I am sorry but this is purely and utterly a myth.
No one in Denmark ever wore "the jew star"and the Danes were tip off by no one but the head of Gestapo in Denmark,who had promised Hitler to make Denmark ..qut:Judenfrei but not Judenrein.
Could the Holocaust been avoided?
- Thread starter PrairieVoice
- Start date
I am sorry but this is purely and utterly a myth.
No one in Denmark ever wore "the jew star"and the Danes were tip off by no one but the head of Gestapo in Denmark,who had promised Hitler to make Denmark ..qut:Judenfrei but not Judenrein.
Graehame
Banned
For the record, I do not believe there was moral equivalence between the Nazis & the Western Allies. That said, I do believe that the Western Allies engaged in war crimes that were nearly as horrifying as those of the Nazis-- just not quite on as widespread or as institutional a level. Aside from Eisenhower's treatment of German POWs-- which, unlike others on this site, I do believe to have amounted to the premeditated murder of at least tens of thousands of people; I offer the firestorm-bombing of Hamburg, Dresden, Pforzheim, Wurzberg, & much of Japan as examples. The firestorms in particular were intentionally created, as well as deliberate attacks on nonmilitary targets, resulting in the deaths of at least tens of thousand of civilians. We could also include the atomic bombing of 2 Japanese cities in this list. The fact that Truman attempted to justify these attacks on a basis that they were military targets indicates at least a dim awareness on his part of the wrongfulness of his decision.
That said, regarding the focal question of this thread-- could the Holocaust have been avoided-- I find myself in fundamental agreement with Geon. No Hitler, no Versailles, & no Thule Group would be a good start.
But maybe we're missing the obvious here. There were an awful lot of Germans who were willing-- even eager-- to carry of Hitler's Final Solution. Had there been fewer of them, or had the Germans who weren't actively involved in carrying out the Final Solution rebelled against it, then that would have gone a long way towards toning things down. I have in mind the German Army, high-ranking members of which were in a position to know what was going on with the einsatzgruppen & other forms of repression on the Eastern Front, but did nothing about it.
And this has been said before, but what if every Jew who was deported to a concentration camp decided to fight back, & take 1 SS guy down with him? They'd have run out of SS guys before they ran out of Jews. Jewish nonviolent complaisance did them in.
That said, regarding the focal question of this thread-- could the Holocaust have been avoided-- I find myself in fundamental agreement with Geon. No Hitler, no Versailles, & no Thule Group would be a good start.
But maybe we're missing the obvious here. There were an awful lot of Germans who were willing-- even eager-- to carry of Hitler's Final Solution. Had there been fewer of them, or had the Germans who weren't actively involved in carrying out the Final Solution rebelled against it, then that would have gone a long way towards toning things down. I have in mind the German Army, high-ranking members of which were in a position to know what was going on with the einsatzgruppen & other forms of repression on the Eastern Front, but did nothing about it.
And this has been said before, but what if every Jew who was deported to a concentration camp decided to fight back, & take 1 SS guy down with him? They'd have run out of SS guys before they ran out of Jews. Jewish nonviolent complaisance did them in.
Graehame
Banned
BTW, Prairie Voice, sorry, but I've gotta agree with ledeper on this one. The King of Denmark wearing the Star of David is a myth.
Cook
Banned
Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz was a German attaché in Copenhagen, not a member of the Gestapo.
Or are you referring to someone else?
I'd really like to think so..........perhaps if the Allies had given them arms? On the downside, though, the Jewish rebels, Zionist or otherwise might've had to worry about Betarist collaborators betraying them to the Nazis.
At least it might've have given the Nazis a whole lot more trouble than they already had to deal with.........which in turn might've led to an earlier end to WWII.
altamiro
Banned
The Thule group was just a catalyst. After about 1936 the group was discredited in both the population and the government - Himmler remained the only believer. Hitler himself used the Thule-originating rhetorics whenever he felt the occasion demanded, but the occult undertone disappeared entirely.
As to Jews not going out without fight... fight with what? They weren't suddenly taken out of their normal lifes and straight int death camps - there was widespread deceit that they are just being "relocated" until they found out where they end up, they were exhausted, weakened and unable to do anything even against a normal police force, much less armed SS backed up by machine gun towers.
Graehame
Banned
ALTAMIRO
"The Thule group was just a catalyst."
I said eliminating the Thule Group would be a good start, not that it would solve the problem."As to Jews not going out without fight... fight with what? ...there was widespread deceit that they are just being 'relocated'..."
I'm well aware of the deceptions that were used to get the Jews to lay down for the Final Solution. My point was that if a dictatorial political party with over a 10-year history of racist invective against white people came to power in the U.S. & told us we were just being 'relocated', then a lot of us would be dragged out the door fighting. With butcher knives if necessary. Even against 4 cops with submachine guns, 1 guy with a butcher knife can take down 1 of 'em. You've just gotta be willing to die.PrairieVoice
Banned
Maybe it is a myth but Denmark still did alot to save its Jews. Many were smuggled to Sweden. I'm of Danish descent and I know members of my family saved a Jewish relative simply by changing the street signs and house address labels so as to confuse police.
Point is Denmark did do alot to save its Jews and the other countries did very little or even helped out the Nazis.
PrairieVoice
Banned
Question is why did the Danes do what they did and the others did not? I dont think French jews were safe even in Vichy.
I think part of it is that, IMO, Danes and Germans have a bond others dont have. The language, food, and culture are similar. Germany didnt hate the Danes like they did the French, British, and Russians because they didnt fight them in WW1. So therefore they were not as willing to press the Danes as hard.
Then there is the question of the Danes themselves. Denmark kept its own government - no puppet rulers. So the Danish government could still use its authority to temper Nazi rules.
I think part of it is that, IMO, Danes and Germans have a bond others dont have. The language, food, and culture are similar. Germany didnt hate the Danes like they did the French, British, and Russians because they didnt fight them in WW1. So therefore they were not as willing to press the Danes as hard.
Then there is the question of the Danes themselves. Denmark kept its own government - no puppet rulers. So the Danish government could still use its authority to temper Nazi rules.
Research later years has proven that had his information came from Werner Best ,Head of Gestapo.
And it is geographically quite easy just to cross 5-20 km of a Sound, as compared to the Netherlands e.g,and strangely enough most of the patrol boats between Denmark and Sweden were refitting and overhauling in that period.
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altamiro
Banned
Precisely. And most people, if they have a glimmer of hope that it can turn out OK, are not willing to die.
You treat the matter with retrospect. The people back then did not have that luxury.
You also have the hindsight to know what can happen - the Pograms had never been on the scale of the holocaust. Like when the planes were taken on 9/11 (or 11/9) nobody believed that the planes would just be crashed into ground targets so (except on one plane) nobody fought back - they thought it was safer that way.
Graehame
Banned
ALTAMIRO & ORRY
You're right, there's a bit of hindsight involved here, but the Nazis had been saying for 10+ years what they intended to do with the Jews, blaming 'em for everything that had gone wrong in Europe, staging events like Kristallnacht... Even without the benefit of hindsight, I think a lot of us would have seen the handwriting on the wall.
As Orry pointed out, in a similar situation one quarter of the passengers on the 4 planes of 9-11 read between the lines & fought back, even at the almost certain cost of their own lives. Had a quarter of the Jews acted similarly, then Hitler would have run out of SS guys.
You're right, there's a bit of hindsight involved here, but the Nazis had been saying for 10+ years what they intended to do with the Jews, blaming 'em for everything that had gone wrong in Europe, staging events like Kristallnacht... Even without the benefit of hindsight, I think a lot of us would have seen the handwriting on the wall.
As Orry pointed out, in a similar situation one quarter of the passengers on the 4 planes of 9-11 read between the lines & fought back, even at the almost certain cost of their own lives. Had a quarter of the Jews acted similarly, then Hitler would have run out of SS guys.
Cook
Banned
Several passengers on Flight 93 had been informed via phone conversations what had happened to the other hijacked aircraft.
No reading between the lines required.
PrairieVoice
Banned
If you look at american prisons and how prisoners can make pretty nasty weapons out of just about anything, you wonder what weapons the people in the concentration camps could have turned out. Granted people in american prisons are not on the verge of starvation and are not being worked to death but still if I would have known a poison gas shower was my destiny I'd have shanked a couple of guards.
Anti-Jewish laws and sentiment were not that uncommon at the time, and compared to the pogroms in the commonly occurred in Russia or other parts of Eastern Europe, Kristallnacht was nothing special. Legal discrimination and occasional mob violence against Jews was within the realm of normalcy for the 1930's. The Jewish community had suffered pogroms and discrimination innumerable times in the past, and for a long time the Nazis just looked like more of the same. How would they know that this time, things were different?
Graehame
Banned
I know, Princeps, that's the argument-- but I just think that a little of the Nazis' "subhuman vermin" talk might have gotten thru. It certainly got thru to the ones who left the country. So, if for whatever reason you can't leave, you still shouldn't lose sight of the reasons why you'd want to.
I Blame Communism
Banned
Not really, no. That's actually kind of offensive. Jews in Germany, in France, and so on were a tiny, widely spread, almost completely civilian minority. Popular to the doctrines of certain groups such as the National Socialist German Worker's Party, Jews are not a hivemind and they cannot instantly organise themselves, so what we're talking about in western Europe is one quarter of helpless, unarmed civilians who don't actually know that they're being carried to their deaths giving their guards lip in completely isolated incidents.
You sound like you're blaming Jews - many of them much too old or young to fight - for not committing futile suicide (which is kind of, you know, against human instinct). Assuming you're not a child or elderly, how exactly do you intend to "take one with you"? You'll never get anywhere without organisation, equipment, and leadership, which you as an ordinary decent French citizen who looks after his own business don't have.
Speaking of that, though: as it turns out, many Jews gave the Germans the fight of their fucking lives.
Though Russia has a long and dark history of pogroms, often state-sponsored, there were never pogroms under Soviet authority, even after anti-semitic measures returned (after WW2). In the 1930s, IIRC, you could be fined for using the word "yid".
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