I was just reading an old post by Roberto Muehlenkamp on the website Holocaust Controversies, which debunks Holocaust denial.
While Muehlenkamp's main point of rebuttal is overall sound here, that even if Luther might have used the German word 'ausgerottet' to mean 'cut-off' in his translation of Genesis, this does not change that the overwhelming use of the word in the German language is to mean extermination, and thus the attempt by the author of the blog he was debunking to claim this might have meant the use of 'ausgerottet' by Nazis like Himmler could have referred to deporting rather than exterminating the European Jews is absurd.
However I am still quite confused why Luther did use the word 'ausgerottet' in this context in the verse the Holocaust denier is quoting here. I am not a German speaker, but every definition of this word I can find explains it to mean 'exterminate'.
Any English translation of this verse in Genesis also uses the term 'cut off', and when I put the German language verse into Google translate it somehow converts the word 'ausgerottet' into 'cut-off', even though once I remove the surrounding context it turns that word back into 'exterminate'.
Can any German speaking contributors to this sub help explain this to me?
Thank you.
Edit: Completed the sentence I forgot to finish at the end of paragraph 2.
Luther was translating from the Greek Septuagint translation of the Old Testament which uses the verb ἐξολοθρεύω (destroy utterly, annihilate, exterminate) and is translated as such, for instance Brenton's 1851 Septuagint translation into English renders it as "that soul shall be utterly destroyed "
As your link points out the Frühneuhochdeutsches Wörterbuch defines the term as having essentially the same meaning as now; to exterminate, extinguish, annihilate. So Luther did not use a poor choice of word, nor mean to use it in an odd sense. It was a faithful rendering of what he had to work with, which in turn was a poor rendering of the Hebrew original. The Latin Vulgate, too, used a similar odd terminology "delebitur anima illa de populo suo" (that soul shall be destroyed out of his people).
So this is all rooted in a bad translation from Hebrew. The modern translations use 'cut-off' or similar because they're not a translation of the Septuagint but working directly from Hebrew.
Luther's Bible is not always a good indicator of his day's German (let alone 1940s German) because there are lots of translational oddities and hebraicisms. One I know offhand is Genesis 2:17 "but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die". Here, "certainly die" in this paragraph and a number of other places was rendered by Luther as "Todes sterben"; that is, you will "death die". Which is as grammatically odd in German as in English, and goes back to an incorrect rendering of the Hebrew absolute infinitive. (you can intensify a verb by putting the infinitive form of the same verb in front, somehow this got turned into the corresponding noun along the way)
For all its faults, the English KJV version didn't make either of these mistakes.