WI: Holocaust Stopped in 1944?

[Roches]

If the gassing stops the death camps are going to get rather crowded. I’m assuming instead that you mean the policy of execution without labour is stopped. Because if you just stop the gas you’re going to get starvation trains and death marches into Poland.

I think we have to assume that the deportations from Hungary are stopped. IOTL, about 450,000 people were deported between May and July 1944, and most of those were sent to the gas chambers on arrival at Auschwitz. The Nazis wouldn't, and couldn't, keep alive the people who were able to work alive within the camp system, let alone those who weren't.

If the situation in Hungary progresses as IOTL, many people will still be killed by the Germans and the Arrow Cross. However, I don't think that's the most plausible way to bring about what the OP has in mind. The Nazis aren't going to stop gassing people in May 1944, and they're not going to stop killing people until, effectively, after the capitulation. It is, however, possible for the political and military situation in Hungary to change in a way that prevents the deportations.

The Hungarian Jews are the largest group that was killed in the extermination camps after May 1944, and the only group that I think could realistically survive. Rural Jewish life in Eastern Europe was already wiped out by May 1944; every Jewish person alive in occupied Poland at that time was in the Lodz Ghetto (to be destroyed within a few months), in a concentration camp, or in hiding.

If something changes with the Lodz Ghetto, then there's a chance Chaim Rumkowski might have a fate other than death on arrival at Auschwitz on 28 August 1944. He was a tyrant and likely a pedophile, but he kept the ghetto open as a slave-labor factory longer than any other. (There are three theories as to how he died: being deemed unable to work and sent to the gas chambers on arrival, being beaten to death by Lodz Jews from the Sonderkommando, or introducing himself to the SS as the ghetto's leader and given a faux tour of the camp before being thrown into the crematorium pits.) My suspicion is that he eyed a political career in Israel. I seriously doubt that he would have survived until 1948 -- but his fate, really, is its own what-if.

 

[GeographyDude]

maybe Operation Valkyrie works?

The timeline isn’t quite right since it’s July ‘44 and you’re looking for May ‘44 (in fact considering how many people would be killed in just those two months reminds us, yet again, just how horrible the Holocaust was)

I think it’s fully respectful to slightly shave down the Holocaust in alternate history, maybe the allies could have bombed the rail lines — especially the bridges — and maybe the German Lutheran church could have found a way to be effective behind the scenes.

And in this particular case, maybe the Valkyrie conspirators could have found a quarter twist as it were, and find a way to make the remoteness and “security” of the Wolf Lair location play to their advantage.

 

[Kevin Renner]

Interesting. I never knew it had been a slur. What country, if you don't mind me asking?

The US unfortunately. I know I never heard my parents use it. At least I'm pretty sure they didn't. In the 60s and 70s Polish jokes were common in the Midwest. My mom told us the same jokes were around in the 30s. Except then it was Italian or Irish. There are jokes about three Scandanavians named Ole, Lena and Sven. Those are some of the few ethnic jokes I've heard that seem to be embraced by the ethnicity. Two of the funniest end "hi Sven!" And "look at dat Sven, he's so vdrunk he dthinks he's me". They really need to be told with a Midwest Scandihovian accent. Not as funny as the classic Two Dogs though

 

[Raferty]

A 1944 POD is probably too late to save Yiddish. Most of the Yiddish-speaking population was comprised of communities in the former interwar Poland and western Soviet Union that had largely been destroyed in 1942 and 1943. Jews from Hungary and the parts of Austria-Hungary ruled from Budapest generally spoke Hungarian by the 2nd quarter of the 20th century.

I'm not so sure about this. A substantial portion of Polish Jews were in the ghettoes that were luquidated later on, and most were not sent immediately to extermination camps but to work camps.

Operation Reinhard hit Belarusian Jews very hard in particular, as well as those deported from Russia. The Poles and Ukrainians meanwhile, we know to have been aside from the Hungarians to be the hardest hit in 1944. There were numerous reports among the SS who administered the work and death camps that the one of the biggest problems in terms of public order in 1944 was the influx of Ukrainian Jews into camps where the Polish still predominated, and the riots and fights between prisoners over ethnic enmity (yes, even among Jews the issue was really heated). This was present almost everywhere in the camp structures in Poland.

We also know that German Jews tended to live longer in the Holocaust and many were not dealt with until 1944-45. This is where the scenes of WW1 veterans waving their service records at the guards who pushed them into the gas chambers were reported, as previously, Jews whose families served in WW1 for the German Army had access to slightly better accomodations in the ghettoes.

Volumes II and III of the Encyclopedia on Camps and Ghettoes deal a lot with the diverse nature of conditions faced by Jews in the ghettoes and on their deportation. There is probably more information there that I have forgotten on this topic.