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Notes -
I’m not unsympathetic to the ideas that you present in broad strokes.
Figuring out an exact death count and sussing out exactly which of the stories told are true is difficult because everything seems to be memory and hearsay, not documents, photographs, videos, or other forms of records that can be examined. Many of the stories seem pretty fantastic even for a work of fiction, let alone a retelling of history. Things like medical experiments and torture in odd and grotesque ways seem less like something that happened and more like confabulation or rumors that get repeated as fact. The human mind is actually pretty good about inventing wild stories about gruesome torture and murder. And Theres the issue of Nazis not keeping up with quotas and simply exaggerating numbers so the higher ups don’t fire them or whatever for poor performance. You can do this easily especially with paper records. Just count fictional people, or count the same person several times— thus a Gay Jewish political prisoner counts on three different tables. That’s just the side of the camps.
And the allies both during and after the war have every incentive to exaggerate the numbers, tge stories, etc. which gives them the ultimate heroic story about themselves and their civilization and why you should be on our side. I don’t think most modern people understand just how much of the logic of WW2 has shaped how we think about our moral universe, our political and social systems, and ourselves. It’s basically the “state cult” of the modern neoliberal order. Hitler has replaced Satan as the ultimate evil in the moral universe, more or less. And for nearly a century, most regimes that we must go to war with are in some way like the Nazis. Depending on which side you take on Israel and Palestine, the other side are Nazi-like. So was Saddam Hussein, Slobodon Milosovic, and dozens of other leaders. Often you’ll hear “stories” of Nazi-like war crimes. In the first Gulf War, George H W Bush claimed that babies were thrown out of hospital windows to be caught on bayonets. In Serbia, they claimed concentration camps. It’s an easy way to manipulate people into support for a war by appealing to the founding myth of the modern age.
I certainly think there was a lot of killing of camp prisoners. Probably on a fairly industrial scale. I would put the full death toll at somewhere between 6-10 million, and much of the violence was genocidal. It happened. That doesn’t mean all the stories are true, nor does it mean that the camps had anything to do with why the allies were fighting the war. We didn’t care about them until they became useful to us.
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