Wendigo
Banned
What have I said that simply isn't true?
Also what do the mods have to do with anything?
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If the Nazis won would they have been able to accomplish Generalplan Ost?
- Thread starter Wendigo
- Start date
What have I said that simply isn't true?
Also what do the mods have to do with anything?
That some people who have posted on this thread believe that the Nazis were misunderstood/the allies were just as bad/the Nazis were a vanilla dictatorships.
This is a serious accusation. Provide examples of this, and when you do, explain why you haven't reported such posts already.
Wendigo
Banned
I'm sorry I didn't make myself clear. I meant some of the posts on the site in general not on this specific thread. I've seen many posts that weren't blatantly pro Nazi but they're still ignorant either morally or historically. More of the apologist kind.
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This is a bit of an interesting discussion. There seems to be a belief that the guys who carried out the holocaust wouldn't have killed a few million more people, and that Hitler and Himler, having gained power, would moderate in the postwar regime.
This seems hard to square with Nazi Germany's shift towards extremism.
This seems hard to square with Nazi Germany's shift towards extremism.
Deleted member 1487
The shift toward extremism tracked with the war being lost. The worse things got for Germany the more extreme the Nazis got. Hitler found his time running out and made the choice to carry out his darkest desires as a result. There was someone that wrote a book, who's title I cannot remember at this moment, that analyzed day by day Hitler's decision to order the Holocaust based on records of his day to day meetings and movements in 1941. The conclusion seems to revolve around US entry into the war in December and Hitler basically deciding it was now or never. Comments he made that have been reported also seem to clue us into his thoughts about it, specifically that so many German soldiers were dying, so he felt he needed to 'rebalance the genetic equation' by eliminating the 'untermensch', especially given that the war had no conclusion in sight. It also seemed to follow his declining health as the stress of the war and Dr. Morrell's treatments added up. So its an open question of whether the same dynamics would play out in a situation where the Nazis win. By definition OTL cannot play out, so the same factors that drove the extremism IOTL won't be present, because the Nazis would have won and have been winning throughout the conflict, so the drivers of a lot of the historical extremism wouldn't be fully present. Now that's not to say that Hitler and the other Nazis wouldn't still do everything to carry out their sick fantasies, but at the same time the things that drove the accumulation of power by the extremists like Himmler wouldn't be a factor ITTL, so its not certain that the full plans would be carried out as the realities of doing so wouldn't exactly mesh with fantastical planning and the more 'rational' Nazis like Speer might end up convincing Hitler to tone it down to ensure that the economy in the East didn't implode and defeat the purpose of the colonizing enterprise. Plus they might well not get enough Germans or 'aryans' to be willing to move into the "Wild East" for settlement.
Wendigo
Banned
Generalplan Ost was first drafted in 1940 after the Polish invasion and then the version made for the Soviet Union was created shortly BEFORE Barbarossa. The Hunger Plan which envisioned the starvation of 30 million Slavs over the winter of 1941 was in the advanced stages of planning in May 1941. So even when they were winning they were still genocidal or at least made detailed plans for genocide especially concerning Poles and Slavs.
If the Reich defeats the USSR sometime between 1941 and 1943 all of their radical plans would already have been written.
IMO in ideological/political terms there was little difference between the Reich and its leadership (Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels etc) as it existed in December 1941 and the one that existed in June 1944 or April 1945. Any differences would be superficial. They were just as racist, just as murderous, and just as zealous in their worldview.
Deleted member 1487
I didn't say they weren't genocidal nutbags that were planning on crazy stuff for a while, I mean look at Hitler's 2nd book from the 1920s that talks about similar stuff. Remember though that the Hunger Plan and Generalplan Ost were drawn up in 1940 when Europe was in famine basically due to the blockade, flooding, and the disruptions of war. The USSR ended up bailing out the Reich with food shipments.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade_of_Germany_(1939–45)#European_food_shortages
The panic that caused was directly related to experiences in WW1 and the feeling that food was a zero sum game and that taking it from the Soviets in 1941 would ensure the survival of German dominated Europe, but that there wasn't enough to go around, so someone would need to starve to ensure the Germans and other Western Europeans could eat. That was the Eastern Europeans in Nazi planning. If the Nazis win, the blockade is taken off, the food situation stabilizes, the motivations might be different because IOTL Nazi planning was driven by the assumption it would be a long war and there would be a battle of the continents, so Soviet food and resources would need to be integrated into the Nazi European plan to ensure they had the resources to fight Britain and the US over the long term and couldn't be blockaded into submission.
To say that the 1944-45 mindset was the same as the 1940-41 one is not factually accurate, same as the 1938-39 one was different than the 1940-41 one.
You're wrong. The Einsatzgruppen moved into Soviet and Baltic territories soon after they were conquered. Babi Yar happened in September of 1941. In Lithuania, the vast majority of Jews (175,000 out of 195,000 total and a prewar population of 210,000) were killed in 1941, the majority of those before December.
If anything, the worsening of Germany's position later in the war slowed down the Holocaust, as the Nazis decided they needed slave labor. The Final Solution, while only formally decided in January 1942, was developed over September and October of 1941. In Poland, the peak period for deportations to the extermination camps was 1942, when Germany still thought it could win; afterward it slowed down, and by 1944, anyone who could be spared for slave labor was, except in Hungary and among people who openly rebelled, as in the Warsaw Ghetto. In fact one of the tragedies of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is that by the time it happened, the pace of extermination of Polish Jews had slowed due to Germany's worsening position in the war, and it's likely that most of the ghetto's inhabitants would've survived the war had they not launched their rebellion.
Deleted member 1487
Retroactively that is included in the Holocaust by historians, but the Wannsee Conference which was ordered by Hitler after the US entered the war happened in 1942. The first steps toward the 'Final Solution' began in mid-1941 with the Einsatzgruppen and a study ordered by Goering in July that eventually led to the Wannsee Conference as the Madagascar Plan was being dumped as the 'solution to the Jewish question'. But until Hitler gave the final order in December, the Holocaust as we know it wasn't planned, the Einsatzgruppen were part of Generalplan Ost and the belief that Jews were the leaders of communism, so just as the Commissar Order was to kill the leadership of the Communist Party, the murder of Soviet Jews was to kill off what the Nazis thought were the pillars of Communism in the USSR, the Jewish communities. It wasn't the full on genocide of all the Jews in Europe yet, it was part of the war on Communism, but lead directly into the Holocaust as the US entered the war and Hitler considered that all Jews needed to go, not just Soviet Jews.
I would suggest reading "Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin" for the evolution of the Holocaust.
https://www.amazon.com/Bloodlands-Europe-Between-Hitler-Stalin/dp/0465031471
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Bolshevism#Nazi_Germany
Not at all. A large part of the Holocaust was extermination through labor. The Nazis used their labor programs, even to the point of wasting eliminating skilled and useful labor, to exterminate people. I mean look at the construction of Camp Dora in the V-2 program. The Holocaust of course was an evolutionary (or devolutionary) process that continued to become more and more extreme as the Nazis realized what they could get away with, but were also motivated by the war continuing to escalate and drag on to no hope of victory (not that in victory they would have done much to moderate unless it became necessary). In 1942 the Germans didn't really expect that they could win outright, they were gearing up for the 'War of Continents' where victory was over the USSR and the absorption of its resources to then have a show down with the US and UK, which Hitler then considered the true heart of the 'Jewish International Conspiracy'. There was only a slow down in extermination via gas chambers because they ran out of people that were easily accessible to exterminate. Getting their hands on Jews in Hungary, Romania, France, etc. required diplomacy as technically they were sovereign states still. By the end of 1942 it was the Jews immediately in Nazis clutches that were pretty much all gone unless they were really useful. I highly doubt the Warsaw Ghetto inhabitants would have survived the war if they didn't rise up; they rose up during another cleaning out of people for the camps and considering what happened to Warsaw when the Poles rose up, what do you think would have become of the Ghetto during that???
https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005188
The Nazis were killing them anyway, the Uprising was the result of the Nazis coming to close the Ghetto and send the last remaining Jews in the city to concentration camps
The Einsatzgruppen did not kill 95% of Lithuanians; they focused on Jews and other categories, such as communists and Roma. What's more, that phase of the Holocaust killed about a quarter of the victims, around 1.3 million Jews (2 million total); not all of this was in 1941, but it was at its most intense in 1941.
At the same time, the situation in the Polish ghettos was getting dire. Food supplies were running low, and the Jews could no longer afford to pay for shipments. This led Hitler et al to develop the Final Solution; they did not want to spend resources on feeding people in the ghettos. Belzec began construction in November of 1941, and Chelmno in October of 1941. Focusing on Wannsee as the turning point is wrong - the decision had already been made months before. It misses not only a large minority of the genocide, but also what led to the decision to embark on the rest of the genocide. It wasn't any turning point within the broader course of the war, but internal developments to the Holocaust as it went on in 1941.
And yet a large majority of people arriving at Auschwitz by train were sent to the gas chambers immediately - to say nothing of Treblinka II, Belzec, Chelmno, and Sobibor, which did not have labor camp annexes and did not select anyone for labor with the exception of Sonderkommando. (Treblinka I was a labor camp, but the total number of people who were imprisoned there, per Wikipedia, was 40,000, compared with 800,000 killed in Treblinka II.)
Extermination through labor was a small fraction of the Holocaust. It gets overrated in Holocaust stories because those are written by survivors, who were definitionally not gassed, and quite often survived by being selected for slave labor rather than extermination. Compare the number of Holocaust stories about Auschwitz with the number about Treblinka; Auschwitz killed 1.1 million people to Treblinka's 800,000, give or take, but because Auschwitz was both an extermination camp and a labor camp, it produced far more survivors, and thus far more stories. Auschwitz is a household name, a byword for the Holocaust and the gas chambers. Treblinka isn't - people in Israel learn about it, but they still use Auschwitz as the byword, and travel to Auschwitz for history field trips. The relative lack of attention paid to people who were shot by Einsatzgruppen in 1941 comes from a similar reason - few to no survivors, and usually those survivors either traveled east and their stories are part of the general Soviet history of victory over the Nazis or traveled west and had a personal history similar to that of the Polish Jews who survived through 1942.
Even relative to numbers, there was a slowdown. In Lithuania, people who survived to 1942 were generally rounded up in ghettos and survived well into 1943 at least. In Poland, the people who were still left in the ghettos by early 1943 were spared, modulo uprisings, until the Soviet advance was close enough that the Nazis decided to close up shop. There's a big difference between saying that the Soviet advance accelerated the liquidation of certain ghettos as the Nazis were trying to cover up evidence of what had happened, and saying that it or the US entry into the war contributed to the Holocaust writ large.
So what you're saying is that except a small number of useful slaves, all Jews in directly Nazi-occupied areas were killed even before the tide had turned against Germany?
A combination of extermination and labor. There's a recent controversy over this, and I'd link you to articles in Haaretz about the subject, but they're paywalled because @#$%. The revisionist approach (in the sense of general historical revisionism, not specifically Holocaust revisionism or Revisionist Zionism) argues two things. First, the uprising was limited in scope (only 16 Germans were killed), and involved a small portion of the people in the ghetto; its actual military achievements were nil. And second, it accelerated the destruction of the ghetto and the deportation of its inhabitants, through Nazi collective punishment.