The Nazi race concept was deliberately kept supranational to license internal extermination

Evidence

Whatever else the Nazi state has achieved, it certainly succeeded in overcoming the most formidable of obstacles to systematic, purposeful, non-emotional, cold-blooded murder of people – old and young, men and women: that ‘animal pity by which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering’. We do not know much about the animal pity, but we do know that there is a way of viewing the elementary human condition which makes explicit the universality of human revulsion to murder, inhibition against inflicting suffering on another human being, and the urge to help those who suffer; indeed, of the very personal responsibility for the welfare of the other. If this view is correct, or at least plausible, then the accomplishment of the Nazi regime consisted first and foremost in neutralizing the moral impact of the specifically human existential mode. It is important to know whether this success was related to the unique features of the Nazi movement and rule, or whether it can be accounted for by reference to more common attributes of our society, which the Nazis merely skilfully deployed in the service of Hitler’s purpose. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 520 (#complicates, via linked claim)

The deciding forces in the Jews’ fateful journey to the storm center of events were without doubt political; but the reactions of society to anti-semitism and the psychological reflections of the Jewish question in the individual had something to do with the specific cruelty, the organized and calculated assault upon every single individual of Jewish origin, that was already characteristic of the antisemitism of the Dreyfus Affair. This passion-driven hunt of the “Jew in general,” the “Jew everywhere and nowhere,” cannot be understood if one considers the history of antisemitism as an entity in itself, as a mere political movement. Social factors, unaccounted for in political or economic history, hidden under the surface of events, never perceived by the historian and recorded only by the more penetrating and passionate force of poets or novelists (men whom society had driven into the desperate solitude and loneliness of the apologia pro vita sua) changed the course that mere political antisemitism would have taken if left to itself, and which might have resulted in anti-Jewish legislation and even mass expulsion but hardly in wholesale extermination. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 273 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Scientific antisemitism was layered in façade institutions hiding the extermination authority — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 912; Nazi Germany was actually governed by secret internal party edicts, not public law; The Nazi accomplishment was neutralizing universal moral inhibition against killing — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 520 (+4 more)

Related

• The Nazi state distributed the sovereign power to kill across all citizens (similarity 0.81)
• Antisemitism acted as a catalyst for Nazi rule, world war, and genocide (similarity 0.80)
• The Nazi accomplishment was neutralizing universal moral inhibition against killing (similarity 0.80)
• The Holocaust was rational social management in scientific dress (similarity 0.79)
• Intense Nazi indoctrination failed to override conventional, nonracial loyalties (similarity 0.78)
• Older Nazi officials retained moral qualms the genocidal machine overrode (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• The Nazi state distributed the sovereign power to kill across all citizens #expands (0.78)
• The Nazi accomplishment was neutralizing universal moral inhibition against killing #complicates (0.75) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 520
• Social factors, not just politics, turned antisemitism into extermination #expands (0.75) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 273
• Nazi ideology subordinated the state to the racial folk community #complicates (0.72) — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2780