You misunderstand . Useful Undesirables really were put to beneficial use , and the ' useless ' ones were eliminated so they wouldn ' t be a waste of food and couldn ' t commit terrorist acts . Nobody is saying The Holocaust was free just that it was extremely beneficial for the German military and economy . The chief constraints upon the wartime German economy were as Adam Tooze ' s Wages of Destruction explains in great detail food and a shortage of ablebodied labourers . Killing people who couldn ' t serve as labourers , and would rebel if they weren ' t given enough food , solved both problems at once . Yes , half a million German Jews were exterminated . And yes , that numbered included 50 k men who could have served as soldiers . But a good 200 , 000 of them served as slaves whether as doctors in camphospitals , engineers in campfactories , or as manual labourers etc . Enslaving such highly educated people saved huge sums in wages . They also kept the rare ones from dying Primo Levi received treatment for pneumonia because he successfully pretended to be an expert in industrial chemistry after memorising a highschool chemistry textbook . The Nazis believed they were in a lifeanddeath struggle against JudeoBolshevism . JUDEOBolshevism . Sure , they were happy to enslave useful Jews and kill all the useless ones , but using them as soldiers was as repulsive as it was unnecessary . After all , the Nazis didn ' t think they were going to lose . And even if they had , would 50 k potentially traitorous men have made a significant difference during Operation Barbarossa 3 million German combat troops , . 5 million combat troops elsewhere , 2 million logistics troops ? IRL Nazi Germany had five atomic bomb projects . The most advanced was the one headed by the Post Office . Nazi Germany ' s institutions simply didn ' t have the c ooperativeresourcesharing ethos necessary to actually successfully develop an atomic bomb , even if it had not encouraged Jews to emigrate in the interwar period . Again , it ' s really satisfying to believe that the Nazis ' evil was irrational and selfdestructive . But the saddest thing is that it wasn ' t .