# Questions about Hitler and Nazi Germany's attempted extermination of Europe's Jews **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [September 18, 2013, 7:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-hitler-and-nazi-germanys-attempted-extermination-of-europes-jews/669168 "2013-09-18T19:02:03Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 21
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2013, 7:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-hitler-and-nazi-germanys-attempted-extermination-of-europes-jews/669168/401 "2013-09-21T19:02:02Z")
> [@Malden\_Capell](#): > > You haven’t given it any thought? > > And yet you ask us to consider all the evidence? I don’t think Gack will ever reflect that what the Irish Catholic former New York politician was in reality speaking about close to **7 million** starving Jews. He is really not thinking about the children. ---
**Author:** ![Gack](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/ecccb3/32.png) [@Gack](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gack)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2013, 7:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-hitler-and-nazi-germanys-attempted-extermination-of-europes-jews/669168/402 "2013-09-21T19:03:18Z")
> [@Steken](#): > > OK. > > So the idea from 1906 and on was… What, exactly? The idea was to generate sympathy for the Jews in Europe leading to funds to support their emigration to Palestine. It all became explicit during WW I as the Heddesheimer book documents. ---
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2013, 7:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-hitler-and-nazi-germanys-attempted-extermination-of-europes-jews/669168/403 "2013-09-21T19:03:29Z")
> [@iiandyiiii](#): > > Whether or not some prisoners died of typhus does nothing to discount the enormous amount of evidence of others that were murdered and starved. As established upthread, the number of recorded typhus deaths was very small. You’ll note **Gack** stopped talking about the meticulous records after this was pointed out. They say The Fuhrer was a terrific dancer, and **Gack** likes to tap dance, too. > [@Gack](#): > > I can’t explain it. These were 15 pages (I think) of notes taken on a meeting that goes into detail about how the Jews are to be rounded up and sent east … Yes, and once sent there they were kept in camps and worked to death or exterminated. It’s not as if they were settled into new townships. > [@](#): > > It is not intended to evacuate Jews over 65 years old, but to send them to an old-age ghetto - Theresienstadt is being considered for this purpose."\* Theresienstadt was an unusual case and it wasn’t a death camp. It was a concentration camp, and the Nazis used it to try to prove that captured Jews were living in humane conditions. Nonetheless tens of thousands of people died of disease and tens of thousands were later sent to death camps. > [@Gack](#): > > I haven’t given it any thought Hardly surprising. If one has decided Oprah is a dean of Holocaust studies, it’s unlikely one is going to look at actual data. ---
**Author:** ![QuickSilver](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quicksilver/32/7832_2.png) [@QuickSilver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/QuickSilver)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2013, 7:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-hitler-and-nazi-germanys-attempted-extermination-of-europes-jews/669168/404 "2013-09-21T19:05:09Z")
> [@Gack](#): > > Of why the number of about to be exterminated Jews is frequently listed as six million, stating in 1906, and in many articles up to the advent of WW II? No, the number is fantasy from some source or the other, I haven’t given it any thought, I don’t think there is anything of substance to think about. Fact is, you’ve not given any of this a single moment of critical thought. Anything that does not fit in with your revisionist, dare I say, anti-semitic views, is summarily ignored. There’s a reason you exclusively quote from fanatic holocaust deniers and ignore generally accepted historic accounts. We’ve all drawn our own conclusions by now. Something tells me we’re not the first or the last to do so. Now, one more time… Why did Hitler want jews out of Germany and Europe? ---
**Author:** ![Musicat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/musicat/32/20189_2.png) [@Musicat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Musicat)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2013, 7:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-hitler-and-nazi-germanys-attempted-extermination-of-europes-jews/669168/405 "2013-09-21T19:05:11Z")
> [@Gack](#): > > There is no mystery here, the Jews were put in camps because it was Hitler’s intention to move them all out of Europe. First he encouraged Jewish immigration, Hitler encouraged Jewish immigration? _Immigration?_ WTF? He wanted _more_ Jews in Germany? After his tirades in _Mein Kampf?_ After his speeches blaming the International Jewish Consipracy for all of Germany’s problems? Not to mention stealing one of his balls! Why would he want _more_ Jews around him? What?? Oh, you mean _emigration._ Never mind. ---
**Author:** ![FinnAgain](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/finnagain/32/12500_2.png) [@FinnAgain](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FinnAgain)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2013, 7:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-hitler-and-nazi-germanys-attempted-extermination-of-europes-jews/669168/406 "2013-09-21T19:20:10Z")
Why did Hitler want the Jews out of Germany, Gack? ---
**Author:** ![Steken](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e274bd/32.png) [@Steken](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steken)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2013, 7:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-hitler-and-nazi-germanys-attempted-extermination-of-europes-jews/669168/407 "2013-09-21T19:20:40Z")
> [@Gack](#): > > The idea was to generate sympathy for the Jews in Europe leading to funds to support their emigration to Palestine. It all became explicit during WW I as the Heddesheimer book documents. They needed funds? The Jews… They needed funds? OK, so they were poor, then. The Jews were poor. Really, really poor. So terribly poor, in fact, that they couldn’t even afford emigrating to Palestine. And yet, despite their abject poverty, they were, somehow, so extremely powerful and influential that they managed to organize both 1) a thirty-plus-year disinformation campaign planting the idea of “six million Jewish victims” in the heads of the foolish goyim, and 2) a motherfucking world war.\* Is this what you believe? * * * - Or _two_ world wars, in case you believe they organized WWI as well as WWII. Do you? ---
**Author:** ![Ibn\_Warraq](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/e19b73/32.png) [@Ibn\_Warraq](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ibn_Warraq)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2013, 7:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-hitler-and-nazi-germanys-attempted-extermination-of-europes-jews/669168/408 "2013-09-21T19:26:35Z")
> [@FinnAgain](#): > > Why did Hitler want the Jews out of Germany, Gack? I obviously can’t speak for him but since he has implicitly said that evil American Jews manipulated the US into the Iraq War to benefit Israel, that American Jews are untrustworthy Zionists, and seems to believe that Mossad was behind 911, I’d say its because he thinks Jews are evil and attempt to manipulate Gentiles for he interests of the Jewish community. I would of course he overjoyed if he proved me wrong and have a different explanation. ---
**Author:** ![FinnAgain](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/finnagain/32/12500_2.png) [@FinnAgain](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FinnAgain)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2013, 7:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-hitler-and-nazi-germanys-attempted-extermination-of-europes-jews/669168/409 "2013-09-21T19:32:37Z")
Obviously us capitalistic-communistic, clannish-cultural-infiltrators defy your puny gentile logic. Us Jews are just that badass. Don’t try to understand. We’re like wavicles, except we rule the world. ---
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2013, 8:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-hitler-and-nazi-germanys-attempted-extermination-of-europes-jews/669168/410 "2013-09-21T20:28:21Z")
And only Hitler had the brilliant insight to understand why the Jews were engaged in a complicated self-contradictory plot that didn’t make any sense. ---
**Author:** ![Steken](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e274bd/32.png) [@Steken](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steken)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2013, 8:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-hitler-and-nazi-germanys-attempted-extermination-of-europes-jews/669168/411 "2013-09-21T20:31:17Z")
> [@Marley23](#): > > And only Hitler had the brilliant insight to understand why the Jews were engaged in a complicated self-contradictory plot that didn’t make any sense. No, silly. Hitler was a Jewish puppet. Draw your own conclusions… ---
**Author:** ![Locrian](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/locrian/32/14146_2.png) [@Locrian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Locrian)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2013, 8:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-hitler-and-nazi-germanys-attempted-extermination-of-europes-jews/669168/412 "2013-09-21T20:49:51Z")
I just googled S.S. Doctor Fritz Klein photos, the famous one of Fritz in the mass grave is the most popular shown. Just down the Google search page, we get [Gack’s incredible and most informative](http://www.whale.to/b/belse_p.html) source of info\* on the typhus infestation, how Fritz was only at Belsen camp for “a few weeks” and how Fritz was “tortured and forced to confess, he was sentenced to death and hanged.” It seems like he’s just paraphrasing the retarded captions under the photos given. (Hey, there’s even one photo of the luxurious triple-teird bunk beds!) Is there a word for people who actually trust a bumbling website with no real background other than paranoid ramblings over thousands of educated historians with evidence that they have personally sought, found and collaborated? ( \* = Yes, it’s whale.to / A good laugh if anything. ) ---
**Author:** ![MonkeyMensch](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/82dd89/32.png) [@MonkeyMensch](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MonkeyMensch)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2013, 9:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-hitler-and-nazi-germanys-attempted-extermination-of-europes-jews/669168/413 "2013-09-21T21:06:51Z")
I think this might be my first post in Great Debates. Go figure. First thanks to Gack for not posting one inflammatory post and then disappearing. Debate requires discussion and you’ve provided that. I disagree with your viewpoint but at least you are trying to make an argument. The website with “prothink” in it was good in that I got to hear others that think along your lines explain themselves in their own words. I disagree wholeheartedly with them, but at least it wasn’t filtered through some other person’s viewpoint, The other point that, I think it was\*\* tomndeb\*\* made, sometimes goes by the boards is that six million isn’t the overriding number of deaths. I realize that the OP is specifically addressing the number of Jewish deaths but don’t forget that was only half the effort. 12 to 17 million people in total were killed by the Nazi regime. There was a seriously large amount of genocide (attempted or successful) that occurred. ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2013, 9:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-hitler-and-nazi-germanys-attempted-extermination-of-europes-jews/669168/414 "2013-09-21T21:14:35Z")
> [@Gack](#): > > As has been pointed out several times that the photos/film are from Belsen, not a ‘death camp’ and not even a work camp, and that at the end of the war 35,000 prisoners died of typhus. USHMM documentation was supplied. The photos/film were made by the Brits at the end of the war and show typhus victims. If that is the entirety of the situation, then you have no point. Typhus does not result in emaciation; it kills too quickly (two weeks or fewer) to permit starvation. The emaciated bodies are those of people who starved. If the starved bodies are not from the extermination camps, then your nonsense about them not being gassed is irrelevant because we are not talking about the same victims. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2013, 9:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-hitler-and-nazi-germanys-attempted-extermination-of-europes-jews/669168/415 "2013-09-21T21:21:54Z")
> [@Gack](#): > > There was a history of anti-semitism in Germany. I’m reading a book on the Warburgs, from which I gather that the Jews were pretty much segregated prior to 1800, and were gradually emancipated during the 1800s. The Warburg book refers to the birth of ‘modern’ anti-semitism, that is post emancipation anti-semitism as starting with a German book ‘The Victory of Judaism’ by Wilhelm Marr. I just read where there was a Anti-Semitic political party in Germany in the late 1800s. > > The development of Hitler’s anti-semitic opinions is given in detail in Mein Kampf. In short he equated Jews with communism, the Social Democratic political party in Germany, and the trade unions, all of whom he saw as working to undermine German nationalism. > > Anti-semitism in Germany no doubt increased after WW 1 because the country was reduced to poverty, turmoil, and strife, and the Jews became a scapegoat. I don’t have a link for this, but it seems plausible. To Hitler, though, the Jews were more than a convenient scapegoat, they really were the source of most evil in the world. In a nutshell: The Nazi Party was, among other things, the most successful political movement in history based on a conspiracy theory. To start with, Hitler did not invent the linkage between radical German nationalism and radical antisemitism; it had been in the air for some time, even in respectable academic circles, when Hitler first started attending NSDAP meetings as a police spy. The waves of nationalism of the 19th Century engendered some extreme variants, including the rather mystical idea that every nation-race has some kind of _Volksgeist,_ a collective race-spirit in which all members participate. Something like Rousseau’s General Will, perhaps. But to participate you had to belong to the “race” in question **by blood.** The 19th Century also produced [scientific racism,](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism) which could be refined down to the level of ethnocultural nations as “races” with their own distinctive, essential characteristics. Put it this way: Nowadays, I think practically everybody will agree that if you switch an Irish baby and an English baby in the cradle, the Irish baby, raised by English parents, will not grow up to be a drunken, brawling, hot-tempered poet (unless getting teased for his red hair drives him to it); nor will the English baby, raised by Irish parents, grow up to be a cold-blooded, stupid, rigidly decent and honest prig. But in 1920, many people would have assumed exactly that. That’s how important heredity was thought to be, and how unthinkingly accepted both racial/ethnic/national stereotypes and class stereotypes were. Plots going back to ancient times play on the baby-switch theme, often on the assumption that the slave raised as a senator or vice-versa will somehow appear to be out of place. Like in [_Big Business_](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Business_%281988_film%29) – Jupiter-Rose and Manhattan-Sadie fit in just fine where they are, but Jupiter-Sadie and Manhattan-Rose are fish out of water. Getting to the Jews: There had always been a prejudice against them in Christian Europe, which in theory they could escape by converting. In Germany, this was known as _Judenhaas_ (Jew-hate) and had a venerable history. [The word “antisemitism”](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism#Etymology_and_usage) was coined about the same time as a new movement that embraced the label, a movement that regarded Jews as **racially** evil, by their hereditary nature. In Germany, more or less beginning with [Wagner,](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Judenthum_in_der_Musik) this new antisemitism synergized with German nationalism in its most chauvinistic form. It also synergized with a tradition of "It’s all a plot by **them!"** conspiracy theories in modern Europe going back to [Abbe Barruel,](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abb%C3%A9_Barruel) who in 1797 published a book blaming the French Revolution on secret societies, including the [Illuminati,](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bavarian_Illuminati) a short-lived Masonic offshoot. This kind of thing actually got some traction – there was a minor [Anti-Masonic Party](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Masonic_Party) in the U.S. Substitute the Jews for the megalomaniacal radical-rationalist intellectuals and you’re good to go. Being, well, **outsiders** to the religion that in a sense united everybody else in Europe, living in their quasi-autonomous ghetto-enclaves, and preserving this strange Oriental language and culture, Jews had always been the subjects of bizarre conspiracy theories – e.g., that they poisoned wells and caused the plague, or [kidnapped Christian babies to drink their blood or use it to make Passover matzohs](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_libel). Now, ignorant as these theories were, they were at least things people of an oppressed and powerless minority **could** theoretically do. But in the 19th Century – not long after the [Jewish emancipation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_emancipation) relieved Jews all over Europe of their old legal disabilities – the new antisemitism started quite insanely attributing all the world’s troubles and wars to Jewish plots. This dovetailed neatly with traditional European cultural stereotypes about the Jews. Consider the historical position of the Jews in Europe. Most times and most places, they were not allowed to own land, not even allowed to be serfs – a serf could in theory have a subtenant, and to own land was to rule it, and there could never be a situation where a Jew had authority over a Christian. So, unlike most Europeans, Jews couldn’t be farmers. Nor could they be knights or soldiers. Nor, of course, could they pursue a career in the Church. But they were allowed to be merchants, shopkeepers, craftsmen, artisans, physicians . . . and moneylenders, a lucrative field they had nearly all to themselves in a Europe where the Church regarded lending money at any interest at all as “usury” and forbade Christians to do it. Of course, moneylenders are never loved, they have this nasty obsession with being repaid and all, and from the POV of a manual laborer they don’t seem to make anything or do anything and yet they seem to be rich. Jews could also be agents and factors for gentile kings and landlords, and **that** endeared them to few. (See the tragic fate of [Joseph Suss Oppenheimer.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_S%C3%BC%C3%9F_Oppenheimer) And the [movie](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jud_S%C3%BC%C3%9F_%281940_film%29) the Nazis made out of it.) People always first blame the parasite they can see. The Russian peasant who complained “Every kopeck I earn goes into the pocket of some damned Jew!” would be overlooking the fact that the Jewish factor who collected his rent had to pass along nearly all of it to a gentile landlord, the Jewish shopkeeper had to buy from a gentile-owned factory, and even moneylenders can often be in danger of bankruptcy. “The American nation makes the Negro clean its boots and then proves the Negro’s inferiority by the fact that he is a bootblack.” – George Bernard Shaw. So Christian Europe made shopkeepers and moneylenders of the Jews, and proved them to be a bunch of greedy, bean-counting shysters. And by Hitler’s time there was also a “Jewish Bolshevik” stereotype to complement the Jewish capitalist. Certainly, in the late 19th Century, a lot of oppressed Jews in the Russian-ruled [Pale of Settlement](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Pale) (where the majority of Europe’s Jewish population lived) were very attracted to socialism, a political movement that promised equality for all, Marx himself was an ethnic Jew (raised a Lutheran and by choice an atheist), and many prominent leftist leaders were Jewish. (Of course, there were also many religious and conservative Jews who were against the whole thing, and there was Zionism as a sort of competing ideology.) And all of this dovetailed neatly with radical German nationalism, as noted above. From [_The City in Mind,_](http://www.amazon.com/City-Mind-Notes-Urban-Condition/dp/0684845911) by James Howard Kunstler, chapter on Berlin: > [@](#): > > Germany’s swift rise as an international power was necessarily accompanied by rapid industrial development. Bismarck managed this momentous transformation with two central tactics. The first was an innovative social welfare system of old-age pensions and subsidized medical care, which purchased the loyalty of the expanding working class. The second, and more sinister tactic, when he had concluded his expansionary wars, was Bismarck’s cultivation of a national siege mentality, portraying the Germans as a people encircled by scheming, jealous enemies from an alien culture, a world-view that would have terrible repercussions a few decades hence. It fostered a radical sense of apartness from the rest of European culture, one outgrowth of which was a virulent strain of anti-Semitism that became institutionalized in science, literature, and higher education. The historian Paul Johnson writes: > > > [@](#): > > > > [The] ruling caste hated the West with a passionate loathing, both for its liberal ideas and for the gross materialism and lack of spirituality which (in their view) those ideas embodied. They wanted to keep Germany “pure” of the West, and this was one motive for their plans to resume the medieval conquest and settlement of the East, carving out a continental empire for Germany which would make her independent of the Anglo-Saxon world system. These Easterners drew a fundamental distinction between “civilization,” which they defined as rootless, cosmopolitan, immoral, un-German, Western, materialistic and racially defiled; and “culture,” which was pure, national, German, spiritual and authentic. Civilization pulled Germany to the West, culture to the East. The real Germany was not part of an international civilization but a national race-culture of its own. When Germany responded to the pull of the West, it met disaster; when it pursued its destiny in the East, it fulfilled itself. The Jews, of course, were alien, rootless, cosmopolitan, etc. – the “mushroom of humanity,” as Hitler called them, springing up everywhere overnight with no deep roots in the soil. They were not German, not even European, in origin, and no matter how long they lived in one place in Europe they could never truly belong there, never be part of the race-community. So. The Nazis took all negative stereotypes about greedy Jews and combined them with racial antisemitism and conspiracy-theorizing and radical German nationalism and cranked it all to eleven: Jews are by their heredity nature prone to be parasites, to invade and leech off of every gentile nation they find themselves in, to make themselves rich and powerful – mainly by pulling strings from behind the scenes, somehow. And they are, by their nature, very good at all that, very clever and cunning and duplicitous and persuasive. Jews are responsible for the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution – for Communism **and** for capitalism (“National Socialism” being in theory opposed to both, but that’s another discussion.) But they are not by their nature creative of anything, that depends on their host nations. The “Aryan” race, OTOH, is a culture-builder. Now, you must understand, **Hitler believed all this.** His world-view was built around it. There might have been some Nazis who took a more cynical attitude, regarding antisemitism as merely a useful tool for unifying the people; but none would have dared say so in public. And **that** dovetailed neatly with Hitler’s principal war-aim, which was to destroy the nations of Poland and Russia. Not merely to destroy Communism. Not merely to conquer Poland and Russia and exploit them like a colony in Africa. But to destroy them utterly as nations, and colonize them with Germans, and build a Greater Germany on their bones, and make Germany a continental power like the U.S. and a world-power like Britain. In the process killing all the Jews there and reducing the surviving Slavs to slavery or, at best, a sort of second-class noncitizenship. A good source here is [_Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties,_](http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Times-Revised-Twenties-Perennial/dp/0060935502/ref=pd_bbs_sr_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196390812&sr=8-3) by Paul Johnson, Chapter 10, “The End of Old Europe”: > [@](#): > > Hitler’s aims can be reconstructed not merely from Mein Kampf itself, with its stress on the ‘East Policy,’ but from his early speeches and so-called ‘Second’ or Secret Book of 1928. This material makes it clear that the ‘cleansing’ process – the elimination of the Jews – was essential to the whole long-term strategy. Being a race-socialist as opposed to a class-socialist, Hitler believed the dynamic of history was race. The dynamic was interrupted when race-poisoning took place. The poison came, above all, from the Jews. He admired the Jews as ‘negative supermen’. In his Table-Talk he said that if 5,000 Jews emigrated to Sweden, in no time at all they would occupy all the key positions: this was because ‘blood purity’, as he put it in Mein Kampf, ‘is a thing the Jew preserves better than any other people on earth’. The Germans, on the other hand, were poisoned. That was why they lost the First World War. Even he was poisoned: that was why he sometimes made mistakes – ‘all of us suffer from the sickness of mixed, corrupt blood’. Race-poisoning was a comparatively common obsession in the time of Hitler’s youth, rather as ecological poisoning became an obsession of many in the 1970s and 1980s. The notion of ubiquitous poisoning appealed strongly to the same type of person who accepted conspiracy theories as the machinery of public events. As with the later ecologists, they thought the race-poison was spreading fast, that total disaster was iminent, and that it would take a long time to reverse even if the right policies were adopted promptly. Hitler calculated it would take a hundred years for his regime to eliminate racial poisoning in Germany: on the other hand, if Germany became the first nation-race to do so successfully, it would inevitably become ‘lord of the Earth’. (Mein Kampf.) > > What distinguished Hitlerian race-theory was, first, this rooted belief that ‘cleansing’ could make Germany the first true superpower, and ultimately the first paramount power in the world; and, secondly, his absolute conviction that the ‘Jewish race-poison’ and Bolshevism were one and the same phenomenon. In 1928, when he wrote his Second Book, he did not appreciate that old-style ‘Jewish’ Bolshevism had ceased to exist and that Stalin’s Russia was in essentials as anti-Semitic as Tsardom had been. On the contrary, he believed the Soviet Union was a Jewish cultural phenomenon. Hence the object of his policy was to combat ‘an inundation of diseased bacilli which at the moment have their breeding-ground in Russia’. Thus the ‘cleansing’ fit in perfectly with the resumption of traditional German East policy, but on a far more ambitious scale. > > Hitler’s full programme, therefore, was as follows. First, gain control of Germany itself, and begin the cleansing process at home. Second, destroy the Versailles settlement and establish Germany as the dominant power in Central Europe. All this could be accomplished without war. Third, on this power basis, destroy the Soviet Union (by war) to rid the ‘breeding-ground’ of the ‘bacillus’ and, by colonization, created a solid economic and strategic power base from which to establish a continental empire, in which France and Italy would be mere satellites. In the fourth stage Germany would acquire a large colonial empire in Africa, plus a big ocean navy, to make her one of the four superpowers, in addition to Britain, Japan and the United States. Finally, in the generation after his death, Hitler envisaged a decisive struggle between Germany and the United States for world domination. > > No one since Napoleon had thought in such audacious terms. In its gigantic scope the concept was Alexandrine. Yet until he was engulfed by the war he made, Hitler was always pragmatic. Like Lenin he was a superb opportunist, always ready to seize openings and modify his theory accordingly. This has led some historians to conclude he had no master-programme. In fact, while always adjusting the tactics to suit the moment, he pursued his long-term strategy with a brutal determination that has seldom been equalled in the history of human ambition. Unlike most tyrants, he was never tempted to relax by a surfeit of autocratic power. Quite the contrary. He was always raising the stakes on the table and seeking to hasten the pace of history. He feared his revolution would lose its dynamism. He thought himself indispensable, and at least four of his phases must be accomplished while he was not only still alive but at the height of his powers. It was this impatience which made him so dangerous in the short term and so ineffectual in the long term (the very reverse of the Soviet strategists). In a secret speech to German newspaper editors in November 1938, after his great Munich triumph, he deplored the fact that his need to talk about peace had led the German nation to relax too much. He argued that for Germany to accept peace, and thus stability, as a permanent fact of international life was to accept the very spirit of defeatism. Violence was a necessity, and the public must be prepared for it. Same book, Chapter 11, “The Watershed Year”: > [@](#): > > Hitler’s ultimate aim was to create a German Volk of 250 million. He said that he proposed settling 100 million Germans on the great plains to the west of the Urals. In 1941 he envisaged that over the next decade the first 20 million would move east. Though he saw the colonization process clearly, he was vague on where the settlers were to come from. Those eligible and willing to settle, the Volksdeutsche from south-east Europe, numbered only 5 million, perhaps 8 milllion at most. His colleage Alfred Rosenberg considered the idea of ‘drafting’ Scandinavian, Dutch, and English settlers, being racially approximate to Germans, when the war was won. Some aspects of this great population transfer, to be the most formidable and decisive in history, were determined in meticulous detail. There was to be polygamy and a free choice of women for servicemen with decorations. The Crimea, after being ‘cleansed’ of Slavs and Jews, was to be turned into a gigantic German spa under its old Greek name of Tauria, populated by a mass transfer of peasants from the South Tyrol. Over vast areas of the Ukraine and south European Russia, a new Volk civilization was planned. As Hitler described it: > > > [@](#): > > > > The area must lose the character of the Asiatic steppe. It must be Europeanized! . . . The ‘Reich peasant’ is to live in outstandingly beautiful settlements. The German agencies and authorities are to have wonderful buildings, the governors palaces. Around each city, a ring of lovely villages will be placed to within 30 or 40 kilometers . . . . That is why we are now building the large traffic arteries on the southern tip of the Crimea, out to the Caucasus mountains. Around these traffic strands, the German cities will be placed, like pearls on a string, and around the cities the German settlements will lie. For we will not open up Lebensraum for ourselves by entering the old, godforsaken Russian holes! The German settlements must be on an altogether higher level! > > As Hitler’s vision expanded, in the heady days of 1941, it came to embrace all Europe. Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, the whole of France north of the Somme were to be incorporated in a Greater Germany, the names of the cities being changed – Nancy would become Nanzig, Besancon Bisanz. Trondheim would become a major German city and naval base of 250,000 inhabitants. The Alps would be the boundary between ‘the German Empire of the North,’ with a new ‘Germania’ as its capital, and ‘the Roman Empire of the South’. The Pope would be hanged in full pontificals in St. Peter’s Square. Strasbourg Cathedral would be turned into a giant ‘Monument to the Unknown Soldier’. New crops, such a perennial rye, would be invented. He would forbid smoking, make vegetarianism compulsory, ‘revive the Cimbrian art of knitting’, appoint a ‘Special Commissioner for the Care of Dogs’ and an ‘Assistant Secretary for Defence Against Gnats and Insects’.’ Pride goeth. And its fall can destroy much besides. ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2013, 9:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-hitler-and-nazi-germanys-attempted-extermination-of-europes-jews/669168/416 "2013-09-21T21:23:04Z")
> [@Gack](#): > > It seems unlikely. I think the six million figure was the total # of Jews in Russia as per the 1906 article, or something like that, so they started with it, it sounded good, etc. Beyond that I have no idea. Which, from the perspective of a 1906 article, would pretty much correspond to legitimate fears of the Jewish people following the most recent (to that date) pogroms, extending from 1903 through 1906. Amazing! After three years of (Russian) government supported pogroms, Jews in Russia feared that they were all to be killed. This argument is nearly as dumb as the claim that a film that showed the “wrong” atrocity was useful in proving that no atrocity occurred. ---
**Author:** ![Malden\_Capell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/malden_capell/32/5274_2.png) [@Malden\_Capell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malden_Capell)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2013, 9:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-hitler-and-nazi-germanys-attempted-extermination-of-europes-jews/669168/417 "2013-09-21T21:49:03Z")
Don’t hold your breath, I wouldn’t be surprised if Gack sought to disprove that the pogroms in Russia took place. ---
**Author:** ![Kent\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kent_clark/32/105_2.png) [@Kent\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kent_Clark)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2013, 10:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-hitler-and-nazi-germanys-attempted-extermination-of-europes-jews/669168/418 "2013-09-21T22:17:59Z")
> [@Malden\_Capell](#): > > Don’t hold your breath, I wouldn’t be surprised if Gack sought to disprove that the pogroms in Russia took place. Of course. That was just a fictional back story invented by the producers of\* Fiddler on the Roof.\* ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2013, 10:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-hitler-and-nazi-germanys-attempted-extermination-of-europes-jews/669168/419 "2013-09-21T22:36:37Z")
> [@Gack](#): > > There is no mystery here, the Jews were put in camps because it was Hitler’s intention to move them all out of Europe. First he encouraged Jewish immigration, . . . Utter nonsense. Germany assessed an exorbitant “flight tax” that few people could afford, to begin with, and that even fewer could afford after the laws proscribing the hiring of Jews or by Jews put so many Jews out of work and Jewish companies out of business. They also imposed restrictions on what sort of property, even personal property, a Jew could take with himself or herself, meaning anyone who emigrated would face certain poverty in whatever land their destination might have been. The notion that Hitler “encouraged Jewish immigration[sic]” is starkly false and if you got that from your usual sources, it is a clear indication that those sources lie. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [September 21, 2013, 10:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-hitler-and-nazi-germanys-attempted-extermination-of-europes-jews/669168/420 "2013-09-21T22:45:16Z")
> [@tomndebb](#): > > Utter nonsense. > > Germany assessed an exorbitant “flight tax” that few people could afford, to begin with, and that even fewer could afford after the laws proscribing the hiring of Jews or by Jews put so many Jews out of work and Jewish companies out of business. They also imposed restrictions on what sort of property, even personal property, a Jew could take with himself or herself, meaning anyone who emigrated would face certain poverty in whatever land their destination might have been. > > The notion that Hitler “encouraged Jewish immigration[sic]” is starkly false and if you got that from your usual sources, it is a clear indication that those sources lie. Unless “encouraged” means “alternately compelled and forbade.” [In the words of the Nazis themselves (Wannsee Conference, again):](http://prorev.com/wannsee.htm) > [@](#): > > II. > At the beginning of the discussion Chief of the Security Police and of the SD, SS-Obergruppenführer Heydrich, reported that the Reich Marshal had appointed him delegate for the preparations for the final solution of the Jewish question in Europe and pointed out that this discussion had been called for the purpose of clarifying fundamental questions. The wish of the Reich Marshal to have a draft sent to him concerning organizational, factual and material interests in relation to the final solution of the Jewish question in Europe makes necessary an initial common action of all central offices immediately concerned with these questions in order to bring their general activities into line. The Reichsführer-SS and the Chief of the German Police (Chief of the Security Police and the SD) was entrusted with the official central handling of the final solution of the Jewish question without regard to geographic borders. The Chief of the Security Police and the SD then gave a short report of the struggle which has been carried on thus far against this enemy, the essential points being the following: > > a) the expulsion of the Jews from every sphere of life of the German people, > > b) the expulsion of the Jews from the living space of the German people. > > In carrying out these efforts, an increased and planned acceleration of the emigration of the Jews from Reich territory was started, as the only possible present solution. > > By order of the Reich Marshal, a Reich Central Office for Jewish Emigration was set up in January 1939 and the Chief of the Security Police and SD was entrusted with the management. Its most important tasks were > > a) to make all necessary arrangements for the preparation for an increased emigration of the Jews, > > b) to direct the flow of emigration, > > c) to speed the procedure of emigration in each individual case. > > The aim of all this was to cleanse German living space of Jews in a legal manner. > > All the offices realized the drawbacks of such enforced accelerated emigration. For the time being they had, however, tolerated it on account of the lack of other possible solutions of the problem. > > The work concerned with emigration was, later on, not only a German problem, but also a problem with which the authorities of the countries to which the flow of emigrants was being directed would have to deal. Financial difficulties, such as the demand by various foreign governments for increasing sums of money to be presented at the time of the landing, the lack of shipping space, increasing restriction of entry permits, or the cancelling of such, increased extraordinarily the difficulties of emigration. In spite of these difficulties, 537,000 Jews were sent out of the country between the takeover of power and the deadline of 31 October 1941. Of these > > approximately 360,000 were in Germany proper on 30 January 1933 > > approximately 147,000 were in Austria (Ostmark) on 15 March 1939 > > approximately 30,000 were in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia on 15 March 1939. > > The Jews themselves, or their Jewish political organizations, financed the emigration. In order to avoid impoverished Jews’ remaining behind, the principle was followed that wealthy Jews have to finance the emigration of poor Jews; this was arranged by imposing a suitable tax, i.e., an emigration tax, which was used for financial arrangements in connection with the emigration of poor Jews and was imposed according to income. > > Apart from the necessary Reichsmark exchange, foreign currency had to presented at the time of landing. In order to save foreign exchange held by Germany, the foreign Jewish financial organizations were - with the help of Jewish organizations in Germany - made responsible for arranging an adequate amount of foreign currency. Up to 30 October 1941, these foreign Jews donated a total of around 9,500,000 dollars. > > In the meantime the Reichsführer-SS and Chief of the German Police had prohibited emigration of Jews due to the dangers of an emigration in wartime and due to the possibilities of the East. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-hitler-and-nazi-germanys-attempted-extermination-of-europes-jews/669168.md?page=20) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-hitler-and-nazi-germanys-attempted-extermination-of-europes-jews/669168.md?page=22)