NAZI's without death camps

sharlin

Banned
Because most of the time its fanboys going on about the German armed forces and how they would have won if not for their leaders etc. Fankwanks of germany in WW2 are common as anything but if you do a fanwank of say the UK, or USSR or USA in WW2 it often gets rapidly labled as thus whilst the German fanwanks don't get the same treatment.

And most of the fanwanks about the Nazi's are a case of 'oh if they did't make it it their mission to put a bullet in the face of every jew in europe and work their untermensch prisoners to death, if they were lucky, i'm sure they would be much better.' Or changing the Nazi's so they are not the Nazi's and then having them do the exact same things as the Germans did whilst the allies who are exactly the same bumble around, going lowing to their well planned slaughters by the NOT NAZIS.
 
Because most of the time its fanboys going on about the German armed forces and how they would have won if not for their leaders etc. Fankwanks of germany in WW2 are common as anything but if you do a fanwank of say the UK, or USSR or USA in WW2 it often gets rapidly labled as thus whilst the German fanwanks don't get the same treatment.

And most of the fanwanks about the Nazi's are a case of 'oh if they did't make it it their mission to put a bullet in the face of every jew in europe and work their untermensch prisoners to death, if they were lucky, i'm sure they would be much better.' Or changing the Nazi's so they are not the Nazi's and then having them do the exact same things as the Germans did whilst the allies who are exactly the same bumble around, going lowing to their well planned slaughters by the NOT NAZIS.

None of which is happening in this thread. And in general, wanking the countries that won the war just isn't done that often regardless of the war since going 'what if Country A won a year earlier?' isn't as exciting and different as 'what if Country A lost?'.

And incidentally, if the Nazis hadn't spent resources on the death camps, they would've done better since they would have more for the war effort. Not enough to win without other butterflies, and they would still be evil, but their wartime performance would improve.

Also a Not-Nazi Germany probably would do better. It would have the benefits of being Germany without all the negatives of being Nazi, although even a reincarnation of the Kaiserreich with WW2 tech couldn't take on the USSR, USA, UK and France. But it would most likely avoid facing such a coalition in the first place. And even if it did, the Allies were gripping the idiot ball pretty hard there at the start IOTL, and I don't think a not-Nazi Germany would butterfly away those any faster (more likely they would go away more slowly, without Hitler's saber-rattling).

Nazi or not-Nazi Germany certainly could do a lot worse in WW2, but a revanchist military dictatorship that's more on the evil scale of Mussolini rather than Hitler has the ability, possibly, to do better in terms of war performance.
 
Slightly less the epitome of evil. Stalin and Mao didn't have extermination camps, and most people rightfully view them as evil tyrants. The Nazis have way too much wrong with them to come close to be rationalized away, death camps or not.
 
Are we talking about the actual Operation Reinhard extermination camps that operated between 1942-1944, or are we lumping in systems such as Auschwitz II that also operated as slave labor centers as well?

Details aside, I don't think the Nazis would be viewed that more differently. Regular concentration camps such as Dachau and Buchenwald were horrible enough. And the Commissar and Commando orders, "Nacht und Nebel," hostage executions, terror bombing, that whole waging war of aggressive conquest thing, and the rest of the Holocaust, among many, many other things, still paint the Nazis in a negative light made hardly less so by the lack of Sobibor and Treblinka and the like.
 
Slightly less the epitome of evil. Stalin and Mao didn't have extermination camps, and most people rightfully view them as evil tyrants. The Nazis have way too much wrong with them to come close to be rationalized away, death camps or not.

They may not have called them extermination camps but the each killed more people then the NAZI's did!
 
They may not have called them extermination camps but the each killed more people then the NAZI's did!

Yes, but over a longer period of time. The Nazis were far more efficient in slaughtering people. I'm not suggesting that the Soviets weren't soaked in blood (and this didn't magically start with Stalin), but the Nazis win the dubious prize of being the most efficient butchers of people in history.
 
Death camps and industrial genocide were the inevitable result of the Nazi's racial policies and beliefs. Removing them would require changing the core tenants of Naziism, along with most of its leader's personalities.
 
Death camps and industrial genocide were the inevitable result of the Nazi's racial policies and beliefs. Removing them would require changing the core tenants of Naziism, along with most of its leader's personalities.

Actually, all you have to do is have the Nazis decide to put it off until the end of the war so they can focus all their resources on the war effort.

Anyway, there would likely be around 30 million Jews in the world today, the majority of them in Israel, with a substantial number in Europe including around a million in France.
 
Actually, all you have to do is have the Nazis decide to put it off until the end of the war so they can focus all their resources on the war effort.

Anyway, there would likely be around 30 million Jews in the world today, the majority of them in Israel, with a substantial number in Europe including around a million in France.

Except that's not how the Nazis thought. For them the Jews were not only an undesirable group to be exterminated , but also the single greatest threat to Germany in Europe. They believed that the extermination of the Jews was not only a social necessity, but a military and political one as well. Thus for them waiting was not an option.

The Nazis were not a rational group, and won't make rational decisions.
 
If he wasn't stopped.

Ukrane probably depolulated
Western USSR depopulation begining.
Poland Depopulated
Most jews in europe exterminated
The continued use of soviet POWs as workers (death through work)
tens of thousands more homosexuals/disabled/'undesirables' exterminated.

Hundreds of thousands more dead, maybe millions.

Though my statements in this thread are on the softer side, I would say that you are right and I would also say that the question is rather "millions or tens of millions" additionaly deaths.

Seriously, what is with this site than any discussion about the Nazis being slightly different than the epitome of evil OTL brand is viewed as Nazi apologism?

Generally, looking closely, question doesn't ask how "we" here on this forum, people with a more than average knowledge of history, or professional historians would view the Nazis, but their general image. The question is also not how feasible it is that the Nazis take a different path to pursue their genocidal goals and how that would play out.

I translate this to "how important are the special circumstances of the death camps important to the general image of the Nazis". Cynically said, we are dealing rather with a cultural than with a political issue here.

Imagine the rails towards that gate in Auschwitz. I do not need to post a photo. We all see that in our mind's eye as we read it. It is an icon, and a powerful one. In the context of the holocaust, there are other important pictures concerning the issue, but this one trumps it all. How many people you know can name more death camps than this one? How many people you know more about the Holocaust than the death camps, are aware of the several methods and different stations of the exclusion of Jews from society, and ultimately the ways to kill them? How many people you know are directly aware how many groups the Nazis singled out for extermination?

Also, the singularity of the Holocaust, a view I personally take with a grain of salt, heavily relies on the idea of "industrial extermination". If this is taken away from the equasion, the doors are wide open for comparison by numbers. Because - putting people to work until they drop; shooting the population of villages; have special units commit killing sprees....that's not so difficult as to that only Germans can do that.

However, for reasons I mentioned earlier, the Nazis will still eclipse other villains in our minds. With a slightly fuzzier picture of the genocide perpetraded, our fixation on WW2 will remain a bit less focussed on the Holocaust (if the term will become common at all - without the crematories) but more on the military matters. That means, it will be more as it was in the 1950s.
 
what image do you think, the nazi party and Hitler would have today, if the death camps were never built but slave labour was still used?


If the Germans don't have death camps then they would have to continue stripping men women and children naked and then shooting them in the back and dumping their bodies in mass graves. After robbing them of course.

The death camps were brought in because shooting people was uneconomic and bad for soldiers morale (who shot them anyway).
 
The notion of Nazis without death camps is absurd. One of the first things done after Hitler came to power was to open Dachau, which then served as the model for all the camps to come. Dachau, while not technically a "death camp" in its early days, was a de facto one for all of the reasons one would expect: unhygenic conditions, disease, insufficient nutrition for prisoners and death through overwork. Same thing for some of the earlier camps that followed Dachau such as Oranienburg and, later, Mauthausen. And then you had the T-4 euthanasia program on top of that. And all of this is before the war, the Einsatzgruppen in the East and the genuine death factories at places like Auschwitz.
 
The notion of Nazis without death camps is absurd. One of the first things done after Hitler came to power was to open Dachau, which then served as the model for all the camps to come. Dachau, while not technically a "death camp" in its early days, was a de facto one for all of the reasons one would expect: unhygenic conditions, disease, insufficient nutrition for prisoners and death through overwork. Same thing for some of the earlier camps that followed Dachau such as Oranienburg and, later, Mauthausen. And then you had the T-4 euthanasia program on top of that. And all of this is before the war, the Einsatzgruppen in the East and the genuine death factories at places like Auschwitz.

Well, they could have just decided to put it off until after the war and focus on the war effort instead to conserve manpower, so it's quite possible.

How do you cram additional millions into that tiny place?

A good percentage of the Jews who died in the Holocaust were highly religious and Zionist, and would have likely immigrated to Palestine eventually. And land has the capacity to hold far more humans than we think; the entire world's population can fit in LA standing shoulder-to-shoulder.
 
Well, they could have just decided to put it off until after the war and focus on the war effort instead to conserve manpower, so it's quite possible.

The Nazis, by 1941, considered the extermination of the Jews to be just as important as the war, as did much of the Heer.
 
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