Nazis destroy Holocaust evidence

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Deleted member 1487

What if the Nazis managed to destroy evidence of the Holocaust?
I mean they decide after Bagration to burn all documents related to the Holocaust, kill the remaining camp inmates, and burn the camps to the ground, plow over the grounds, and plant trees over it, like they did for Sobibor.
This means no Allied soldiers liberate concentration camps, no film crew come in and document everything, and no documents are captured to implicate anyone.
Obviously there still are people that know about it, Sobibor survivors, ghetto survivors, Allied POWs in nearby camps, Allied spies, etc.
But this is no physical evidence, just witness testimony.
What does this mean for the Nuremburg trials? What about public perception of the war and the Germans/Nazis? Holocaust denial?
 
Well for first, they can't destroy everything. The most obvious evidences, people, and administrative proofs, ok. But it would remain "archeological" evidence (as the grave pit in the Balkans), the ver own destruction would let traces (as an eventual destruction of the proofs of the destructions).

It would be harder to proof, and far more revisionism, but it could been deducted from the lack of jewish population, the network created by the nazis, and archeological proofs.
 

elkarlo

Banned
Well for first, they can't destroy everything. The most obvious evidences, people, and administrative proofs, ok. But it would remain "archeological" evidence (as the grave pit in the Balkans), the ver own destruction would let traces (as an eventual destruction of the proofs of the destructions).

It would be harder to proof, and far more revisionism, but it could been deducted from the lack of jewish population, the network created by the nazis, and archeological proofs.


No Jewish pop? That's circumstantial evidence.

But yeah, can't erase the bodies of millions of people. You'd really have to go outa your way to do that, and now with DNA testing, you could prolly find traces no matter how though they were
 
The novel Fatherland features a successful Holocaust that the Nazis try to erase all evidence, physical and witness of. I dont want to give any spoilers but some does survive. It's actually near on impossible to achieve given the sheer scale of the Holocaust, Fatherland takes place in a Nazi victory TL where they've more time to do it, in the scenario you've outlined it would be very difficult to achieve this with the Russians bearing down on them. It's probably likely that had someone suggested doing this they would have been accused of defeatism.
 
The Nazis did try to hide evidence of some of the death camps ahead of the advancing Russian Army. In the end the scale of what had taken place poved to be too big to hide.
 
Yep, someone at some point is going to ask. ''Hey where are all the Jews at...Oh didnt Hitler say he wanted to wipe them out or somthing...'':rolleyes:

In the occupied nations and the U.S.S.R they knew from the day the Germans invaded, that Jews were being rounding up or simply killed on-site. This cannot be hidden.

So nov major change from OTL. Except the Germans might be viewed even worse to some degree.
 
Not only did these psychopaths not destroy the evidence, they actually filmed themselves doing much of it! Also, the bulk of the holocaust took place after the tide of the war had thanfully turned against them.
 

Ismail

Banned
Holocaust "denial" is a lot more popular compared to OTL.
It is denial, I don't see the reason for scare quotes.

Anyway as others have noted it's pretty much impossible to cover it all up, and it wouldn't really make much sense anyway (sans a crushing Nazi victory everywhere giving them decades to try to erase all mentions and evidence) unless the Nazis somehow didn't win the war but the state continued to exist post-1945. But that's then also assuming a return to their pre-1938 border, which in turn would leave more than a little evidence of the Holocaust in occupied territories.
 
The Allies already had evidence before June 1944.

Didn't the Jewish community in Allied countries try to publicise what was going on as early as 1942? IIRC, Allied governments and their citizens either didn't believe it at first, or they believed it and either didn't really care, or they thought it irrelevant to war strategy....
 
Didn't the Jewish community in Allied countries try to publicise what was going on as early as 1942? IIRC, Allied governments and their citizens either didn't believe it at first, or they believed it and either didn't really care, or they thought it irrelevant to war strategy....

More a "Sucks, but what can we do about it?" approach, but yeah. Jews and Poles and other Eastern Europeans who escaped the camps brought back information, and the Western Allies had recon photos of the major death camps.
 

wormyguy

Banned
Re: the lack of a Jewish population, a lot of people would probably accuse the Soviets, especially in a Cold War similar to OTL.
 
Would take a very long time, and a lot of manpower and resources (heck, don't forget that killing people was the whole purpose of death camps; speeding up the process without wasting incredibly large amounts of ammo isn't possible). And still people would know about it, also because the Nazis weren't quite as stereotypically thorough as one might expect from Germans and Austrians. Don't forget that, early on, they also had concentration camps where they did sent letters home about everybody dying, even if they were Jews who, rather than
And there's the large amount of allied servicemen they just locked up next to the camps, even the death camps.

Holocaust denial would be a ridiculous claim even without apparent physical evidence, mainly because no party involved, except for the occupied and thoroughly re-educated Germany, would support it.

Family legend (sadly, he's deceased know) has it that my grandfather was in a death camp (after being very unruly in a Arbeitseinsatz camp), and later on in the war the Germans did try to wrap up their activities, with the Russians at their door step; they had to stop halfway because the Russians were very near and they were nearing the bottom of their ammunition supply (can't remember the camp's name :/). Massacring people on short notice is very hard and costly, unless you go all Rwanda on them, which is something I don't even see most SS guards doing to thousands of people.
 
Impossible to cover up completely. Even in a Nazi peace scenario it will be exposed, the question is, how long can the inevitable be delayed?
 
Re: the lack of a Jewish population, a lot of people would probably accuse the Soviets, especially in a Cold War similar to OTL.

Why would the Soviets be blamed? Didn't many anti-communists accuse the Communists of being Jewish dominated? Also, many members of the Soviet government and military were Jewish.
 
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