Deleted member 94680
I assume you're an intentionalist then?
Neither. I don’t doubt Hitler’s intention to exterminate the Jews, but I find it laughable that people believe the entire Nazi apparatus of death were mindless automatons slavishly following der Fuhrer’s every command.
I won't question that Nazism leads to mass persecution, bigotry and horrible things but if they were hell bent on mass extermination the Nazis certainly took their time to get there.
That simplified and ignores most of what the Nazis were about. So they took a long time to get there, that must mean they were basically nice guys forced into a corner? How does that explain Aktion T4? Didn’t take ‘em long to arrive at that ‘solution’. The Madagascar Plan wasn’t a surprise holiday package for all of Europe’s Jews as a thank-you from Hitler for nicely leaving Europe. It was slow death in a tropical hell-hole. The ‘Final Solution’ was a panicked reaction to a catastrophically collapsing military situation that forced the leadership of the Nazi regime to accelerate their time table. To suggest Auschwitz, Birkenau, Sobibor, et al could be set up and operated without wholesale cooperation from every level of the Nazi regime is as much nonsense as to suggest Hitler was unaware of their existence and operation.