their goal was the extermination of entire ethnic groups, not maximizing profits.
As if they never intertwined the two.
British imperialism was an important influence on the Third Reich, as was the exterminatory settler‐colonialism in most of North America. The European invaders, after all, never had to answer for their atrocities, and they reduced North America’s massive indigenous population to a shadow of its former self. That must have been a great example indeed to the Germanic Fascists. What was to prevent them from repeating that success in the East?
And anybody who makes a slight exaggeration like ‘Britain and France were just like the nazis because they were also imperialistic’ is most certainly not ‘the dumbest man alive.’ I’ve seen far worse, far more inappropriate analogies involving the Third Reich yet nobody deployed an unfunny hyperbole like that one.
The vast majority of German corporations and the state department made their fortunes by giddily hightailing it to Poland and using the millions of individuals marked for extermination as expendable slave labour to reduce their labour cost to essentially zero, since they didn’t even need to bother taking care of them since they’d die either way.
Is that not essentially identical to the Scramble for Africa and India?
The US and Canada probably killed more people than the Axis Powers. Estimates of 100 million Native Americans living in North America reduced to a few thousand. It just took longer than what the nazis did in a decade because they didn't have industrial murder factories to do it. Instead, they paid bounties for scalps. Entire tribes eradicated by having their hair scrapped from their skulls and turned in for money.
Nazis would have killed more than 100 million if they weren't stopped. I only point this out to illustrate how apocalyptic the white man's arrival was for indigenous people. In either case, it was done to create wealth for the in-group at the expense of the out-group.
