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It's the most wonderful time.

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This episode explores topics that some may find disturbing.

Listener discretion is advised.

Historians have long argued that the Holocaust highlights a sharp contradiction at the heart of Nazism.

Despite the desperate need for forced labour to feed the German war machine,

the regime still went ahead with the mass extermination of European Jewry.

But for the Nazi hardliners, there was no contradiction.

Economics and extermination were two sides of the same coin. Both were needed for victory.

Winning the war required the ruthless destruction of all the perceived threats and the mobilization of all remaining resources for the war effort.

In the case of Jews judged capable of work, the authorities fused both these aims into

the policy of annihilation through labour. Forced labour meant temporary survival for the selected

Jews, but almost all of them were dead men and women walking as far as the

SS were concerned.

And that's also a clip from Nicholas Vacman's magnificent K.L., a history of the Nazi

...