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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

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Having shipped all those hundreds of thousands of Jews to eastern work camps, do you believe that his earnest intention was to win the war, then graciously release all those people and pay for their resettlement to the Middle-East? Why?

You are asking why I believe this?

No. I am asking you why you believe the Nazis would have bothered. Kindness? Saving face? The impracticality of genocide? What? There is nothing in Nazi ideology which remotely motivates going out of their way to help the Jews where killing them would have been cheaper, more straightforward, more popular with their core supporters, and more in line with Hitler's decade-spanning rhetoric. Any lip service paid to re-settlement plans strikes me as the paperwork equivalent of dad telling little Billy that he's driving Fido to a nice farm in the country.

The reason the gas chamber story is so important is because, if you say, "the Germans killed 6 million Jews" the natural follow-up from any thoughtful person is: when? where? how? why? The fact is, there is no "alternative hypothesis" other than the story of millions of Jews being gassed inside shower rooms.

Well, surely there has to be. Those millions of Jews did, in fact, die without ever seeing the gleaming shores of Madagascar. Your explanation for this seems to be that they were left to starve (in you view, purely by accident as supply chains deteriorated), which is what I analogized to a murderer turning out to have left his victim to starve to death in his basement, instead of poisoning her. That seems perfectly sensible to me; "lock them all someplace under armed guard, in cold and squalid conditions, don't give them enough food, and while you're at it, maybe extract some slave labor out of them for as long as they still have a bit of life on them, that way you'll recoup costs and wear them out faster" is a perfectly cromulent way to kill six million people. Slower than gas chambers, possibly more expensive as a result, but it would get the job done, given time.

I would much sooner believe that was the plan, than believe that Nazi Germany was ever prepared to allot significant resources to Jewish resettlement in the event of German victory. Granting no gas chambers, I think the most likely scenario is that resettlement remains the official policy for international PR purposes, but its implementation is endlessly deferred until an overwhelming majority of Jewish prisoners are found to have already died in custody, tsk-tsk, what a shame, our bad. And by then, everyone with a brain knows what really happened, but what are you going to do now, even if you disapprove?

No. I am asking you why you believe the Nazis would have bothered.

Shouldn't you be asking that question? If their plan was to kill them all, why did they bother bringing them to all of these camps, feed them, give them shelter, etc.? Why didn't they just kill them? Jewish labor was crucial for the German war effort. If they were so intent on killing all the Jews, why didn't they pursue that before the war? Why did they enter diplomatic arrangements with Zionists and why did they go through the trouble of planning to transfer the Jews in Madagascar? It's up to you to explain why they planned to do that initially, but then changed their minds and decided to gas them all. But I'm struggling to understand why you're asking "why do you believe the Nazis would have bothered" when by all accounts that was the policy they were pursuing before the war and before 1942. I'm only saying they didn't radically shift their policy position in favor of some secret gas chamber conspiracy. If you are saying they changed their minds and drastically changed their policy you should be able to provide some evidence for that.

I would much sooner believe that was the plan, than believe that Nazi Germany was ever prepared to allot significant resources to Jewish resettlement in the event of German victory.

So you think the Havaara Agreement and Madagascar Plan were just fake or something? Or they were just cover stories? Why don't you believe they would have pursued a policy they were obviously pursing before and during the early part of the war?

Those millions of Jews did, in fact, die... I would much sooner believe that was the plan

The death toll in the concentration camps is not in the millions, I can't remember off the top of my head but it's overall <100k IIRC. That's why the gas chamber story is so important. You think it was Germany's plan to lose the war and have their infrastructure get completely destroyed from both fronts? That was their plan to kill all the Jews? The collapse of Germany was unplanned, and yes that created catastrophic conditions in the camps. It says more about your biases that you are more willing to believe the Germans planned the collapse of their infrastructure in order to kill the Jews than to believe that they would have pursued the policy they were pursing before the war and through 1941...

Shouldn't you be asking that question?

Huhuh. "This is how you deal with questions…"

I have counters to many points in that paragraph, some of which @Amadan has already fielded. But I think addressing them would distract me from pointing out that I asked you a very simple question and you are still refusing to answer it. Let me repeat it:

What do you think was going through Hitler's brain? If you're so convinced that right up until 1945 he totally wanted to deliver as many healthy Jews to Madagascar as possible, why do you think he was clinging to that plan instead of attempting the "annihilation of the Jewish race" which he had long promised his base, and was now in a position to deliver? I genuinely want to know. Do you think he didn't want a Jewish genocide? That he wanted it, but he didn't think he could get away with it? That the Madagascar thing was just easier? Tell me!

You think it was Germany's plan to lose the war and have their infrastructure get completely destroyed from both fronts? That was their plan to kill all the Jews?

No, obviously not. I think that, if all else failed, their long-term plan would have been "put all the Jews in camps and, once we no longer need their slave labor, let them all starve". You can, in fact, deliberately let prisoners starve even if your infrastructure is just dandy. In this scenario, to the extent that the breakdown of German infrastructure forced their hand, it would simply have accelerated an outcome which was already in the cards long before.

All specifics aside, if you have hundreds of thousands of people in camps (even camps which had only been work camps up til that point!), it is just evidently quite easy and quite cheap to let them die. It is certainly easier and cheaper than shipping all those people from Poland to Madagascar.