Regardless, it is extremely IMpractical to exile and murder an educated subculture within your society, especially while gearing up for war. Letting them keep and continue to manage their assets would have been better for German productivity overall.
Well, plus a few of them were piecing together how to build an A-bomb.
Keep in mind that genocide wasn’t necessarily thought of as the high crime it is in Western Society today. Hell, go look at the list of genocides just from the 19th & 20th centuries. This one was hardly new or unique.
Moving into lands and completely wiping out the former inhabitants has a long and inglorious history, including being specifically ordered and approved by the God of the Old Testament. (in other words, the Jewish g-d.)
I would disagree. A “colonial” genocide of people out of sight of the metropolitan, like the Belgian Congo, is one thing (and note that this genocide was, in fact, roundly condemned at the time) - a genocide of one’s neighbours is another. The main predecessor for Hitler’s genocide (one he specifically envoked himself) was the Turkish massacre of Armenians, and most Europeans considered the Turks to be rather less than civilized, as a result of actions such as this.
In addition, the mechanical, industrial nature of it - the creation of dedicated ‘death camps’ with associated gas chambers and crematoria - not to mention gastly human ‘experiments’ - makes this one somewhat unique.
Meh. A myth from the late Bronze Age (which archeologists insist did not, in point of fact, happen) isn’t the same as a wholesale approval of genocide generally today. Rabbinical literature confines the Caananite thing to its time and place.
I have to call bullshit on you here; the mass murders of Jews and communists by the Einsatzgruppen carried out on the heels of the advancing German troops had fuck-all to do with suppressing organized uprisings and everything to do with murdering as many Jews and communists as they could possibly lay their hands on. The Commisar Order was issued by Hitler on June 6th, before he had even invaded the Soviet Union and specified that
Having been captured in battle, they hardly represented a threat of “organized uprisings” in “occupied territories”. They were to be killed for being ideological enemies of the Nazis. The murder of 3.3 million Soviet POWs by starvation can hardly be explained as a result of concern about organized uprisings.
Directly regarding the OP, a simple look at the stab-in-the-back myth - in short, that the German Army didn’t lose WWI but was instead stabbed in the back by civilians (read Jews, Marxists, and ‘cultural Bolsheviks’) - which Hitler subscribed to, used to help propel him into power and made official history in Nazi Germany makes lie of the notion that anti-Semitism in Germany was based on class differences.
If you think Jews are parasites sapping the strength of the nation and are just waiting for the perfect time to stab you in the back then killing them makes a kind of practical sense.
Both.
Jews have historically been behind the scenes pulling strings for a worldwide Communist revolution so they can pile up obscene amounts of wealth through their capitalist endeavors.
We see today a similarly logical plan by the New World Order Elite (and we don’t have to elaborate on who they are) to depopulate the world so they can make a fortune selling their evil products to the masses.
I mean, this stuff is obvious. 
:eek::(:smack:
So, that recent nutcase thread about how many neo-Nazis one might meet in modern Germany had a faint link to reality.
Sorry, the minute that creep began telling me about the “practical” reason for genocide would be the minute I recounted several family members’ service with the Mighty Eighth Air Force…
Yep. Some of the smarter Nazi functionaries saw this, but they were brushed aside.
Back in 1935, Hitler’s Minister of Economics, Hjalmar Schacht (tellingly, not a member of the NSDAP), spoke out against the destruction of Jewish businesses at a time when all the country needed was stable, robust growth. As soon as he had finished his speech, Gauleiter Erich Koch leaned in and whispered a word of warning. (“Mönchlein, Mönchlein, du gehst einen schweren Gang!” = “Little monk, little monk, you’re on a perilous path!” = The same words supposedly said to Luther after he decided to tackle the Catholic church.)
Two years later, Göring forced Schacht to resign.
Even if you grant the truth of the guy’s assertions, it’s still bullshit. There is no “practical reason” that can justify murdering 6 million men, women, and children. Pretending otherwise is just victim-blaming, and while it’s not as evil as the actual act of genocide, it is still indicative of a hateful mindset.
On the contrary, I believe nationalizing the assets of an already hated minority group to fund a war, develop deep national pride & unity, and enable the pursuit of literal world domination could be considered practical reasons for the acts.
Calling it a “practical reason” might not have been the most tactful choice of words, but I don’t see how it is hateful or victim-blaming to point out that there was a strong pre-existing strain of antisemitism in Germany (and not only there) which the Nazis built upon. Acknowledging that fact, and trying to better understand the historical environment in which Hitler rose to power, does not in any way excuse Hitler’s actions or shift any portion of the blame for the Holocaust onto its victims.
However, as already noted, the Jews did not possess or control sufficient property or capital to actually make the effort worthwhile. Hitler could have accomplished the same thing at less expense, (thus providing a greater return on investment), by simply deporting them while not permitting them to take any property with them. And in the period prior to the war when he would have had more need for liquid capital, he did not do any such thing. When Hitler came to power, there were only about 525,000 Jews in a population of around 67 million and they simply did not hold that much wealth.
Given the long European tradition of expelling Jewish communities while confiscating their property, your correspondent’s hypothesis is plausible, however, the facts indicate that that is not what actually happened.
The same source, suggests a reason for the Commissar Order was fear of Soviet commissars organising an uprising as in 1918.
‘The first draft of the Commissar Order was issued by General Eugen Müller on May 6, 1941 and called for the shooting of all commissars in order to avoid letting any captured commissar reach a POW camp in Germany.[3] It was believed by the German leadership that the November Revolution of 1918 had been caused in part by captured Soviet commissars reaching POW camps in Germany in late 1917-early 1918, a “mistake” that the Reich’s leaders were determined to avoid in 1941 by shooting all captured commissars.’
There were other reasons why so many of the Russian PoWs died, mostly to do with the character of the war on the Eastern Front which Hitler decided was to be a war of annihilation. That tone was quite different from what had gone before and it was set in 1941. There was no Geneva convention on the Eastern Front and genocide began in these captured territories.
Also, keep in mind that Hitler went after people who were converted Jews, or people with Jewish ancestry. You could be a freaking Catholic priest, but if you had a Jewish parent/grandparent, that marked you as a Jew in the eyes of the Nazis.
Barbarossa might have been successful without the Holocaust. Not for the resources it took, but for the Russian populations alienated which initially cheered them as asavior from brutal Soviet rule.
I know they went after the gypsies too, partly to rid europe of what they considered “inferior” races. Sadly this was cheered by many other europeans.
Again, I’m going to have to call bullshit on you here. The bit that I bolded in your quote is directly the stab-in-the back myth perpetrated as history by the Nazis and has no basis in actual fact. It’s like quoting the Protocols of the Elders of Zion for reasons the Nazis murdered the Jews. The Nazis claimed it was true, taught it as history in their schools, and some did actually believe it to be a true document rather than the fabrication it actually is; but it doesn’t mean the Nazis were exterminating the Jews to save the world from the insidious Jewish plot to control the world.
I’ll also note that at best this only covers the murders of political commissars murdered on the spot when captured by regular German troops and does nothing to explain in what possible way the shooting of 1.3 million Jews by the Einsatzgruppen in the wake of Barbarossa can be explained away as being undertaken out of a desire to prevent organized uprisings, particularly since they relied upon help from the locals in carrying out pogroms whenever possible. That some in the Wehrmacht liked to try to justify their cooperation with the extermination of millions of human beings for being racially undesirable by calling them anti-partisan operations is paper thin transparent bullshit:
And yet again I’m going to have to call bullshit on you. There were no ‘other reasons’ that so many Soviet POWs died aside from the deliberate German policy of murdering them by starvation and neglect for basic sanitation. They were Slavic peoples, and as such subhuman under Nazi racial ideology, barely above Jews on the racial scale. The Nazis planned on murdering or expelling almost all of them to Siberia when they had won the war under Generalplan Ost, with the rest reduced to illiterate slavery. The idea that there was no Geneva Convention (actually, you mean Hague Convention) on the Eastern Front was the defense tried at Nuremburg, any guesses how that went down? From wiki on the Commisar Order:
Now why, exactly, would Hitler personally absolve in advance any German soldiers who violated international law in enforcing this order if the order was not in fact illegal under the Hague Conventions?
Finally, the idea that genocide began on these captured territories in 1941 conveniently ignores that the Einsatzgruppen began its activities from the start of the war with the invasion of Poland in 1939 where:
This is an often brought up historical what-if. The problem is the entire purpose of the war for Hitler was to take lebensraum in the East for the German people from the Polish, Slavic, etc untermenschen who happened to be living there, and were to be exterminated in the process. The only way you have the Germans not brutalizing the Russian and other Soviet populations in Barbarossa is by removing Hitler from the equation; but by removing Hitler from the equation Germany suddenly has no reason to be doing something as foolish as trying to conquer Russia in 1941. The amount of initial cheering is usually highly exaggerated as well, and wasn’t coming from Russian populations; it was coming from non-Russian Soviet populations hostile to Soviet rule such as the Ukraine (for the famine in 1932-33 among other things) and the Baltic States (which had only been occupied by the Soviets in 1940 as part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact).
@Dissonance
I am sure there will be someone along soon enough who will call bullshit on you at the date of 1939 and find incidents going back to 1933.
Often there are many reasons for an action, some more important than others. I have read of various practical explanations for the deaths of Russian PoWs. Lack of food due to supply problems, winter clothes being confiscated for use by the German army. But these often don’t stand up to scrutiny.
We find practical reasons used in:
Propaganda designed to convince the German public of the threat of conspiracies by Jews and Communists.
Nazi public health policies promoting euthanasia.
Overcoming objections from German soldiers and officers told to participate in massacres.
Post war defence of war crimes.
Are you arguing that there was in fact no practical reasons at all and the motive was simply ideological where the victims were regarded as subhuman threats to the Nazi political project that were to be eliminated?
It was largely places like the Ukraine and Baltics and such, yes, but even with German policy being what it was, about 50,000 Russian troops did end up fighting for the Germans.