The Romani were. They were explicitly in the same racial category as Jews, and targeted in the same way. The actual numbers and percentages of Romani killed are still being debated, since they were by definition a hard group to quantify, but they were very high.
Groups like the Romani were targeted for racial and cultural reasons. But Jewish people were also targeted for political reasons. The Nazis viewed them as opposing German greatness, undermining the state, political traitors, etc. So while many group were targeted for removal, it was the Jews who were really targeted.
This difference was reflected in how much effort and resources were expended, even in the last months of the war, in rounding up Jews by the hundreds of thousands from places like Hungary and sending them to the death camps.
I had a uncle who was a POW in the last year of the war. The Eastern Front was nearing his camp so the Germans sent everybody on a 2+ month long hike during the middle of winter on foot. When they got too close to the Western Front they were doubled back. Virtually no food, sleeping outdoors, men who were already frail from the harsh conditions in the camps. Thousands died.
At least the goal was to keep them from being liberated. There were also death marches from the death camps. The whole point of those was to walk people to death.
Were they “directly killed”? I find the very question offensive.
Even if this made sense and I agreed that only the Jews were True Scotsman targeted, I don’t see how this responds to the point I’m making. Why do non Jews typically not get a mention, and don’t get counted in the total?
The Jewish population was, as much as they could, fairly well integrated into European society - hence figures like Einstein and numerous other scientists, or for example Freud - integral participants of the countries they lived in but the subjects of intense hatred and prejudice. By contrast, the Romani were more on the periphery, did not participate as much and were simply regarded as vermin, as criminal scum who would cheat and steal. So while there was a systematic attempt to collect and eventually dispose of Jews, the attitude to Romani seemed less visceral. Many German decrees, for example, exempted pure gypsies and only targeted mixed-bloods; initial efforts simply deported them out of the Reich to occupied territories until the administrators refuse to accept them.
The highest estimate I’ve seen said 250,000 to 500,000 and maybe 1/4 of the Romani population, which is horrible but not to the level of 6 million. Plus, anyone identifying as communist or part of the resistance, homosexuals, mentally impaired, etc. - when discussing the topic of “who else besides Jews were victims of the Nazis?” there is no end of victims. Dachau, for example, was set up as a prison camp for political prisoners, which initially meant communists, trade union leaders, and other trouble-makers before they started dumping anyone and everyone into any available camp.
All true, and all important. But still not relevant to the point I was making.
We never treat atrocities this way: we never just count the number of X people targeted, because Y people were targeted for different reasons or whatever. We count the number of people killed.
I think it’s the size of the population. There just weren’t that many Romani. Also, the Nazis didn’t have as wide and deep a propaganda effort against Romani as they did against Jews, partly I believe because of population size, partly because there was a duality of attitude towards “Gypsies” - they were despised, but their lifestyle was also romanticized (“lustig ist das Zigeunerleben”), and also because they didn’t decide on extermination of that group until relatively late in the war. That said, once they decided, the odds of survival in a camp were even lower for Romani than for Jewish inmates.
Probably because the specific atrocity - “Exterminate the Jewish population” - was more complete and more systematic than any other such atrocity. Jews were specifically and universally targeted and the decimation was far closer to complete than any policies against other groups, and the resultant death toll far higher. However, anyone who goes beyond the basics is well aware of the Nazis’ persecution and slaughter of a variety of groups with varying enthusiasm. To my mind, the fanatical concentrated effort to erase the Jews is a distinct and heinous atrocity. They weren’t just “one more victim group”.
It’s pretty much defined the evil of that regime to an extent we don’t attribute even to the Japanese in WWII or the Germans in WWI. Even Stalin, nasty and vicious homicidal maniac that he was, was more of an equal opportunity paranoid. He killed millions, but did not make a concentrated effort to wipe out a group on ethnic or religious grounds.
It’s rarely mentioned that at the same time as the Armenian Genocide there were also genocides against Assyrians and Greeks in Turkey.
The Rwandan Genocide is remembered as being directed against the Tutsi but also included Hutu sympathizers and Batwa Pygmies.
No-one has said they are one more victim group.
One more time: I know the Jews were targeted for extermination in a way quite different to other groups. Nevertheless, I’m saying it’s strange that the other groups don’t even get mentioned in the death toll. To the extent that if you were to ask “How many people were killed in WWII concentration camps?” I really think a majority would say “6 million” or “6 million Jews” and not follow with “plus” anything.
And this thread is about the composition and conditions of the camps but explicitly is only concerned with jewish deaths.
We don’t do that with other atrocities. Just an acknowledgement that that’s strange and I’ll shut up about it.
Japanese in WWII is debateable. You need a pretty strong stomach to read about the rape of nanking, for example. Not saying it’s worse but I wouldn’t be comfortable saying it’s trivially lesser either.
Are they typically excluded from the total deaths?
I reject your entire premise.
(1) The Holocaust is a (horrifyingly) unique event. There aren’t enough other genocides of similar scale for us to be able to say “well, see, in these other 5 holocaust-like events, we discuss things THIS way, but in the Holocaust, we don’t… why is that?”.
(2) Non-Jewish victims of the holocaust are discussed all the time. If, with no other context, you said to me something like “hey, how many people died in the holocaust” I would say “6 million or so Jews, and a few million other people”. They’re discussed so often that even the issue of whether or not they’re discussed is an issue that is discussed a lot.
(3) There are plenty of contexts in which it doesn’t make sense to discuss non-Jews. Ie, “why were so many Jews so passionate about the founding of the state of Israel? Well, remember, they had just witnessed the Holocaust, in which 6 million of them were murdered…” or “why do I take anti-semitism so seriously? Because it wasn’t that long ago that anti-semitism in a western nation led to the Holocaust and the murder of 6 million Jews”. In both of those contexts, mentioning that non-Jews were also murdered would be odd.
(4) The fact that Jews are so prominent and influential in the USA certainly means that the Jewish victims of the Holocaust are discussed more frequently and more prominently than maybe they otherwise would be. But there’s nothing sinister about that. There’s a big difference between “David Cohen lost aunts and uncles in the holocaust, so he donates money in his will to organizations which focus on holocaust remembrance from a Jewish perspective” vs “David Cohen lost aunts and uncles in the holocaust, so he uses his political clout to quash any attempt to publicly mourn non-Jewish holocaust victims”.
(5) As others have said, there are at least two major differences between Jewish and non-Jewish holocaust victims:
(a) pure numbers. Far more Jews were killed than any other single group. The percentage of Jews from some nations that survived the holocaust is fractional.
(b) the ethnic and hereditary arbitrariness of it. Hitler tried to kill political undesireables, like union organizers? Well, lots of dictatorships have done similar things. It’s murdery, but it’s sadly fairly common in human history. Hitler tried to kill all the homosexuals? Well, that’s very evil, but “homosexual” is not a cultural/ethnic group. If Hitler had actually killed 100% of Jews in Europe, there would be no Jews there today (barring immigration). If he’d killed 100% of homosexuals alive in 1940, there would still be homosexuals there today. Trying to literally exterminate Jews was trying to end the existence of an entire people/culture in a way that does not apply to his other victim-groups. (The Roma being a partial exception…)
Well there have been multiple genocides.
Yes the holocaust is the biggest but if that means we should use a different calculus for the death toll, you need to give a reason why.
I disagree. This thread is a good illustration of that: the content of the question is about conditions in the camps and what proportion of people died directly from gassing, but the question is restricted to jewish deaths. Why?
All the responses in the thread also just discuss the 6 million that died, with no mention of other fatalities. That’s what prompted me to post into this thread in the first place.
Yes, obviously.
I didn’t claim there was.
I don’t think it’s a deliberate thing, or that anyone would benefit from the impression that only jews died.
Just something I find a little odd. And I am thinking of the other groups, surely it’s not pleasant for them to be left out of any mention.
I’m well aware of these differences and I’ve acknowledged as much in every post.
But the logic simply doesn’t follow. More Jews were killed than any other single group…therefore…let’s only mention the number of Jews killed when discussing the event in its entirety. What, why?
Well, let’s take two hypotheticals. In one, there were 12 million total victims, 6 million Jews, who Hitler wanted to wipe out for purely ethnic/racist reasons… and 6 million Roma, who Hitler wanted to wipe out for purely ethnic/racist reasons. In that case, it would be expected in almost all contexts to talk about “the genocide of Jews and Roma”.
In another hypothetical, there were 6.001 million total victims, 6 million Jews, and a relatively tiny handful of a few other random people. In that case, people would almost always refer to “the genocide of Jews”, with only occasional contexts in which the other thousand victims were mentioned.
Reality is somewhere in between those extremes, and, as one would predict, our reaction is somewhere in between. Sometimes the Jews are mentioned more prominently, sometimes they are mentioned exclusively, sometimes not. Sometimes “Jews” is used loosely as shorthand for “holocaust victims”, sometimes it’s not, sometimes it’s unclear whether it’s being used that way or not.
Are there particular, specific, cases that bother you?
Reality is much, much closer to the former than the latter. Perhaps *even more *skewed in that direction.
Yes no other single group comes close to the number of Jews that died, nor were other groups singled out in quite the same way. But in terms of death tolls, there is no reason why this fact is significant other than a post-hoc rationalization for ignoring the millions of others who died.
Well this thread is a good start.
I’m not someone who enjoys posting the same comment over and over. But I’m just saying there’s no obvious reason to omit non-jews in a topic like the OP, and people are repeating the same facts back to me as if they’re an answer, when they’re a non sequitur.
Yes Jews suffered much more than any other group, and were essentially exterminated from central europe. But what’s the logical line between that and saying all the other millions of deaths shouldn’t count towards the total?
To take the OP as representative of common thinking on the topic is inadvisable, as the entire OP is based on thinking I for one find odd and not useful - the very concept of breaking out “direct” and “indirect” deaths.
I don’t know of anyone (who doesn’t have some disturbing angle on the subject) who says the other deaths don’t count. Towards the total or in any other way. So for me there is no logical line.
If a grade school were destroyed by a bomb, and 24 children died, and 11 adults as well, the 24 children would likely be named separately from the total. (“35 people died, 24 of them children.” “24 children died, as well as 11 others .”). The others are just as dead. Their deaths are meaningful. The children are singled out because it is noteworthy within the total.
The OP of this thread in no way singles out Jews.
Jews are first mentioned in the third or so post, when quoting actual Nazi paperwork. So, blame the nazis for the fact that the quote is:
“Under proper guidance, in the course of the final solution
the Jews are to be allocated for appropriate labor in the East.”
And not
“Under proper guidance, in the course of the final solution
the Jews (plus Roma, homosexuals, communists, and labor union organizers) are to be allocated for appropriate labor in the East.”
Yeah, please, don’t misrepresent what I have said. I never said that the indirect deaths did not, count, literally the opposite. Isosleepy
Dying of disease or hunger is a different transaction from gasing or shooting. The question is not on whether the former are victims or not, it’s clear they are. The question is the breakdown.
As a point of interest, here’s the first paragraph of the current Wikipedia article on the Holocaust. Note that it specifically calls out different definitions:
Like so many words and phrases, it has different meanings in different contexts. And that can lead to confusion. Such is language.
Although it’s worth pointing out (and I realize I’m risking treading on “doesn’t count” territory here) that it’s the systematic, industrialized gassing of millions that makes the Holocaust unique. Mao and Stalin and plenty of other authoritarian regimes sent huge numbers of people to camps/gulags/whatever where they were worked slowly to death in conditions of appalling cruelty, and we should certainly not forgive or forget that. But only Hitler turned the full industrial and logistical focus of a 20th century economic power to the express and immediate purpose of just murdering an entire people as fast and efficiently as possible.
That said, imagine this conversation:
A: I take talk of genocide personally, as my aunt and uncle died in the holocaust
B: My grandmother and grandfather also died in the holocaust
A: Really? But you’re not Jewish!
B: They were communists. They were arrested up in 1938 and taken away to camps and never heard from again.
A: Well, they were probably just starved and worked to death, not gassed, that doesn’t count!
Obviously that’s an incredibly unreasonable reaction for person A to have.
Ah right, my mistake.
But yes the responses on the totals immediately started talking about what proportion of the 6 million.