In other words if Hitler had not invaded any other country and the Nazis had set about destroying only German Jewry, would any other nation have intervened? Would they if necessary have invaded Germany and toppled Hitler to stop the killing or ethnic cleansing? Or would they have considered it an internal German affair? Clearly the world knew of the German oppression of the Jews but I’m talking about if Auschwitz-style killings had come to international light.
Even during the war they (the allies) considered the mass slaughter of Jews “an internal affair”. Note the main excuse for not bombing Auschwitz and other death camps was that fact that doing so offered no military advantage.
Also note that the Holocaust began long before Hitler invaded Poland and started the war. Western nations did little or nothing about it, so I’m confident stating that Hitler would have been able to kill anyone and everyone he wanted to for as long as he wanted to without worry of military intervention as long as he confined it Germany.
Also, disabuse yourself of the notion that the world did not know about the holocaust before the war. While perhaps not common knowledge to everyone on the street, it was not information that western governments were innocent of.
As a point of comparison, Mao and Stalin were as responsible for mass killings as Hitler was, and at approximately the same time period in world history. They even got away with keeping certain territories (Tibet and Eastern Europe) as long as they didn’t overstep.
Had Hitler stopped with a few early annexations and the extermination of the Jews, I doubt that anyone would have stopped him.
[pedant]Well, they didn’t know because it was not taking place before the war. The holocaust started halfway through the war. After the invasion of the USSR. Yes, the world knew about the persecution of Jews that was taking place in Germany, the racial laws, banned from professions, kristallnacht etc before the war. The decision for Genocide wasn’t made until the war was well underway [/pedant]
Has any nation ever gone to war with another heavily armed nation just because the second nation was doing something despicable to some of its own people, but that did not threaten the interests of the first nation? You would be risking your own nation’s safety, and condemning huge numbers of your own people to death, on the off-chance that if you won (always a big if), you could rescue some people to whom you owed no particular obligation. It would be massively irresponsible for any government to do such a thing, and, if any tried, their people would not stand for it. Wars are never fought out of altruism (and a good thing too!).
Almost certainly not. Countries opposed Germany because it threatened other countries. At most you might have seen economic and diplomatic sanctions against Germany if Nazism had stayed within German borders.
Right. Certainly the USA would have raised some noise, called for sanctions, and stuff. But no one would have gone to war about it.
Iraq. A great part of the reason was what Saddam was doing to his own people.
Korea.
There have also been some smaller conflicts.
Now of course in Realpolitik, everything “threatens the interest” of every other nation.
Well the first concentration camp (Dachau) was opened just 51 days after the Nazis took power, it held mainly (2/3rds) political prisoners, not Jews. The official policy of genocide wasn’t decided upon until 1942. Many Jews (including scientists like Einstein, and many of the early nuclear physicists) had already left Germany before then, or soon after. Indeed, until then, there were discussions by Nazis of trying to find a location to deport all the Jews to.
You actually believe that, do you? :smack:
That was about containing Communism and preventing the further rise and spread of Soviet and (then still allied) Chinese Communist power, considered a direct threat to U.S. and Western European interests. It was not altruism on behalf of the Korean people, any more than British and American involvement in WWII was about altruism on behalf of the Jews, Poles, Czechs etc.
The U.S. (under U.N. auspices) went to war over Korea only when the North Koreans invaded the South in 1950. South Korea was and is a U.S. ally. The North Koreans have done plenty of terrible things to their own people since then, and we’ve never invaded them.
IMHO today’s deep concern over human rights mainly sprung from the discovery of the depth of horror of the holocaust. Before then, polite racism was the norm; or in some areas of the USA, impolite racism. After the revelations of deaths by the millions, it kind of turned some peoples stomachs; nobody really believed that a “civilized” people were capable of such atrocities. Remember, in the lead-up to WWII, a lot of refugees had trouble getting into other countries because they were Jewish, even though the basic Nazi persecution was well known.
How many countries actually sent ground troops to Korea under UN auspices? Or contributed in any way?
Re: Iraq - The first war was due (ostensibly) to the invasion of Kuwait. And the second war was (again, ostensibly) in reaction to its possession of weapons of mass destruction. Neither was was (yup, ostensibly) due primarily to Iraq’s treatment of its own citizens. Even the ‘true’ reasons weren’t because of human rights violations. It was oil and revenge (IMHO).
Sixteen countries sent troops to Korea. By far the largest contributor was the United States which sent 302,000 people. (South Korea had 600,000 troops of its own.)
Here’s a list of the other countries that sent troops:
Australia - 17,164
Belgium - 3,498
Canada - 27,000
Colombia - 6,200
Ethiopia - 3,518
France - 4,000
Greece - 5,000
Luxembourg - 89
Netherlands - 5,300
New Zealand - 4,500
Philippines - 7,420
South Africa - 811
Thailand - 6,500
Turkey - 15,000
United Kingdom - 60,000
Denmark, India, Italy, Norway, and Sweden sent medical units.
The Republic of China (Taiwan) offered to send 35,000 troops which would have made them the largest troop contingent after the South Koreans and Americans but their offer was refused.
Indeed, as revolting as they were the pre-war concentration camps were not the extermination camps like Auschwitz and Treblinka set up from 1942 on for the express purpose of committing mass murder on a mind boggling scale.
Thanks, Little Nemo, for the summary.
How would those 35,000 be more than the British 60,000?
I am not quite sure what your point is (whatever it is, it seems to support rather than contradict what I was saying about wars not being fought out of altruistic concern for victimized foreigners), but the very fact that what was the single nation of Korea is now divided into two states is simply a consequence of the fact that it was seen as strategically important by the opposing sides of the cold war. America did not aid South Korea because it was a pre-existing ally. American made sure that a South Korea existed, and then defended it, to make sure the whole country did not fall under the control of Soviet allies. (Much the same thing was tried in Vietnam, with less success.)
Countries may give all sorts of fake altruistic and legalistic reasons to justify their going to war, but most of it is bullshit, and, mostly, everybody concerned knows that. Desptie what they said at the time, Britain did not really enter WW1 because it cared so much about the Belgians, or WW2 because it cared so much about the poor Poles (let alone the Jews). They did it to stop Germany getting too powerful and becoming a serious threat to British interests.