Achieving “living space” for the German people was one of Hitler’s central aims. The concept was developed in the late nineteenth century and popularized in the 1920s after Germany lost territory at the end of the First World War. Hitler saw the concept as essential for the survival of the German people. The object was not just space, but imperial space that could be exploited for resources and whose population would serve German needs. This “greater economic area” was to be self-sufficient (autarkic) as far as possible, creating a German-centered economic bloc to reflect what some German economists assumed was the way the world economy was developing. The war against the Soviet Union was intended to complete this program of imperial expansion and provide room for the surplus German population as well as generous supplies of food and raw materials.

This chapter focuses on policies of the Allies from 1941 until 1945. Responding to the news about the mass extermination of the Jews, individuals and Jewish organizations lobbied for making declarations denouncing Nazi atrocities and taking diplomatic and political measures. This chapter shows the complexity of Allied attitudes, logistical and political considerations, actions, and inactions with regard to the fate of the Jews in Europe. In particular, it concerns the response to the destruction of Hungarian Jewry, the rescue initiatives and role of Roul Wallenberg, and the refusal to bomb Auschwitz.

This chapter examines Nazi policies that sought to “weed out” members of the population based on racial criteria (primarily targeting persons whom the Nazis classified as Jews, Sinti, or Roma), eugenic criteria (targeting individuals labeled as suffering from genetic diseases), or the criterion of deviance (targeting those whose deviance from social or sexual norms supposedly revealed their biological inferiority). The chapter argues that Nazi biopolitics was a contentious arena in which rivaling Nazi Party, state, and SS agencies competed for influence. This argument is developed by investigating three topics: Nazi sterilization policy; a protracted 1933−5 conflict between two competing racial theories and the impact of the conflict’s outcome on the drafting of racial legislation that culminated in the 1935 Nuremberg laws; and the 1937−8 turn to a biopolitical policy of “preventive detention” in concentration camps, on the orders of the police, which centralized efforts to round up “Asoziale,” a category that included beggars, vagrants, homeless persons, prostitutes, and potentially anyone exhibiting behavior considered socially deviant.

In this chapter of Complex Ethics Consultations: Cases that Haunt Us, the author explores the misunderstandings that can arise when there are no good options but a decision must be made. Zaner discusses the complex emotions faced by a pregnant woman carrying a fetus at 22 weeks gestational age and neural tube defect. She is referred to the maternal-fetal unit. She faced a decision about whether to terminate the pregnancy based on uncertain information and a two-week deadline to make a decision. The author reflects on the ethical dimensions so many parents face when either decision is irreversible and information is tenuous, but a treatment decision must still be made.

This chapter explores the essentially narrative dimensions of substantive self-knowledge, conceived of as understanding to what extent and in what ways one has or has not exercised one’s distinctively human powers in reasonably endorsable ways within a social setting. (There are also important social preconditions for this conception of substantive self-knowledge.) The thought is that both Kant and Wordsworth conceive of self-knowledge in this way – as a kind of open-ended achievement of moral self-assessment – rather than as primarily a matter of introspective awareness or the discernment of fixed qualities of character. Wordsworth (who was engaged with the reading of Kant and Fichte in 1791) in particular worries about and makes evident the continuing problem of arriving at stability or closure in self-assessment.