Underclass

[Conservationist]

Another hypothetical:

What society ever went backward by ditching its underclass?

[crow]

Nazi Germany.

[Conservationist]

Didn't ditch its underclass -- Jews were actually as a whole one of the wealthier groups in Germany.

[crow]

Retards? Disabled? Just throwing up a possibility.
I'm no historian.

[Heydrich]

Retards? Disabled? Just throwing up a possibility.
I'm no historian.

That was hardly the cause of National Socialist Germany's decline either. If the war cost Germany anything it was its best and brightest lost on the field of battle. Ridding itself of various undesirables was certainly not a net negative. 

[crow]

I never suggested it was.
The moral of the story is: Germany was crushed in the end.
So while not the obvious cause, it did not a lot to help.
I have a feeling doing people in can be a risky course.

[Eleison]

Germany had the right idea, they were just over ambitious, and they got side-tracked by racism.  If they had been smarter, they would have taken the American route and created a nation for the Jews, thus moving them out of Germany and gaining an ally in the Middle-East.

[NHA]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_Plan

[Dylar]

The Reich's, ah, demographic adjustment efforts most certainly contributed substantially to Germany's defeat.  The machinery of extermination ultimately employed something on the order of a million men of fighting age, men that otherwise might have been employed at the front, in addition to all the materiel resources that were poured into the pursuit of genocide.  Then there were the ancillary effects, the engendering of support for partisan resistance in the East (which ultimately tied down hundreds of thousands of troops that, again, might have proved real handylike at the front), and the hardening of the negotiating position on the part of the Western Allies.

And all this to target a handful of small, geographically isolated and concentrated, easily identified (and generally unpopular) minority groups.  Now, imagine the kind of resources you'd have to devote to selectively exterminating 80-90% of the total population.  You might as well hope to flap your arms and fly as rid society of the its <120 IQ segment.

[Humanicide]

Not to mention all of the Jewish resistance groups which popped up around Europe, further seeking to undermine the Nazis. Completely stupid idea; getting rid of all the Jews. Never mind there might be smart people in there that the Germans could use in their society; nope!

You get rid of the underclass? You get rid of a TON of labor. Going to have to breed like mad to pick up the slack.

[Tralfamadorian]

Didn't ditch its underclass -- Jews were actually as a whole one of the wealthier groups in Germany.

But they also tried to exterminate the Slavs, which ultimately caused them to get raped by Russia.

[Heydrich]

Didn't ditch its underclass -- Jews were actually as a whole one of the wealthier groups in Germany.

But they also tried to exterminate the Slavs, which ultimately caused them to get raped by Russia.

This is nonsense. Hitler viewed many the Slavs in general as being inferior to Germanics, but there was no plan, nor action ever carried out to "try to exterminate the Slavs." Many a Slav may have perished in the war on the Eastern Front, but they died in battle, as partisans, criminals, etc. For goodness sake, the Wehrmacht employed a small legion of Slavic Russian prisioners/volunteers (HiWi's) to assist them throughtout the war - most were exterminated by Stalin after the war for their efforts.   

[Tralfamadorian]

there was no plan, nor action ever carried out to "try to exterminate the Slavs."

False.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost

[NHA]

The plan was to conquer the slavs and "re-germanize" them. Not so much to exterminate them. Seems more or less the same compared to ancient Roman policies during conquest.

Under Generalplan Ost, all Slavs unfit for Germanization were to be expelled from the areas marked out for German settlement. In considering the fate of the individual nations, the architects of the Plan decided that it would be possible to Germanize about 50 per cent of the Czechs, 35 per cent of the Ukrainians and 25 per cent of the Byelorussians. The remainder would have to be deported to western Siberia.

     It was planned to remove the Czech intelligentsia not only from the areas marked for German settlement but from Europe in general, since their attitude to the Third Reich was hostile and they would be a threat to it even in Siberia. Apparently they were considered capable of organizing resistance to German rule. The best solution, thought the Plan's authors, would be to enable the Czech intelligentsia to emigrate overseas.

     As for the Ukrainians, the original idea was to leave about one-third in the future German settlement area. Naturally, this group was to undergo gradual Germanization. The remaining two-thirds were to be deported to Siberia. A Reichskommissariat Ukraine was to be set up in the area not marked for German colonization. Later these ideas were revised, and the intention was rather to deport the Ukrainians not suitable for Germanization to the area of this Reichskommissariat. However, the details of these plans had not been finalized. The Byelorussians were to be treated similarly to the Ukrainians, with this difference that only about a quarter were to be Germanized and the rest deported to Siberia.

     The plans for Poles and Russians were different. These two nations presented the Germans with greater difficulties. At first glance this seems somewhat puzzling, since, in Wetzel's opinion, the Polish and Russian nations possessed many of the Nordic characteristics, proper to the German nation. It is only from his later remarks that it transpires that both the leading circles of the NSDAP and the Reich Security Main Office held the view that, though the Polish nation lent itself to Germanization as far as racial characteristics were concerned, political considerations made it necessary to abandon any plans for full-scale Germanization. This held out no hope of success because of the Poles' highly developed sense of patriotism, their hostile attitude to Germany and their natural bent for underground activity. The attribution of these qualities to the Poles and the conclusion, completely justified as it happens, that voluntary Germanization of even a fraction of the poles was doomed to failure, goes a long way to explain the methods used against the Polish people from the very outset of the occupation, methods designed to wipe out the greatest possible number of Poles.

[crimsonking]

Not to mention all of the Jewish resistance groups which popped up around Europe, further seeking to undermine the Nazis. Completely stupid idea; getting rid of all the Jews. Never mind there might be smart people in there that the Germans could use in their society; nope!

You get rid of the underclass? You get rid of a TON of labor. Going to have to breed like mad to pick up the slack.

pardon my observation, but if you rid yourself of a huge portion of a population that likes to use up resources, wouldn't your demand of said resources drastically dwindle, and in return, the supply would only have to match the new demand, not the old?