Nazis destroy Holocaust evidence

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Re: the lack of a Jewish population, a lot of people would probably accuse the Soviets, especially in a Cold War similar to OTL.
That would be a stretch. When hundreds of thousands of people get deported by the Nazis, who even before the mass deportations already had a reputation of outright killing Jews in places like Dachau (usually as part of repercussions; they often rounded up random Jews in the neighbourhood when the resistance did something), people aren't going to blame the Soviets, when they can blame the people who took their friends, their freedom and most of their standard of living away.
 

BlondieBC

Banned
The Nazi's did destroy a lot of the evidence. The were very precise record keepers. We know from intel intercepts the number of dead Jews on a certain day, mid war. If the Germans had nothing, we would probably have very near an exact count of the killed, and their names. Have you read, IBM and the Holocaust?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

It goes into a lot of the details of the records need to execute the Holocaust. Hitler was killing Jews who did not even know that they were Jews due to the 1/4 rule. A sixty year old man, who granddad has been Jewish as a child 40 years ago could still get you killed. You grandparents converting to another religion did not save you. They had to compile old census records from up to 100 or so years prior with list of local residents. When the SS came to town, they had a list of names and address of people to catch. This type of organization generates a lot of paperwork that is hard to destroy in its entirety. IMO, the Germans did an excellent quality job destroying records consider the rapidity of the collapse at the end.

As to bodies, the were digging up corpse to run through the crematorium but never finished the job. Himmler gave this job to a SS officer he did not like so much. In 1941, around 1 million or more Jews/Slavs/others were killed in mass graves. Some of the bigger sites were up to 33,000 bodies, but most were much smaller, as small as a few score. From memory, it was about 100 or so per site on average. It is just a lot of work to did up 10,000 sites in war zone, where the front is collapsing, when you are low on the totem pole for resources. For these sites, planting trees will not help, because the locals often attended and knew where the sites were located at.

To realistically shutdown the camps, Hitler has to stop using them months (I would guess at least 3) earlier than he did, and issue orders to kill everyone in an orderly fashion, then burn them and destroy the camp. If he did this, many 100K's more Jews/Slavs/others would not have died. IMO, this would have been unacceptable to Hitler and the SS extermination command.

Now, all this being said, If Hitler had started destroying evidence earlier, there would be a lot more Holocaust denier in the world, but no where near a majority. There would still be the trials, but they would not be as important.
And if there are no trials, it is because the trials were skipped and the high ranking Germans were just shot.
 

CalBear

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Short term it is utterly impossible. The Reich killed ELEVEN million people, 6,000,000 of them Jews. They were still killing even as the Reich collapsed around their ears.

The only way to even try to hide things is to win the Continental portion of the war (a fairly unlikely, albeit barely possible event). Then you could take the years needed to destroy everything. Even then you would miss things.

The flipping morons committing the genocide made HOME MOVIES and took tourist snapshot of the activity (disgusting and idiotic as that seems). These got out all through the war and the Western Allies and the USSR had some of them. Those are gone way outside any chance of retrieval. Some of the other material would wind up in an attic or basement, ticking away for years until found.

You then have to realize that a victorious Germany had really, really insane plans for Europe (shameless plug: Something I look at in some detail in the early part of my Anglo/American - Nazi War T/L). The insane bastards planned to depopulate POLAND, the entire %^#@ country of Poland. They were going to obliterate Leni,grad and Moscow, literally stone by stone until nothing was left standing.

So to recap:

1. Kill every Jew in Europe, along with every Roma, homosexual, Communist, Socialist, and Unionist, roughly 30 million Poles, and sizable parts of the population of the Ukraine and European Russia.

2.Tear down every city and town in Poland. Replace it all with massive German run plantations worked by the few Slavs allowed to survive as serfs.

3. Obliterate Leningrad (St. Petersburg) and Moscow and eliminate any trace they ever existed.

4. Destroy all religion and replace it with the Party and its pseudo-religion.

How do you hide that?
 

BlondieBC

Banned
Short term it is utterly impossible. The Reich killed ELEVEN million people, 6,000,000 of them Jews. They were still killing even as the Reich collapsed around their ears.

The only way to even try to hide things is to win the Continental portion of the war (a fairly unlikely, albeit barely possible event). Then you could take the years needed to destroy everything. Even then you would miss things.

The flipping morons committing the genocide made HOME MOVIES and took tourist snapshot of the activity (disgusting and idiotic as that seems). These got out all through the war and the Western Allies and the USSR had some of them. Those are gone way outside any chance of retrieval. Some of the other material would wind up in an attic or basement, ticking away for years until found.

You then have to realize that a victorious Germany had really, really insane plans for Europe (shameless plug: Something I look at in some detail in the early part of my Anglo/American - Nazi War T/L). The insane bastards planned to depopulate POLAND, the entire %^#@ country of Poland. They were going to obliterate Leni,grad and Moscow, literally stone by stone until nothing was left standing.

So to recap:

1. Kill every Jew in Europe, along with every Roma, homosexual, Communist, Socialist, and Unionist, roughly 30 million Poles, and sizable parts of the population of the Ukraine and European Russia.

2.Tear down every city and town in Poland. Replace it all with massive German run plantations worked by the few Slavs allowed to survive as serfs.

3. Obliterate Leningrad (St. Petersburg) and Moscow and eliminate any trace they ever existed.

4. Destroy all religion and replace it with the Party and its pseudo-religion.

How do you hide that?

Mainly for Calbear, but really anyone who knows for sure.

If Hitler had been 100% successful in killing the UnderRaces, how many million people would that have been?

Jews were defined as 1/4 Jewish or more, i.e. one Jewish Grandparent. Were Gypsies and Slavs defined the same way? i.e. If a person Grandmother was a Pole, but your other three Grandparents were Germans, would you be classified as a Pole?

Also, does anyone know how Hitler got the 1/4 number? I have seen the Hitler was 1/8 or 1/16 Jewish idea. I can also see that is how far census records went back, but did Hitler himself ever explain his "logic"?

On Moscow at least, i read they were going to do a big lake, but there could be multiple plans. And man it would take a long time to do Moscow Stone by Stone. I took a Three Gorges Vacation before the damn, and i go to watch people taking out buildings with sledgehammers and wheel barrels. This method is real, real slow, and likely not to far from how they planned to do it. Replace Chinese worker with Slav Slave, and it is what Hitler planned.

Not only home movies, sometimes the executed the Jews withing sight of a town or village. If there was a nice natural depression with sandy soil, they would massacre people within 100 meters of homes. If I had to pick an over/under number, I bet at least 500K people not in the SS personally witness a murder.

Calbear left out the mentally retarded (low IQ) and people with mental illnesses.
 
As long as there are survivors, they are going to have trouble covering this up. Even if they raze all the death camps, the liberation of other concentration camps, and the discovery of mass graves and other ruins of destroyed death camps will still show the world that the Nazis were ... an unthinkably evil murderous regime.

So to cover up the holocaust, they would have to convert all the other concentration camps to death camps, and they would need to cover up that part of the cover-up.

And that's not to mention the home movies.

Or they could say that the death camps were to mass-murder political dissidents and/or homosexual men, not Jews or Romani or other religious and ethnic minorities. The Allies seem to have been fine with that, considering postwar definitions of genocide, postwar court rulings, and postwar Allied imprisonment of such holocaust survivors.
 

CalBear

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It is actually an good question as far as total deaths if the Nazis had taken the Continent. Jews in Europe totaled around 8.9 million. Roma were in the 2 million range with mentally handicapped running at least 500,000. Non Jews/Roma in Poland ran around 29 million with the Ukraine around 39 million. The plans for both Poland and Ukraine would have required between 5 & 10 million slaves/serfs/workers. The rest of the European USSR would run 60 million +/- if you take out the Baltic states. The Party hadn't really given a lot of thought to the Yugoslavian population, but it has to be expected that the "Southern Slavs" would not have fared much better than those to the North.

That gives you a total of ~137 million "excess" population, of that there would have been a "need" for around 30 million to serve the Master Race as it redrew Europe for all time. Even if you treble the figure for serfs/slaves (which was something the various Gauleiters wanted almost from the start, once they started to take the theory of Germanifcation and try to make it work on the ground) that would mean 47 million people intentionally murdered because of their race.

Throwing in the people killed in the massive war that was going to be needed to put the plans into place 65-70 million dead wouldn't be a bad starting point.

As far as definition, it was actually pretty much arbitrary. People in Poland and the Ukraine were "Germanized" if thy had blue eyes or "looked German". By 1944 some people in General Government were being getting the "Aryan" stamp just for being really useful in running factories or transport systems (Jews and Roma excepted). The complete lack of any standard, however artificial, is probably one of the best illustrations of just how sick the Party leadership was.

I learned a LOT about the Nazi system in the Reich while I was doing my T/L, probably more than I wished I had learned (I actually had real-life sleepless nights a few times). When I started I had Nazi Germany in a select group, along with Stalinist USSR, Mao's PRC during the Great Leap Forward, and Pol Pot's Cambodia, for the most despicable government of all time.

Now, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the Hitler's Reich was, hands down, the most evil, repulsive and utterly despicable state that ever existed. No one else, even Pol Pot, can even stand on the same stage.






Mainly for Calbear, but really anyone who knows for sure.

If Hitler had been 100% successful in killing the UnderRaces, how many million people would that have been?

Jews were defined as 1/4 Jewish or more, i.e. one Jewish Grandparent. Were Gypsies and Slavs defined the same way? i.e. If a person Grandmother was a Pole, but your other three Grandparents were Germans, would you be classified as a Pole?

Also, does anyone know how Hitler got the 1/4 number? I have seen the Hitler was 1/8 or 1/16 Jewish idea. I can also see that is how far census records went back, but did Hitler himself ever explain his "logic"?

On Moscow at least, i read they were going to do a big lake, but there could be multiple plans. And man it would take a long time to do Moscow Stone by Stone. I took a Three Gorges Vacation before the damn, and i go to watch people taking out buildings with sledgehammers and wheel barrels. This method is real, real slow, and likely not to far from how they planned to do it. Replace Chinese worker with Slav Slave, and it is what Hitler planned.

Not only home movies, sometimes the executed the Jews withing sight of a town or village. If there was a nice natural depression with sandy soil, they would massacre people within 100 meters of homes. If I had to pick an over/under number, I bet at least 500K people not in the SS personally witness a murder.

Calbear left out the mentally retarded (low IQ) and people with mental illnesses.
 
It is actually an good question as far as total deaths if the Nazis had taken the Continent. Jews in Europe totaled around 8.9 million. Roma were in the 2 million range with mentally handicapped running at least 500,000. Non Jews/Roma in Poland ran around 29 million with the Ukraine around 39 million. The plans for both Poland and Ukraine would have required between 5 & 10 million slaves/serfs/workers. The rest of the European USSR would run 60 million +/- if you take out the Baltic states. The Party hadn't really given a lot of thought to the Yugoslavian population, but it has to be expected that the "Southern Slavs" would not have fared much better than those to the North.

That gives you a total of ~137 million "excess" population, of that there would have been a "need" for around 30 million to serve the Master Race as it redrew Europe for all time. Even if you treble the figure for serfs/slaves (which was something the various Gauleiters wanted almost from the start, once they started to take the theory of Germanifcation and try to make it work on the ground) that would mean 47 million people intentionally murdered because of their race.

Throwing in the people killed in the massive war that was going to be needed to put the plans into place 65-70 million dead wouldn't be a bad starting point.

As far as definition, it was actually pretty much arbitrary. People in Poland and the Ukraine were "Germanized" if thy had blue eyes or "looked German". By 1944 some people in General Government were being getting the "Aryan" stamp just for being really useful in running factories or transport systems (Jews and Roma excepted). The complete lack of any standard, however artificial, is probably one of the best illustrations of just how sick the Party leadership was.

I learned a LOT about the Nazi system in the Reich while I was doing my T/L, probably more than I wished I had learned (I actually had real-life sleepless nights a few times). When I started I had Nazi Germany in a select group, along with Stalinist USSR, Mao's PRC during the Great Leap Forward, and Pol Pot's Cambodia, for the most despicable government of all time.

Now, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the Hitler's Reich was, hands down, the most evil, repulsive and utterly despicable state that ever existed. No one else, even Pol Pot, can even stand on the same stage.

I wonder what would happen to the Bulgarians...on one hand, we're allied, on the other, we're untermenschen. Maybe Hitler would do a Japan and claim that we aren't slavic due to proto-Bulgarian admixture in the 7th century, no matter how ludicrous that it. On the other, I doubt a continent-bestriding Germany would be very happy with us, as we refused to DOW the USSR and didn't implement the Final Solution on our national territory....Finland could also get a few armies sent its way.

I don't think even Nazi puppet states would be happy to see an (albeit lukewarm) ally being invaded.
 
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Ismail

Banned
Between the gulags, Katyn Forest, the millions killed in Ukraine and such no doubt various accusations would come forward...
I doubt claims that the Soviets massacred Jews will be taken seriously after the McCarthyite period. Jewish culture experienced a relative flourishing in the wartime USSR.
 
I don't think even Nazi puppet states would be happy to see an (albeit lukewarm) ally being invaded.
The Nazis might just use that unhappiness as an opportunity to enact a regime change and replace the reactionaries with far right Nazi nutters, like they did with Hungary in OTL '44.
 

Vladimir

Banned
No possible way they could cover it up. Firstly, remember the Sobibor instance, where the Jews rose up and killed 11 Nazi guards, and a few managed to break out of the camp and survive the war. That was one of a series of Jewish uprisings. Secondly, there were Jews who had gone into hiding or were fighting as partisans, and they knew what had happened to their families. Thirdly, there were individuals who had escaped the camps. There were also a token number of Jews who fled to the US (1,000 were symbolically made prisoners-of-war and held in camps), who would have seen their families wiped out. Already you have thousands of people who can attest that the Holocaust took place. Add the countless non-Jews who saw the deportations taking place, and those who helped them in various ways (such as Irena Sendler, who smuggled Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto), and you have tens, if not hundreds of thousands ready to attest that a Holocaust took place.

The Nazis would not have been able to dig up all the mass graves and burn the bodies before the Allies arrived. There were countless such graves, and to quickly dig them up and get rid of the bodies in a short amount of time would require manpower that the SS did not have, especially since it also was fighting (and losing) a war. They also did not have the manpower or technological resources to destroy all of the concentration camps and grow plant over it before the Allies arrived. When the Allies arrived, they would have found crematoriums and gas chambers, and traces of human ash would probably be recovered. Even a kid would understand what had happened.

Then, there is also the matter of newspapers. In summer 1942, the New York Times reported via the London Daily Telegraph that 1 million Jews had already been killed. In 1943, the German newspaper Der Strumer confirmed that Germany was embarking on a campaign to rid Europe of the Jewish people. Many people already knew what was happening, just not the full extent of it.

You also have to take in consideration that once the Germans begin systematically rounding up and killing people, some will try to hide. It is also possible that the Nazis will miss some documents.

Plus, even if the Nazis did hide it all, Europe will notice that 1/3 of its Jews are missing, and taking what Germany was gearing up to do before the war, it will be quite easy to fit the puzzle together.

It would have been simply impossible to suppress the evidence of an atrocity conducted on such a mass scale.
 
I wonder what would happen to the Bulgarians...on one hand, we're allied, on the other, we're untermenschen. Maybe Hitler would do a Japan and claim that we aren't slavic due to proto-Bulgarian admixture in the 7th century, no matter how ludicrous that it. On the other, I doubt a continent-bestriding Germany would be very happy with us, as we refused to DOW the USSR and didn't implement the Final Solution on our national territory....Finland could also get a few armies sent its way.

I don't think even Nazi puppet states would be happy to see an (albeit lukewarm) ally being invaded.

The Finns were declared to be Ehrenarier(Aryans of non-Aryan origin) by the Nazis after the Finnish DoW on the USSR, likely something similiar would be "bestowed" upon the Bulgarians. You have to remember that you're dealing with a "racial classification" here that changes all the time due to the political situation and has no real basis in logic or history.
 
It is denial, I don't see the reason for scare quotes.

Some people consider correcting numbers or saying the numbers of deaths are lower is "denial" of the Holocaust hence my quotes. i.e. I think one of the Croatian politicians who lowered the death tol for Jasenovic concentration camp was called a holocaust denier by nationalist serbs. Given how inflammatory this can get, I used quotations. After all, people who lower the number have a better argument if Nazi Germany destroys the death camps and evidence etc etc.

I wonder what would happen to the Bulgarians...on one hand, we're allied, on the other, we're untermenschen. Maybe Hitler would do a Japan and claim that we aren't slavic due to proto-Bulgarian admixture in the 7th century, no matter how ludicrous that it. On the other, I doubt a continent-bestriding Germany would be very happy with us, as we refused to DOW the USSR and didn't implement the Final Solution on our national territory....Finland could also get a few armies sent its way.
.

The Finns were declared to be Ehrenarier(Aryans of non-Aryan origin) by the Nazis after the Finnish DoW on the USSR, likely something similiar would be "bestowed" upon the Bulgarians. You have to remember that you're dealing with a "racial classification" here that changes all the time due to the political situation and has no real basis in logic or history.

Let's remember by 1944 Himmler was talking about "defending the white race" and seemed to have dropped his "germanic aryan" kitsch due to having his ass kicked by the Soviet Union & trying to rationalize all the non-german workers in the reich and groups like Russian Liberation Army...

Source: War of the World

A question-if the Nazis somehow win the European war, what happens to Fascist Italian policies toward Jews?

Mussolini gives Hitler the finger like what Finland did with Nazi Germany (stuff like Jewish Finnish soldiers having religious services and speaking Hebrew/Yiddish loudly and obnoxiously in front of Wehrmacht soldiers and especially SS units)

Okay not exactly like that. But the Finnish government did not acceed to the whole 'give us your Jews plzthx' request from Nazis. The Japanese in Shanghai did the same, partially due to them wanting the Jewish powers of moneymaking (no, seriously - imperial japan encouraged Jewish immigration under that logic) and when the japanese asked the jews why nazis were obsessed with the jews, one responded "because we're short, dark-haired and asiatic" or somethign similar.
 
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