True enough, but another way to look at it is the rolling stock to move 6 million people to be murdered at death camps was enough to move the personnel of the entire German Army almost twice over. Granted, however, that this is only personnel, excluding all of the supplies and heavy equipment. The point about the small number of personnel used to carry out the holocaust is well taken; the size of the Einsatzgruppen that followed the German Army as it advanced east into Russia and murdered over 2 million people including 1.3 million Jews, mostly in the first 6 months or so of the invasion totaled only a little over 3,000 men.
You are forgetting the forced labor (ie slave) battalions of the Nazi Allies, run entirely by the Allied country itself.
The Hungarian Jewish labor battalions, for example, were actually quite large (all destined for murder, in any event), and were a factor for the Hungarian troops, everything from digging ditches to being marched through minefields.
But you’re right, as a component of the German war machine, not that much.
Since I mentioned my family above, I should say my father survived a Hungarian labor camp.
I doubt Einstein would have worked on an atomic bomb even if he stayed in Germany; he didn’t work on it in the US, after all. He was a pacifist (a big reason why his only contribution to the bomb was signing a letter) and it seems very unlikely he’d be willing to work on a bomb for Germany even if the Nazis welcomed Jews.
Germans lost the First World War when they weren’t rounding up and exterminating millions. I think the diverting of resources such as railroads, guards etc hurt their war effort but they were doomed by taking on three major powers.
I don’t think they mobilized women in the workforce like the Allies did. Early in the war Hitler exempted artists from the draft because he considered himself to be one. A lot of these top Nazi officials were evil but fortunately not too bright in thinking strategically.
::joke aborted about how the war might have gone if only the artists had fought for Germany in WWII::
Thanks!
Follow up Q: Where did the other 5MM Jewish people come from? How were they handled? Was the cost similar, even if paid for by the subjugated nations (like Poland & France)?
If 10% of the Jewish pop cost 75K soldiers, then nearly 6MM could have cost 750K soldiers? Now we are talking about 15%. Does that extrapolation work like that? That seems pretty significant.
Oh, so they were used in the war effort sometimes. Well, if this is the alternative, maybe I should work on a different plan.
I have a few friends who are decedents of survivors, and they never mentioned anything like this! Just when I thought I had heard it all.
[sappy aside]
My introduction to this horror was when I was in 5th grade around 1980. A survivor came to my class and told us stories all day. I was shocked. She said that she always stays a little fat just in case, cause that saved her the first time around. She showed us the number tattoo on her arm - That made it very real to me. There are few things from that long ago that I remember so clearly. I wish every one could have an experience like that (my experience, not hers!), I think we would live in a kinder world.
[/sappy aside]
Dag
There were several “nationalist” right wing political parties in Germany in the 20’s. (like the DNVP) German National People's Party - Wikipedia
The Nazi’s won out (eventually) because of the growing dissatisfaction with the Weimar Republic (and it’s failure to fix the economy), and that the Nazis seemed much more passionate and sincere. As time dragged on, more and more of the moderates became convinced that something truly radical must be the answer (to whatever problems they perceived in the Weimar system).
Don’t forget that a lot of this anti-Weimar, pro-authoritarian (but not necessarily anti-semitic) movement came from within the halls of government itself, up to and including President Hindenberg.
Edit: My point being that a Nationalist authoritarian government would have happened, but it didn’t have to be the Nazis.
The NSDAP was not more “passionate and sincere” – they were better connected and ruthless.
The Weimarer Republic had lots of problems. One was not a proper majority, due to the fact that there were just to many parties without a common goal.
Another was economically, there was a financial crisis going on at the time due to the stock market crash. People were on the streets.
Also , the major parties were aware that its either nationalistic (right wing) or the communist parties (left wing) – however, the conservatives falsely thought, that they can control Hitler and his NSDAP.
They formed a coalition with the NSDAP, which the NSDAP exploited and basically forbid any other party to be part of the political system by various schemes, one of them was putting them into prison.
Imprisoning and killing all these millions of people, did not only cost valuable resources and personal. It made Germany loose vital scientists and engineers.
Once Hitler and his NSDAP had enough power to start putting people methodically into prison camp and get away with it - rationality flew out of the window and idocracy took over. Which led to things like having uneconomic battles like Stalingrad, fighting on several front and declaring war on the US, etc… the list of idiotic decisions is long.
The Holocaust is just one reason why Germany lost WW2.
Also saying that Hitler was a genius is wrong. He was far from being a genius. A more accurate description would be that he was charismatic and knew how to convince and make people believe in him and his goals.
P.s.: Austrian German is basically the same German as regular German.
I don’t think we disagree in general, but I would like to explain that remark a little more.
The Nazis weren’t all that connected until 1928ish, after some impressive (for them) wins in local elections and gaining seats in the Reichstag. They usually got less than 5% (iirc) of the vote, nationally, before that time, and thus seen as a fringe group.
What I mean by “sincere” is that the Nazis never compromised on their beliefs, and generally refused to merge with other nationalist parties (and dilute or change their message, vague as it was… this was due to Hitlers stubborness & mania at control of the Nazi party.), or to form political alliances of convenience that made them appear to be contradicting themselves.
Many national level parties would form voting blocks with other parties in order to try to push various legislation through the Reichstag, and thus “share the blame” if something doesn’t work out right. (The Nazis were pretty good at that kind of blame game, too.)
In general, the Nazis seemed to be the ultimate extreme “party of NO” (on the national level policies), always looking for ways to discredit the parties and personalities who happened to hold office(s) at whichever particular time was in question. Hitler’s motto appeared to be “always agitate!”.
I’m not a German speaker but my understanding is there are two broad groups of dialect in German: High German and Low German. High German is spoken in Austria, Bavaria, and western Germany. Low German is spoken in northern Germany. So Hitler might have sounded like a native speaker in Munich or Cologne but not in Hamburg or Berlin.
It was built before the war.
During the shoah by bullets the Einsatzgruppen, essentially mobile mass murder squads operating in the east, numbered around 3000 and used ammunition prodigiously in pointless atrocity while Speer was working miracles squeezing every ounce of production from the Reich.
The SS Death’s Head who ran the camps once the shoah by gas began numbered 22,033. Later in the war Germany’s manpower reserves were so stretched old men and Hitler Youth members were being called up, factories losing their workers to the army.
Interesting article on the ‘quantum exodus’, how Nazism’s anti-semitism before the war drove many of its best and brightest into the arms of the western allies.
One other point I’ve seen made is that in the USSR in 1941, there were a great many people who were very unhappy with the Soviet regime and were prepared to greet the Germans as liberators. If the Nazis hadn’t made their goals of extermination and enslavement so immediately and abundantly clear, it’s quite possible that the Soviet military and industrial machine would have fallen apart.
Again, this has been done to death. See post 17 in this thread. This would require the Nazis to not have been the Nazis and Hitler not to have been Hitler, in which case there is no reason for Germany to be invading the Soviet Union in 1941. To reiterate from Mein Kampf, published in 1925:
The extent to which the Germans were “greeted as liberators” is pretty vastly overblown as well. Stalin wasn’t terribly popular in the Ukraine, but the Germans weren’t marching through the Ukraine to liberate it but to conquer. The Baltic States, from which the Germans did recruit volunteers from the Germanic population, could only make an ironic claim to liberation by the Germans at best. Not only did Germany have no intention of giving them their independence back, they had lost their independence in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact which divided up not just Poland but the Baltic States, Finland, and a slice of Romania between the Soviet Union and Germany. As can be seen on this map of the initial proposed divisions and the ones that actually took place, Germany was initially to get Lithuania but traded it for a larger chunk of central Poland. The Soviet military and industrial machine was in no danger of falling apart, quite the opposite, the Germans had grossly underestimated it and the number of divisions the Soviet Union could mobilize. As Halder put it in his diary in August, not even two months after the invasion:
and
Well, yeah, obviously it’s a huge counterfactual. But that’s basically the whole point of the thread, no? Some alternate reality version of Hitler without the racial theory (or at least not acting on it immediately) but still ultra nationalist and aggressively expansionist.
Of course I suppose another way of looking at it is that Hitler’s racial theory caused him to invade the USSR, which cost him the war! So it was a big drag on the war effort.
If you read the first few posts of the other thread you may see the humor in that statement.
My German friends tell me that they can barely understand the Germans from the far side of the country, so I just made that part up. Besides, I think the time machine is a much bigger chalenge than what language I need to learn 
Nope, This is a narrow question about him stopping just before the creation of the death camps, and quantifying this particular waste of resources. I don’t think it would have made any difference to the outcome of the war, so the Temporal Stablility Committee let me explore this one option :eek:
Well, in that case, the only real alternative to the camps is leaving them in the ghettos as permanent wards of the state. Even with the less-than-starvation rations being provided, I can’t imagine that used fewer resources than murdering them outright.