Nazi extermination programs were justified ideologically, not by economic or military utility

Evidence

The testimony of Karl Brandt, one of the physicians charged by Hitler with carrying out the program of euthanasia, is characteristic in this context (Medical Trial. US against Karl Brandt et al. Hearing of May 14, 1947). Brandt vehemently protested against the suspicion that the project was initiated to eliminate superfluous food consumers; he emphasized that party members who brought up such arguments in the discussion had always been sharply rebuked. In his opinion, the measures were dictated solely by “ethical considerations.” The same is, of course, true for the deportations. The files are filled with desperate memoranda written by the military complaining that the deportations of millions of Jews and Poles completely disregarded all “military and economic necessities.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2613

Categorization

• QUESTION: Arendt’s point — that ideology overrode even military self-interest — is a striking inversion of functionalist-materialist explanations of the Holocaust worth chasing in the Islamophobia readings.
• XREF: Connects to Arendt’s broader ‘banality/ideological logic’ thesis and to biopolitics frameworks (Foucault) used in later Islamophobia scholarship.