13 - Hors de combat

Summary

The relationship between mobilization and immobilization in Nazi total war was dynamic rather than static over time, space and circumstance. In the long view the Nazis could regard human and material resources devoted to the total destruction of 'racial inferiors' as part of a broader total war. At the same time this exertion represented considerable costs at the expense of the total war against the nation states fighting Nazi Germany, though the wartime increase in mobilization of prison and camp labour compensated for this. There were several categories of Germans wholly or partially immobilized, by age, by mental or physical condition, by disposition, or by gender. The immobilization was met with a costly and labour-intensive Nazi campaign to integrate disabled soldiers into the war economy. While most homosexuals remained, undetected, part of the Nazi war effort, the debate over their nature and utility is an instance in the realm of science and medicine of the dynamics of mobilization and immobilization.