Write now I’m reading about the Einsatzgruppen…I’m sure I’ve mentioned it here before. It’s nightmarish. No really—it gives me nightmares.

The justification that the Nazis used for massacring Jews on the Eastern Front…before the full industrial killing infrastructure of the camps was in place…was that the Jews were engaged in partisan activity. Whole villages and neighborhoods were massacred as “retaliation” for a sabotage or an attack on German troops or local allies. The event prompting the massacres was basically always a fiction, but the Nazis were attempting to create a counterfeit history in which their purges of Jews were justified and even “ethical” by the standards of wartime. The Nazis weren’t just imagining a future where they’d one, but already concocting the mythos that they would teach their descendants.

Yeah…it’s a foul Godwin, but it’s especially foul because the people concocting this story are so ignorant of what they’re talking about.