WI: Sterilization instead of holocaust?

They spent money on camps rather than just shooting or starving the people they wanted to kill. And we know they could shoot or starve them outside the camps because they did - tens of millions of civilians.

There is no way it's a mass surgical sterilization, it's going to be irradiating or chemically sterilizing people. And it won't make any difference to the number of people killed outside the camp system, or those who died in camps without being gassed.

The main difference here is that anyone who died in a gas chamber will instead be irradiated in a sterilization chamber. They'll go on to starve in the camps in similar numbers, or if they survive, to die young of cancer or other radiation or sterilization related problems. It's possible that there are more survivors in 1945 - but far fewer survivors in this world by 1965, and far fewer descendants of survivors by today.


We'll see sterilization as one of the indisputable signs of a genocide, and talk of sterilization as one of the key warning signs, it won't just be part of the technical definition.

Six million people eat at the same time and none prepare their own meal?

How did food get into the ghettos?
 
What if it was done by secretly poisoning the food of Jews? This should be within reach of the Nazi secret services, and fits them.

That does not guarantee sterilization.

And now you have invented more costs; the poison, the additional food (in the holocaust prisoners where give 6 spoons of oatmeal per day and would live for about 6 weeks on that before they died), the additional guards needed to guard those people, the risk of rebellion increases because now more people are alive.

You would make a bad slavemaster, dont quit your day job :)
 
Even if you are only sterilizing males, and confine yourselves to those 10-60 that would mean at least 2,000 procedures a day.

That seems reasonable. How many hospitals were there in Germany at the time? My earliest source says around 2,000 so one extra appointment per day.

You'll need some real doctors to supervise even if you train medics/technicians to do the work. realistically you'll need 15 minutes per procedure between doing it, preparing for the next etc - you have to tie off blood vessels or you'll have a lot bleed to death, clean instruments or you'll get 100% infection rates and so forth because the idea is to use them for slave labor not kill them in large numbers through complications.

If we're also using them for slave labour this is pointless. I assumed that this was instead of the camps. If they are in camps what's the point in sterilizing them? No one is having kids in labour or death camps.

So at a maximum of 4 procedures an hour this is 500 man-hours of work per day, with 8 hour shifts 24/7 this means and assembly >60 "sterilizers" working every day of the year, with no days off plus some support staff. Since you want to eliminate any Jewish taint, you can't have the women get pregnant even if they are used as whores for Aryan soldiers so they need to be sterilized or get aborted with every pregnancy.

Even if you are willing to wait 60-70 years until all the Jews are dead, and remember while 6 million died, there were survivors who were not processed before the camps were overrun, sterilizing 6-8 million folks is a HUGE logistical effort even under the most minimal circumstances.

Right the question was not whether or not this was a massive logistical undertaking, but whether it was easier than the holocaust. Because you've decided that they have to go to camps and basically do the entire holocaust without the gas chamber bit then obviously I agree that it's harder.

Also don't think that aborting pregnancies would be that difficult, you don't need a doctor to do that.

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https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/cont...-of-europe-in-1933-population-data-by-country

There were 9.3 millions Jews in Europe in 1933.

500k in Germany, 3 mil in Poland.

Getting a doctor appointment for every male Jew in Germany/Austria/Czechslovkia before 1939 seems hard but not impossible. Presuming that you're cataloguing them anyway, but I don't see why you'd put them in camps here because this is the whole point as an alternative to seclusion.
 
The mass murder of Jews is what gets the most attention when discussing the Reich's death toll. The casualties in Poland and particularly Belarus are not mentioned that often.
It gets mentoined plenty. It is just that over the past decade or so (maybe longer) it seems that the word Holocaust was pushed specifically to refer to Jews and those forcibly clsssified as Jews.
 
Check out the book Making History by Stephen Fry. It’s an AH book in which a pair of students travel back in time to prevent Hitler from being born by putting a sterilizing drug in the water in his hometown, thereby rendering Hitler’s father infertile prior to his conception.

It ends up that someone who’s just as big of an asshole as Hitler takes charge of the Nazi party, rises to power, and doesn’t fuck up a lot of the things Hitler fucked up OTL, so the Nazis conquer Europe. The hell of it for the Holocaust is that the Nazis use the water that sterilized Hitler’s father to sterilize the Jews, wiping them off the face of at least Europe with very little effort.

As far as I know, no such sterilizing drug that could permanently poison a well and last as long as it would have needed to for the plot to work exists. Sterilizing any massive number of people would be a bloody mess, no pun intended, and killing them was sadly a much more efficient way to go.
 
Check out the book Making History by Stephen Fry. It’s an AH book in which a pair of students travel back in time to prevent Hitler from being born by putting a sterilizing drug in the water in his hometown, thereby rendering Hitler’s father infertile prior to his conception.

It ends up that someone who’s just as big of an asshole as Hitler takes charge of the Nazi party, rises to power, and doesn’t fuck up a lot of the things Hitler fucked up OTL, so the Nazis conquer Europe. The hell of it for the Holocaust is that the Nazis use the water that sterilized Hitler’s father to sterilize the Jews, wiping them off the face of at least Europe with very little effort.

As far as I know, no such sterilizing drug that could permanently poison a well and last as long as it would have needed to for the plot to work exists. Sterilizing any massive number of people would be a bloody mess, no pun intended, and killing them was sadly a much more efficient way to go.

"and doesn’t fuck up a lot of the things Hitler fucked up OTL, so the Nazis conquer Europe"

That is cherry picking by the books author

Before 1941 Hitler, from the Axis perspective, did everything right. In 1936 few wanted to annex the Sudetenland. In 1938 the generals did want to invade Czechoslovakia. In 1939 the generals did not want to invade Poland. In 1940 the generals did not want to invade France.

The only "fuck ups" come in the USSR.

But if there is no Hitler, there would most likely not be a German Reich having a huge part of Europe.

Just a side note.
 

Deleted member 94680

Read up on the Wansee Conference.

The representative for the Einsatzgruppen specifically mentioned that shooting was not a long term solution to the “problem” due the impact it had on the troops carrying it out. It was also agreed that a cheaper more effective method was needed.
 
If we are only sterilizing males, using all 2,000 hospitals in Germany (not all of which are equipped to do this but leave that aside) at one Jew per day per hospital that is ~2,250 days (working 7 days a week 365 days a year), taking 12.3 years (during which more Jews will likely be born) given 9,000,000 Jews overall. Sterilizing 4.5 million men, perhaps 3 million women (those past menopause need not be sterilized), and performing an significant number of abortions is going to be a huge task even if using the crudest methods with technicians trained to minimum standards is a huge undertaking and still leaves you with a lot of Jews over the next 50-60 years.

If the Nazis want slaves, they will have plenty of Slavic peoples. The Nazis (as well as others) considered Jews to be useless for heavy work, so the sort of agricultural and other heavy low skill labor they would want from slaves would be better done by Slavs than Jews - and there were lots and lots of Slavs (and other Untermenschen). While the death camps did use resources, other than the use of shipping (trains) the resources consumed were not as valuable as the medical resources used to sterilize that many people and the Enlosung (final solution) was "final" and immediate.
 
If we are only sterilizing males, using all 2,000 hospitals in Germany (not all of which are equipped to do this but leave that aside) at one Jew per day per hospital that is ~2,250 days (working 7 days a week 365 days a year), taking 12.3 years (during which more Jews will likely be born) given 9,000,000 Jews overall. Sterilizing 4.5 million men, perhaps 3 million women (those past menopause need not be sterilized), and performing an significant number of abortions is going to be a huge task even if using the crudest methods with technicians trained to minimum standards is a huge undertaking and still leaves you with a lot of Jews over the next 50-60 years.

I absolutely do not agree. Anyone can perform an abortion, you don't need a hospital to beat up a pregnant woman. If you see a pregnant woman wearing an armband in the street do your duty German citizen and push her down the stairs.

4.5 million in six year is fine. Presumably the number of hospitals will increase as they take territory.

This is all assuming you use a doctor. Personally I don't think you need to use one. You don't care if they survive the process so just walk into the ghettos with a knife and go around and cut them all that day. Let the Jews help each other to not die. Save your doctors for Germans.

Do this once or twice a year and you're fine. Ghettos weren't so large that a group of soldiers couldn't manage this easily.

If the Nazis want slaves, they will have plenty of Slavic peoples. The Nazis (as well as others) considered Jews to be useless for heavy work, so the sort of agricultural and other heavy low skill labor they would want from slaves would be better done by Slavs than Jews - and there were lots and lots of Slavs (and other Untermenschen). While the death camps did use resources, other than the use of shipping (trains) the resources consumed were not as valuable as the medical resources used to sterilize that many people and the Enlosung (final solution) was "final" and immediate.

Right I agree. Don't make them slaves, let them keep doing whatever they're doing except castrate them.
 

BigBlueBox

Banned
I think there are some important factors that are being ignored. If the Nazis decide the Jewish Question isn’t urgent enough to require immediate extermination, then it doesn’t require immediate sterilization either. They can prevent Jews from reproducing by separating the men and women. Since they would be rounding up the Jews for slave labor anyways that shouldn’t be too difficult. They could decide to delay sterilization after the war. If they were somehow able to win, then the amount of Jews who survived to be sterilized would be rather low considering the conditions in the labor camps.
 
By starting WW2, they made sure there wouldn't be enough food for everyone in Europe for the duration of hostilities and a few years afterwards. So they end up with millions crudely, painfully and often lethally sterilized, only to end up with millions left to starve anyway. The "net balance", if we can call it that, may end up with more survivors ITTL, but it wouldn't be "instead of holocaust" but rather "as part of the ATL Holocaust"
 
@RMcD94 : Don't argue surgical procedures and techniques with a surgeon....

I'm not arguing surgical procedures. I'm arguing about why anyone would if Jews got infected or died from blood loss. Who exactly has an issue with that in the Nazi command? Humans have made eunuchs for millennia, if you honestly thought they were all made in modern hospitals with qualified doctors then I've got a bridge to sell you.
 
The thing with these kinds of questions is that they are all equally bad. Holocaust and Mass sterilization are both equally bad.

Even if they(Nazis) really "believed" that their "race" was superior, they could have just sponsored pro-natalist policies and concentrate on making the economy and society better.

If they wanted to integrate the Jews, Poles and the Gypsies better, they could have used other good methods like Education.

"Your freedom to swing your arm ends where my Nose begins".
 
@RMcD94 : <sigh> I am not arguing that eunuchs have not been made for a very long time, although sterilizing females is much much more recent and the Nazis did not want Mischling. The point is that making 3-4 MILLION eunuchs in a relatively short period of time is quite another thing. Sure you can recruit butchers and give them an afternoon training session and tell them to bring the knives from their shops, and the job will get done after a fashion. Of course, you'll lose a lot of your castrati due to infection, blood loss/shock but what the heck, they are only Jews. If you want to keep the Jews around as non-reproducing slaves, that sort of plan isn't going to work too well. If, OTOH, like the Nazis, the desire is make them gone ASAP then the death camps are just fine - remember just one, Treblinka, processed 5,000-6,000 a day 365 days a year.

If you listen to speeches, read some of the written propaganda, or see some of the films you will see that the Jews in particular were referred to over and over as a "disease". You don't reduce germs by controlling them and letting them die out, you get rid of them by eliminating the source of future infection. For those without German language skills, much of this is available in translation...
 
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