Recreating the world

I bought a thrown out copy of Diana Ackerman's The Zookeeper's Wife in the library. Our librarian, the head honcho, has a passion for throwing out books. There is now a whole floor without books. Forget stack rooms, storage, floor to ceiling library shelves. Our librarian decided that apart from some light fiction, books don't belong to publicly funded libraries in this electronic age. Whole sections of the library disappeared. I happened to know a little about the The Zookeeper's Wife, a friend talked about it a while ago, so I had to save it from oblivion. It is a fascinating account of the wife of the keeper of the Warsaw zoo, who used the zoo and its cages to save people escaping from the Warsaw ghetto. But it is also the story of Poland, annihilated by the Germans during the war, the destruction of first the Warsaw ghetto, and later by the whole city. But I was particularly interested in the idea of recreating the world in an idealized way fuelled by the romantic Nazi imagination. Underpinning the Nazi rationale for waging war on Slavs, Jews, races they considered inferior, was a false analogy with the animal kingdom. Slaughtering or enslaving the entire population of vast regions was justified by the need for lebensraum for a superior dominant race. The fact that Germans were far from superior or dominant in European history, that until a millennium ago they were scattered primitive tribes on the fringes of civilization, did not enter into consideration. What the Nazis dreamed about was the recreation of an Arcadian German world, with wild animals that roamed the primeval forests that the German tribes had inhabited way back. Some of these animals had become extinct, but using the theories of of the pseudo-science of eugenics, the otherwise sane and educated but sadistic zoologist, Lutz Heck, attempted to breed from existing animals animals that had disappeared. That in the course of recreating the dead he had to destroy the living was of no concern to him. To recreate the idealized Germanic world, the Nazis had to destroy the existing real world. They were amazingly successful. Within five years the whole of Poland and much of the Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, as well as Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Austria, and much of the Balkan lands was destroyed. But so was Germany. The crazy romantic dream ended up with the reality of heaps of rubble an ruins throughout Europe. How could this happen? How could so many be swayed by the semi-literate rants of a half educated failed painter is something that is still not really understood.