The Holocaust, its Causes

Great Debates
1

The general theory of the cause of the Holocaust has been that Hitler was not a very nice man. He felt the same antisemitism common among Europeans of his age, but he felt it much more deeply. The Holocaust was therefor not a bug in his war plans, it was a feature.

So I was reading the Wikipedia article. Wikipedia is supposed to be the mainstream accepted view. In Section 7.1 it points out that the real Holocaust began as a result of the Americans entering the war.

What?

The thinking is that although Jews and others were mistreated and murdered before December 1941, the industrial-scale slaughter began on 8 December 1941. You see, Hitler said in 1939 something along the lines of Ïf the Jews start another world war, I will kill them all."

He felt (says the article) that the all-powerful American Jews would veto American entry into the war in order to protect European Jews.

What think you of this? It seems a shocking theory. Does it have a wide following?

2

I wasnt aware of this and it makes sense.

Regardless though I’m thinking it would have happened eventually maybe just at a slower pace.

3

Huh?

Hitler was presumably actually an anti-semite. However, he and the Nazi party in general used anti-semitism to get and keep themselves in power. The problem wasn’t that Hitler, as an individual, was ‘not a very nice man’. The problem was that he was a totalitarian, and way too many people went along with him, either in the interests of increasing their own power relative to others or due to fear of what would happen to them if they didn’t.

4

I like the quote there, “if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will be not the Bolshevising of the earth, and thus a victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!” As if up until then, there hadn’t been any war; some Germans had just been on a Grand Tour.

5

Uh…

No.

Wikipedia is not good enough to cite by itself, it is very useful for the cites it gives. On that note it is clear that the Nazis did claim that they would kill the Jews if a new WW took place, but for many outside Germany the implication was that 'the end of the Jews" in Europe was going to be the result of warfare, not genocide.

And really, it was the Nazis the ones that declared war to the USA, they really wanted to get rid of the Jews already and they found a convenient excuse.

Of course, even with an early speech of Hitler declaring so, very little was said about the extermination of Jews becoming a reality if there was a world war, one implied thing is that if there was an end to the war that then any extermination would end. So I will have to go full Dr Strangelove on them:

Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you keep it a secret! Why didn’t you tell the world, EH?!?

6

No I don’t believe this theory is correct.

The German mindset during WWII was very eugenics-focused and it was thought that ‘ethnic purity’ would bring strength to the country. This was not just Jews but all undesirables, including those with birth defects, etc.

At the start of the war they tried to use more humane methods such as forced sterilization to attain purity but found it was taking too long. They needed to become “strong” very quickly if they were going to win the war so they started actively killing the undesirables. When the tide of the war turned against them and they were desperate they became even more focused on obtaining ethnic purity, even at the expense of the war effort.

7

The problem with this theory is that it’s trying to apply logic to crazy.

8

I think this is accurate: there was already a plan to deal with Jewry; Hitler probably expedited the matter out of fear that America’s entry into the war might interfere with those plans. But the article itself points out that the construction of death camps started before the Americans entered WWII.

9

Wannsee was set for around the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, originally. It was supposed to be on 9 December, and then bumped another month after that, to 20 January 1942. The precipitating event therefore, wasn’t the war with the US, but likely the lack of ultimate success of Barbarossa.

Nazi ideology thought of the Jews as a treacherous minority, whose actions in WW1 caused Imperial Germany’s defeat. When the Nazis were blitzkrieging merrily through Western Europe, the presence or absence of a Jewish minority was a minor consideration. The Nazis were winning handily. (Although Einsatzgruppen were following the Wehrmacht through Poland and the USSR, and killing notable Jews on their lists.) Besides, eventually the British would see reason, and sign an armistice. As 1941 drew to a close, not only were the British still alive and kicking, but the USSR kept sprouting army after army that were unanticipated in OKW strategic planning. Germany was in a two front war, same as WW1, and securing themselves from a ‘treacherous’ minority became more of a motivating factor. It wouldn’t be enough to have Jews dispossessed in ghettos; they needed to be gone, or gone.

I don’t think the US had anything to do with that thought process, except as perhaps a potential dumping ground for European Jewry, like Madagascar. Not that the US would have accepted such an offer, though it is an interesting alternative history. And that resettlement idea was, I think, only a cover story, and not one the Nazis were seriously considering.

10

I don’t see the Wikipedia article arguing much for this theory, just stating some of the arguments for it, and some arguments against interspersed with the overarching facts.

11

The asserted strategy makes absolutely no sense unless the American Jews know about and tried to prevent entry into the war. It was actually the American nazis who did that (Lindbergh, I’m looking at you). If American Jews were aware of this threat, my parents would have heard about it and I would have heard it from them. The theory is self-serving insanity.

12

And water is wet.

You need to remember that Hitler was not a one-off aberration. He was in many ways a symptom of a larger disease. Goring, Himmler, Heydrich, Eichman, Gobbels… they not only shared Hitler’s antisemitism but also subscribed to his “Jews ruined the world and we need to make them pay for that” philosophy. Hitler deliberately and purposefully surround himself with people who willing to commit genocide. One of the openly-stated reason the Nazis gave for the war was the very existence of Jews – as Dewey_Finn notes.

Hogwash. The “real Holocaust,” if you want to use that phrase (and I would be cautious of using that phrase IRL for reasons that I hope to make clear but I assume you are referring to the mass, large-scale murder of Jewsish civillians in Nazi-occupied territories) began either in the fall of 1939 when the Einsatzgruppen was formed and began mass killings across occupied Europe or, if you’re the pedantic type, in the summer of 1941 when Goring, acting on orders from Hitler, requested that Reinhard Heydrich “submit to me as soon as possible a general plan of the administrative material and financial measures necessary for carrying out the desired final solution of the Jewish question.” The Final Solution, of course, was genocide: not relocation Madagascar or Africa or other solutions that had been proposed before the war, but the actual extermination of every single living Jew in Europe. However the 1941 date is flimsy at best: it is simply the date that Nazi Germany began to codify into state policy the Final Solution. The Nazis had been carrying out the Holocaust well before the summer of 1941.

Cite for this date, please. Actually, forget the cite, I’m going to call bullshit right now. Just off the top of my head I’ll point out the massacre at Babi Yar in which ~33K Jews were killed over two days (IIRC, maybe it was three) in September 1941. A few weeks later somewhere between 30K - 100K Jews were murdered in the Odessa massacre in Romania. The Einsatzgruppen were responsible for both. The Einsatzgruppen were, of course, Nazi death squads formed and deployed for the sole purpose of rounding up undesirable civilians and killing them. All before 8 December 1941, as you will note.

Aktion T4 began in September 1939, and while it originally was designed to eliminate “undesirables” from the population (people with mental illnesses or birth defects) it was quickly used to justify killing anyone that the Nazi leadership didn’t want around, inluding thousands upon thousands of Jews.

The Wannsee Conference was in January 1942. The mass killing of Jews in Auschwitz began in March 1942. Treblinka opened in July 1942. Chelmno opened in December 1941 [double checks date – that must be where the 8 December date comes from]. Belzec opened in March 1942. Sobibór opened in April 1942. And a bunch of others that I don’t have the stomach to keep googling for. These camps were a natural progression of atrocities committed earlier by the death squads. Bullets were expensive, soldiers were needed on the front lines, and Zyklon B was cheap and gas chambers coupld be built and operated by the very inmates that were marked for death.

Are you arguing that the above atrocities, as well as the many others that occurred before 8 December 1941 somehow are not part of the Holocaust?

America’s entry into the war may have changed the logistics of the Holocaust – and I am not at all convinced it did. We did not bomb the camps or disrupt the rail lines. The Einsatzgruppen was not part of the Wehrmacht and not deploy to the front lines so allied forces did not engage them (I won’t say never, but I’m not aware of an instances where the Einsatzgruppen fought alongside the Wehrmacht forces). (Historians and sociologists have been arguing for 70 years why the U.S. didn’t do more to stop the Holocaust, but the simple reason was that American war aims were to get Germany to capitulate. Germany’s execution of European civilians really didn’t influence those aims one way or the other, so the U.S., while well aware of what was going on, chose to ignore it.) But America did not force Hitler’s hand, it did not push him to act in some sudden irrational manner when previously he had been the model of reason and critical thinking.

The seeds of the Holocaust were planted well before Hitler assumed power in Germany. Hitler took the extant fear and mistrust of Jews and ran with it. It began to grow with the Nuremberg Laws, the opening of Dachau, Kristallnacht, and numerous other incremental elements that, taken in aggregate, were the foundation of the Final Solution. Arguing that the Holocaust was the result of America’s declaration of war against Germany is laughable. The Holocaust occurred because the Nazis were all bags of dicks, full stop.

13

Excellent post by Lancia I don’t have much to add to, but this struck me:

Nobody with a lick of historical sense would make such a blatant simplification, which is also dead wrong.

ETA: this “general” theory was also the most popular excuse of the lower rank nazis (and many upper rank): “see, Hitler was crazy, but he was the Führer, so what could we do but follow his orders? It was the LAW!” :face_vomiting:

14

It’s also pretty common among ‘it can’t happen here’ folk.

‘It was all Hitler’s fault! We don’t need to worry about anybody else!’

15

The Jews were just a convenient scapegoat as a part of the facism playbook:

  • Powerful and continuing nationalism
  • Disdain for human rights
  • Identification of enemies as a unifying cause
  • Supremacy of the military
  • Rampant sexism
  • Controlled mass media
  • Obsession with national security
  • Religion and government intertwined
  • Corporate power protected
  • Labor power suppressed
  • Disdain for intellectuals & the arts
  • Obsession with crime & punishment
  • Rampant cronyism & corruption
  • Fraudulent elections

Once people are dehumanized it does not take much more effort to get to gas chambers and ovens.

16

It is well-known, from Hitler’s “Second Book” (unpublished until after the war, because by the time Hitler finished it he had achieved power and had no more need of books to make his case), that he had a definite plan for making Germany a world power, and cleansing Europe of the Jewish “race-poison” was an indispensable element of it. Hitler actually believed in antisemitism as it had evolved in the 19th Century, i.e., that Jews were not merely dangerous religious dissidents – that kind of prejudice, called Judenhaas or Jew-hate, was much older in Europe – but that they were genetically predisposed to evil – that they lacked any cultural creativity of their own, but were adept at taking control of gentile societies behind the scenes and sucking them dry – that there really was such thing as a Jewish-Communist Conspiracy, but Jews were likewise responsible for capitalism in its existing form – all of it. Hitler believed it, it was not, on his part, merely a matter of uniting the people against a convenient enemy.

17

In an interesting bit of irony, the Jews as the “backstabbers” myth started in neighboring France in the late 1890s (Dreyfus Affair), well before the Nazis started beating up Jews on the streets of Munich. Another irony is that the scientific racism that the Nazis embraced originated as an American import. Nazi Germany is a classic example of how bad ideas can go global: America’s scientific racism was an export to Europe, and one could argue that some segments in America dabbled with European fascism for a while in the 1930s.

We see the same phenomenon now with hybrid democracy and the rise of authoritarianism.

18

I have seen this list of the “fascism playbook” posted on Facebook a lot, but not all of it actually applied to Nazi Germany.

For instance: they did not have a “disdain for intellectuals and the arts”, they had a disdain for intellectuals and artists coming from perspectives that they disagreed with, but they celebrated the ones on their side. The Nazis were obsessed with art, actually, their whole movement had a very distinctive aesthetic component. Part of that was suppressing artistic movements that they deemed “degenerate”, but it’s not the same as “disdain for the arts.”

Religion was not intertwined with government in Nazi Germany; they had no regard at all for the longstanding German Christian traditions, and massacred countless priests and ministers.

“Supremacy of the military” is highly debatable. The SS - a doctrinaire political clique - surmounted the various branches of the military; many of the high ranking officers were not fully committed to the Nazi ideology, and there were numerous attempts to overthrow Hitler’s regime from within the military.

I doubt that sexism was any more rampant in Hitler’s Germany than anywhere else in the world during the 1930s, and the line about “obsession with national security” just seems like an attempt to tie historical fascism to modern America.

19

Yeah agree the list is not necessarily historically significant WRT the Nazis, but my point of identifying an out-group to blame the nation’s troubles on put the Jews in the crosshairs (even more than they were previously). Imagine if 1930’s Germany had an even more easily identifiable target group to fulfill this need.

20

Sorry, that’s not generally true. The official Catholic church as an institution didn’t really cooperate with nazism, but all too often they turned a blind eye to their crimes. This doesn’t apply to hundreds of individuals (clergy, monastery or Catholic laypeople) who were prosecuted and often killed for their religious and ethical beliefs, as well as not to Protestant individuals and from other Christian or non-Christian denominations. But there surely were collaborations between the third reich and parts of the organized Protestant churches. Here’s a short overview, the best I could find in English:

That’s also not true historically. Antisemitism, culturally and “scientifically”, was at the heart of national socialism from the very beginning of the movement. The Jews weren’t an easy scapegoat they had in 1933, they had been their core enemies from the very start.