Did Nazi Germany ethnic cleansing policy shorten WW2?

[Luath]

Hello all, this is a question that I've pondered recently, would WW2 have been longer if a hypothetical German government was not waging a war of annihilation against central and Eastern European peoples? Leaving aside the problem that a 'hypothetical German government' that one assumes is not 'as' murderously disposed as OTL, would also butterfly the second world war. What I want to do is interrogate the relationship between the length of WW2 and the ethnic policies of Germany during this time, after all, would the Soviets have fought as hard if they didn't know that certain annihilation awaited them? Would the partisan movement have been as strong if a gentler policy towards the Ukrainians and Belarusians was enacted? Finally there's also the question of resources, taking a coldly logistical view, the holocaust and other extermination methods was a waste of vehicles, fuel, building materials, manpower and ammunition. And externally, would land lease have been made freely available to the Soviets if it was not a clear policy of extermination?

As a counter, I remember that WW1 lasted four years to WW2s six. Perhaps it simply isn't possible to maintain a conflict at that scale for so long if the stakes are not that high. I'll also add that just because active extermination would not be sought in this scenario, it would do nothing about the racial hatred towards Eastern Europeans that long pre-dated WW2. I'm not presenting this a 'Germany wins ww2 with this one trick' scenario, I think even without the Nazis the resource and manpower problems in Germany would doom it to defeat. I simply wonder if the conflict was prolonged by the nazi policies.

Luath.

 

[Captain Homicide]

Germany in this scenario would likely have a much larger and much more effective collaboration campaign among the various Soviet ethnic groups which would probably result in the USSR’s collapse.

A more rational and less fanatical Germany would be able to extract much more resources from the occupied USSR and there’s a very good chance that Britain (and the US if they get pulled into the war) would accept German domination of the continent due to the massive forces, resources and casualties the strategic bombing campaign, any landing in France and the long slog against a mostly intact Wehrmacht all the way to Berlin would take. What the WAllies would do if the USSR is occupied and Germany’s strength only increases has been discussed in detail in various threads on this site.

Whether or not the USSR gets Lend Lease depends on if this version of Germany is still at war with Britain and if Germany declares war on the US (or if the US declares war). The partisan movement in this scenario wouldn’t be anywhere near as strong if Germany isn’t killing, starving, enslaving and displacing millions of Slavs and Jews.

Peter Hayes did a very detailed breakdown in the book Why?: Explaining The Holocaust explaining why the Holocaust was such a minuscule use of resources and it wouldn’t have affected the outcome of WW2 if there was no extermination campaign against Jews and Gypsies.

The question is what type of government does Germany have in this scenario?

Is it still fascist? Authoritarian? Totalitarian but not genocidal?

 

[Luath]

Thanks @Nathan Bernacki and @Captain Marvel. If anything from what you've told me it would seem that WW2 would have been even shorter, not longer in this scenario. Especially given how dire the German supply issue really was, as to call into question the whole enterprise, but then again the election of the Nazis did effectively toss out the opportunity Germany had at the end of WW1. I wonder if a less isolated USSR could've stymied Germany through economic policy alone. To answer your question CM, I didn't have anything in mind in particular, especially since a non-Nazi German government is unlikely to pursue a direct war with the Soviets, oh they'll still be nationalist enough to want all the old Imperial territory back, plus Austria-Sudetenland into the bargain. So potential (very likely) war with everybody else. I also question how much more resources the Germans could get out of the East given that they were already stripping it in OTL. It seems to me that the only way the Germans might pull of a win, is if there is something going on in the USSR that they can take advantage of.

 

[marathag]

Holocaust wasn't such a burden on German manpower as some people think it was. T

But it was on railpower. Lots of locomotives and cars set aside to running people to deathcamps, rather than logistics or industrial production

 

[Luath]

But it was on railpower. Lots of locomotives and cars set aside to running people to deathcamps, rather than logistics or industrial production

That was what I was thinking, all that time set aside to moving prisoners, eating into coal reserves, which could have been spent else where.

 

[Captain Homicide]

But it was on railpower. Lots of locomotives and cars set aside to running people to deathcamps, rather than logistics or industrial production

The amount of trains used for the Holocaust was minuscule in comparison to total German locomotives.

Here’s a relevant passage from Peter Hayes’ book I referenced earlier:

Finally, legend has it that the deportation trains to the camps must have impeded the German war effort. Nothing could be further from the truth. Very few deportation trains were in transit at any one time, and they had the lowest priority on German railroads, which means they were never allowed to obstruct or delay troop movements or supply trains. That is one reason why the trips from Western Europe to the death camps, and even the ones in the early stages of the deportations from Warsaw to Treblinka in 1942 that traveled only sixty miles, often took as long as three or four days and arrived carrying numerous suffocated, starved, parched, and in winter frozen corpses. Boxcars usually were used in the East, and either closed cargo wagons or third-class passenger cars from Western Europe, but in both cases, the transports nearly always consisted of dilapidated equipment. Even the locomotives were relics. Loading each transport of 1,000 people or more generally required only ninety Germans, and the guard personnel en route usually consisted of only fifteen, since sealed boxcars required little supervision. Indeed, the Germans preferred them in part for that reason.

All told, the Germans used about 2,000 trains to move three million people to camps over thirty-three months in 1942–44, which works out to sixty trains per month or two departing per day, on average. In contrast, the German Reichsbahn carried 6.6 billion passengers in 1942–43 and ran 30,000 trains per day in 1941 and 1942 and about 23,000 per day in 1944. In that final year, the Nazi regime needed only 147 trains over eight weeks, an average of fewer than three per day and never more than six, to deport almost 440,000 Hungarian Jews. Allocating even that many trains in a short time for a murder operation was unprecedented, and it happened only because the deportations had a subsidiary purpose directly tied to the war effort. Auschwitz was supposed to extract 100,000 able-bodied workers from the deportees, 10–15 percent of the initially anticipated total, and ship them immediately on to the Reich, where they were to labor on the massive effort to put Germany’s war production plants underground. Even so, at the height of the deportations from Hungary, those trains constituted no more than 1–2 percent of the daily railroad traffic in that country. They employed an infinitesimal one-fifteenth of 1 percent of the functioning locomotives and one-tenth of 1 percent of the operating rolling stock under the jurisdiction of the German Armaments Ministry at the time. Clearly, the shares of German railroad equipment and activity devoted to the Holocaust were tiny, both in total and at any particular time.

As the same author once said in a talk on C-SPAN, one of the true horrors of the Holocaust was that the Third Reich did it with their “little finger” so to speak.

Transporting, imprisoning and killing large numbers of people is child’s play for any major industrialized country with the necessary will to do so. They don’t even have to be industrialized as 800,000 Tutsis killed (mostly with machetes and farm tools) in 1994 in 100 days demonstrates.

 

[marathag]

Still, every train running to a death camp is one less doing something that actually helps winning the war, and worse, that the returning trains are going back empty, and take up space in yards, waiting for the next load. The DR didn't have that kind of excess gear to allow that.

The DR was still paid for each 'passenger' on that one way trip.
The average travel time to the camp was four days, so the same returning empty.
So that trainset is not available for military use for a week.

So there are costs.

 

[Alex1guy]

The amount of trains used for the Holocaust was minuscule in comparison to total German locomotives.

Here’s a relevant passage from Peter Hayes’ book I referenced earlier:

As the same author once said in a talk on C-SPAN, one of the true horrors of the Holocaust was that the Third Reich did it with their “little finger” so to speak.

I mean that makes sense I guess. They didnt care about the people in the trains, so parking them on sidings for hours or days to let troop transports or supplies through would have been of little concern.