Nazi Victory: What happens to the extermination camps?

CalBear

Moderator
Donor
Monthly Donor
You would still agree that from the very beginning of Operation Barbarossa that the intended end goal for the Slavs in the minds of Hitler and his inner circle was extermination and enslavement on a large scope and scale though it may not have been written in full length on paper right?
sloreck laid it out preety much on the button. The details were hanging in the air, not the goal.
 

Wendigo

Banned
It's shocking that in the first 2 years of the war with the USSR so many low and mid level officials and bureaucrats in the Reich sat together in meetings and in their offices and earnestly debated how to eliminate/kill tens of millions of people in an organized and timely manner simply because they were "subhuman."

The sheer callousness is astounding and unprecedented.
 

Insider

Banned
This would be the one real sticking point. There was a appallingly tidy profit running out of the camps to some highly placed officials bank accounts. The utility of the camps would diminish once the Reich had won and completed the elimination of the Jews/Roma/German Communists and the odd PoW. The plan (well, the last version of the plan that is know, there was never a version that had all the right signatures to have a absolute "go") was to eliminate the Slavic population through slave labor/starvation/exposure while creating Hitler's insane vision of the East along with "transportation to the East" (i.e unheated cattle cars with no food or water into Central Asia or Siberia, mainly for those who couldn't work).

It is very possible that some Nazi big wigs might keep the camps going, even as the overall plan was taking place, to wring a few more coins out of the system.
The big wigs had their industrial contracts for forced labour and obvious bribes. But the bribery wasn't a bug, it was a feature, even rank and file guards used the prisoners for small business in exchange for better food and some modicum of protection. Others utilised the most obvious source of income - the new arrivals - stripping them for their last prized possessions. Of course being caught stealling bullion and forgein cash would mean becoming prisoner on its own, but for clothes, shoes and the rest of the stuff these people took with them once they were evacuated, the camp autorities were more willing to overlook the issue.
It is actually possible that it was purposeful or semi-concious reaction. Without additional perks from the job even the iron willed aryan ubermensh (tm) could start exhibiting (gasp!) humane reflexes.
 
Suppose that the horrors were covered up, somehow. No empire lasts forever--imagine the archeologist that discovered some of the MASS graves, and connects the graves with the fact that they were all shot? (Earlier extermination involved lots and lots of shooting.)
 
So who cares what some future Indiana Jones finds. After all the Third Reich was supposed to last a thousand years.
 
So who cares what some future Indiana Jones finds. After all the Third Reich was supposed to last a thousand years.
And after a 1000 years no one would care anyway, regardless of what took over. Even an equality-taken-to-the-absolute-extreme based regime would not be enough to reverse the dilution of effects that a long time in history can do. In all honesty, no-one really cares what Genghis Khan did to the Persians and everyone else, and he killed somewhere between 3-6 times as many people as Hitler.

"So you have heard about the Khan's butchering at that city in Iraq in 1220."
"Yeah. That was a bit bad."
"Don't you feel sorry for the two and a half millions that died?"
"Not really. That happened long ago."
[moves on to next topic]

- BNC
 
Recently there was a story on "60 Minutes" about a priest who is searching for the site of mass graves where the Einsatzgruppens shot Jewish victims. He gets his information from interviewing locals. The point is that even in our world we don't know where all the graves are and no one has bothered to mark them.
 
The Nazis had zero interest in keeping records or marking where the graves of their victims were, even during the time when they were winning or at least thought they were. When it became obvious they were losing, they made strenuous efforts to cover up mass graves, camps etc. They spent a lot of effort better used elsewhere trying to cover evidence, marching prisoners away from the front etc. From a strictly military standpoint leaving prisoners in place would have forced the Russians to devote some effort towards feeding them and providing medical care, if only for self protection against epidemics, roving bands etc. In some instances Geermans had bodies dub up and burned then the bones crushed to hide evidence.
 
Burn the bodies, dig a big pit...problem solved. In the Nazis win scenario nobody foreign will be going anywhere in Großdeutschland they are not supposed to so no need to worry about that. besides, pit gets filled, cover it, plant grass, move to the next pit...
 

Wendigo

Banned
Burn the bodies, dig a big pit...problem solved. In the Nazis win scenario nobody foreign will be going anywhere in Großdeutschland they are not supposed to so no need to worry about that. besides, pit gets filled, cover it, plant grass, move to the next pit...

Since I doubt they would bury them too far away from their worksites across Europe, in a literal sense the post war Nazi New Order would be built on a foundation of millions of bodies. Which is skin crawling to ponder to say the least.
 
I'd imagine that the Extermination Camps would be an "open secret" where the government would deny they existed but many people would know the grim reality of them in private.
 

Wendigo

Banned
I'd imagine that the Extermination Camps would be an "open secret" where the government would deny they existed but many people would know the grim reality of them in private.

IOTL the phrase "going up the chimney" was often used by average German citizens both in conversation and as a warning from 1943 onward: "Don't let the Gestapo hear you say that or else you'll go up the chimney."
 
Stalin did win, Gulag was profitable and ran to 1954...1955.

Khrushchev was no democrat, ask the Hungarians - but Gulag did get downscaled.

Would a victorious Nazi Germany have a Thaw when they run out of easy targets?
 
Would a victorious Nazi Germany have a Thaw when they run out of easy targets?
It depends on who succeeds Hitler IMHO with someone like Speer downscaling the concentration camps to the amount necessary to hold criminals and dissidents when the "sub-humans" have been disposed off while someone like Himmler might ratchet it up to target "insufficiently Aryan" Germans.
 
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