Long threads on this in SD.
Also, re above, concentration camps, whose ultimate goal, was death, and sometimes–like Auschwitz and Dachau at first–concurrent goal, was immediate killing. Later, Auschwitz was merged with the camp Birkenau, and it, Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka existed solely as industrial processing centers.
Manpower efficiency wasn’t the reason for the shift from open air shootings and mobile gas vans to death camps; the number of personnel in the Einsatzgruppen was shockingly small for having carried out the murder of over 2 million human beings by these methods. There were only 3,000 membersin the 4 Einsatzgruppen organized for Barbarossa.
See above, the Nazis did indeed kill 2 million people in mass open air shootings, 33,771 Jews were shot at Babi Yar on Sep 29-30, 1941 for example. You are probably thinking of the Oradour-sur-Glane massacre with locking women and children in barns (the church, actually) and setting it on fire. That wasn’t actually part of the Holocaust; it was a massacre of civilians carried out by the 2nd SS “Das Reich” Panzer Division in retaliation for partisan activity it encountered during its march to Normandy.
It actually left a huge paper trail as the Nazis were quite meticulous in their record keeping; they were also smart enough to destroy most of it, but what survives is quite detailed and very damning, for example the Jäger Report:
The Wehrmacht wasn’t told to keep away from the Einsatzgruppen while they were “working”, though their direct involvement is something that a lot of its surviving officers preferred not to acknowledge. The Wehrmacht was well aware of, and worked quite close with the Einsatzgruppen:
Based on what I’ve read, and what I remember from the Imperial War Museum’s holocaust exhibition, what they did at Auschwitz-Birkenau and other camps is basically sort the incoming prisoners into the ones that weren’t useful for work (old, children, infirm, weak), and gas them right away, and the others would basically be worked to death.
The only reason I bring this up is that I have been accused SOMETHING I WILL NOT REPEAT DUE TO SDMB MODERATOR RULES, and to satisfy some of the more younger, uninformed posters proof of this statement being truly used, above is the latest example.
The Holocaust did happen; 6 million Jews, if not more, and many more others, of targeted ethic racial or other groups, were killed systematically by the Nazis. Im just trying to get to the root of the “ovens” comments and how that may or may of not played a part in the actual extermination process.
I’ll be damned. I just now saw this thread in the “New Posts,” and I assumed that the OP was prompted by Huckabee’s idiotic remarks. I’m amazed to see that it was actually posted a few days before them. Talk about topical!
Reading Ardennes 1944: Hitler’s Last Gamble by Antony Beevor, came across a passage that shows that Germans at the time used this wording (or a variation thereof), p.45;