WI: Holocaust never happens, and nazis not anti-semetic

The easiest way to explain the weakness of the Madagascar Plan is to simply note that, as a first step, it required a successful Operation SeeLowe. The plan was dependent on full access to the British merchant fleet, as well as those of the other occupied countries (aka: the same ships that were being sent to the bottom in the Battle of the Atlantic) and was designed to max out at 4,000,000 deportees (1M a year./;). There were vastly more than 4M Jews in Europe, with the generally accepted figure being 9-9.5M.

This sort of scenario also ignores the Reich's other crusades against minorities and nationalities, including the Roma and the Slavs. Depending on whose figures you accept the Reich killed between 300,000 and 1,000,000 Roma and 2.1M non-Jewish Poles, plus hundreds of thousands of Salvs in the rest of occupied Europe. The straight up extermination camps killed around 3.1M people, mainly Jews. The other roughly 6M civilians (around half of who were not Jewish) who were willfully murdered died due to salve labor, shootings, hangings, being thrown off cliff en masse, drowned by being thrown off bridges or cliffs into rivers/lakes en masse, etc.

Most of these were "quietly buried", burned in open pits or simply left to decompose. The problem is that a burial pit with 50,000 bodies can't really be hidden.

Had the Reich been successful the goal was to KILL 85% of every Slav in Poland (that is 23.5 MILLION Slavs) down to 65% in European Russia, with figures for the rest of Eastern Europe falling between these two figures.

The Reich was evil incarnate. Its written plans called for the murder of tens of millions of people. Had the Nazis been successful the Six Million (who represent the greatest willful mass killing in modern times) would be almost an afterthought in their butcher's bill.

Ok point taken, my reasoning was that if they weren't exterminating jews they weren't exterminating anyone (yet), so if they loose the war they wouldn't be the cliché of genociders.
In the nazi victory scenario however they would obviously be. But IOTL they were trying to destroy all evidence of their killings. That's why they favored gassing-cremating over simply shooting people in the head, as it leaves no traces, just witnesses. Once the job is done, it's like in Fatherland, bury the secret....
 
Ok point taken, my reasoning was that if they weren't exterminating jews they weren't exterminating anyone (yet), so if they loose the war they wouldn't be the cliché of genociders.
In the nazi victory scenario however they would obviously be. But IOTL they were trying to destroy all evidence of their killings. That's why they favored gassing-cremating over simply shooting people in the head, as it leaves no traces, just witnesses. Once the job is done, it's like in Fatherland, bury the secret....
Although for a while the gassing-cremating process wasn't that popular either. At most of the Aktion Reinhardt camps the Nazis simply buried the bodies and covered them in lime. It was only once they started losing and realized they needed to cover up the evidence that they really started cremations and exhuming bodies to be crushed up.
 
To be fair, they weren't really voted into power. Hindenberg appointed Hitler as Chancellor, after trying twice to find someone else who could assemble a majority in the Reichstag and failing.

They never carried a majority in any election on the National level, their best showing being an admittedly impressive 43.9%. After that it as a series of political maneuvers and acts of terror, coupled with Hindenberg's death at age 86 that put Hitler into supreme power.

That said, there as never any doubt that the Nazis were virulently antisemitic from the day they became a national movement. Hitler, Goring, Gobbels, and the gang were violently antisemitic and were proud of of it.

Given the way in which the appointment of a Chancellor worked, personally I think that it's a fair representation to say that the Nazis were voted into power. I would object to simplifications such as "voted in by a majority of the Germans", but that was not needed to become a Chancellor under that system.

In any case, the point was that the voters knew the NSDAP points, and they made no secret of their anti-Semitism. It actually was one of the reasons they were voted.
 

Saphroneth

Banned
Given the way in which the appointment of a Chancellor worked, personally I think that it's a fair representation to say that the Nazis were voted into power. I would object to simplifications such as "voted in by a majority of the Germans", but that was not needed to become a Chancellor under that system.

In any case, the point was that the voters knew the NSDAP points, and they made no secret of their anti-Semitism. It actually was one of the reasons they were voted.

They certainly got the highest two or three voteshares of any single party under the entire Weimar system.
In a proportional representation system, to get 43.9% is incredibly impressive. If the system in use had been a FPTP system instead, then the Nazis would have had something like 60% or 70% of seats I believe.
 

Frances

Banned
As i pointed out earlier, in their desire to claim equal victimhood with the Jews - which the Nazis themselves didn't see it as, other groups have spread myths.'

As i said, disabled people were not sent to the camps, they were sent to special sanatoriums where they were gassed.

The Nazis were bad enough - people don't need to make things up.
 
Although for a while the gassing-cremating process wasn't that popular either. At most of the Aktion Reinhardt camps the Nazis simply buried the bodies and covered them in lime. It was only once they started losing and realized they needed to cover up the evidence that they really started cremations and exhuming bodies to be crushed up.

Indeed. In fact I disagree with Vrykon. Gassing and cremating the remains are two separate aspects, and the reason why the Nazis resorted to gassing isn't that they did not want evidence. The reason was that it was more efficient than mass shootings, in more ways than one.
 
Vrykon said:
Ok point taken, my reasoning was that if they weren't exterminating jews they weren't exterminating anyone (yet) ...
Why is that a given? The OP asked only what if the Holocaust never happened and anti-semitism was not at the core of the national socialists. That still leaves a lot of room for racism, purges and other witch hunts.

CalBear said:
So, remove the evil, make them far less loathsome, and you can start to create a noble cause that was simply led astray, good men who were just defending the beliefs and homes.
I am not sure how removing just the holocaust while Germany still eradicates slavs on the same level as OTL makes their cause suddenly noble. Or how they are then suddenly "not evil" then anymore.

Dan Reilly The Great said:
If Communism is their main boogeyman, then they are not likely to antagonize France and Britain as these are the two most powerful players in Europe that will find common cause with Germany against the Soviets. So there won't be a Munich crisis or an invasion of Poland.
So you are saying Hitler antagonized France and Britain over the Jews? I.e. once the Jews were not the boogeyman anymore but let's say "The Slav" or "The Communist" or (new brand) "The Slavic Bolshevik" he'd somehow had avoided upsetting France and Britain when he unravelled the post war order of Versailles?

Sorry, I remain sceptical. I do not see the link between "no holocaust" = "no Munich" => "no guarantees for Poland" => "no war with France and Britain".
 
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I agree. The best you could get was for Hitler to wait until the war was won before he started going after the Jews and other "undesirable" groups.

You can't. The Ostheer lived off the land, which meant starving the Soviets. So Soviet civilians have to die at the very very least by the tens of thousands, while the war is still going on. Hundreds of thousands is more likely.
 

Frances

Banned
If Hitler hadn't broken his Munich promises, there would have been no promises to Poland.

There's a whole article on Wikipedia written by Polish nationalists who think the West should have gone to war to stop the formation of the Eastern Bloc.
 
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