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The men who created the hellish conditions in the Nazi concentration camps, where a select group of men were placed in the uniquely compromised position of having to fight to save their lives, were individuals of pure evil. These bloodthirsty, power-hungry men forced other men, who had been stripped of their humanity, to engage in life-threatening gladiatorial combat. The most powerful of the evil monsters who conceived, developed, and governed the concentration camp prisoners were Heinrich Himmler, Rudolf Höss, Reinhard Heydrich, and Theodor Eicke. They were a who’s-who of vicious psychopaths.
The first Nazi concentration camp, Dachau, was put into service in 1933 shortly after Hitler took over as Führer (leader) of Germany. Most of the initial prisoners were communists, socialists, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Romanis and Sintis (who are colloqui-ally known as gypsies). By 1934, the category of those imprisoned was extended to include Jews, disabled people, and hardened criminals. The Nazis used color-coded triangles to categorize prisoners: green triangles were for criminals, red triangles for communists, pink triangles for homosexuals, yellow triangles for Jews, black triangles for those who were asocial, purple triangles for Jehovah’s Witnesses, and brown triangles for Romanis and Sintis.
Heinrich Himmler, the sadistic head of the SS, took control of the concentration and extermination camps. Though he had the appearance of a mild-mannered bookkeeper, he was a cold-hearted overseer who took immense satisfaction in perpetuating genocide. He appointed Theodor Eicke, a man governed by an iron commitment to brutality and a stridently expressed need for order and control, to serve as commandant of the first concentration camp, Dachau, then as inspector of all concentration camps. According to the Jewish Virtual Library, those two men and Reinhard Heydrich established fifteen thousand camps in countries under Nazi control. They were a trio committed to the apocalyptic goal of murdering all of the Reich’s enemies.
In addition to being the overseer of the concentrations camps, Himmler created the Einsatzgruppen (paramilitary death squads) whose purpose was to follow German soldiers into conquered Eastern European countries and massacre Jews, Soviet commissars, Slavs, Romanis, intellectuals, and even passive enemies of the Reich. They carried out their grisly work by shooting their victims with a series of shots fired by firing squads or individual officers or by machine gunning them; the victims had first to dig their own graves, either trenches or single plots. By the end of World War II, historians estimate that the Einsatzgruppen had slaughtered more than 2 million Jews, Romanis and Sintis, political prisoners, resistance fighters, communists, Polish intellectuals and priests, and innocent women and children. Though formed by Himmler on orders from Hitler, the Einsatzgruppen received their direct orders from Reinhard Heydrich, who took great pride in the number of people that had been killed. Hitler was so impressed with Heydrich’s cruelty that he commented that Heydrich had a heart of iron.
Himmler also admired Heydrich, who seemed the essence of the strong, pitiless Aryan man who through brutality would control Nazi-dominated Europe. From his boyhood, Himmler had always been fascinated by strong men and Jews; the former he admired, the latter he came to despise (and in some instances to fear). His intense anti-Semitism was fed by the writings of professional anti-Semites who proselytized in books and pamphlets against Jews. One such provocateur was the originator of the term “anti-Semitism.” He was Friedrich Wilhelm Adolph Marr, who wrote an 1879 pamphlet, The Way to Victory of Judaism over Germanism, in which he asserted that Germans and Jews were locked in a historical conflict based on race. He complained that self-defeating liberal ideals had resulted in Jewish emancipation, and as a result Jews controlled German finance and industries. A resolution of the problem could only be attained by the victory of Germans and the death of the Jews. To further promulgate his ideas, he founded the League of Antisemites, which was the first German organization committed to combating the alleged threat that Jews posed to Germany. Short of killing off all the Jews, Marr advocated their forced emigration to other countries. For Himmler, Marr’s writings as well as those of other professional anti-Semites were building blocks that would result in the creation of concentration camps.
At the university, Himmler participated in a fencing club, the League of Apollo, whose president was Jewish. There may be nothing more injurious to an aspiring athlete’s dreams of glory than to be surpassed by the athletic skills of a member of a hated minority. Himmler’s envy and malevolent hatred of a Jew’s skills further fueled his feverish anti-Semitism.
His hatred of Jews even led him to disavow his allegiance to Catholicism. For Himmler, there was nothing as wrong-headed as the Jewish Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. In place of Catholicism, Himmler embraced an exotic German mythology of heroes that included a belief in the occult and in the evil doings of Jews. He was well on his way to being a perfect Nazi ideologue. His need for a superman was fulfilled by the dictatorial leadership of Hitler. Himmler—like millions of others—came to regard Hitler as the embodiment of the ideal of the powerful leader, a person of nearly god-like abilities who would lead the German people to their glorious destiny. Himmler so profoundly believed in the idea of the Aryan superman that he created a criteria based on that idea for those who wanted to join the SS. It was a racial entrance exam that proved one’s Aryan ancestry and established the necessary physical attributes of blue eyes, blond hair, and an athletic physique. Himmler commented that “like a nursery gardener trying to reproduce a good old strain which has been adulterated and debased, we started from the principles of plant selection and then proceeded quite unashamedly to weed out the men whom we did not think we could use for the build-up of the SS.”1
Not only would Himmler not have qualified as an SS superman, neither would have Goebbels, who had a club foot, nor Goring, who was obese. And Hitler, who closely resembled Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp, was not exactly a blond athletic god. Nevertheless, Himmler attempted to generate a new race of supermen, though not from his own genes. Instead, he urged his SS members to marry Aryan women whose ancestry had been thoroughly researched and who would give birth to the new race of supermen. Himmler said that each of the SS men should father at least four children. However, he was sorely disappointed that 40 percent of the SS remained unmarried, and those who did marry had—on average—only one child.
While Himmler tried to turn his puerile myth of Aryan supermen into a reality, he regarded the prisoners of the concentration camps as abhorrent, diseased scum. In a mind such as his, Jews were viewed as carriers of something more dangerous and infectious than the Black Plague. As one would exterminate disease-carrying rats, so one had an obligation to exterminate Jews whose contagious germs should not be permitted to infect and destroy the race of Aryans.
In a speech at Posen in Poland, Himmler spoke not only of the need to exterminate the Jews but also of the need to never speak publicly about it. He explicitly told his SS officers about the Reich’s plan to exterminate Jews so that the officers could not later claim they had been ignorant of the plan. Their complicity would cause them to be circumspect, if not silent. Here is what Himmler said:
I also want to refer here very frankly to a very difficult matter. We can now very openly talk about this among ourselves, and yet we will never discuss this publicly. Just as we did not hesitate on 30 June 1934 [the Night of the Long Knives, when hundreds of SA troops were murdered] to perform our duty as ordered and put comrades who had failed up against the wall and execute them, we also never spoke about it, nor will we ever speak about it. Let us thank God that we had within us enough self-evident fortitude never to discuss it among us, and we never talked about it. I am talking about the “Jewish evacuation”: the extermination of the Jewish people. It is one of those things that is easily said. “The Jewish people is being exterminated,” every Party member will tell you, “perfectly clear, it’s part of our plans, we’re eliminating the Jews, exterminating them, ha!, a small matter” … because we know how difficult it would be for us if we still had Jews as secret saboteurs, agitators and rabble-rousers in every city, what with the bombings, with the burden and with the hardships of the war. If the Jews were still part of the German nation, we would most likely arrive now at the state we were at in 1916 and ’17.2
Himmler not only expected all of the SS to be his loyal and obedient subjects, he also looked for particular individuals who would enthusiastically carry out his policies while remaining as loyal to him as he was to Hitler. One such person was Rudolf Höss, who turned out to be one of Himmler’s most devoted epigones. In fact, he was so ardent in his devotion that he kept a photo of Himmler on his desk rather than one of Hitler. As a reward for his devotion and his hard work carrying out anti-Jewish policies, Höss was appointed commandant of Auschwitz in 1940. This followed his successful role running Dachau.
Beyond the barbed wire of the Auschwitz camp, Höss spent his leisure time in a stately mansion with his wife and five children. No luxury was too good for them. As the bodies of gassed little children were shoveled into ovens from where their incinerated remains went up in smoke, the happy-go-lucky Höss children laughingly played games, enjoyed their toys, and remained ignorant of their condemned neighbors whose only hope was either survival or a quick death. For the Höss family, there was no sense that their world was on a path to Armageddon at the hands of a monomaniacal psychopath.
Höss’s reputation as a brilliant manager of death continued to impress Himmler, Hitler, and others in the Nazi hierarchy, so in June 1941 Höss was summoned to a meeting in Berlin. There Himmler informed him that Hitler wanted him to exterminate all the Jews, but he should not speak about it. It must be kept secret. Back in Auschwitz on September 3, 1941, Höss set about finding the most efficient and rapid manner for disposing of Jewish prisoners. Having learned about Zyklon B from one of his subordinates, Höss began using the deadly chemical. He was pleased at the pace he was able to kill prisoners. He said that it only took three to fifteen minutes for victims to perish, and he knew that they were dead because they had stopped screaming.
Following his capture and interrogation, Höss was hardly the relaxed and smiling SS man frequently pictured in his elegantly tailored uniform. Shortly after being taken prisoner by the British, he was beaten, leaving him with a bloodied face and dressed in a beggar’s uniform of torn and crumpled clothes. He was a man whose pride had been shattered and made feeble, leaving him nothing but his newly adopted religious faith and a look of stark confusion. He was put on trial in Nuremberg on April 5, 1946. He made the following statement as part of his confession.
I commanded Auschwitz until 1 December 1943, and estimate that at least 2,500,000 victims were executed and exterminated there by gassing and burning, and at least another half million succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total of about 3,000,000 dead. This figure represents about 70% or 80% of all persons sent to Auschwitz as prisoners, the remainder having been selected and used for slave labor in the concentration camp industries. Included among the executed and burnt were approximately 20,000 Russian prisoners of war (previously screened out of Prisoner of War cages by the Gestapo) who were delivered at Auschwitz in Wehrmacht transports operated by regular Wehrmacht officers and men. The remainder of the total number of victims included about 100,000 German Jews, and great numbers of citizens (mostly Jewish) from The Netherlands, France, Belgium, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Greece, or other countries. We executed about 400,000 Hungarian Jews alone at Auschwitz in the summer of 1944.3
When he was accused of murdering three and a half million people, Höss replied, “No. Only two and one-half million—the rest died from disease and starvation.”4
Found guilty and sentenced to death, Höss (who had returned to his Catholic faith) wrote,
My conscience compels me to make the following declaration. In the solitude of my prison cell, I have come to the bitter recognition that I have sinned gravely against humanity. As Commandant of Auschwitz, I was responsible for carrying out part of the cruel plans of the “Third Reich” for human destruction. In so doing I have inflicted terrible wounds on humanity… . May the Lord God forgive one day what I have done… . May the facts which are now coming out about the horrible crimes against humanity make the repetition of such cruel acts impossible for all time.5
However, such a confession does not wash away his casual attitude to the death of millions that he expressed at his trial.
At Auschwitz we endeavored to fool the victims into thinking that they were to go through a delousing process. Of course, frequently they realized our true intentions and we sometimes had riots and difficulties due to that fact. Very frequently women would hide their children under their clothes, but of course when we found them we would send the children in to be exterminated. We were required to carry out these exterminations in secrecy but of course the foul and nauseating stench from the continuous burning of bodies permeated the entire area and all of the people living in the surrounding communities knew that exterminations were going on at Auschwitz.6
Höss also noted that it had been easy to exterminate large numbers of prisoners. Two thousand bodies could be disposed on in half an hour. And he didn’t need guards to force the prisoners into the gas chambers because the prisoners thought they were entering showers. Of course, instead of water washing over their bodies, poison entered and filled their lungs, killing them. Höss expressed pride in the success of his technical accomplishments.
Following his trial and subsequent death sentence, he was taken to be hanged. In his crumpled outfit, hands tied behind his back, he shuffled to the gallows; there, he was hoisted onto a stool. Standing before the hooded hangman, he blankly stared ahead, his lips sternly set. The rope was placed over his head, tightly looped around his neck, and the stool that he stood on was kicked out from under hm. He suddenly dropped to his death. The once fiercely sadistic overseer of mass exterminations, his neck broken, dangled from a rope of vengeance and justice.
Though Höss had authority over only one concentration camp, there was another brutal henchman who wielded far greater power. Along with Himmler that man exercised murderous power over millions of prisoners. He was Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich. But unlike Himmler, whose background was modest and unimportant, Heydrich came from a highly cultured and talented family. His father, Richard Bruno Heydrich, was an admired composer and opera singer who founded the Halle Conservatory of Music, Theater, and Teaching. Reinhard’s mother was a popular piano teacher at the conservatory. His family was wealthy and socially prominent.
His parents named him Reinhard after the tragic hero in Richard’s opera Amen, and he was named Tristan in honor of Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde. The name Eugen was bestowed on him in honor of his grandfather, Professor Eugen Krantz, who had been director of the Dresden Royal Conservatory. Coming from such a background, Reinhard naturally developed a strong interest in music and rigorously studied the violin. Discriminating listeners were impressed by his musical talent, and wherever Reinhard went, he carried his violin. He could be heard playing outside concentration camps, in his office, at home. How such a man could become one of the primary architects of the Holocaust has been a question asked by many. But perhaps Hitler had the answer when he said that Reinhard had a heart of iron. He was a man full of inordinate self-regard who prided himself on his erect posture, his invulnerability, his adherence to discipline, and his lack of sympathy for the victims of the Holocaust. Psychologists have classified him as an extreme case of narcissistic sociopathology. In other words, he was a perfect administrator for mass murder.
Robert Gerwath, the author of Hitler’s Hangman, stated that Heydrich was one of the most terrible figures within the Nazi regime, a regime that was notorious for the large number of people who committed or were complicit in war crimes.7
He was also intensely ambitious and rose to numerous positions of authority from which he could put his murderous plans into effect—one of the most far reaching was chief of the Reich Main Security Office which controlled the Gestapo, the Kriminalpolizei (criminal police), and the Sicherheitsdienst (secret police). In addition, he was chief of what would become Interpol, which gave him an international reach against his enemies.
In addition to his police roles, he was assigned to carry out the propaganda aims of the Nazi regime regarding the 1936 Olympics. He made sure that anti-Jewish acts were suppressed before the Olympics and certainly during the games. He did not want the world to see the Nazi regime as brutal and inhumane. After all, Germany was the country that gave the world Goethe and Beethoven, among various other luminaries. For his success in painting a benevolent picture of Nazism, Heydrich was awarded the Olympic Games Decoration. His suppression of anti-Jewish acts was short-lived, however, for two years later he helped organize the pogrom known as Kristallnacht. To make sure that the Reich’s goals were reached, he instructed the attackers to burn Jewish businesses and synagogues and to arrest affluent Jews. Arrested Jews were first beaten then thrown into local prisons. From there, they were sent, like herds of cattle, to slaughterhouses euphemistically called concentration camps. It has been estimated that more than twenty thousand Jews were arrested during Kristallnacht, and the event presaged the savagery of the Holocaust. By the time Germany went to war, Heydrich had organized the Einsatzgruppen, which was to follow the army into conquered lands and shoot all Jews between the ages of fifteen and forty-five. However, Heydrich expanded his order so that Jewish women and children and the elderly would also be murdered. Not satisfied that some Jews would escape execution, he finally decided that all Jews had to be killed. The Einsatzgruppen in their savagery not only shot thousands of Jewish women, they often gang raped them. If a woman was pregnant, she was shot in her belly to make sure that no Jewish infant would survive, grow to adulthood, and procreate.
The meeting at which Heydrich determined that all the Jews in conquered lands had to be exterminated was held at the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942. The conference was held to carry out the Final Solution to the Jewish Question (Endlösung der Judenfrage), as Hitler called it. Heydrich made it clear to the fifteen attending Nazi officials (eight of whom held PhDs) that all Jews would be deported to concentration camps in Poland and there they would be killed. Heydrich prepared and distributed minutes of the conference, thus making all attendees complicit in the Final Solution. By war’s end, Heydrich believed, there wouldn’t be a Jew alive in all of Europe.
This psychopathic man who loved beautiful music and was totally devoted to carrying out the Holocaust was also a lover of sports, a highly competitive athlete who enjoyed tennis, fencing, skiing, and boxing. He was an excellent fencer and a competent tennis player and skier, but he was an awkward boxer as seen in brief film clips made in the 1930s. Yet he loved putting on boxing gloves with one of his young sons and letting the little boy pummel him. Seen with his family, Heydrich appears to be a happy man, untroubled by all the murders he oversaw. His conscience never troubled him because he believed fanatically in the righteousness of his deeds. Or it may have been that Heydrich, the narcissist, did not have a conscience. He was a man who could as casually order mass murders as order dinner in an expensive restaurant. He was a devoted father, a loving husband, and the blood on his hands washed over his entire being like a summer breeze. Not only did he look like a happy family man, he also looked like the perfect Aryan according to Himmler and Hitler. But unlike Hitler, Goebbels, Göring, and Himmler, who were short, dark haired, and unattractive, Heydrich was tall, blond, and blue eyed. In uniform, he looked officious and cold. His tiny porcine eyes seemed to convey his coldness.
Yet there were rumors swirling around Berlin and Munich that could have ignominiously ended Heydrich’s career. What was the nature of those rumors? It was stated in whispers that Heydrich had Jewish ancestors. When the whispers reached the ears of Hitler (who had also endured such rumors) and those of Himmler, they could not believe that such a fine Aryan specimen was diseased with Jewish blood. To show his disregard for the rumors and support of Heydrich, Himmler decided to promote him. He stated to Hitler and the Nazi hierarchy that Heydrich would become an even more zealous instrument for carrying out the extermination of Jews just to prove that he had no Jewish blood.
Heydrich, much to the pleasure of his enemies, came to a bloody end. On May 27, 1942, while riding in his convertible Mercedes-Benz, he was the victim of two assassins who had been trained in England for just such a mission. The mission was code named Operation Anthropoid. The assassins had been trained by the British and sent by the Czechoslovak government-in-exile to kill the man they referred to as the Butcher of Prague. Heydrich had previously killed numerous Czech partisans and other enemies of the Reich. And hatred of him in Prague was epidemic. The assassins were armed with a gun, which jammed at the time of their attack, but they had several hand-grenades, which they flung with the accuracy of major league baseball pitchers. A single grenade landed against one rear wheel of Heydrich’s car. When it exploded it sent shrapnel into Heydrich’s body, damaging his spleen, diaphragm, and one lung. He suffered from the pain of metal particles splintering numerous organs, especially his spleen and liver. Heydrich was rushed to a hospital, and upon hearing the news, Hitler dispatched his personal physician to care for the wounded man. A doctor wanted to give Heydrich medicine to prevent the onset of a blood infection, but his suggestion was vetoed by Hitler’s doctor. An infection set in, and a week after the attack Heydrich went into a coma and died. Czech partisans cheered, but their good cheer turned to solemn anguish: Hitler ordered that two Czech villages (Lidice and Lezaky) suspected of hiding the two assassins be destroyed, their men and boys shot, and their women sent to concentration camps. So incensed was Himmler by the assassination of Heydrich, now raised to the status of a martyr, that he created Operation Reinhard to accelerate the extermination of Jews. He ordered that three extermination camps be constructed. They were Sobibor, Belzec, and Treblinka.
Another key figure in the lineup of criminals who developed the concentration camps and pursued the goal of complete extermination of a race was Theodore Eiche. Having been put in charge of Dachau, he ambitiously made it a prototype for all other Nazi concentration camps, and as commander of the SS Division Totenkopf of the Waffen–SS, he continued to expand the number of concentration camps in conquered lands. Eiche not only enjoyed overseeing the torture and terror he inflicted on prisoners, he also enjoyed killing prominent enemies of the Reich such as Ernst Rohm, Nazi head of the SA (Sturmabteilung, or Storm Detachment, an original Nazi paramilitary organization), and Gregor Strasser, an important Nazi organizer. Excessively proud, arrogant, and cruel, Eiche believed that only an important Nazi, such as himself, should be permitted to kill other important personages. A famous man should be killed by another famous man, he said. A common soldier should not be permitted to kill a general or a political leader, for example.
Like many early devotees of Nazism, Eiche had a history of failure in all that he had attempted. (Hitler was a failed painter; Goebbels was a failed novelist.) He dropped out of school, was fired from jobs in several police departments, was hired by the German firm BASF but fired after being found guilty in an attempted bombing plot, and was sent to prison but escaped to Italy. Upon his return to Germany he participated in additional criminal activities and was arrested, then sent to prison where he went on a hunger strike. He was then placed in the Psychiatric Clinic of Wurzburg. His friend and admirer Heinrich Himmler ordered Eiche’s release. Himmler then appointed Eiche commandant of Dachau, informing him that he could redeem himself in that position and impress the Nazi hierarchy with his management skills and liberal use of punishment.
At Dachau, Eicke brought organization to what had been a chaotically run institution. While punishments had often been meted out impetuously, Eicke set up rules and a list of specific offenses that resulted in varied punishments ranging from beating to execution. While prisoners had been dressed in the deteriorating clothes in which they had arrived, they now found themselves wearing the notorious blue-and-white-striped pajamas that further diminished their individuality. The guards were put in different uniforms, each of which had death’s head insignias on the collars. Eiche trained not only the guards at Dachau but also the guards who would be assigned to camps that Eicke subsequently developed. In addition to teaching guards when and how to use punishment, especially torture and murder, he taught them how to keep the work of the camps secret from surrounding communities. Eiche’s work at Dachau proved successful. Himmler thus considered Eicke redeemed and reported the successful results to Hitler. In 1934, Himmler put Eicke in charge of all concentration camps in Germany. Eicke organized each camp based on what he had accomplished at Dachau. He was promoted to inspector of the concentration camps (Inspekteur der Konzentrationslager und SS–Wachverbande) and a week later he was promoted to a group leadership position in the SS (SS–Gruppenführer). In 1942 he was promoted again, this time to senior group leader (Obergruppenführer). In addition to rebuilding Dachau, he established the camps of Buchenwald, Ravensbruch, Mauthausen, and Sachsenhauser. For the new camps, Eicke trained and instructed the commandants: Rudolf Höss of Auschwitz; Paul Werner Hoppe of Stutthof and Wobbelin; Josef Kramer of Natzweiler-Struthof and Bergen-Belsen; Richard Baer of Mittelbau-Dora; and Martin Gottfried Weiss of Neuengamme and Lublin-Majdanek. Each of these commandants used torture and murder as their weapons of terror. Eicke instructed them that tolerance was a sign of weakness and should be avoided at all costs. In addition to training SS guards in the techniques of terror, he also instilled in them Nazi racial ideology, which—of course—meant a murderous hatred of all non-Aryans.
Eiche was deeply ambitious and wanted an even larger role than overseeing concentration camps. He had a new opportunity to prove himself when Germany invaded Russia on June 22, 1941. The invasion was code named Operation Barbarossa after Frederick I, the twelfth-century Holy Roman Emperor and Warrior King. Shortly before the invasion began, Hitler signed an order stating that all Soviet commissars should be shot immediately following their capture. Into the bloody maelstrom, Eicke, eager to carry out Hitler’s order, led a division of the SS that murdered thousands of Red Army commissars. While enthusiastically committing murder, Eicke was wounded when he stepped on a mine. It was a minor wound, yet he returned to Germany for treatment. Having quickly recovered, he was back in Russia committing more murders. So bloodthirsty and rapacious was his division that it developed an infamous reputation not only for raping and pillaging but also for killing enemy soldiers who had surrendered and every Jewish woman and child they could find. Many of the Jewish women were gang raped before they were shot. After the war, estimates of the number of Soviet troops killed were put at more than 3 million. Of murdered Soviet Jews, the number exceeded 1 million.
For Eicke, the invasion of Russia was an adventure in mass murder. On the ground, he could see the corpses piling up, but in the air, he could get a god-like view of the immense devastation he had caused. On February 26, 1943, he took off in a Fiesler Fi 156 Storch on an inspection mission. The ground below was carpeted with death, destruction, and debris. However, Eicke failed to see the Soviet anti-aircraft battery that fired on his plane. The plane went into a dive, crashed, and burst into flames. Eicke’s corpse was pulled from the burning wreckage, and he was soon given an elaborate hero’s funeral at one of the cemeteries of his division near Orelka. Following the Nazi retreat, the Soviets bulldozed the cemetery, and Eicke’s remains were never found. He was fortunate to have died in combat for had he lived, he would have been tried before a war crimes tribunal and sentenced to death.
These were the four men who created circles of hell on earth where desperate men were ordered to fight one another for the entertainment of guards who spent hours every day murdering those deemed to be subhumans.