What Nazism Meant

In his book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer shows what Nazism meant to conquered lands: plunder, exploitation​—and worse. Among other things, Shirer stated: “The Jews and the Slavic peoples were the Untermenschen​—subhumans. To Hitler they had no right to live, except as some of them, among the Slavs, might be needed to toil in the fields and the mines as slaves . . . The culture of the Russians and Poles and other Slavs was to be stamped out and formal education denied them.”

After mentioning the enormous material plunder the Nazis took from occupied lands, Shirer commented that “it was [for] the plunder not of material goods but of human lives” that the mercifully short-lived Nazi regime would be longest remembered. He said: “Here Nazi degradation sank to a level seldom experienced by man in all his time on earth. Millions of decent, innocent men and women were driven into forced labor, millions more tortured and tormented in the concentration camps and millions more still . . . were massacred in cold blood or deliberately starved to death.” Shirer concludes: “This incredible story of horror would be unbelievable were it not fully documented and testified to by the perpetrators themselves.” Of course, the victims, too, have fully documented and testified to the horrors.

Accurately the Bible says of human rule: “Man has dominated man to his injury.” Also: “It does not belong to man who is walking even to direct his step. Correct me, O Jehovah.” Thus the Bible counsels: “Do not put your trust in nobles, nor in the son of earthling man, to whom no salvation belongs.”​—Ecclesiastes 8:9; Jeremiah 10:23, 24; Psalm 146:3.