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

Manman

Banned
Honestly I see the world forgetting about it. Unlike most atrocities the Germans are neither weak or minor so they will have no reason to let that get in the way when you can make a good trade deal and get German goods, resources, and trade. Apart from that there is no actual neighbor that is either with the Nazis or simply to far away to care. Even the Jewish people will have to deal with if relations get better and things cool down after whatever cold war has happened.
 
In Himmler's Posen speech, he contemplated keeping the whole thing secret. "...To have endured this and at the same time to have remained a decent person — with exceptions due to human weaknesses — has made us tough, and is a glorious chapter that has not and will not be spoken of..." (emphasis added) I think the reality will be a bit different insofar as there will be for some decades people in Germany and greater Europe who remember the Jews and either know their fate or suspect it. But for later generations, it will be something that falls into the memory hole driven by government policy never to speak of it and lack of first-hand or even second-hand knowledge as those with first-hand knowledge know better than to openly discuss it as well as a Nazi educational system that will push government propaganda and disinformation.

Outside Germany, of course, the fate of the Jews will be known and it will be considered one of history's great atrocities, together with the wholesale murder of other "undesirable" groups such as the Roma, Slavs and others who were exterminated. Much of that memory will exist in the United States with its large population of immigrants from affected countries and groups.
 
We only know about the Holocaust thanks to the Soviet Union and the Western Allies liberating the concentration camps. There were reports of atrocities against Jews in Allied newspapers, but they were footnotes in newspapers and based upon mere reports from the occupied countries. Take this clipping as an example.

DT1942_3177339a.jpg


Had those troops not found the camps due to the Nazis winning, the Holocaust would only be considered a myth at worst and at best, something that only matters to the Jews who escaped Nazi Germany, since they would be the only ones spreading the word about it. Without the documents that revealed the mass extent of the Holocaust, historians would only treat this supposed 'Holocaust' as a minor detail in history, compared to the crimes that the Nazis would've perpetrated in this timeline that would've exceeded it. The aforementioned stories about the Jews being gassed would be dismissed as lies by some people, equivalent to the story of German factories using human corpses during World War I, since there is no evidence, aside from hearsay, that the Holocaust actually happened or happened to the extent reported by the Jews, who have an axe to grind with Germany and so, some people would think, have no problems lying about supposed atrocities.
 
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

They did try to hide it, to a major extent, even from most of the German people IOTL though.

That is to say that I agree with those who say that even a victorious Third Reich would try to hide most of its worst crimes from the world and from much of its own population as well. As much as an openly evil Nazi empire publicly revelling in its darkness and depravity and happily presenting itself to the world as a slavering, blood-soiled monster knee-deep in guts and severed limbs is a well-used AH trope, going by the OTL decisions of the Nazi leadership, or that of other major OTL totalitarian regimes, it just does not seem very realistic in my humble opinion.

The great majority of all regimes want to present themselves as the good guys, I'd argue, even while having ideologies that are at core actually evil. The Nazi view of what it means to be a good guy was of course a lot different from much of the world at the time, but in general outlines the public image the Nazi state wanted to project for the other powers and foreign peoples was not actually alien to humanity itself. The Nazis would hide their worst excesses, and rationalize and spin the rest as generally beneficial for humanity or at worst "necessary sacrifices". They'd want to attract allies and fellow travellers all around the world, not to create opposition against themselves everywhere. They need to use Big Lies skillfully to do that, coming clean about their worst crimes would be very bad PR policy.
 
Last edited:
They did try to hide it, to a major extent, even from most of the German people IOTL though.
Wasn't only when they were losing the war and had to worry about war crimes trials

The great majority of all regimes want to present themselves as the good guys
Given they consider them to parasites, why would they hide what in their view killing locusts anymore then farmers try to hide it .

They'd want to attract allies and fellow travellers all around the world
They already have the territory from the soviet union and its not like there European allies can go against them and geopolitics takes priority over morals
 
Wasn't only when they were losing the war and had to worry about war crimes trials

If the fear of repercussions in the hands of the victors would have had such an effect on the leading Nazis, wouldn't it stand to reason that they would have also started abandoning their programs of mass killing and destroying/hiding the concrete evidence when losing the war seemed more likely? In reality the expectation of losing made them ramp up the Holocaust, not to slow it down. In fact the attempts to hide the more unsavoury results of Nazi policies predated the war. For example during the Berlin Olympics of 1936 things were "camouflaged" in Berlin and some anti-Jewish policies eased up "for the duration" exactly to give the foreign visitors a less negative and less controversial view of Nazi Germany.

So, I don't buy the argument that the attempt to hide the worst crimes was simply due to a fear over postwar treatment.


Given they consider them to parasites, why would they hide what in their view killing locusts anymore then farmers try to hide it .

It is a poor analogy. Farmers know that the great majority of the country's, if not the world's population shares the idea that locusts are indeed harmful and eradicating them is a good thing. In the case of the Nazis, they certainly knew that most of the world's population (and much of Germany's population too) considered Slavic and Jewish people human beings.


They already have the territory from the soviet union and its not like there European allies can go against them and geopolitics takes priority over morals

Making the majority of the world's population see your country as a bloody, inhuman abomination that needs to be cleansed with fire is much worse geopolitics than trying to look like a generally more-or-less normal, even admirable nation.
 
At the end of some sort of Nazi victorious scenario, there simply won't be any way to hide the fact that essentially all of the Jews of Europe are GONE. The deportation of the Jews from everywhere Nazi rule exists can't be hidden because millions of people have seen neighbors taken away, boxcars of Jews on the rails and so forth.(1) The complete absence of Jews, to the tune of perhaps 8 million or more, might very well be sold as "they died due to disease, lack of food, "collateral damage" during fighting, basically shit happens in wartime. Very few will buy that, especially when the Roma likewise totally vanish and Slavs die off in large number and are reduced to serfdom.

From early on the Nazis have made no secret of their desire to expunge the Jews from anywhere they ruled, initially just Germany. Not that they called for extermination first, but if it is expulsion where are they? IMHO the Nazis won't try and hide the fact that Europe is Judenfrei, they will trumpet it at least internally, but what Himmler is saying is that the details of the death camps including medical experimentation, murder of children, and so forth and the Einstazkommandos burning synagogues with the Jews inside, won't be publicized. Sort of like the comment of Bismarck on diplomacy and sausage making.

(1) As an example the Nazis made zero effort to hide the deportation of French Jews, the Velodrome d'Hiver collection area. Hundreds, if not thousands, of Frenchmen were involved in this from gendarmes who collected the Jews to railway workers who helped the trains move. This is only one example of dozens or hundreds, and not all those who participated were fascist sympathizers or rabid antisemites who would have celebrated these actions.
 
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
Because this was their intent OTL, clearly stated.
They were seemingly set out to cancel the very memory that Judaism (or things like a Polish or Russian nation) even ever existed.
 
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...

Jews? What Jews? Do you mean that fanatical tribe the Romans exterminated under Hadrian? They never lived in Europe of course. Oh, I see, you are buying into the decadent propaganda of those Liberal American mongrels.

(This is what I guess the official Nazi line might look like).
 
In the aftermath of their glorious victory, Germany decided the fate of the Jews who had caused them such pain throughout the centuries. In a magnanimous gesture to allow the Jews a chance to redeem themselves for their millennia of sins, they were transported to fertile and warm lands far to the edges of the Reich where they could be safely monitored as they created their own society far away from where they might harm any Aryan. Tragically however the innate depravity, laziness, and duplicity of the Jews caused them to refuse to do any work or farming, leading to mass starvation (despite generous German food aid) and resulted in them slaughtering eachother en-masse in a final orgy of spite and greed, leaving no survivors. A sad yet powerful testament to the danger of the Jewish race even to itself, and the ultimate fate of a parasite whose host has rejected it.

And naturally, proof would be plentiful. There would be thousands of photos of ruined towns and villages, starved corpses in mass graves, and bodies of unarmed men women and children who were shot by their fellow Jews. In any case, the ultimate fate of the Jews would be of little import to citizens of the Third Reich. Those who cared enough to ask would be given this incontrovertible proof, and those who persisted or made seditious claims that these photos look suspiciously similar to sights seen in Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, the Baltics etc in the wake of German conquest would be treated with the full contempt Jew sympathisers deserve from society and the state.


Remember, the Nazis spun penniless Jewish refugees in the Warsaw Ghetto living in squalor as "undeniable proof the Jews are filthy misers who refuse to spend money on better living conditions" and visibly starving Jewish children begging for food on the street as "undeniable proof that the Jews' greed and obsession with commerce is genetic and even their children are subhuman scum" in The Eternal Jew. Farcically evil and blatant lies like above would be well within their zone of comfort. Also their propaganda would not be an effort to convince a doubting outside world but a thoroughly indoctrinated Germany under the assumption that enemy powers will inevitably collapse soon and leave Germany utterly unchallenged. The SS would delete all records and physical evidence of the Holocaust, with the only evidence being the few escaped camp inmates who made it to safety, private diaries (and possibly photos) from German/European workers/soldiers involved in the holocaust, allied intelligence, documents and such circulated within the governments of Nazi Allies, and possibly internal communications between Nazi leaders.

The world would be entirely aware of what the Nazis did, though many would likely consider the "deportations to their own colony" propaganda to be partially true (with it being understood as "we force marched them to a freezing wasteland and let them die of starvation and exposure like Turkey did with the Armenians") but once the Reich inevitably collapses, the accounts of those who partook in the holocaust would gradually filter out, and when combined with other info would lead to the einsatzgruppen and death camps slowly gaining recognition as the true mechanism of genocide.
 

Ak-84

Banned
Even within the Nazi regime, the level of ant-Semitism varied. In the upper echelons. Himmler was fanatical, kill every Jewish Man, woman, child and their cat and damn the consequences. Hitler was much more boilerplate, approved of it but he'd probably have stopped the extermination if he thought there was an advantage. Goering was someone who opposed mass killings, although he did fuck all to stop them.

It really depends on who takes power in the post-war era. As well as the calculus of international relations. Its not like the British or the American and the Soviets had clean hands as far as genocide was concerned. For all I know, they might even admit some "wrongdoings" and "excesses". Bit like the British do today.
 
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.
This makes sense to me. Armenien genocide is one example, the ressurrection of Stalins reputation in Russia is another. While nazism surpassed Stalin particularly in evil intent, without detailed knowledge it could end up in the same category. At least as long as the reich created State exists. Post that I Think it would be gradually uncovered how bad it was. But beeing far in the distant past, it wouldn’t have the impact on human Rights etc.it had IOTL.
 
OP: Probably something like this:
"First of all, so called Holocaust is vastly overblown. True, some people of various nationalities interned in concentration camps died of starvation and disease, but definitely not millions of them, and it wouldn't have happened if British and American hadn't blockaded trade of non-military goods between Germany and the rest of the world. There weren't even six millions of Jews in Europe before the war. Many Germans died or malnutrition too, never-mind Allied firebombings of German cities. Second, to the extent that some isolated illegal execution taken place, they were conducted on orders of Himmler, without Hitler's knowledge. Our beloved fuhrer couldn't have possibly known, or he'd stop them."
 
Last edited:

Ak-84

Banned
Enough Jews died in OTL, without the Nazis actively trying to kill* them, that it would be a somewhat plausible argument.

*Anne Frank for instance, it was Typhus that did her in. And of before anyone says it, of course the Nazis were culpable in her death.
 
You only have to look to Japan's version of history in their school curriculum today

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21226068

and this is in a country who was defeated. In a victory scenario it wouldn't be talked about.

Similarly I remember going to the Deutsches Museum in Munich in the 1980's and being surprised that they just ignored the Second World War. Think it's changed now but that was 40 years after the fact.
 

Deleted member 94680

There would be no holocaust.

There would be a Judenfrei Europe, but that would be because the Jews have been transported out of the Reich. The concentration camps were simply holding areas, designed to keep the Jews away from normal folk whilst their transport was being arranged, see? It wouldn’t be trumpeted, but it would be common knowledge that the Jews are gone and it would be “a good thing”. Zeitgeist would agree that removing the Jews was necessary because reasons and not much more thought than that would be given to it.

Abroad, in whatever nation that opposes the Nazis - if such a nation exists - there wouldn’t be much thought to it either, as more important issues would dominate the thinking of the nations. After all, OTL the Americans never worried about the Armenian Genocide when trying to woo Turkey in the Cold War did they?
 
Even if people KNEW about the Holocaust, it would be a blip in the radar and compared to the horrors of Generalplan Ost and the extermination of 60-80% of Eastern Europe's population. The genocide of Jews would simply be lumped in with the overall Nazi extermination of everyone they hated.

For comparison: OTL, about 60% of Jews in Europe died in the Holocaust. TTL, we're talking about 60% of everyone living between the German border up to the Ural Mountains.
 
Last edited:
Top