Carville: Wake up Democrats; you could lose

[Aaron MkII]

They handed out speed?

Its a wonder they lasted as long as they did.

[Akhlut]

Yeah. Pills before every assault, on watch and of course just when you felt like it....and to add to that the German war machine singlehandedly saving the french wine market...heck with 2 liters a day of wine I'd probably be too blazed to consider anything as well.

Two liters of wine a day? On top of speed whenever they felt like it?

Jesus, I think there are white supremacist biker gangs that show more restraint.

That probably does make it a shitload easier to throw people on cattle trains and throw them into gas chambers, though.

[Thanas]

They handed out speed?

Yeah, Hitler considered it quite important for the soldiers and received daily injections of it himself.

From Spiegel online:

Hitler's Drugged Soldiers

The Nazis preached abstinence in the name of promoting national health. But when it came to fighting their Blitzkrieg, they had no qualms about pumping their soldiers full of drugs and alcohol. Speed was the drug of choice, but many others became addicted to morphine and alcohol.

In a letter dated November 9, 1939, to his "dear parents and siblings" back home in Cologne, a young soldier stationed in occupied Poland wrote: "It's tough out here, and I hope you'll understand if I'm only able to write to you once every two to four days soon. Today I'm writing you mainly to ask for some Pervitin ...; Love, Hein."

Pervitin, a stimulant commonly known as speed today, was the German army's -- the Wehrmacht's -- wonder drug.

On May 20, 1940, the 22-year-old soldier wrote to his family again: "Perhaps you could get me some more Pervitin so that I can have a backup supply?" And, in a letter sent from Bromberg on July 19, 1940, he wrote: "If at all possible, please send me some more Pervitin." The man who wrote these letters became a famous writer later in life. He was Heinrich Boell, and in 1972 he was the first German to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in the post-war period.

Many of the Wehrmacht's soldiers were high on Pervitin when they went into battle, especially against Poland and France -- in a Blitzkrieg fueled by speed. The German military was supplied with millions of methamphetamine tablets during the first half of 1940. The drugs were part of a plan to help pilots, sailors and infantry troops become capable of superhuman performance. The military leadership liberally dispensed such stimulants, but also alcohol and opiates, as long as it believed drugging and intoxicating troops could help it achieve victory over the Allies. But the Nazis were less than diligent in monitoring side-effects like drug addiction and a decline in moral standards.

After it was first introduced into the market in 1938, Pervitin, a methamphetamine drug newly developed by the Berlin-based Temmler pharmaceutical company, quickly became a top seller among the German civilian population. According to a report in the Klinische Wochenschrift ("Clinical Weekly"), the supposed wonder drug was brought to the attention of Otto Ranke, a military doctor and director of the Institute for General and Defense Physiology at Berlin's Academy of Military Medicine. The effects of amphetamines are similar to those of the adrenaline produced by the body, triggering a heightened state of alert. In most people, the substance increases self-confidence, concentration and the willingness to take risks, while at the same time reducing sensitivity to pain, hunger and thirst, as well as reducing the need for sleep. In September 1939, Ranke tested the drug on 90 university students, and concluded that Pervitin could help the Wehrmacht win the war. At first Pervitin was tested on military drivers who participated in the invasion of Poland. Then, according to criminologist Wolf Kemper, it was "unscrupulously distributed to troops fighting at the front."

During the short period between April and July of 1940, more than 35 million tablets of Pervitin and Isophan (a slightly modified version produced by the Knoll pharmaceutical company) were shipped to the German army and air force. Some of the tablets, each containing three milligrams of active substance, were sent to the Wehrmacht's medical divisions under the code name OBM, and then distributed directly to the troops. A rush order could even be placed by telephone if a shipment was urgently needed. The packages were labeled "Stimulant," and the instructions recommended a dose of one to two tablets "only as needed, to maintain sleeplessness."

Even then, doctors were concerned about the fact that the regeneration phase after taking the drug was becoming increasingly long, and that the effect was gradually decreasing among frequent users. In isolated cases, users experienced health problems like excessive perspiration and circulatory disorders, and there were even a few deaths. Leonardo Conti, the German Reich's minister of health and an adherent of Adolf Hitler's belief in asceticism, attempted to restrict the use of the pill, but was only moderately successful, at least when it came to the Wehrmacht. Although Pervitin was classified as a restricted substance on July 1, 1941, under the Opium Law, ten million tablets were shipped to troops that same year.

Pervitin was generally viewed as a proven drug to be used when soldiers were likely to be subjected to extreme stress. A memorandum for navy medical officers stated the following: "Every medical officer must be aware that Pervitin is a highly differentiated and powerful stimulant, a tool that enables him, at any time, to actively and effectively help certain individuals within his range of influence achieve above-average performance."

The effects were seductive. In January 1942, a group of 500 German soldiers stationed on the eastern front and surrounded by the Red Army were attempting to escape. The temperature was minus 30 degrees Celsius. A military doctor assigned to the unit wrote in his report that at around midnight, six hours into their escape through snow that was waist-deep in places, "more and more soldiers were so exhausted that they were beginning to simply lie down in the snow." The group's commanding officers decided to give Pervitin to their troops. "After half an hour," the doctor wrote, "the men began spontaneously reporting that they felt better. They began marching in orderly fashion again, their spirits improved, and they became more alert."

It took almost six months for the report to reach the military's senior medical command. But its response was merely to issue new guidelines and instructions for using Pervitin, including information about risks that barely differed from earlier instructions. The "Guidelines for Detecting and Combating Fatigue," issued June 18, 1942, were the same as they had always been: "Two tablets taken once eliminate the need to sleep for three to eight hours, and two doses of two tablets each are normally effective for 24 hours."

Toward the end of the war, the Nazis were even working on a miracle pill for their troops. In the northern German seaport of Kiel, on March 16, 1944, then Vice-Admiral Hellmuth Heye, who later became a member of parliament with the conservative Christian Democratic party and head of the German parliament's defense committee, requested a drug "that can keep soldiers ready for battle when they are asked to continue fighting beyond a period considered normal, while at the same time boosting their self-esteem."

A short time later, Kiel pharmacologist Gerhard Orzechowski presented Heye with a pill code-named D-IX. It contained five milligrams of cocaine, three milligrams of Pervitin and five milligrams of Eukodal (a morphine-based painkiller). Nowadays, a drug dealer caught with this potent a drug would be sent to prison. At the time, however, the drug was tested on crew members working on the navy's smallest submarines, known as the "Seal" and the "Beaver."

Alcohol, the people's drug, was also popular in the Wehrmacht. Referring to alcohol, Walter Kittel, a general in the medical corps, wrote that "only a fanatic would refuse to give a soldier something that can help him relax and enjoy life after he has faced the horrors of battle, or would reprimand him for enjoying a friendly drink or two with his comrades." Officers would distribute alcohol to their troops as a reward, and schnapps was routinely sold in military commissaries, a policy that also had the happy side effect of returning soldiers' pay to the military.

"The military command turned a blind eye to alcohol consumption, as long as it didn't lead to public drunkenness among the troops," says Freiburg historian Peter Steinkamp, an expert on drug abuse in the Wehrmacht.

But in July 1940, after France was defeated, Hitler issued the following order: "I expect that members of the Wehrmacht who allow themselves to be tempted to engage in criminal acts as a result of alcohol abuse will be severely punished." Serious offenders could even expect "a humiliating death."

But the temptations of liquor were apparently more powerful that the Fuehrer's threats. Only a year later, the commander-in-chief of the German military, General Walther von Brauchitsch, concluded that his troops were committing "the most serious infractions" of morality and discipline, and that the culprit was "alcohol abuse." Among the adverse effects of alcohol abuse he cited were fights, accidents, mistreatment of subordinates, violence against superior officers and "crimes involving unnatural sexual acts." The general believed that alcohol was jeopardizing "discipline within the military."

According to an internal statistic compiled by the chief of the medical corps, 705 military deaths between September 1939 and April 1944 could be linked directly to alcohol. The unofficial figure was probably much higher, because traffic accidents, accidents involving weapons and suicides were frequently caused by alcohol use. Medical officers were instructed to admit alcoholics and drug addicts to treatment facilities. According to an order issued by the medical service, this solution had "the advantage that it could be extended indefinitely." Once incarcerated in these facilities, addicts were evaluated under the provisions of the "Law for Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases," and could even be subjected to forced sterilization and euthanasia.

The number of cases in which soldiers became blind or even died after consuming methyl alcohol began to increase. From 1939 on, the University of Berlin's Institute of Forensic Medicine consistently listed methyl alcohol as the leading factor in deaths resulting from the inadvertent ingestion of poisons.

The execution of a 36-year-old officer in Norway in the fall of 1942 was intended to set an example. The officer, who was a driver, had sold five liters of methyl alcohol, which he claimed was 98 percent alcohol and could be used to produce liquor, to an infantry regiment's anti-tank defense unit. Several soldiers fell ill, and two died. The man, deemed an "enemy of the people," was executed by a firing squad. According to the daily order issued on October 2, 1942, "the punishment shall be announced to the troops and auxiliary units, and it shall be used as a tool for repeated and insistent admonishment."

But soldiers apparently felt that anything that could help them escape the horrors of war was justifiable. Despite general knowledge of the risks involved, morphine addiction became widespread among the wounded and medical personnel during the course of the war. Four times as many military doctors were addicted to morphine by 1945 than at the beginning of the war.

Franz Wertheim, a medical officer who was sent to a small village near the Western Wall on May 10, 1940, wrote the following account: "To help pass the time, we doctors experimented on ourselves. We would begin the day by drinking a water glass of cognac and taking two injections of morphine. We found cocaine to be useful at midday, and in the evening we would occasionally take Hyoskin," an alkaloid derived from some varieties of the nightshade plant that is used as a medication. Wertheim adds: "As a result, we were not always fully in command of our senses."

To prevent an "outbreak of morphinism, as occurred after the last war," Professor Otto Wuth, a master sergeant and consulting psychiatrist to the military's senior medical command, wrote a "Proposal to Combat Morphinism" in February 1941. Under Wuth's proposal, all wounded who became addicted as a result of treatment were to be centrally recorded and reported to the "District Medical Board," where they would be either legally provided with morphine or routinely examined and sent to drug rehabilitation treatment centers. "In this manner," Wuth concluded, "morphine addicts will be recorded and monitored, and the entire group will be prevented from becoming criminal."

The Nazi leadership was more lenient with those who became drug-addicted as a result of the war than with alcoholics, probably because the Wehrmacht was concerned that it could be sued for damages, because it was in fact responsible for dispensing the drugs in the first place.

There was also another long article about alcohol consumption and its increase after the Wehrmacht struck a deal with the french vinemakers associations, but I can't find it at the moment.

[PeZook]

Holy fu...

I knew all armies had problems with alcohol abuse, especially during garrison duty ; But handing out massive amounts of speed is something new to me. Although, didn't British pilots also get amphetamines during the BoB?

On another, yet similar note: Seweryna Szmaglewska mentioned in her book, Smoke Over Birkenau, that near the very end, Auschwitz inmates could buy weapons and ammunition from the guards in exchange for vodka. This might've been just a rumor amongst inmates, but it sounds strangely credible.

[Aaron MkII]

Speed is still issued, but under tight control in modern armies.

This, wow...whole nother thing.

[The Spartan]

The US military hands out stimulants still. In addition to high caffeine coffee or caffeine spiked gum in their rations there's also "go pills" for pilots and spec-ops soldiers. Look up dextroamphetamine and modafinil.

[Simon_Jester]

They handed out speed?

Its a wonder they lasted as long as they did.

Speed is still issued, but under tight control in modern armies.

This, wow...whole nother thing.

Mostly they were using it to counter fatigue. "Need to function today, but you got no sleep last night because you can't sleep through an artillery bombardment? Here you go." Same reason as in modern armies. And from the sound of it, after a year or two they figured out why they needed to have medical officers issuing it under control.

[Junghalli]

Doping up soldiers on drugs to "enhance performance" and who cares what it does to their health is not behavior I'd find terribly surprising from a dictatorship famous for being bloodthirsty.

[Block]

The Allies lost shitloads of military battles too, but ended up winning the war in the end; just because something had a lot of failures doesn't mean it is hopeless and we should just give up.

You really are an idiot. They didn't have "failures" they got fucking slaughtered. There was and is no way to win with non-violent resistance when the people you're trying to resist consider you sub-human and are willing to take on world opinion and fight wars to make sure you die.

[SirNitram]

If your opponents goal is your death.. Not resources, not land, not ideals.. DEATH.. Pacifistic resistance, almost always public protests and civil disobedience does not counteract it; it paints a large target saying 'The people you want to murder are here, open fire'.

[Junghalli]

Even confining the question to Poles and Russians under Nazi occupation I'm not sure there could have been no resistance that was effective at all except violence.

If the Nazis really wanted to kill everyone in their occupied territories ... why are there living Poles? Why didn't they go straight to the total depopulation? I would guess because this would have been inconvenient and they had higher priorities. I would also guess that on a day to day their basis their occupation order did rely to a large extent on the cooperation of the occupied, if nothing else simply on the basis of "if we tell them to do X or we'll kill them they'll actually do X". I wonder how inconvenient it would have been for the Nazis if much of the Polish population refused to obey even the simplest orders from them and basically called them on "do what I say or I fucking kill/torture you" with "then I guess you're going to have to kill/torture me."

I mean, even just talking about Jews being herded off to the death camps, they physically walked onto the trains and stuff. Doing something as simple as refusing to physically move onto the cattle cars would have made things more inconvenient for the Nazis. Sure, it might mean the Nazis just shoot them right there instead ... but hey wait a minute, wasn't one of the motivations behind building the gas chambers that mass executions by shooting people at close quarters turned out to be traumatizing to the executioners? Maybe just forcing the Nazis to rely more on direct face to face brutality and less on clinical at one remove brutality would have had an effect.

Keep in mind this is in the context of the Nazis fighting a big war ... which making things inconvenient for them would divert resources away from, weakening them and making their demise more likely and sooner.

Mind you, I'm not saying this would be an optimal strategy in that situation or even the easiest/most behaviorally realistic strategy (calling the regime that employed guys like Mengele on "do what I say or I do terrible things to you" in a way that leaves you completely open to their retaliation might well be scarier than violent resistance), I'm kind of thinking aloud about how even in this seemingly textbook "this is the kind of situation where nonviolence doesn't work" situation maybe it's not completely clear-cut about that.

[Simon_Jester]

Doping up soldiers on drugs to "enhance performance" and who cares what it does to their health is not behavior I'd find terribly surprising from a dictatorship famous for being bloodthirsty.

Falling asleep in a fighter cockpit can be pretty hazardous to your health too, y'know.

Keep in mind this is in the context of the Nazis fighting a big war ... which making things inconvenient for them would divert resources away from, weakening them and making their demise more likely and sooner.

Is this more inconvenient than, say, knowing that if you send two soldiers off to do something they'll get ambushed and killed? Or more inconvenient than having to post guards on your stuff to keep it from getting blown up by sneaky guys with dynamite?

There are levels of inconvenience. "Our conscripts are getting so shook up by all this shooting people that a lot of them have psychiatric problems" is a much lower level of inconvenience than "our conscripts are getting shot at."

Besides, what context? What big war? Does this strategy rely on the assumption that someone else is belligerent enough to fight while you, personally, are not?

[Junghalli]

I didn't mean to suggest it was a particularly good strategy. What I was questioning was the formulation of nonviolent resistance acts as automatically completely ineffective against an enemy that wants to kill you.

Incidentally it occurs to me that stuff like sabotage could quite easily fall under the umbrella of nonviolent resistance, and I could see that being pretty effective. Reading some of the posts here I sort of get the impression people are imagining nonviolence here as meaning taking the playbook of MLK, Ghandi etc. and applying it straightforwardly to Nazi-occupied Poland. Effective military strategy may vary widely from one context to another, why wouldn't the same be true for nonviolent resistance forms?

I mean I'm personally pretty skeptical of strictly nonviolent resistance being a good idea in this context, but it's kind of interesting to probe the question since the argument being advanced seems to be more-or-less "nonviolence wouldn't have worked on the Nazis therefore strict pacifism is invalid."

[Sea Skimmer]

The Germans encountered a fair bit of nonviolent work refusal style resistance in WW2. They had a really easy solution, no work, no food which was easily enforced since everyone was on a ration system and Western Europe as a whole had food shortage the whole war. The subhumans could be slaughtered at will, everyone else could just starve if they didn't want to work. It wasn't volunteerism that got millions of foreigners directly working in Nazi war plants. Non violent resistance can have a point against someone like the Nazis, but only as a means of supporting and forming a violent resistance. Particularly if you count sabotage as violent, as I personally would. All the slaves sabotaging V-2s they were forced to weld together certainly engaged in useful resistance that wasn't taking up arms, but it sure wasn't non violent when one of those things blew up on the pad.

[Simon_Jester]

I didn't mean to suggest it was a particularly good strategy. What I was questioning was the formulation of nonviolent resistance acts as automatically completely ineffective against an enemy that wants to kill you.

A BB gun isn't a completely ineffective way to handle a charging rhinoceros. It's just not going to stop you from getting gored and trampled flat by the rhino.

Incidentally it occurs to me that stuff like sabotage could quite easily fall under the umbrella of nonviolent resistance, and I could see that being pretty effective. Reading some of the posts here I sort of get the impression people are imagining nonviolence here as meaning taking the playbook of MLK, Ghandi etc. and applying it straightforwardly to Nazi-occupied Poland. Effective military strategy may vary widely from one context to another, why wouldn't the same be true for nonviolent resistance forms?

The real problem is simply that 'nonviolent resistance' almost by definition has an upper limit on how resistant you're willing to be. In the context of civil society and rule of law that works, it works really well and I like it because I think less violence is a good thing. Outside that context it just stops making sense.

Now, if we really had, say, some kind of memetic-quasi-warfare by which you really could make whole attacking armies throw down their guns by thinking happy thoughts at them... hell yes, I think that would be a great way to use nonviolent methods to deal with and avert war. But I don't expect that to be practical, and I think anyone who imagines it 'could have worked' in some past conflict is deluding themselves.

I mean I'm personally pretty skeptical of strictly nonviolent resistance being a good idea in this context, but it's kind of interesting to probe the question since the argument being advanced seems to be more-or-less "nonviolence wouldn't have worked on the Nazis therefore strict pacifism is invalid."

No, it's more like "absolute pacifism which rejects every thing that includes any war, no matter what the alternative is, is bloody stupid when you take it to its extreme."

I view it as a sanity-check for pacifists, or people with any other strong political view. If they can say "yes, sometimes you gotta drop the ideological principle because following it would lead to a disaster," then you can have an intelligent conversation with them hopefully.

If they can't or won't say that, it's impossible to have that conversation. Any more than you can have an intelligent conversation with a free-market advocate who thinks everything should be market-based, including stuff like parent-child relationships. You can't talk to them and expect to get a reaction that passes the Turing test.

Because either (one) they're so in love with this idea and so inflexible about it that they can't fit a theory into the practical applications of that theory without being reduced to babbling gibberish. In which case you can't expect a reasonable dialogue, because there's no real correlation between what they say and what they observe- they say the same thing no matter what happens.

Or (two) this being the Internet, they're parodying their own argument, as a way of wasting your time for giggles. It depends on who's doing the talking.

[SirNitram]

Even confining the question to Poles and Russians under Nazi occupation I'm not sure there could have been no resistance that was effective at all except violence.

If the Nazis really wanted to kill everyone in their occupied territories ... why are there living Poles?

I was not speaking of Poles in general. I was pointing out that there were big sections of Europe where 'Peaceful Resistance' of the Nazis is basically inviting the firing squad over. I admittably know very little of the Polish situation during WW2.

I believe the main reason people are discounting sabotage is that there's a strong chance where a campaign of sabotage kills folks, which the man responsible for this careening Off Topic being one who considers all human-caused death evil, therefore also evil.

I don't believe anyone here is saying strict pacifism is invalid. That's a strawman of most I see posting, at least. At the core, however, there is one issue never brought up, or if so, I have not seen it in my readings: Nonviolent resistance, of the kind DX13 prescribes, is bloody dangerous. You depend entirely on the aggressors not simply deciding to crush you, since you are pacifists, and chances are, they have lots of weapons and at least a few who are OK with using them on you.

There's another point which, at least for me, is a sticking point. It's one thing to speak of the goods of pacifism. Indeed, it's good when it works. But I cannot ask others to do it on my behalf, knowing they would be in danger. If I must choose, I'd rather have three guys wrapped in 67 short tons of modern battle tank, than three guys not moving from their spot. Because at least in the later, I did what I could to wrap them in the loving embrace of lots and lots of armor and defenses. My ideals are not for other people to die for.

[weemadando]

They handed out speed?

Its a wonder they lasted as long as they did.

Speed is still issued, but under tight control in modern armies.

This, wow...whole nother thing.

Mostly they were using it to counter fatigue. "Need to function today, but you got no sleep last night because you can't sleep through an artillery bombardment? Here you go." Same reason as in modern armies. And from the sound of it, after a year or two they figured out why they needed to have medical officers issuing it under control.

David Stirling talked about the effects of the British issue versions - recalled times when he killed people who were no threat while under the influence of them- iirc, by throwing grenades into barracks dormitories. Make of his stories what you will, but it's certainly a believable consequence of having people on amphetamines in the battlefield.

[Simon_Jester]

Again, pacifism would work a lot better if our philosophical talk-you-out-of-it weapons were as sophisticated, reliable, and effective as our technological blow-shit-up weapons.

[Block]

You really are an idiot. They didn't have "failures" they got fucking slaughtered.

So were most the armed resistance, but you aren't dismissing that option out of hand.

Because at least you take some of them with you if you resist with force of arms. Non-violent resistance against people like that is just as bad as doing nothing, people that consider you sub-human tend not to change their minds.

[MKSheppard]

If the Nazis really wanted to kill everyone in their occupied territories ... why are there living Poles? Why didn't they go straight to the total depopulation?.

You're a fucking dumbass who hasn't even read some of the basic level histories of the Holocaust and other badness in the Eastern Territories of Dem Deutsches Reich.

The Germans didn't want to kill them all (except for the Jews and other specific undesirables); because where would they get the great mass of slaves/serfs who would wait on the minority of BRAVE TEUTONIC FARMERS in the East after the war?

What they did was "peel off" the intellectuals who formed the upper class of Poland/Russia as they invaded, so that within a generation or two, Russian or Polish culture would be forgotten, and there would be a huge mass of semi-educated peons who spoke a gibberish form of German and couldn't do 1+1.

That's why as they invaded Poland and European Russia, the death squads were executing boy scouts, church leaders, teachers, professors, etc etc; and why the teaching of children was outlawed, along with printing presses.

[MKSheppard]

If the generally decent, ordinary people of Germany can become evil Nazis, surely evil Nazis can become generally decent, ordinary people again when the corrupting influences are removed.

And how do you propose to do that when the Nazis control all the methods of influencing peoples in Germany, and more importantly have control of the state apparatus of power (secret police, etc etc)?

Oh yeah, that's right; by breaking the power of the Nazi state via invasion and occupation.

[MKSheppard]

Really, most of the ideas proposed in here are about as effective as all the schemes that Jewish groups kept proposing (and still do to this day) regarding the holocaust -- e.g. bombing Auschwitz; which the US looked at, and turned down in late 1944 or 1945 IIRC.

The main problem is, bombing the death camps diverts precious bomber sorties; and given how hard on the Nazis were for eliminating the undesirables, do you really think for a moment that because the rail lines into Auschwitz have been cut for a few days (railroads get repaired mighty fast in wartime); that the Nazis will all rethink their scheme? No, they'll just find some other alternate method of disposing of the 'special' trainloads that were tied up by the bombing -- these are the people who devoted precious transportation assets and precious fuel to send special cleanup groups to mass graves in European Russia to burn the corpses and then grind the bones up into ash with machines in order to eliminate evidence of what the thousand year reich had done.

[PeZook]

Shep, the Generalplan Ost did call for near total extermination of most Slavic people ; Only 3.5-4 million Poles (out of a pre-war population of 24 million) were to be maintained as a slave race in the way you described. Although IIRC the plan evolved somewhat in response to the...changing wartime situation.

The reason there's still a Polish culture is obvious: the Red Army crushed the Nazi occupiers before they could carry out the plan. But they were well on their way by 1944 nonetheless. It's just that murdering 20 million people takes a lot of time, especially if you want to keep the local railroads and administration running, too, so that you can prosecute your war on the OTHER undesirable slavic guys.

[Akhlut]

Nonviolent resistance doesn't only work by preventing the enemy from accomplishing its goal. A big component is also convincing him to change his goal.

How do you propose on making Nazi Germany change its goal without eliminating the leadership apparatus? Don't forget, they were more than happy to kill other Germans who did not kowtow to the Nazi government. Civil disobedience works extremely well only when the ideology of the people you're trying to convince does not view those they are opposing as worthy of slaughter.

If the generally decent, ordinary people of Germany can become evil Nazis, surely evil Nazis can become generally decent, ordinary people again when the corrupting influences are removed.

How do you remove the corrupting influences without killing the Nazi hierarchy? Notice that, despite the large number of Nazi soldiers hanging around, that once Hitler and the higher echelons of Nazi power were killed or captured, German resistance evaporated. There wasn't even a partisan movement, despite the numerous partisan movements in Nazi-occupied territories prior to the end of the war.

[Akhlut]

Look at the real world events of WW2: 60,000,000 dead around the world, including about 2/3 of all the Jews in Europe.

Refusing to participate in mass murder and urging others to do the same may lead to a disaster.... but every war is a disaster, no doubt about it, and WW2 arguably the worst of them all. I'd rather risk disaster than guarantee disaster.

France and Britain were trying the pacifistic route for a long time precisely because they didn't want to risk disaster (after all, they remembered the brutality of WWI). And, oddly enough, had they pressured Hitler with military threats early on in his regime (for instance, after the Anschluss or the annexation of the Sudetenland), he wouldn't have been able to start WWII at all, and likely would have not had the Holocaust, or had one that was much, much more reduced in scope and lethality (more like a larger Aktion T4 rather than a full-blown Final Solution).

So, in that instance, being a bit more belligerent would have been the better course of action, as opposed to being pacifistic.

At the time, Hitler just wanted to get rid of the Jews. But, nobody else wanted them either. (Even Switzerland, who had a pretty admirable record during the war, relatively speaking, was hesitant to take Jewish refugees.)

Do you think that when Hilter invaded the USSR that all the Jews there would have been simply shipped out instead of shot and thrown in mass graves?

But, no, even in the face of disaster, countries held to their ideological horseshit. Alas, instead of being a commitment of self-sacrifice and peace, their ideology was anti-semetism and "I got mine, fuck you."

Turns out it took the Holocaust to make nations around the world to start to consider acting in ways that weren't completely self-serving (as opposed to merely mostly self-serving these days).

That the Allies ended up being on the "right" side of that war was an accident. This is the biggest danger to saying WW2 was justified: if the ends did justify the means (a moral philosophy that logically must be rejected), it was purely by chance. Using it as a model for future justifications is simply a terribly idea.

Why must the ends justifying the means be rejected? After all, one has to consider that any consequences as a result of the means are included in the ends.

Aside from that, we can use lessons from WWII to improve ourselves; for instance, we can both accept refugees from nations that are on the path to genocide, as well as destroy the leaders of such nations in order to deprive them of some of the impetus for committing genocide. Two birds, one stone and all that jazz.