What if the Nazis had confined their attrocities to Germany, rather than invading other countries and exporting the Holocaust through much of Europe? What would have been the response of the rest of the world upon discovering the extermination of German Jews, homosexuals, etc. (I assume the Germans couldn’t keep it a secret forever). If discovered in time, would the U.S. and its allies have invaded Germany? Should they have?
I believe that, if confined to Germany, the “Final Solution” would have succeeded. I think the allies would have found out about it in time, but would not have mounted an invasion in time to save anyone.
Probably horror and no actual military difference. OTOH, it probably would have gotten them to rearm faster and would have made such a conflict inevitable with the next 20 years.
Probably not. War is a difficult endouver, and can be done only in limited circumstances.
The US? Absolutely not. You have to remember that Europe, back then, was a long, long ways away. There weren’t 747s flying between the US and Europe avery 5 minutes. We didn’t even jump into the WWII to defend our European allies until we ourselves were bombed and Germany decalared war on us. (Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?)
The rest of Europe? Doubtful. The Jews were not real popular anywhere. Besides, what did Europe do about the millions killed in the USSR?
Can you think of a single example where the US/Europe intervened to stop a genocide* internal to a country? Perhaps the closest thing is Yugoslavia, but one could argue that it was de facto split apart and the genocide had an external cause
*using that term losely here, and meaning a wanton slaughter of civilians.
Eddie Izzard said something like “At first Germany just killed they’re own people. And we’re sort of ok with that.” I can’t think of any war the United States engaged itself in for the specific reason of setting foreigners free. Even in these enlightened days where we realize that no nation is an island we don’t fight to set other people free from oppression. Unless of course there’s some other reason for us to get involved.
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Heck, just don’t attack the Soviet Union and it was possible that nothing could have been done about it.
The Spanish-American War, at least ostensibly, was fought to free Cuba from Spanish oppression. Sure the Maine incident triggered it, but there was enough doubt about the cause so that it might not have led to war if public opinion hadn’t already been inflamed. And there were certainly colonist ambitions by special interests as well, but for the man in the street the war was mainly about freeing Cuba.
Given the political circumstance in America at the time of the holocaust in the 1940’s it is possible that we could have went to war.
You have to remember that when WWII started FDR was begging for a reason to enter the war (which led to conspiracy theories claiming he allowed Pearl Harbor to happen). There is good evidence out there that FDR and Churchill talked about the US entering the war before Pearl Harbor happened. The reason FDR might have wanted a war was because the country was in a depression, his New Deal was not working and his popularity was going down because of his showdown with the Supreme Court. I don’t think it would be that far fetched to suggest that FDR might have used the atrocities committed by Hitler to justify sending this nation into war.
Then again FDR was reelected a third time mostly on his promise to keep America out of the war, despite his eagerness to participate in it. If it was found out that Hitler committed these acts after 1940 then it might be possible that FDR would not have been elected president again. Then we could never know for sure what would have happened. Unless someone knows a lot about Wendell Willkie.
The fact that FDR had been moving the US towards involvement before Pearl Harbor (which isn’t to say that he would necessarily have made the final step of direct involvement) is irrelevant in this context, as it had long been obvious that the Nazis would not confine themselves to the borders of Germany. Obvious because they had already invaded most of their neighbours. Remember that by the time Roosevelt proposed Lend-Lease, the Nazis already controlled Czechoslovakia, half of Poland, Denmark, Norway, France (directly or indirectly), Belgium and the Netherlands. That Roosevelt saw this as a serious problem hardly proves that he would have been equally willing to contemplate intervention against policies committed only within Germany.
Without a European ally, US intervention would have been a complete non-starter. And, to second John Mace’s point, it isn’t at all obvious that even other European countries would have intervened. But what they might well have done would have been to try economic sanctions, ineffective though they had already proved to be against Italy in 1935-6.
The OP assumes no September 1, 1939 - hence no existing European war for the US to enter into.
In that case, the events that US policy would react to would be quite different to the Holocaust as we know it:
the Nazis’ actual anti-Jewish policies would probably be more similar to the avoved one: to expel all Jews from Germany. Of circa 537,000 Jewish Germans in 1933, circa 315,000 had been driven into emigration by 1939 (having been robbed on the way out), and about 30,000 were in concentration camps. I’d think the continuation of this politics, without WWII (Jewish emigration was officially stopped at its beginning), would be: a number of Jews murdered in the lower five digits (but ostensibly dying of natural causes in concentration camps), the rest forced to emigrate.
Even now, this does not make Western countries make war against a strong military opponent. With the matters of the murders being sufficiently murky, and anti-semitism in Western countries not having been deligitimized as it has been by the Holocaust, I’d very much doubt anyone would consider a war.
Which leaves political opponents, homosexuals and Gypsies. Would the the matter of persecution of these get much traction in Western countries given the mindset of those times?
IMHO what Nazi Germany wanted was ‘Living Space’. Something akin to the colonial empires of the other western nations. As it couldn’t expand in the rest of the world, which was already taken, Germany chose the east to expand. Which was cool because that was just territory belonging to the evil communist empire and only inhabited by inferior Slavs.
A bit like the expansion the USA had to the West.
Part of the reason for the Slavs being called inferior was probably just propaganda so it was easier to sell to the people why they could take the territory in the first place. The Slavs were their ‘natives’.
So what they were looking for was a war of conquest with the USSR, destroying communism and getting extra living space. Poland kind of was in the way en route to the USSR.
As quite a bit of Polish territory was already viewed as being German, taken away by the treaty of Versailles, the eradication of the state of Poland wasn’t troubling too many Germans.
The British response of ‘Peace in our Time’ encouraged them to think it would be OK to take back the last bit of the injustices imposed by Versailles.
The dividing up of the country between Germany and the USSR created a convenient border to be exploited later for the invasion.
IMO, if France and Britain hadn’t decalred war over Poland there wouldn’t have been a WWII, Germany would have invaded the USSR, getting its Living Space and that would have been the end of it. For some time at least. We would not have seen the invasion of Western Europe.
Initially the “Solution to the ‘Jewish problem’” wasn’t genocide but removing them from society and relocating them. First the idea of moving them to Madagascar and later isolating them in the vast expanses of the new Eastern territories, sort of like reservations. It wasn’t until well into the war that the ‘Final Solution’ became the strategy and I wonder if it would have been implemented had Germany won the war by ’41 or ‘42.
You have to look at the reasons FDR wanted to go into the war. The reasons stay the same if WWII started or not. FDR would have still wanted a war to get into even if WWII never started.
No one can be certain if he would have convinced the American people, who still remember WWI, to enter the war alone only to help the jews, but I’m sure he would have tried.
Sorry for that last post of mine; I made a New Year’s resolution to stop with the snarky drive-byes, and I don’t want to derail this debate. Please ignore.
After Nazi Germany broke the umpteenth pledge that all they wanted was (the rheinland, anschluss, the sudetenland) and then they would be content by annexing the Czech rump state they exceeded what could be considered reasonable from a national self-determination/treaty readjustment point of view. Great Britain threatened war in a way that both governments unquestionably understood. Germany chose not to believe the threat.
I am not so sure that giving France and Britain a thorough pasting would not be prerequisite for invading Russia. Having a hostile, humiliated France on the border is a bad time to be overextended in the east.
Euthanasia for undesireables (mentally deficient, etc) began in '39. The first gassing of Jews occured late in '41 at Chelmo. It was preceded by military “special actions” killing mere tens of thousands at a clip in the wake of Barbarossa. And of course ghettoization, Nazi-style, had a certain associated death rate. Doesn’t seem like much of a delay to me, or particularly late in the war.
The “final solution” makes a hell of a lot more sense in peace than in war - they were willing to waste valuable logistical resources to keep the death camps going, as well as squander a desparately needed work force.
I don’t think the genocide could have happened without the war. Without the war the concentration camps would have been more like what they were purported to be…harsh labor camps. War has a way of relaxing norms, of sweeping away the old rules and the old standards. When your buddies are getting killed on the eastern front it’s quite a bit easier to behave brutally yourself. Without the war there wouldn’t be the urgency of the death camps. Without the war there would have been camps and pogroms and murders, but eventually most of Greater Germany’s Jews would have been able to escape abroad.
As for the contention that FDR was itching for war, of course he was itching for war…against a Germany that had already overrun half of Europe. If Germany wasn’t invading other countries it wouldn’t be a threat, there would be no war. And if FDR for some reason needed a war, why would he attack Germany, on the other side of the planet? There were plenty of Latin American countries to invade if he needed to gin up a jingoistic little war to jump-start the economy or some such.
What Latin American scandal going on in the 1930’s could have sold a war better than the holocaust? Plus FDR had that good neighbor policy going with Latin America.
FDR certainly didn’t need war with Germany. The US and Japan had been sizing each other up and planning for war for decades. Getting war with Japan would be easy. War with Germany much harder (especially without the German declaration of war).