The blurry line between religious and crazy

Are we including the crazy fundamentalist theists who flew jumbo jets with full passenger manifests into buildings on 9/11..? They were all devout believers. Some if not most of the suicide bombers in Iraq are devout believers. Or is it just Muslims that do crazy stuff: except for Branch Davidians, and the People's Temple in Jonestown, and crazy Christian cults. What about crazy Christian individuals..?Sam Harris once pointed out that if you waved your hands over your waffles and said a few Latin phrases and then insisted that they had turned into the body of Elvis, you'd be crazy. But if you believe a wafer turned into Christ in exactly the same way, then you're just a Catholic.Are we prepared to allow an affirmative defense in our courts that God told the accused to do whatever heinous acts they did..?

If you're going to consider the effects of the Holocaust you should consider all of the effects. WWII was not part of the Holocaust and was ancillary to it. The Nazis stole the property of displaced Jews, whether they were sent to concentration camps or simply decided to emigrate. This property included art, jewels, money in bank accounts, cars, real estate, and raw materials. It is estimated that $18 billion in Jewish property was confiscated (stolen) by the Nazis, and most of it was never returned after the war, as the owners were dead. This property funded at least one third of the German war effort."Prof Ullmann said, "Conservatively, their money financed at least 30 per cent of the German war effort." Christine Kuller of the University of Munich, who also worked on the study, said tax offices built whole hierarchies of bureaucrats "who discovered dwellings and bank accounts and emptied them". The bureaucrats then disposed of all traces of those who disappeared in the extermination camps."Yes, the Nazis were extremely efficient, and ultimately unsuccessful, but their lack of success doesn't mean they weren't also efficient.
Edited by MFFJM2, : No reason given.

Exactly. The article is specifically about the economic inefficiency of Germany under the Nazi regime. The Nazi final solution was not formally decided until the Wannsee Conference. Given the requirement that most of the atrocities had to be hidden from view and that the mechanism used to kill millions was ad hoc, the Nazi death machine was extremely efficient.Edited by MFFJM2, : sp.

Once again, the description of efficiency was in regard to the Holocaust, not in every other area of Nazi endeavor. In 1933 there were approximately 3 million Jews living in Poland, and by 1945 there were only 45,000. There were nearly 1/2 million Jews living in Germany in the same year, and by 1945 only 37,000. In Greece there were 100,000 Jews prior to the war, and by its end only 7,000. In the former Yugoslavia from 70,000 to 3,500. The position I am defending is not that the Nazi's were efficient in everything they did. Far from it, but in conducting their final solution they were mercilessly efficient, far beyond anything ever seen before.I was not describing anything except what recent studies have shown about how much property was stolen from displaced and murdered Jews, and subsequently used in the German war effort. The population figures on European Jewry from the Holocaust shows the effectiveness of the Nazi attempt at a final solution.