"The Nazis were explicit about the status of their victims. They were Untermenschen— subhumans— and as such were excluded from the system of moral rights and obligations that bind humankind together. It’s wrong to kill a person, but permissible to exterminate a rat… . Jews were the main victims of this genocidal project… . Jewish people posed a deadly threat to all that was noble in humanity. [These] putative enemies of civilization were represented as parasitic organisms— as leeches, lice, bacteria, or vectors of contagion… . Sometimes the Nazis thought of their enemies as vicious, bloodthirsty predators rather than parasites."