses emerging from the ranks of oppressed minorities are pretty much as common as universities having to baby sit the untalented offspring of first rate geniuses.

What the Nazis had actually exiled or murdered were all the various sorts of Germans who had shown a willingness to stir up the pot, for good or bad.

What was left behind was not just that pot - it was also seventy five million people as inert as that pot.

Luckily their postwar children and grandchildren are all over the map - smart, dumb and everything in between .

Life can resume in the new Germany with the full breath of humanity's wide diversity of beings  and so we might once again see world culture and science enriched by contributions from the Germanic lands ...

Still gassing right up to the end : Ravensbruck

Since the Russians were hard into eastern Poland by the end of 1944, it has always seemed believable to most people that Himmler himself ordering the gas chambers to stop working as of November 1944 and for the SS to destroy all evidence of their existence.

No evidence of this 'order' has ever come to light, but clearly with the Russian front lines only a few dozen kilometres away, the local camp commanders and SS staff knew they had to stop, quickly destroy all the chambers (and the remaining prisoners) and then move back West pronto.

But forgotten in all this was the fact that there were still many many concentration (cum work cum elimination) camps still in Germany itself.

(Because only a handful camps were entirely about the quick elimination of as many Jews as possible - most freely mixed their activities up).

Ravensbruck was Hitler's only all women concentration camp ,home to women from two dozen nations and where at least 50,000 died.

(Lots of children and babies died there too - usually by being quickly deliberately murdered rather than by being worked to death like their mothers.)

Most women died by overwork and underfeeding -  but many also by executions for any small or imaginary infraction ---- or in ghastly medical experiments.

And after November 1944, death came in a new form - via a brand new gas chamber.

It ran on and on and on until just before the camp was overrun near the very end of the war.

For some reason, any mention of Ravensbruck and its gas chamber (maybe due to its extremely late start up date, who knows?) brings the Holocaust deniers out of the woodwork, as any Google search on the two words will reveal.

But the story of Ravensbruck is real and it needs to be much better known : and I think Sarah Helm has done it, in her book "If this were a Woman".....

Synthetic Horses

We have not traditionally regarded 'horsepower' that has been provided by steam, gasoline or electrical motors rather than by actual horses as coming from objects that are man-made, artificial and synthetic.

This is unfortunate because it reduces our ability to understand the causes for WWII's atrocities.

We are all well aware that humanity in the Age of Progress had an unstoppable mania for replacing as much of inanimate Nature as possible with synthetic man-made equivalents ---with artificial food and artificial leather being among the many low points in the process.

But none of this synthetic autarky in inanimate objects can be said to lay a very direct trail to the WWII horrors of Aktion T4, the Hunger Plan or the Holocaust (with their planned killing of tens of millions of 'useless mouths') over on the bad guys' side of the Atlantic.

Or to the post-war planned killings of tens of millions of work horses for horsemeat, over here on the good guys' side of the Atlantic.

That is because if newlyweds ever decide to replace expensive imperfect natural diamonds with cheap perfect synthetic diamonds, natural diamonds will merely become "useless" but not "useless mouths".

They will now be be useless to humanity but they won't cost tightfisted humanity a dime if left lying there in the ground forever more.

Disposing of living ex-machines

Not so with formerly very valuable animal and human slaves gradually rendered useless and worthless in the Age of the Machine.

For short periods of time, humans and work horses can exhibit amazingly good pulling powers but for sustained work a good quality work horse can only provide 1 horsepower of work output and a healthy adult only about .1 of a horsepower.

It is true that mechanical pulling engines need fuel just as humans and animals need food, but mechanical engines can work full out for 24 hours, 365 days a week.

In practise, horses and humans eventually work at less than full sustained capacity, if not given sufficient hours of rest daily and days off weekly to rest up.

So over a week of 168 hours, an unceasing two horsepower engine (a very small engine even in 1800) could replace a team of maybe ten horses, each working as well as the mechanical engine for bursts of time and feed just as cheaply, but only able to work full out for about 35 hours a week.

Discarded as a consequence to save money and increase profits, these ex-machines still had to be feed and cared for.

At least as long as upper class humanity still retained vestiges of old fashioned charitable concerns towards the smaller, older, slower weaker beings among them.

Now cue --- not Charles Darwin, or even his 1859 theory ---but rather the popular elite response to his theory.

As if well known, Darwin developed his theory well before 1859 but planned not to release it until he felt elite opinion would accept it.

1859 was not that time he felt - he was probably right - but Wallace's plans to release his very similar version of the same theory forced Darwin's hand.

I am tempted to say that any time in the 1870s was the right time for Darwin's theory to win elite approval but I may be 110% wrong.

Instead it just could be that the 1870s were the epoch changing decade that they became only because of the impact that Darwin's earlier theory had had upon elite humanity.

For its talk of an universal and eternal battle for survival providing elites the intellectual justification for some long sought after changes settling the post-slavery fates of once valuable animate man and beast, replaced by mechanical machines.

The poor were no longer to be 'always with us' but rather, as losers in the evolutionary race, to be assisted off the coil of life with a 'gentle kindly tug at their ankles'.

(To describe a way of thinking that Moscow Show Trial defender George Bernard Shaw made infamous.)

Just as it was long believed that the decline and disappearance of Canada's natives was evolutionary inevitable, so it couldn't possibly be morally wrong to kindly haste Nature's cruel ways with a little man-made starvation and terrible housing.

Synthetic autarky - the belief that 'fit humanity' didn't need imperfect inanimate nature ultimately extended to not needing imperfect animate humanity either.

For Darwin's cousin Galton had quickly picked up Darwin's ball and invented Eugenics.

And it was his negative eugenics that made it possible for ordinarily decent people, during WWII, to solve the longstanding 'problem' of disposing of 'useless' living, breathing, eating machines once they had been replaced by new synthetic models, without losing any sleep.

'Evolution really did all the killing, not us', said Germany's population, in justification after the fact ...