Well, you’re welcome not to participate. Or we can just agree to disagree.
Not really. On a per-capita basis, the Rwandan genocide killed faster and more cheaply than the death camps. Which makes sense, really - easier to ship machetes, or let people use their own on-site, than to transport living victims, maintain a camp infrastructure, etc.
Note that this is not Holocaust denial. The Nazis did, indeed, kill millions through the Holocaust alone, plus executions through their judicial process (such as it was), plus the war, and so on et sickening cetera. They just weren’t all that efficient at it, in the death camps or anywhere else.
And none of them would have the people behind him and the popular support needed. I think the Reich could have easily collapsed due to infighting and battling factions. Hitler was the crazy glue holding it together.
I was merely speaking to the point of an assassination near the end and your quibbling about a week or two being a big difference. Certainly who over the course of the war were more useful and why is a fair enquiry - even if it’s already fairly well trod ground.
Fair enough, fellas. Maybe I was having a bit of tunnel vision about the late Fuhrer and the end stages of the conflict.
Of course there is no way to actually know one way or the other. It’s all just guessing.
Yes. Himmler must be on the list. Heydrich and Eichmann, but he had superb staff and civilian support.
The efficiency of not only the camps improved over the years only after research and constant “manufacturing reports.”
In addition, as many people often are unaware, that not only were concentration camps “underutilized,” that so many had to be constructed, and German engineers, naturally, did their best to achieve the best designs possible, culminating only in 1941 for the bold and novel creation of death camps–which too were under constant re-appraisal by engineers in Germany.
Field data was crucial. For a good two years, the numbers of troops and other military resources, the duration of operations, and of course the number of the Jewish dead in the “eradication” of the Jews in every village, town, and city (eg the Warsaw Uprising, famously) were important data for military analysts, demanded and supplied after every “special operation” (the particular skills required of Einsatzgruppen “task forces,” or after any encounter of note (under what criterion I have no idea) when men of the Regular Army (Wehrmacht) had the opportunity or inclination.
Efficiency of application of force was constantly monitored and improved. After the killing “by hand” of 1.3 million people from 1939 to 1941 various boards of experts finally determined that only industrial methods would hope to efficiently solve the Jewish Problem. Concentration camp capital equipment was installed or re-designed, and of course operations research influenced change in how people/“products” were ordered in the workflow. And only then was the concept of “concentration camp,” abandoned–no matter how bizarre and inappropriate the German re-definition of a pre-existing term/idea/thing. German industrial and government employees created something new, truly new in the history of the planet: extermination camps, Vernichtungslager, aka death camps Todeslager, factories designed by solidly trained, modern engineers. The destruction of the Jews was Germany’s Apollo project.
Careers depended on such data.
In his own book, Speer says the Allies could have stopped German war production completely in 43, if they hadn’t switched from bombing factories to bombing cities. At one point, they were down to their last ball bearing.
Ironically, Speer was constantly begging Hitler for labor, which was one reason he said he couldn’t believe in the extermination camps, until he saw the evidence.
I haven’t studied this subject, so I wouldn’t know the answer. However, I’ll just list some possible candidates for other people to pick from: Goebbels, Jodl, Burgdorf, Gunsche, Fegelein, Krebs, Grawitz, Goring, and Keidl. I learned those names from the Hitler parodies on youtube.
Sorry, that’s “Keitel,” not “Keidl.”
Yes, but it turns out he was lying about that.
Jodl and Keitel were yes-men, Fegelein (Fegelein! Fegelein! Fegelein!) was a drunken womaniser, Goering an indolent lump who led the Luftwaffe to ruin.