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I think you make some very reasonable objections based on the way the holocaust is often taught and framed in Western countries. And indeed many people one /r/askhistorians coming from not a skeptical position at all but still nor understanding why the Germans took certain actions. Because the way the Holocaust is taught in high school as a singular event and not how it fit into the broader German war effort and also because I think most high school teachers and principles would be uncomfortable articulating Nazi arguments in a Steelman way. This leads to some holes in the framework and I think you'd be surprised how close you are to the academic and not the pop culture version of the holocaust.
The death camps we all know were part of a much larger machinery of forced labor ranging from keeping farmers on their fields in Soviet collectivized agriculture (the Ukrainian peasants who though the Germans were going to re-introduce private property were bitterly disappointed) to conscripted foreign laborers in factories, to forced labor in work camps, to finally the death camps. The economy of the third reich, especially in the war's later periods ran on tens of millions of slave laborers the majority of which were not Jews. Now if the Germans were simply using the Jews as a slave labor and ill treating them to death we would expect to see a demographic hole in Jewish communities, remember in pre-war Poland 10% of the population was Jewish and in the Western Soviet Union many towns were majority or plurality Jewish not mention many villages that were essentially 100% Jewish. If the Germans were just taking slaves we would expect to see the able bodied gone and the very old and very young remaining but this is not what we see instead we see essentially all of Eastern European Jewry just vanish the very old and the very young included. Sometimes people will say they just went to Israel at all but the numbers just do not add up at all even if you only use Poland and there is no reason to do that, say what you will about the Soviets but they were pretty autistic about demographics.
The idea the holocaust cost lots of resources is something of a myth about the holocaust it didn't take huge resources to do it was done reasonably efficiently and on the cheap and likely turned a profit. The actual number of German camp guards was fairly low as the actual function was mainly ran by capos and it just doesn't take that many people with guns to control large number of people especially when you are just going to kill them and bring in the next batch. You say killing a slave labor force when they were in the middle of a war doesn't make sense but they largely didn't do that. They largely killed the ones who couldn't work and then put the rest to work in conditions varying from being worked to death on starvation rations, to treated semi-ok as long as they were doing productive labor. The reason Oscar Schindler was able to save the Jews he did because they were doing productive labor for the war effort. If they stopped being productive well... We also have other examples of states doing similar things see the Ottoman Empire killing the Armenians while losing a war instead of even attempting to use them for labor. I feel like you are overly focused on the Jews being a useful slave labor force when from the German perspective they were an especially dangerous slave labor force subversive and radioactive. The Germans perceived, at least by the later stages, WWII as a war against Jews as they blamed Jews for both Anglo Capitalism and especially Bolshevik Communism. They viewed the Jews under their control as racial enemies and the entirety of the war as a race war but especially on the Eastern front.
We can see the Germans take special efforts to get their hands on Jews specifically such as in Hungary after the coup when the Germans had more influence over the government they used it to deport the entire Jewish population. If they needed these slave labor positions filled why weren't they already using Poles or Russians and why take the very old and very young and virtually the entire Jewish population of Hungary? In the standard narrative this does include lots of able bodied men being killed because of the sudden influx.
Another case where the Germans did kill able bodied men were the Einsatzgruppen and if you respond to anything in my post. respond to this I'm curious about what you think about them because they are often left out of alternative holocaust narratives and arguments and you didn't mention them either. A typical denier argument or even question by a curios redditor on Askhistorians (I know you don't identify that way and didn't make this argument) Is why didn't the Germans just shoot everyone? and the answer is they tried! But it turns out shooting tons of people is hard and plays hell on the psych of people doing it. Not to mention using bullets this way strains the war effort a lot more than working people to death. the Einsatzgruppen are also incredibly problematic for both the Western and Soviet narratives as they often were heavily involved with local collaborators which even today is something of a problem of the West in terms of Ukraine and the Baltics, which makes them incredibly unlikely for the West to falsify.
I'm not sure I agree about the witness testimony and historians don't actually give continence to stories like that it's not a hidden thing in holocaust studies and any event involving millions of people is going to have a lot of people making crazy shit up. But we do have evidence outside or witness testimony we have reams and reams of paperwork we have stuff like the Wannsee Conference and General Plan Ost. We have train manifests and none of the people put on trial for it actually denied it. You can say they were tortured but we don't actually have any evidence of that and the Nuremburg trials seem like the fairest version of victors justice I've ever seen given that some of them were acquitted. As for your idea the numbers can only go up in the narrative This is not the case the numbers of those killed at Auschwitz have been revised down several times by historians. If the evidence is there holocaust scholars will lower them. In fact deniers use the lowering of numbers killed out Auschwitz as something of a gotcha.
I know this is a long post and I don't expect a response to all of it or really want to get in a tit for tat. but if you respond to anything. I'd ask you opinion on the Einsatzgruppen, the lack of a demographic hole of missing able bodied Jews and what you think of the existing documentation we do have. I'm curious if any of this changed your mind and if not why not?
Thanks for a great reply. Regrettably I think it was caught in the spam filter or something because I didn't see it until like two days after you posted it, and also if others saw it I'm sure you'd have a lot more upvotes.
I'm about to move from the prep phase of dinner to the cooking phase, and you have so much here, so in short I'd just like to say
Hey I appreciate your response I was pretty disappointed when my effort post didn't show up forever so glad to know you at least saw it!. For what it's worth I think despite all the time it gets holocaust education in the West is pretty bad and pretty much any thinking person is going to have them based in the high school curriculum version of it we get taught. I spend a fair amount of time on /r/askhistorians and the amount of liberals with massive doubts about the holocaust is pretty telling. Well not doubts exactly they tepidly come in writing paragraphs of disclaimers about how they believe the official story but there are massive gaps where the tory they've been told makes no sense. Most true deniers start here as well and they are almost always arguing against the version they were taught in high school. IE the camps separated out of all context and a lot of myths thrown in combined with strawman version of Nazi ideology.
Most teachers are unwilling/incapable and probably just a little scared to actually explain Nazi ideology and goals and the Eastern Front is severely undertaught and without either of those the Holocaust narrative taught doesn't actually add up. and there are tons and tons of "Good Liberals" with those same doubts they are just to scared to voice them for fear of being labeled a denier. I actually think one of the reasons people get so hysterical when the Holocaust gets even slightly questioned is because many of them can't counter skeptical arguments at all so they are just running off pure emotion.
Yeah that's about right. The hand has been overplayed so egregiously that anyone with half a brain is going to commit the ultimate, unrecoverable crime of noticing.
(Thanks again.)
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