Nazi administrators could endorse Jewish extermination while opposing methods they found uncultured

Evidence

There is, for instance, the curious intervention of Welhelm Kube, General Commissar in Minsk and one of the oldest members of the Party, who in 1941, i.e., at the beginning of the mass murder, wrote to his chief: “I certainly am tough and willing to co-operate in the solution of the Jewish question, but people who have been brought up in our own culture are, after all, different from the local bestial hordes. Are we to assign the task of slaughtering them to the Lithuanians and Letts who are discriminated against even by the indigenous population? I could not do it. I ask you to give me clear-cut instructions to take care of the matter in the most humane way for the sake of the prestige of our Reich and our Party.” This letter is published in Max Weinreich, Hitler’s Professors, New York, 1946, pp. 153–154. Kube’s intervention was quickly overruled, yet an almost identical attempt to save the lives of Danish Jews, made by W. Best, the Reich’s plenipotentiary in Denmark, and a well-known Nazi, was more successful. See Nazi Conspiracy, V, 2. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2594

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The Kube letter evidences Arendt’s core scaffolding point: a worldview separating ‘our culture’ from the ‘bestial hordes’ lets perpetrators object to the method of slaughter while fully endorsing the goal — ideology reframes murder as a technical question of prestige and manners, not a moral one.
• XREF: connects to: Nazi guards could sincerely punish victims for conditions the guards themselves created — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 363