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The element of the story you gloss over is the extensive but not-much-talked about cooperation between the Nazis and Zionists, which is a subject which was discussed in Ron Unz's new article on Israel and the Holocaust earlier this month. In addition to the extensive efforts of the Germans to transfer Jews to Palestine, there existed plans for a post-war Jewish state in multiple forms, including the Madagascar Plan (a plan which Joseph Goebbels still mentioned in his diaries when the Holocaust had supposedly already been decided and implemented). After the Madagascar Plan, there were various plans for resettlement in the Pale of Settlement, newly conquered Russian territory, the Lublin district of occupied Poland, etc.
This is why the gas chamber and alleged extermination program are such important claims in the story. Without those elements, this is a story of a country that brutally collapsed right in the middle of a mass resettlement. Like if Israel decided to concentrate and then resettle all Palestinians out of Israel into Egyptian territory, but then Israel was destroyed and conquered by Iran right as that was happening. And then the Iranians made a bunch of ridiculous claims about death factories using absurd methods of mass murder- i.e. the Israelis turned the Palestinians into bars of soap!
So, the Nazi plans all entailed the creation of a Jewish state after expulsion from the European sphere. Historians though claim that (for some reason) this long-standing policy was replaced with an extermination order (they can't say who, when, where or why such a radical change in policy was decided, and such an order has never been found) using primarily homicidal gas chambers disguised as shower rooms.
If you accept the Revisionist interpretation, that the plan was for resettlement East ahead of the post-war creation of a Jewish state, then these plans by the AfD are absolutely comparable to what the Nazis did. And in particular, if it turns out the Wannsee conference really was all about resettlement as a plain reading of the minutes show, and not codewords for an extermination policy, then the Wannsee Conference is comparable to secret conferences planning for mass resettlement of migrants to their homelands or to a separate colony of some sort.
The gas chamber legend and alleged extermination order are the only things that set them apart, which is why those claims are so important to the broader history.
Whatever the actual numbers the nazis conduct against various ethnic groups during the war was murderous. They also enslaved for labor plenty of Europeans and Jews too. It isn't accurate that AFDs plans are equivalent with the nazis agenda even under the framework of many revisionists. Whether towards the Jews specifically, or other populations. It is fair to say the nazis commited genocides against multiple ethnic groups.
Actually the use of nazism as a propaganda towards Europeans is unethical also because the Nazis mistreated the people of plenty of European countries. But of course before the nazis and during and after them, other evil factions existed with a negative agenda against Europeans who even milked antinazism to justify themselves and demonize Europeans. Including those who suffered under the Nazis.
One could well argue that the antifa type of faction, which in fact shares some of the worst pathologies that nazism had, has in fact an agenda quite more destructive than even the nazis. And this applies especially when it comes to Europe. So I would say that if you are more hostile to Europeans than even the nazis, then you should not be allowed to have any influence and say about Europe.
In regards to AFD, some level of repatriations is a moderate response for their own survival that has been forced upon European nations by the extreme "destroy Europeans" faction which tries to promote as fait accompli the extinction of European ethnic groups. And of course there is the issue of those who migrated, illegally but "legalized" or legally, and got a paper saying they belong in said nation while are contemptuous of the native people and see the process as a conquest and are happy for it, and support discriminating against the natives, denying them their nationhood, and bringing more foreign settlers. Fundamentally, homeland's should be made mainly by their own people and minorities that respect the native majority and are tolerated in turn and through small numbers and intermarriage there might be some assimilation.
Too large numbers and too much hostility and the assimiliation goes to the other way towards the postnational state for the natives to be oppressed and destroyed and as a homeland for the conquerors. There are always trade offs when it comes to human rights and different nations, and this is the way that results in the least trouble and mutual respect of the rights of different nations to existence. And preserves world diversity of different nations, over say the world being dominated by the more fertile blacks, or a coalition of foreign groups who subsequently transform the west more in line to south africa. https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/diversity-is-good-actually
The Nazis conduct was of a more imperialist, genocidal nature in general at expense of non German populations under their control, so it isn't productive to compare AFD suggestion to that. In fact it can aid the conduct of anti-Europeans and help create a narrative that reverses the victim with victimizer. Which in this case the victimizers are those trying to destroy European nations.
The concentration camps and labor camps were part of the war effort, for sure. But the "Final Solution" as such was the resettlement of the Jews out of the European sphere into what would have become a Jewish territory partly occupied/administered by Germany, at least in the short term. That is comparable to Israeli ambitions to expel the Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank, including proposals to resettle them into a territory on the Sinai peninsula. 2rafa is trying to say these things are not comparable, but that's only the case if you accept certain premises such as mass gas chamber extermination inside shower rooms. If you take the documents at face value, they are comparable policies.
The use of "slavery" to describe wartime conscription is a bit dubious, but I don't feel like splitting hairs. If you give someone a rifle, force them to the front, and shoot them if they try to desert, I don't think you would call that enslavement (or maybe you would!).
The Nazis conducted slave raids across Europe, ultimately kidnapping millions for forced labor. Himmler being characteristically blunt:
The Nazis conducted slave raids across Europe insofar as the Soviets conducted slave raids across Europe, but nobody says the latter because the only real purpose of the former is to draw distinctions that don't actually exist. It's pretty typical of the mainstream historical method, too: ignore the thousands of WVHA documents dealing with the administration of the prisoner labor force, which did not regard them as slaves (and they were paid for their labor), but pick out a sentence from a (poorly sourced? can't tell) "secret speech" by Himmler.
If you want to call the forced labor during the war slavery that's your prerogative. I think it would be dishonest to call wartime forced labor as salvery but not conscription for front-line combat. But it's just splitting hairs. My point was that just because the Israelis have no plans to use Palestinians for forced labor does not mean their proposals to expel the Palestinians to the Sinai peninsula cannot be compared to German plans for the resettlement of Jews.
Nazis burned down Polish/Ukrainian villages and marched people onto trains at gunpoint to be sent to the Reich to work but at least they got paid in worthless money.
Yes the Soviets also made extensive use of slave labor and Stalin was also a bad guy.
Israeli treatment of the Palestinians is quite horrible and still isn’t half as horrible Nazi treatment of the European Jews.
It's not as much a question of "horribleness."
For our entire lifetimes, the idea of anybody supporting a mass expulsion/deportation/resettlement, whatever you want to call it, so close to home has not even entered into anybody's minds. It is significant that now we are faced with two plausible programs of mass resettlement within the "Western" sphere of influence: the resettlement of Palestinians out of Palestine, i.e. to the Sinai desert, and the mass deportation of non-European migrants.
Of course people like 2rafa who support these initiatives are going to try to explain why these programs cannot be compared to the Nazi policies regarding the Jews. But the uncomfortable reality is that they are definitely comparable. It's a grave situation, it's going to be violent if these policies are carried out. The gas chamber legend elevates the Nazi policies to another plane of existence, and allows people like 2rafa to not confront the similarities which are definitely there.
Look, I am willing to believe- I don’t believe it, I think the evidence is stacked against it, but I’m willing to believe it in the existence of a good argument- that Hitler did not intend to exterminate the Jews and German gas chambers were not tools of mass murder. I’m willing to believe the death total from the Holocaust was dramatically lower than generally believed. And I’ll even concede that Nazi Germany had the moral high ground on the eastern front compared to the USSR(but still in the sense of, like, the edge of the Mariana Trench instead of the bottom).
But it seems suspicious that of people making this argument- and I say this to Holocaust deniers in my ingroup- the argument makers(as opposed to fellow travelers and argument repeaters) can’t tell you if 200k-300k Jews dying from a combination of localized massacres and poor conditions in the camps is a tragedy that reflects a black mark on Hitler’s regime. Because Germany was quite clearly capable of running large scale prison camps with a normal-at-the-time death rate in conditions of wartime. They did it in WWI, after all. But even if the Jews in the concentration camps all died of typhus or famine or whatever(and I will concede that plenty of them did in fact die from this), that represents at least a lot of neglect from the German government and Nazi party for which they are morally culpable. Not to mention the massacres ‘in the field’ by einsatzgruppen. I’ve never seen a Holocaust denier even attempt to address the einsatzgruppen by the way; if it was all localized massacres that also seems like something Nazi germany is morally culpable for because they 1) had a policy to concentrate these people 2) per official state ideology considered them racial undesirables and 3) per official state ideology considered murder an acceptable way to deal with other undesirables, such as the disabled, and overzealous SS or Wehrmacht captains ordering massacres is what happens when that combination comes about.
Look, the eastern front was evil vs evil in a way that breaks most peoples’ brains. I don’t blame you for trying to resolve that ambiguity in your head by absolving the Nazis of guilt. And I especially don’t blame you for it when whites are under attack and anyone who defends them gets called a Nazi. But acknowledge what actually happened here especially when polite, intelligent people refute your arguments and provide high-quality, detailed, evidence-filled explanations of Nazi Germany being more evil to Jews than Israel is towards Palestinians a couple of times a month.
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Again, we have the extermination program in writing. You seem to have conveniently forgotten this, again, since our last 40-comments back-and-forth in which you tried to dodge the issue.
Of course they can. You know this, because we discussed this ad nauseam.
It won't
It wasn't
It clearly doesn't. The opposite is true. We've been over this. Stop lying.
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I never heard of the Madagascar plan before but as an alt history that would be one of the more interesting things if it happened especially for the HBD crowd if 6 million Jews went there.
American Jews accomplished a lot but we never received anywhere close to that and they took over our elite institutions. Ashkenazi Jews were 15/20 of the biggest political donors in 2020 in America. Madagascar could have become one of the most powerful global civs on that timeline.
Best I can tell America received around 2 million Ashkenazi Jews by 1920. So a country counting for some natural population growth double the size of Americas Jewish population. That population has produced 30-40% of Nobels. The scientific output of Madagascar might rival the rest of the world.
There were a few equivalent ones. Northern Australia was also mooted, and I'd love to see a counterfactual in which the Australian Indigenous had to fare with that particular settlement.
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Is this where you pretend that Eichmann doesn't exist again? This is well trod territory by now. I'm trying to keep my wording compliant in order to avoid a warning by the mods, but your particular fixation wouldn't be so annoying if it were just merely dishonest - it's that you have to constantly bring it up as well.
It is "well-trod territory" because even the mainstream has backed away from the original stature given to the Wannsee Conference as supposedly being the decision point for the extermination policy. It was a 90 minute meeting of mid-level officials. Wannsee was only important because they have literally nothing else to go on, so they have to take a 90 minute meeting about Jewish resettlement and pretend that "resettlement" is a codeword for gas chamber extermination. They also say the Germans specifically wrote the minutes of the meeting to camouflage the actual purpose of the meeting. That's not a misrepresentation, either, that's actually what they claim.
The Revisionist interpretation of Wannsee, i.e. what the minutes of the meeting say it was, is actually comparable to AfD meeting in secret to plan proposals for mass resettlement of migrants. It is not comparable to the Steven Spielberg version of history.
Man, if only they had somehow tracked the guy who wrote those Wannsee minutes down. Maybe interrogated him, or had a big trial or something. What an incredibly insightful process that would have been. Shame it didn't happen.
Your hate is too obvious, it makes the shtick too visible. You need to apply a few more layers of lacquer or something. I don't get the point of it all either, it's too effortful to be merely the product of some kind of stubborn contrarianism. I know you're lying, you know you're lying, you know I know you're lying, what's the point?
An interrogation in a show trial from a rogue state that violated international law by kidnapping someone is not a good way to establish the use of code-words in the minutes to a meeting. Decades before the Eichmann circus, Josef Bühler, the deputy governor of the General Government and attendee of the Wannsee Conference testified at the IMT as a defense witness for Hans Frank in 1946, and claimed that the purpose of Wannsee was to discuss the forced resettlement of Jews in the northeast of Europe:
You must admit though, that it's likely he understands that if he does say, yeah we did decide to exterminate the Jews and I was in on it, is unlikely to go well for him after the war. So why do you think you can trust what he says? He has a huge incentive to say, oh no, from my understanding we were just going to move them.
If I were a Nazi, that is exactly what I would say once we lost!
Yes, if you assume the conclusion, you can explain behavior in that light.
It's not assuming the conclusion. It's pointing out IF the conclusion is right then his words cannot be trusted. You can't then rely on his words to disprove the conclusion. Because he would say the same thing either way.
An accused murderer who is guilty is highly likely to lie. Which is why we generally do not accept "I didn't do it" on its own to exonerate them and let them go with an apology as part of an investigation. We check their alibis against other people, were they at the bar they claimed to be at? Did anyone see them?
But pointing out that someone accused of X is not often a credible witness in their own defense is not particularly radical. It can't be used as evidence they did do X, because of course an innocent person will also claim (honestly!) they didn't do it, but it doesn't on its own tell you they are innocent either. because there is a significant incentive to lie to protect themselves.
OJ says he was innocent, should he be believed?
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If Israel was in the process of resettling all 5.4m Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and was then invaded by Iran, and when the dust settled it turned out that perhaps 500,000 of those Palestinians survived and were discovered by the Iranian occupiers, the rest having vanished from history never to contact their countless surviving relatives overseas ever again, I think it would be fair to suggest they had died in the war. If it turned out that the Israeli civilian casualty rate was such that only 500,000 out of 9.5m Israelis were killed, it would be reasonable to ask what the Israelis had done to ensure a civilian casualty rate that was 90% for Palestinians but just 5% for Israelis.
Beyond the usual discussions, though, I think there are a few questions you gloss over.
Firstly, most mainstream Holocaust historians accept that Hitler’s initial plan was not to murder all Jews if he could persuade them to leave by other means. They acknowledge Hitler’s deep enmity toward Jews, but they also acknowledge that emigration was obviously the first preference of the Third Reich.
Secondly, you seem to imply that a Jewish Madagascar under Nazi authority would have been (a) capable of hosting the exiled population and (b) something analogous to a Jewish state like Israel. I don’t think either of those are likely. If anything, a Jewish Madagascar would have been - at best - like an occupied West Bank, which you have previously railed against as highly unethical. In reality, given the extremely generous NGO support for the Palestinians, life on Nazi Madagascar would have been much worse.
Thirdly, Hitler wasn’t only concerned by Jews on his territory. Hitler was of the profound belief that all Jews, everywhere, were a threat to his project and to Aryan civilization. Hitler railed against Soviet, American and British Jews long before he was at war with them and indeed long before he was even in power. The argument that ‘it just doesn’t make sense for him to kill them, even if he was hostile to them’ often ignores this fact.
Hitler believed Jews were a great threat to his civilization whether they were within or beyond Germanic lands, and in this context the Holocaust makes more sense for Nazi leadership, since the mere exile of Jewry would not ‘solve’ their Jewish Problem under these circumstances, particularly if those exiled Jews bore a (reasonable, we might say) grudge about all their expropriated land and property and general ill treatment.
And this is the crux of the whole question. If Hitler doesn’t merely hate Jews but considers them eternal enemies of his civilization, then leaving them alive in their own state in Madagascar or in Palestine or elsewhere just doesn’t make sense amid the heightened tension of wartime, unless you think he was such a great guy that he just considered it morally wrong to kill them (but not to do any of the other stuff he unambiguously intended, like ethnically cleansing West Slavs to make way for German settlers and so on).
The revisionist interpretation requires that Hitler - who had no issue killing his political enemies, or indeed even friends, often on spurious or fully false flag charges - chose not to kill the Jews under his total control, despite extreme public hostility toward them for 20+ years, blaming them for almost everything that went wrong in Germany, and considering even their existence in foreign lands a great threat to Aryan civilization, because…he was a nice guy? Because that was a step too far?
The Holocaust would appear to be more congruent with Hitler’s writing, ideology and deeply-held worldview than the absence of the Holocaust. Nowhere does Hitler express any empathy or compassion for the majority of the Jewish population that would suggest he was not content for them to die.
The same could be said for the rhetoric of various Israeli politicians towards the Palestinians.
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Broadly on your side in this sub-exchange, but puzzled how ‘thirdly’ fits with the claim that a Jewish state would have prevented the Holocaust. Palestine was not only well within Germany’s reach, but it was right next to their primary goal in North Africa. If the Germans had taken Egypt and the British had withdrawn to Iraq, it seems like the Palestinian Jews would have been screwed regardless of their relative population share - if Anita Shapira is to be believed, the Yishuv’s plan (such as it was) was to cooperate so as not to give a pretext for reprisals.
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Dunno, Ashkenazi Jews are much better at running a society than Palestinians.
Without extensive imports (which Germany was already short of) of food and fuel the great majority of the settlers wouldn’t have survived the first 24 months, it would have been like Darien or one of the other failed European settlements of Central America. Beyond that time the survivors may have been OK, depending on the level of German meddling.
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If Iran had the grip on the region that Stalin had behind the Iron Curtain, you would not trust any reports coming out of Iran about the state of Palestinian survivors and how many of them were killed by Israel, and how. If Iran refused any international observers or investigators and deployed their own kangaroo courts to place the blame for every single Palestinian death during their brutal conquest of Israel onto Israel, you would not accept that either.
Yes, the Madagascar plan is comparable to the Israeli expulsion of the Palestinians to the occupied West Bank, that's my point (with the major exception that Palestinians were indigenous to Palestine and Jews were not indigenous to Europe). So were the plans to concentrate the Jews in the East in the Pale of Settlement/Lublin/Russia which never came to fruition because the Eastern Front and then entire regime collapsed. Those plans are in fact comparable to plans you support for dealing with Palestinians, and to a lesser extent non-European migrants.
It's interesting you call adversarial rhetoric from leaders the "crux of the whole question" rather than the mountain of documents that quite clearly lay out the policy objectives as described by Revisionists... South Africa's submission to the ICC accusing Israel of genocide follows a similar line of argument, under the heading Expressions of Genocidal Intent against the Palestinian People by Israeli State Officials and Others (pp. 59 - 67), i.e. here's a brief sample from those pages:
This is especially interesting because, since no written orders for extermination or mass gas chamber executions have ever been found, the mainstream historical position has heavily relied on vague rhetoric from German leaders and cherry-picking diary vague diary entries to allege a genocidal policy intent in lieu of any orders actually establishing it, like you are doing in your post here. But now that it's Israeli leaders giving the same sort of rhetoric you would hear from Goebbels or Hitler (in many cases worse), I assume you don't think this is evidence of a genocidal intent. But don't tell me these things are not comparable, they absolutely are comparable.
“Genocidal intent” is a largely bullshit term (even if it’s sometimes necessary) outside of the most banal “I will commit genocide” declaration (and even then), just look at how many thing politicians say they’ll do and then don’t.
That said I think, exactly like some of the speeches and diary entries you mention, that some on the extreme right fringe of Israeli politics (not Bibi) have expressed what could become an openness to genocide. And I certainly think there are a substantial number of religious Zionists who don’t particularly care what happens to the Palestinians, or whether they live or died.
But litigating genocidal intent is different than litigating genocide. And yes, I absolutely think that if there’s some geopolitical chaos and 90% of Palestinians on territory controlled by Israel vanish in 4 years Israel should be the prime and obvious suspect in their disappearance. So I’m not, in that sense, disagreeing with you at all.
Edit: And regarding your first point re. the Iranian control example, I agree and am glad you acknowledge that the central question about the whole revisionism debate does revolve around estimates of the prewar and postwar Jewish population of Central and Eastern Europe, as I have long argued here.
I don't think it's a bullshit term given that you appealed to it without calling it that in your previous post. Revisionists point to all the documentary evidence that the plan was resettlement and concentration. You point to Hitler's speeches portraying Jews as an enemy to infer a genocidal intent even if you don't call it that. In any case, you are trying to draw a difference between these two cases where we only find more similarities...
Bibi has invoked Biblical prophecy and associated the Palestinians with Amalek:
The revisionism debate does not revolve around population estimates, because that data is fundamentally incomplete and unreliable. The Revisionist case weighs most heavily on the documentary and physical evidence, with population census data being too inconclusive for the question at hand. For what it's worth, the mainstream position does not revolve around estimates of prewar and postwar population estimates either, by far the most important body of evidence is testimony from witnesses which has been picked apart by Revisionists for decades.
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