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Newspapers report that a key feature of American Nazi public assemblies is the repeated threat to complete the destruction of the Jews. One of the extralegal features little considered in governmental decisions on Nazi demonstrations, like the aborted march in Skokie, is their importance in moulding the definition of the Jew and his place in American society.
What follows is a Nuremberg Military Tribunal selection from the interrogation of S. S. Col. Paul Blobel, a leading assassin of Jews, who was sentenced to hanging.
Q. Do you wish to say that they (i.e., Jewish victims) soon reconciled themselves to what awaited them?
A. That is how it was. For them it was as if human life had no value. Those people either had had some experience of their own or did not recognize their own inner values.
Q. In other words, they went to their deaths joyfully?
A. I would not say “joyfully.” They knew what awaited them. They had been told. They reconciled themselves to their fate. That is the peculiar character of those people in the east. I would say that the nerves of men who took part were torn to pieces. They were more depressed than those who had been condemned to be shot.
Such notions were an important factor enabling the Nazis to engage in mass killings. Implied in Blobel's rejoinder is that the Jews are resignedly fulfilling what they know to be their necrophilic destiny. For this purpose Jews are virtually exploiting the life-embracing Nazi who, despite his sensibilities, is a selfless and devoted tool of historical forces as well as of the self-cleansing state. Jews are marked off from other people by a complete lack of assertive striving after life. Hitler remarked on his destruction of Jews: “One must not have mercy with people who are determined by fate to perish.” Hilberg relates that Himmler told the personnel of the mobile killing units at Minsk that combat was everywhere in nature. “Whoever tired of the fight went under.” The Nazi volunteers were to take the role of uncou