| Chapter Intro: | Introduction |
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by genocidal images of mass human slaughter, inhumane massacre, unspeakable atrocities and the profound despair that arises from utter senselessness. The Second World War, however, was not simply a repeat of the First World War in terms of its devastating effects, its atrocities, massacres and widespread carnage. The Nazi era manifested a completely different reality, an unprecedented phenomenon with new and unfamiliar cultural implications. The carnage was not ‘senseless’, for it was highly rationalised and systematized; bloodshed was motivated by fierce ideological convictions. Many of these ideologies were nourished and inspired by the ideas of Nietzsche concerning the imposition of a ‘super regime’, able to rise above the restrictive morality of ordinary men.
While it is impossible to create a clear division between categories of right and wrong, evil and good, throughout the career of the Third Reich, the ambiguities and perceptions of equal guilt and equal reprehensibility that overshadowed the previous world war were largely absent from the second. Highly masterminded and systematised evil forces were responsible for the bloodshed which took place, for in full operation was a rationalised, strategic regime which meticulously orchestrated, calculated and supervised a systematic process of ethnic cleansing. The rationale of the concentration camp universe indicates not merely the decline and dissolution of reason in the face of absolute evil, but something other than this, something much deeper. This war was to do with ‘presence’ rather than ‘absence’. It was a war of extreme, conceived purpose involving the presence of a new collective political force and new methods: ‘lebensraum’, autarky, world domination. As Hannah Arendt states in The Origins of Totalitarianism: