If the Nazis never created death camps would they have been created eventually?

If the Nazis never created death camps would they have been created eventually?

  • No they wouldn't have been created

    Votes: 14 34.1%
  • Yes they would have been created by another dictatorship

    Votes: 27 65.9%

  • Total voters
    41
It is not like the idea of concentration camps were unique or new at that time and neither was the idea of systematic ethnic cleansing by (attempted) total extermination of a population. Mass murder and genocide have happened frequently throughout history.

The Nazi death camps were 'just' a logical extension of trends that went as far back as written human history. It was unique in that it was the first time large scale genocide and industrial organization was put together in a situation were the victims were just sympathetic enough to cause the sort of outrage to make people say: "Never Again!"

If it had not been the Nazis someone else would have done the same sooner or later.

If the nazis had spared the Jews and instead only targeted less sympathetic victims like the Gypsies, the international outcry would have been far less strong and some other group would have continued with the same method until at some point the magic combination had been reached.

For the longest time in history you would be hard pressed to get people to agree that genocide was even wrong as long as they were on the side of the victors not the victims. It was only with the dawn of the age of enlightenment that the idea that killing entire peoples to take over the land was evil became a mainstream thing.

As late as the late 19th or early 20th century English settler killed the entire native population of Tasmania so that today not a single full-blooded Tasmanian aboriginal remains just a few people claiming distant part ancestry who try to reconstruct the destroyed culture.

Not long before WWI The Belgian king was running the Congo like his own personal plantation and possibly killing as many Congolese in the process as Hitler killed Jews.

Ans the US was putting up concentration camps in the Philippines where thousands died due to the poor conditions around the same time.

All these were in part widely protested and condemned by a lot of people, but not to the degree the Nazi Holocaust was.

People were still mostly okay with that sort of mass murder as long as it happened far away to people sufficiently alien and as long as there was the enough excuses about it being just a by-product of something else rather than the actual aim.

A few decades later and mores had slightly changed making that sort of thing slightly less acceptable. Mass media and war reporting had evolved further and Nazi Germany had lost the war making it extremely easy to call their actions out for what they were. (War crimes and crimes against humanity are much easier to justify if you are a winner of a war.)

The holocaust was the cumulation of people doing what people had always been doing but doing it on a much larger scale and in a climate were that was no longer acceptable.

Without the Nazis killing the Jews the idea that this would have been 'wrong' would have not been present as much in human culture and somebody else would sooner or later have done something similar and gotten a similar reaction.

Eventually if the world had continued without a proper, large scale and well organized genocide long enough we might have developed enough to see inequivocal that it was wrong without having an example to hold up along those lines.

Surely there was plenty of opportunity there at different points in the history in the last few decades. Of course a colonial power massacring natives or things like the killings of Tutsi by Hutu wouldn't have had quite the same impact due to lack of organization and industrialisation to drive the killing. But some things that may have happened would surely have come close enough.

For that matter I would not be so sure that at some point in the future something like the holocaust in both scale and deliberate action may not come again some day, even with the example in history telling everyone to never let this happen again.

Humans can be right bastards.
 
Couldn't Siberian labor camps (ones in the far hinterlands specifically) count?
if so, the Nazi weren't first.

Unlike Nazi death camps Soviet labor camps weren't meaning to be mass destruction camps. There died lot of people but it wasn't intentional. Soviets just didn't care any shit survive prisoners or not. Nazis wanted just kill all who were in camps.
 
Unlike Nazi death camps Soviet labor camps weren't meaning to be mass destruction camps. There died lot of people but it wasn't intentional. Soviets just didn't care any shit survive prisoners or not. Nazis wanted just kill all who were in camps.

Dubious.
The NKVD and then the KGB knew which gulag and camps were the worst. and thus sent the most undesirables (often gypsies, Ukrainians, etc) to them knowing they'd die eventually.
 
...For that matter I would not be so sure that at some point in the future something like the holocaust in both scale and deliberate action may not come again some day, even with the example in history telling everyone to never let this happen again.

Humans can be right bastards.

I'd actually be surprised if it didn't happen again at some point. Those with first hand knowledge of it all have largely passed on and those who are a generation removed from it and thus secondary witnesses (i.e. those who have spoken to survivors and grew up with it hanging over the world) are at mid-life or older. While museums and preservation of the camps may delay it, sooner or later the atrocities of the Holocaust will pass from something fairly concrete and personal into the realm of the abstract. For people my age (50ish), the Holocaust may not have happened within our lifetimes, but it is still something tangible within my own personal experience. I've seen the tattoos, I've spoken with people who have survived the camps and been able to think of it in terms of something that could have happened to or been perpetrated by people the age of my parents and grandparents. Now fast forward to someone born in 1991. They don't remember the Cold War, much less have any personal connection to the Holocaust. Now fast forward again to people being born today who are another generation removed and who will be young adults when the centennial of the Holocaust takes place. To them, these events will be dark chapters from a long ago past which they will read about in a book and which will be covered in a day or two of a high school history class. Only a handful will bother learning much more and even fewer will speak to people my age, who might tell them that, yes, this really happened and here's what the lady who survived the camps told me about it. And against that backdrop of diminishing knowledge and personal experience, someone will come along and tell them that "the history books exaggerated the whole thing, it really wasn't that bad".

Maybe this is all a bit pessimistic, but the world in many ways is just as bigoted and ugly as it was 70 years ago, full of people looking for a scapegoat for their problems. Not to send this off into Chat, but there is today in Europe and in North America ample evidence for this, that view that things will be better if only we could get rid of the "other" in our midst. And as long as that view persists, and it matters not who the "other" may be, there will always be a few for whom genocide is an acceptable solution to the "problem". They will speak of it with regret, perhaps, an unfortunate but necessary step, but the end result will be the same. And with our technology, so much further advanced from the 1940s, it has the potential to be far more efficiently lethal.
 
The British camps during the Boer War were part of an overall strategy that was designed to deprive the Boer Kommandos of the support they received from the civilian population. This included emptying the countryside and also string barbed wire fences to divider the countryside up in to manageable chunks. The appalling death rate in the camps, mostly women and children, was due to the lack of clean water, adequate sanitation, limited medical care, etc. While no doubt some of the mistreatment was due to individuals who wanted bad things to happen to these civilians, simple incompetence managed to do the trick. When you look at the medical and other preventable disasters that overtook British forces in South Africa...
 
IIRC the Boers were also hitting the railroad lines, which affected not only the British soldiers, but also unfortunately the camps.
 
Death camps implies using the state's resources to create specific camps for extermination of people. It implies efficiency, and arguably dispassionate execution combined with industrial prowess and technical proficiency.

The window of opportunity for this is before the Information Age (when dictators and scumbags would try and hide this) and after the state gained enough industrial capacity for this to be a reality (probably after 1900).

No, I do not think death camps would be invented, precisely because the brutal Pol Pot types can always work people to death in fields. Work camps like North Korea or "reeducation camps" are distinctly different from death camps whose goal is to process as many people into the oven as quickly as possible. The next window for "death camps" will be in a post-scarcity society, where resources don't matter and disposal of undesirable persons needs to take place away from population centres to avoid the media. Even then it's easier to just put them there, give them minimal food and let them rot.

All this is why the Holocaust is especially egregious, due to the might of progress, science and innovation being turned against the human race.
 
How about the anglo/boar war . The british concentration camps do they count ?
Not in the slightest.

The British camps during the Boer War were part of an overall strategy that was designed to deprive the Boer Kommandos of the support they received from the civilian population. This included emptying the countryside and also string barbed wire fences to divider the countryside up in to manageable chunks. The appalling death rate in the camps, mostly women and children, was due to the lack of clean water, adequate sanitation, limited medical care, etc. While no doubt some of the mistreatment was due to individuals who wanted bad things to happen to these civilians, simple incompetence managed to do the trick. When you look at the medical and other preventable disasters that overtook British forces in South Africa...
Quite.

The British concentration camps of the Boer war had far more in common with Japanese Internment camps in North America during WWII than they did the Nazi death camps.
 
I would've preferred an option for "They were unlikely to have been created", but since no such option was provided, I voted "No".

It's not that the Nazis were the only regime evil enough to do it. I just think that all the other regimes evil enough to do such a thing were either less organized, less "clinical" in their methods, or had a more "pedestrian" vision of mass death (think Rwanda).

The Soviets certainly had the organization and willingness to kill that was required. But they demonstrably preferred other methods.

North Korea might have all the required qualities, but they've never controlled a sufficiently large, hated population of "Others" to call for such an operation.

I simply don't see it likely to happen anywhere else -- not by that specific sort of organized, planned, industrialized method.
 
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