re: #586 William Barnett-Lewis

The racism did hurt the war effort and probably caused them to collapse even sooner than the would have without it. However in The Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze it is argued that the Germans lost the war essentially as soon as they started because they did not have sufficient resources to defeat their enemies. Squandering resources on the killing simply made them lose faster.

Note that economically the genocide *was* profitable, in the sense that they ended up with the surplus of loot. Of course, they would have an even bigger surplus if they had “just” robbed the Jews, and transported only the Jewish workers (whom they indeed sorely needed as slave labor) instead of whole populations. So ideology trumped pragmatism. But then the war was ideological in the first place, so pragmatism was abandoned in the very beginning.