The idol of Nazi Germany was carried to its ultimate, naked form: race as a biological mechanism. Human life was reduced to a parameter of blood — to a "purity" or an "inferiority" written in the veins before any deed. From this premise everything else followed with cold logic: if the worth of a person is determined by origin, then some may be exalted as "masters" and others subtracted from the number of the living. And murder was set upon an industrial assembly line, with train schedules, quotas, and accounting. The guilt here lies wholly with the Nazi state and its idol of race; the victim is innocent — this must be said plainly, without any equating of the two.
The catastrophe became the bloodiest in history — around sixty million dead across the world. At its heart lay the Holocaust: the systematic extermination of about six million Jews, two-thirds of European Jewry. Auschwitz and Treblinka with their gas chambers; Babi Yar and the "Holocaust by bullets," where the Einsatzgruppen shot people over pits — more than a million and a half victims in these shootings alone. They also killed the Roma, the sick, prisoners of war, and Slavs. The machinery of death worked methodically, like a factory.
Captivity covered occupied Europe — a network of death camps, the complicity of some and the silence of others, the fear that paralyzed resistance. But the law overtook the idolater himself as well. Germany, which had bowed down to race, was cast into its own fire: the total war it had unleashed came back to it as ruined cities, millions of its own dead, a national catastrophe. The maker of the idol burned within it together with its victims — but he burned as the guilty one, not as a victim.
The return demanded a passage through repentance. The Nuremberg tribunal gave a name to the unspeakable — "crimes against humanity"; there followed denazification and decades of remembrance under the vow of "Never again." And out of the ashes were born the pillars of a new world order: in 1948 came the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on the Prevention of Genocide, and the very word "genocide" was forged in order to name this evil and to keep it from recurring nameless. The law was fulfilled to the end: the idol of race led its creator to collapse, and humanity to a hard clear-sightedness about the inalienable dignity of every human face.