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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35785 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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Even reading Tacitus shows the same continuity of character.

Tacitus also says that the Germans nailed people to trees and burned them alive as sacrifices to Wotan.

The Germans wouldn't have wasted delousing chemicals to kill people or have wasted forced labor that would allow them to feel self-righteous in perpetuity.

Old people and children are not wasted force labor, they're dead weight.

The notion that Germans would use euphemisms in the one extant documented meeting concerning the implementation details is absurd to anyone that has ever met a rank-and-file German.

Here is Himmler talking openly about the extermination of European Jews without use of code-words in the Posen speech of October 6 1943:

In this connection, I may comment before this very tightly knit group on a matter which you, my Party Comrades, all take for granted, and which is the most difficult task I have ever faced in my life, the Jewish problem. All of you gladly take it for granted that there are no longer any Jews in your administrative districts. All Germans — with a few individual exceptions — are aware that we could not have endured the bombings, the hardships of the fourth year of the war, and could not endure fifth and sixth years of war that are perhaps yet to come, if we still had this demoralizing pest in our national body. "The Jews must be eradicated ["ausgerottet"]." This brief sentence is easily said. But for the man who must carry out what it calls for, it is the gravest and hardest thing in existence. Now, look, after all they're Jews, only Jews. That's plain enough. But just think about how many people — including Party comrades — have addressed to me and other officials those famous petitions of theirs in which they say: The Jews are all bastards, of course, but so-and-so is a good Jew and should be left alone. I daresay, judging by the number of such appeals and the number of people who express such opinions, the number of "good Jews" in Germany must have exceeded the total Jewish population! In Germany we have millions and millions of people who each have their "one good Jew." I mention this only because you can see in the vital field of your own administrative districts how many respected and upright National Socialists have their "good Jew."

I ask that you assembled here pay attention to what I have to say, but not repeat it. The question came up: Well, what about the women and children? — I came to a determinedly simple conclusion about that, too. I did not believe that I had the right to wipe out ["auszurotten"] the men — rather I should say, kill ["umzubringen"] them or have them killed — and let their children grow up to avenge themselves on our sons and grandsons. The hard decision to wipe this people ["Volk"] off ["verschwinden"] the face of the earth had to be made. For us, the organization that had to carry out this task, it was the most difficult one we ever had. But it was accomplished, and without — I believe I can say — our men and their leaders suffering any mental or spiritual damage. That was clearly a danger. To become too brutal, too heartless, and lose respect for human life, or to be too soft and bring oneself to the point of a nervous breakdown — the path between these two ever-present possibilities is incredibly narrow, the course between Scylla and Charybdis.

We have turned over to the Reich Ministry of Economics all the wealth we confiscated from the Jews — the sums were staggering — right down to very last penny. I have always maintained: We have a duty to our people, to our race, we have a duty to a leader such as has been given to our people only once in 2,000 years, not to be petty here, but to go the limit, as we must do in all things if we are to win the war. Yet we do not have the right to take even one penny of the wealth confiscated from the Jews. At the outset, I laid down the line: Any SS men who take so much as a mark of it are as good as dead. In the past few days, I've had to sign a number of death sentences — I might as well say it, there were about a dozen. One has to be strict here, or everyone will suffer. I considered it my duty to speak very openly to you — the highest bearers of the will, the highest dignitaries, of the Party, of this political order, of this political instrument of the Führer — about this matter and to give the facts as they are. By the end of the year, the Jewish problem in the lands we have occupied will be solved. There will be left only remnants, individual Jews who are in hiding. The problem of Jews who are partners in mixed marriages and the problem of half-Jews will, in accordance with this policy, be rationally examined, decided upon, and resolved.

Source is this thread on the CODOH revisionist forum, which anyone can read if they want to see whether the revisionist interpretation of such a speech holds up.

Here is Himmler talking openly about the extermination of European Jews without use of code-words in the Posen speech of October 6 1943:

In the Posen speeches Himmler describes the policy as "Judenevakuierung", which is alleged to have been a code-word. So he is still using the "code" at Posen. And months later he continues describing a policy of evacuation/resettlement/emigration to the East with the killing of Jews being in the context of partisan reprisals (which revisionists do not deny happened).

So he is still using the "code" at Posen.

In other speeches at Posen he uses the word "Judenevakuierung." In this speech he uses the word "umbringen," which unambiguously means "kill."

the killing of Jews being in the context of partisan reprisals

Partisans are in fact mentioned much earlier in the speech and then Himmler says, 'enough about partisans,' and then moves on to talking about other stuff, and finally when he discusses the solution to the Jewish question in the excerpted paragraphs partisans are not mentioned once.

The hard decision to wipe this people ["Volk"] off ["verschwinden"] the face of the earth had to be made.

Partisans are not a "Volk" and "the East" is a place on the face of the earth.

By the end of the year, the Jewish problem in the lands we have occupied will be solved. There will be left only remnants, individual Jews who are in hiding.

Goal is no Jews left in German-occupied territory by the end of 1943. Which included "the East," however you define it.

By October 1943 the Holocaust was in many ways complete; somewhere around 5 million Jews were already dead at this point. By far the largest remaining Jewish population in Europe was in Hungary, who was still an ally (and wouldn't start deporting its Jews to Auschwitz until after March 1944 when Germany seized control). The remaining Jews still on the chopping block were smaller populations in western countries: Italy, France, the Netherlands, and Germany itself.

The distinction is there were various kind of camps:

  • Arbeitslager (work camps), which were slave labour camps. Inmates were treated very poorly, but there was an active effort to keep them alive because they provided either useful manual labour or some element of skilled labour.

  • Konzentrationslager (concentration camps), where the inmates were more or less expected to work at menial tasks until they died.

  • Vernichtungslager (extermination camps) where almost all individuals were murdered immediately, usually within an hour or two of arrival. Only the strongest individuals would be selected as sonderkommandos, and these groups would be liquidated from time-to-time. If you had made it to November 1943 (the end of Operation Reinhard), the only extermination camp operational past that point was at Auschwitz (with the exception of a brief resumption of gassing operations at Chelmno in June 1944). The others were all farther east and by mid-1943 the Nazis realized they were at risk from a sudden Soviet advance.

The two main reasons why Auschwitz gets so much attention in memoirs/popular histories is that Auschwitz had a work camp, a concentration camp, and an extermination camp; so while more people were murdered there than anywhere else, there were also tens of thousands of survivors. Additionally, it was the principle destination for the western (and Hungarian) Jews who were the last to be targeted, so they were both those who entered the concentration and labour camp systems last (making them most likely to survive), and those able to freely write about their experiences post-war.

This, incidentally, reminds me of one of the logic problems of the "resettlement" thesis.

Let's consider Soviets. When Operation Barbarossa commenced, the Soviets did, indeed, brutally resettle/kill various ethnic populations considered unreliable, like Crimean Tatars, Chechens and Volga Germans, in operations that could well be considered genocidal. The logic was that if areas with such unreliable populations would fall to Germans, they might work or fight for them.

However... this resettlement happened eastwards, to Central Asia and Siberia, not westwards. If some Soviet official had suggested resettling them westwards, they would have probably been considered crazy, or a traitor. After all, the idea was not giving Hitler more workers faster!

Yet, the resettlement thesis seems to suggest the Germans were intent on moving a lot of Jews eastward, towards the Soviets, and continue this movement even after the tide turned and the Soviets started approaching Germany. If so, this would have meant that a population that the Nazi ideology said was particularly predisposed to Communism and supporting the Soviets - the Jews - would have been reached by the frontline more easily, making them potential and willing Soviet workers and soldiers.

Why would they do this? The idea that the Nazis just killed them solves that problem, at least.

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