Wasn’t there a better way to do the mass killings? It seems that the German High Command really didn’t do a very good job at figuring this out and thinking it through. The killing of people in showers, shooting them, or any number of other creative ways to off folks (starvation, dysentery, etc), gathering the bodies and throwing them into ovens or burying them in mass graves all seemed to waste materials and manpower.
Why didn’t, for example, the germans remove a part of a railroad track going over a high trestle, ravine, or river, and after saving the engineer, allowing the train to plunge the trainload of people over the edge? That would seem to work, and would get rid of more people at one time as well.
Or, how about making them march into a mine shaft or a some other large underground passage that is no longer used and just seal the two ends.
I’m not trying to be morbid. From what I understand they looked for better ways to exterminate the mud people in large bunches. Did they come up with anything else besides the famous gas chambers and ovens?
(I read for example that shooting them one at a time was very bad for morale for the germans, was not always foolproof, and required ammunition the germans were starting to run out of. I can’t imagine cleaning up the shower area after all the poisoned were dead was pleasant for the people forced to do it, nor was it good for german morale to see all those bodies stuffed in the ovens.
They could have just herded them all into one large enclosed area with very tall wire fences and then dropped a bomb on them from above. This seems like it would have been the most efficient way.
You seriously think sacrificing whole trains is more economic than gassing people or shooting them with a single bullet each? For a start the Germans needed every train they could spare to move supplies and troops around; even the ones they used to ship the doomed to the death camps were a luxury they couldn’t really afford.
The Germans never ran out of ammunition in that sense. A belt of machine gun bullets? I mean honestly, they had 3 million soldiers fighting on the eastern front.
In general: what makes you so sure the methods they used weren’t the best available for the task?
The people forced to do it were death camp inmates who would themselves be killed later, so their pleasure wasn’t that high a priority for the Germans.
There was an HBO movie with Kenneth Branagh about the Nazis’ Wannsee conference, that spent a good chunk of time discussing this very question, throwing the evil in stark banal relief.
Cut 'em some slack. They were breaking new ground. There had been genocides in the past, but the application of industrial organization and technology was unprecedented, of course they made a lot of blunders, like NASA in its early years.
Besides. It wasn’t just the ‘German High Command’ killing Jews. It was everybody, so I guess they couldn’t kill off everyone at once. I mean, it would totally kill the buzz, yanno?
But too direct- it had a bad effect on the people who did it.
ISTM that the big problem was not simply the killing, it was the disposal of the bodies. Plus you don’t want to waste a lot of resources. I would have worked them half to death to reduce their weight, then put them on a treadmill running a grinder to reduce the bodies to pulp and then make it into fertilizer or something.
Not that the whole idea wasn’t a waste of time, being driven by ideological reasons rather than practical ones. The Nazis lost out on a lot of workers they could have used. Similar to the mistake they made when invading the USSR. Lots of the satellite republics had people who hated Stalin and might have been helpful in fighting against him. Instead the Nazis treated them like slaves and made enemies.
Because Snidely Whiplash didn’t work for the Nazis. (Being Canadian, he would have sided with the Allies.) This idea is impractical and kind of silly, and what engineer is going to do this job?
As you noted, some cases earlier in the war, roving bands of SS soldiers just shot them. The problem was that some of the soldiers reacted like humans beings do: they were horrified and disgusted. I don’t know what other options were considered, but plan the Nazis ultimately came up with removed the human element as much as possible through compartmentalizing and by making the prisoners do a lot of the work. In any case they didn’t gas everyone. Some of the camps were death camps where almost every single person who arrived was put to death, but others were slave labor camps where the relatively healthy prisoners were put to work, which ostensibly aided the war effort.
Sometimes. Often, the victims knew exactly what was going to happen.
The Germans did experiment with methods and settled on the ones they used, and it’s hard to argue with their choice (from an efficiency standpoint of course). The mass killings were highly efficient. 75-80% of all Holocaust victims were killed in 1 year (early 42-early 43), while simultaneously waging an apocalyptic scale war with Russia in the East, and defending against increasing US-British bombing in the West.
As others have said, a lot of the real dirty work was carried out by inmates who were killed if they didn’t comply, so there were not really any wasted resource issues there.
I was thinking more of the waste of resources like bullets, or gasoline (when they tried killing with truck exhaust) and Zyklon B. As well as wasting time - killing Jews (and gays and Jehovah’s Witnesses and Roma and retarded people and whatnot) instead of concentrating on conquering Russia or Great Britain. I am sure they could have found a better use for concentration camp personnel than killing Anne Frank.
In fact the Nazis did have a more efficient way of killing people. They simply cut off the supply of food and everything else going into a particular city, and in that manner exterminated the population of the city. Millions of people throughout the occupied Soviet region were killed this way, and the eventual master plan was to get rid of the entire “slavic” population.
Stalin used the same basic method against Soviet peasants, of course.
It seems like throwing the bodies down an old mine shaft would be a supremely efficient disposal method. Just drop them into the big hole, and that’s that. Out of sight, out of mind. It wouldn’t be hard to arrange some kind of death chamber right next to the pit.
The excellent and chilling Conspiracy, the entirety of which is available on YouTube. Basically, the Nazis wanted to murder as many as possible in as little time as possible as economically as possible. In other words, make it a production line. Bullets were expensive, bodies left out in the open caused a health risk and even SS men would eventually balk at shooting women and children all day long.
They found that gassing, whether from CO poisoning or Zyklon B, fit their requirements. Industrial sized crematoria takes care of the bodies. The wiki article has an overview of the methodology and conference.
If public and international opinion wasn’t a factor, the doomed would be killed before they were even loaded onto a train. (Which was basically how the Einsatzgruppen did it in the East). The death camps were mostly reserved for slave labor and those captured far from a convenient battlefront.
I’d like to join the chorus about how silly the train thing is. As for the shaft, if it were 50’x50’ and a mile deep it would hold a couple million people. So you’d only need five or six of those. But then you wouldn’t be able to steal their gold teeth.
I’d be hard pressed to think of a more efficient way than what the Nazis did. Remember, you need people to line up for this. It can’t be a set of grinding gears or you’ll have constant panics.