Who would the nazis scapegoat for the WWI Dolchstoßlegende and other national ills?
Who would the nazis scapegoat for the WWI Dolchstoßlegende and other national ills?
In I Have Lived A Thousand Years, Livia Bitta-Jackson described being transferred to an airplane factory. While the conditions she experienced were definitely slave labor, they were positively luxurious compared to Auschwitz (including actual luxuries like perfumed soap). I could see a system like this implemented routinely, where the Jews are kept in conditions essentially identical to laborers, only with no personal freedom. There would be slave labor camps, but built with the goal of getting the work done rather than working the slaves to death.
You still run into the usual problems, some of which were at least hinted at upthread.
1. Your proposal would be fine for undesirables capable of working. What about the children, the old, the ailing, the disabled? Note, with this respect, that a Jewish doctor or a Gypsy marriage middleman might have been entirely able to work - if carrying on with their profession. But the Germans would want to use them, say, as an assembly-line worker and as a shovel-using miner - so they also fall in the category of the undesirables who are unable to work.
2. Food. I'm not sure you have the whole picture here. Compare these two situations:
2.1 The Germans pick up a Pole or an Italian in January 1944. The guy is not fat but he has survived on his own until then, probably integrating his occupied country's rations (which are ultimately run by the Germans) with whatever individual means possible: the black market, bartering, stealing, a second unofficial job etc. The Germans use him as a slave laborer, giving him not nearly enough food to survive. The Germans are thus exploiting the man's own body fat, which was accumulated not entirely at all through food sources that the Germans themselves were managing/supervising. The man quickly becomes a skeleton. By June 1944 he dies of starvation, exhaustion and/or some illness. The Germans however have captured another slave, and exploit him in the same way. Again, part of the body fat the second man is running on until he dies in December 1944 was not accumulated through German-run supplies. Repeat once again, and maybe the third slave is still alive in May 1945.
Or
2.2 The Germans capture a slave in January 1944. They put him to work and they feed him enough for him to survive until the end of the war. They don't need to replace him twice, which spares them some train traffic, coal, administration and "police" overhead, etc.; on the down side, those other two men that in case 2.1 later became slaves also are somewhere in German-occupied Europe... eating. And possibly not working for the German war effort.
In which situation are the Germans expending less food?
While it was 1944 before food became a problem for Germans rations were short for Poles and Jews from the start.I hadn't considered food. As the food situation became more critical, the Nazis would certainly reduce rations for their slaves. I suppose someone might see the problem coming and try using the slaves to solve the problem, having them work as farmers (and getting more slaves, up to and including sending the entire population of Poland into the fields), but there has to be a limit to what can be done by throwing bodies at the problem.
Honestly I think a interesting perspective is a East Europe which deal with a massive Jewish minority. As example Poland will still be 10% Jewish. Will the Polish Jews be the loyal guard for communism (saving them from the Nazi)?
In fact could we see in Communist Poland see the Jews pretty much function in similar manners to the Alawite of Syria?
...the West isn't going to care very much because the Holocaust never happened.
A lot of Jews and others would still be killed in the labour camps having been worked to death.
...
Nazism would still be regarded as the most evil ideology ever (barring World War III),...
Ghettos = mass starvation even without the death camps. Over 100,000 died of starvation in Warsaw alone.
Once you start talking about those kind of numbers then I don't really see what the moral difference is, after the war, between deliberate starvation and death camps.
Jewish culture in the Western World was Yiddish culture. It was a rich and vibrant culture, language and way of life built over centuries that was destroyed. The only fragments left are the descendants of Yiddish immigrants to other nations, such as the United States, and the survivors. But the parent heritage, the strength of the bedrock, was cut out and destroyed, and what still exists is passing away with time.
http://www.npr.org/2014/08/09/338975625/effort-to-preserve-yiddish-works-not-bupkes
Slight nitpick, but the Holocaust killed 36%--not 40%--of World Jewry.The Holocaust killed 40% of Jews worldwide, but that meant 60% that didn't die, of whom a great deal were Ashkenazi. In the United States and USSR, especially, there were large and vibrant Jewish communities (and there still are in the US). Yiddish has been falling out of favor as Jews assimilate, but it seems likely that that would have happened in Poland or whatever as well, especially under a Communist government (particularly when you recall that Jews living in, for example, Ukraine and Belarus were culturally very similar to those in Poland proper - it was all the Pale, after all).
Slight nitpick, but the Holocaust killed 36%--not 40%--of World Jewry.
Much more importantly, though, do you think that we could see something of a revival of Yiddish in the future due to the growing Haredi Jewish population?
Millions of Soviet citizens died or suffered severe effects of malnutrition, some even after LL food shipments had reached high levels in 1944.Given that the Soviets were managing to get on with providing death camp level nutrition for the children and elderly working in the factories, I think the Germans can afford a bit of food to work the "undesireables." In fact, the Germans were generally overfed until around 1944.