What if the Final Solution was carried out in Germany before World War II starts?

In 1942, as the war was slowly going against the Nazis, the Nazi Party decided to carry out the Final Solution-the mass murder of the Jews of Europe. Behind the front lines, Jews were murdered en-masse, at first in mass shootings carried out by the Einsatzgruppen and then in concentration camps such as Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen in Poland and Germany, respectively. The mass murders were carried out away from the prying eyes of the German people, since the Nazis did not want a repeat of the public backlash of the Aktion T4 program.

But what if the Holocaust started on German soil before World War II even started?

In this timeline, the Wansee Conference happens sometime in the 1930s and the decision is made to exterminate the Jews on German soil as a test run for the upcoming war. Numerous methods of extermination are carried out in parallel to the OTL process of elimination for methods of mass murder-mass execution of Jews in German forests, carbon monoxide vans become a regular sight at concentration camps like Dachau. This program of extermination moves to Austria when it is annexed in 1936 and then Czechoslovakia in 1939.

By September 1939, the majority of the Jewish population of Germany and it's territories are either dead or they have fled the country. The Nazis have refined the method of extermination and have settled upon Zyklon B as the prime method of exterminating the Jews which comes just in time as they are planning to invade Poland, the country with the densest population of Jews in all of Europe...
 
Well if they started before word would get out at some point, and while racism was normal.. Genocide wasn't exactly thought well of
 
If word got out of what was going on, the allies would have probably been more willing to stop the Germans before poland
 
Strangely in 1941 the mass shooting of Jews was being performed by einsatzgruppen, police battalions, heer, and allied auxiliaries.

Correspondingly before 1936 the moral fatigue of carrying out the commissar order manually was unknown.

I'm not sure you can speed up the process of the holocaust without having a large peasant and proletarian Jewish and slavic population to experiment upon. I'm not sure that Germany can acquire Poland before 1936.

yours,
Sam R.
 
As has been mentioned, during peacetime hiding such a thing would have been impossible. Germany (and Austria) are pretty populated, while there were concentration camps (like Dachau) they were really nasty prisons, not camps designed to bring in live humans at one end and process them in to dead bodies minus useful bits at the other. Building camps to do this for 500,000 + people where they could be well hidden from the general populace in Germany would be impossible - folks might not see the interior but the trains going there, etc could not really be hidden for any time. Putting the camps in the relatively empty parts of Poland (for the most part) got them out of prying eyes

In a famous speech to KZL guards Himmler admitted that the "work" they did would be hidden even after victory. The need for secrecy, both from international view and to let the Jews believe they were going to work camps to keep them quiet, was why the camps were where they were and why the effort to trsansport, in hte middle of the war, Jews fro Holland and France, or Greece, to the camps over large distances took place. Secrecy was key, the T4 program before the war where "defectives" were killed was done secretly as well.
 
Ignoring mob violence (probably incited by the government) against Jews may be more plausible.

Accelerating efforts to deport would be more plausible, IMO, for the reasons mentioned above.
 
Ignoring mob violence (probably incited by the government) against Jews may be more plausible.

Now I've just been reading Raul Hilberg's _Destruction of the European Jews_ as you do when you're injured at work but have to keep working. The NSDAP state apparatus was disgusted with "singular actions" because of their disorderly illegal nature, and as it cost German insurance companies money.

Accelerating efforts to deport would be more plausible, IMO, for the reasons mentioned above.

Hilberg suggests that deportation of Reichs Jews was the last phase, post-dating other steps in "destruction" of the Polish Jews. This was in part due to the Germans having more money than the Poles, and due to the "wholesale" implementation in Poland of policies that developed more slowly in Germany itself.

yours,
Sam R.
 
I read some where that one of the challenges that the Nazis faced in Germany is that while many Germans did not like the Jews, they did have feelings for the Jews that they may have known. A doctor who was kind to them or their relatives. A shopkeeper who extended credit during hard times. A lawyer who did legal work and waited on the payment. A school teacher who was widely respected for helping students. A university professor who was respected for the same reasons. A boss who was kind to his employees. A war veteran who had served along side them during the war. A skilled worker who the boss knew could be counted on.

Supposedly these were some of the reasons that the German Jews were not sent to camps until later in the war.
 
German Jews were disproportionately middle to upper middle class professionals and those with wealth and property whose absence would be conspicuous both at home and abroad through their connections. It would be impossible to hide this, and would lead to Germany becoming internationally toxic and unable to squeeze out the concessions from appeasers that they managed in OTL that put them in a good position at the war's start. It would also make it harder for them to get good relations with Balkan and Eastern European countries that they had in OTL, although perhaps not by all that much.

Also, the German population was anti-Semitic but not to the point that they would be after a few more years of constant propaganda. This would not be a popular thing domestically and would cause problems in the army, as well.

I don't really see how this goes off without a hitch.

Now, if German Jews were like their Eastern counterparts and lived mostly in isolated villages with little to no socioeconomic power, perhaps this kind of action would be more feasible. Then again, if that was the case, I don't think the German population's anti-Semitism would be as strong as there would be less economic incentive for it.
 
Top