How would the Holocaust be remembered in a Nazi Victory TL?

For the purposes of this thread, I'm assuming a scenario similar to Fatherland or the Anglo-American Nazi War, in which Nazi Germany dominates Europe, but the rest of the world is free of fascism.

In Nazi Germany and its puppets, Holocaust denial will probably be official policy; during the war the Nazis denied any policy of genocide, and even created a Potemkin village at Theresienstadt to show the world that no extermination was taking place. Despite the official stance of the Nazi government, knowledge of the killings was widespread throughout the Reich and most of Europe. In a Nazi victory TL, it would be an open secret.

How would the Holocaust be remembered in the rest of the world? By 1941 Allied governments had fairly detailed knowledge of the camps and the exterminations, and even reports appeared in newspapers in the Allied nations. So I think it's safe to assume that knowledge of the atrocities would be fairly widespread.

However, knowledge alone doesn't mean much. The Armenian, Cambodian and Rwandan genocides are fairly well known, but they have unfortunately had little impact on societies outside the ones in which they occurred. And indeed there would be little more than knowledge. In a Nazi victory there would be few if any survivors, a handful of photos or documents smuggles out of the Reich, and perhaps aerial reconnaissance photos taken by Allied airmen. Without actually seeing the survivors, the corpses, the crematoria and the camps, would the Holocaust still have the same impact on society? With the end of the Final Solution, the camps would be demolished, with only a few artifacts left behind to show what once happened there. The last executioners would die off, and eventually the Reich itself would collapse. The Holocaust would eventually become little more than another name in a litany of past crimes, just another page in the black book of history.

Does this analysis seem sound?
 

Manman

Banned
Unlikely to be remembered other than the Jewish community which might forget as a generation gap and distance would mean that they would also forget in time.

Honestly while the holocaust is something most of the nations would know about it wouldn't mean anything to them considering most people would have no experience or reason to know about it other than a test on history class. Even nations going against the Germans would move to use other propaganda pieces on account that such a subject would be to extreme to be used as the main propaganda piece.
 
Even nations going against the Germans would move to use other propaganda pieces on account that such a subject would be to extreme to be used as the main propaganda piece.
No, they would move on to using other propaganda pieces because the Holocaust was the tip of the iceberg of what the Nazis were planning.
 

Manman

Banned
I mean that as much as people say how evil some groups are the reality is that people don't want to hear horrible things over and over. After a while people move on to the next story and move on or they grow numb to the atrocities and simply stop caring.
 
Why would the Nazis even care to hide or deny the Holocaust and mass exterminate of other groups given they considered them to be subhuman parasites
 
No, they would move on to using other propaganda pieces because the Holocaust was the tip of the iceberg of what the Nazis were planning.
This. Suppose they can keep the Holocaust as an open secret and something known across the world like the Rwandan genocide or Stalin massacres are known today. What happens to the enslavement and extermination of whatever Soviet people they end up ruling? It's just too much to ignore.
 

Anchises

Banned
For the purposes of this thread, I'm assuming a scenario similar to Fatherland or the Anglo-American Nazi War, in which Nazi Germany dominates Europe, but the rest of the world is free of fascism.

In Nazi Germany and its puppets, Holocaust denial will probably be official policy; during the war the Nazis denied any policy of genocide, and even created a Potemkin village at Theresienstadt to show the world that no extermination was taking place. Despite the official stance of the Nazi government, knowledge of the killings was widespread throughout the Reich and most of Europe. In a Nazi victory TL, it would be an open secret.

How would the Holocaust be remembered in the rest of the world? By 1941 Allied governments had fairly detailed knowledge of the camps and the exterminations, and even reports appeared in newspapers in the Allied nations. So I think it's safe to assume that knowledge of the atrocities would be fairly widespread.

However, knowledge alone doesn't mean much. The Armenian, Cambodian and Rwandan genocides are fairly well known, but they have unfortunately had little impact on societies outside the ones in which they occurred. And indeed there would be little more than knowledge. In a Nazi victory there would be few if any survivors, a handful of photos or documents smuggles out of the Reich, and perhaps aerial reconnaissance photos taken by Allied airmen. Without actually seeing the survivors, the corpses, the crematoria and the camps, would the Holocaust still have the same impact on society? With the end of the Final Solution, the camps would be demolished, with only a few artifacts left behind to show what once happened there. The last executioners would die off, and eventually the Reich itself would collapse. The Holocaust would eventually become little more than another name in a litany of past crimes, just another page in the black book of history.

Does this analysis seem sound?

In Nazi-Europe:
I think it would be remembered in a strange way between denial and"might makes right". The industrial scale would be denied as a conspiracy theory while on the other hand anti-semitism and murders would be justified as a necessary thing because judeo-bolshevism etc. (Fascism would be much more legitimate ITL sadly).

Rest of the world:

Probably similiar as the Armenian Genocide in OTL. A Jewish Diaspora trying to raise awareness and several other groups trying to prevent a classification as genocide.
 
Depends on if the Holocaust is ongoing past Nazi domination of Europe. No way in hell does Germany ever acknowledge it, at least not under the Nazis, but the rest of the world may recognize that the Nazi regime was (and maybe is) committing atrocities. I liken it to the state of the prison camps today in North Korea - ask NK about those camps and they will deny their existence despite defectors’ accounts and even Google Earth proving that they’re there. It will be the same with the Holocaust in Germany - defectors will tell all about them and satellites will show where they are, but Germany will admit its head of state is a goose before it admits that there are any such camps.
 
Pretty dam sad that there are so many post WWII analogues to the Holocaust.
Not as bad as the Holocaust but still pretty dam bad.
 

Manman

Banned
It probably wont be like North Korea considering its resources and it lack of better neighbor to compare it to. Also the genocides will not continue to happen considering they would probably be successful. All in all I see at that it would end up like China where the whole Great Leap forward is ignored and Germany continues as a great power.
 
It would be spoken of as being one of Heinrich Himmler's finest accomplishments. In the Nazi psyche, there is no room for pity. If they won, they would proclaim it to the world. Even in defeat, a lot of the Nazis' response to the whole thing was, "Yeah we did it, and why aren't you thanking us?"
 
In German-controlled Europe, I imagine it likely would not be remembered much, or at least, people would be willfully ignorant of it in the sense of "not my problem".

However, in the rest of the world? It's definitely gonna be remembered as the greatest human tragedy the world has ever seen. There's no way it wouldn't be, especially since a Nazi victory scenario means the Holocaust would be orders of magnitude worse than OTL - not only would the remaining European Jews be hunted down or forced to flee, tens of millions of Slavs would be exterminated, enslaved, or resettled. Not only would their people be exterminated at the hands of the Nazis, but their culture, history, languages, even their architecture would be destroyed. What the Nazis had planned if they won would make OTL's Holocaust look insignificant by comparison. There is simply no way people in the rest of the non-fascist world would forget about something like this. Especially if there is an equivalent to a Cold War between the Nazis and the remainder of the Allies in this TL.
 
The Jewish communities outside Nazi occupied areas will never, ever forget this. From what Himmler said in some of his camp visits and talks to SS men it appears that, in a victory scenario, the extermination of the Jews per se would not be hidden, as making any occupied areas Judenrein would be the accomplishment of a Nzi promise. However the details of the camps would not be written down or openly acknowledged. OTL lots of folks knew about the Einsatzgruppen, the camps, and even the sordid details as soldiers/SS men would take photos which made it home and write home about events. what happened to people who served terms in the regular concentration camps (not the death camps) was known, to have this out as an open secret was a deterrent to anti-Nazi behavior. evidence and the sort of details that came out OTL won't be in the face of the folks outside the Nazi sphere.

What will happen with Generalplan Ost, even if only partially completed, will simply be too big to hide. making the deaths of perhaps 8 million Jews (which is the OTL numbers plus survivors or those not yet behind final lines), but add in the Slavs who will die or be enslaved, just can't hide it.

As far as what the countries outside the Nazi sphere will do, the answer is not much. Some of the worst antisemitism may be toned down as too close to what the Nazis did, but otherwise not much. The dead are dead, and since we posit the Nazis are victorious the "west" will have to learn to live with a Nazi dominated continental Europe like they learned to live with the USSR. Some time down the road a WWIII may erupt or the Nazi system will collapse internally like the USSR did, but for at least 2-3 decades after the end of the war I don't see much being "done". If the system collapses internally, which is by no means a guarantee, by that time probably most of the senior Nazis of WWII are dead, and the younger Nazis who were in person executioners, canp guards etc will be just invisible - so expect no trials. If there is a WWIII, and assuming this doesn't result in mutated cockroaches taking over, I expect there will be plenty of reasons to try and hang a whole bunch of Nazis up and down the chain of command for actions during that war and searching out perpetrators of crimes during WWII will be a very low priority indeed.

For the non Jews it will all fade in to history books as one of many evil things the Nazis did, for the Jews it will never be forgotten and probably become a significant day of mourning observed every year, like those for some other past tragedies. For the Germans, they might get to :"the Nazis were bad, but then again we don't have Jews to worry about".
 
Funny thing Praetor brought this up, since IMO the Holocaust might be acknowledged by the Nazi regime to some extant, though only in a warped lens in a sense of "they had it coming" attitude that some people have of communist atrocities and of course deliberately misconstrue many aspects of the Holocaust, namely making false claims about many victims dying of "accidental" conditions and keeping the death toll below 1 million.
 
How can the Nazi regime reconcile the Jews being well.... all dead, and denying the Holocaust? The current holocaust deniers like playing numbers tricks, but I mean, its a lot harder when there are next to no surviving Jews in Europe...
 
I can imagine the Nazis openly screaming it from the rooftops while also doing likewise when discussing generalplan ost.
 
Depends on if the Holocaust is ongoing past Nazi domination of Europe. No way in hell does Germany ever acknowledge it, at least not under the Nazis, but the rest of the world may recognize that the Nazi regime was (and maybe is) committing atrocities. I liken it to the state of the prison camps today in North Korea - ask NK about those camps and they will deny their existence despite defectors’ accounts and even Google Earth proving that they’re there. It will be the same with the Holocaust in Germany - defectors will tell all about them and satellites will show where they are, but Germany will admit its head of state is a goose before it admits that there are any such camps.
SfqB8.gif
It can happen.
 
Top