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Notes -
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.
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.
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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