This is an archived post. You won't be able to vote or comment.

7
8

What was Hitler's endgame? (self.AskHistorians)

HAESisAMyth が 投稿

並べ替え:
ベスト
トップ新着論争中古い順Q&A
あなたは単独のコメントのスレッドを見ています。

残りのコメントをみる →

[–]Georgy_K_ZhukovModerator | Post-Napoleonic Warfare & Small Arms | Dueling 16ポイント17ポイント  (8子コメント)

Lebensraum (Living Space) for a racially pure German Empire that spanned to the Urals. This expanse, as well as how to get it, was described by Darré in a private speech to high level members of the RNS in 1936 thus:

The natural area for settlement by the German people is the territory to the east of the Reich’s boundaries up to the Urals, bordered in the south by the Caucasus, Caspian Sea, Black Sea and the watershed which divides the Mediterranean basin from the Baltic and the North Sea. We will settle this space, according to the law that a superior people always has the right to conquer and to own the land of an inferior people.

And it hardly was new news at that point. Quite soon after taking power Hitler had made clear (to certain people. He wasn't blabbing it to everyone) plans to launch a war of conquest into the East, and anyways, anyone who had read Mein Kampf should have already known, although far too many people made the mistake of dismissing it as mere rhetoric.

From pretty much the moment the Nazi party took power, their primary focus was on rearmament with the pointed goal of facilitating this expansion. It is generally understood that the rate at which Germany was going was totally unsustainable, and the only way collapse would be preventable was through these presumed conquests that would continue to feed the war machine, and pay for its own conquest in the end. The party made grand promises for the improvement of the German people's lot, to improve their standard of living to that of the United States, and while various policies were advanced to this end, to quote Adam Tooze:

The real instrument for the attainment of American-style consumer affluence was the newly assembled Wehrmacht, the instrument through which Germany would achieve American-style living space.

The endgame beyond that was competition with the United States (which, at least in the 1920s, Hitler believed he could team up with the UK to take on). In his unpublished "Second Book", Hitler talks about the final showdown with the United States which, again, reaching to Tooze:

by one last great land grab in the East it would create the self-sufficient basis both for domestic affluence and the platform necessary to prevail in the coming superpower competition with the United States.

So, that is the framework that we should look at Nazi Germany within. Focusing on industrial improvement with the goal of building up their military might, and slowly pushing the envelope with the Western Powers until they would intervene - first through rearmament in of itself, remilitarization of the Rhineland, the Anschluss, the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia as a whole, and finally Poland, which was the point where war of course broke out.

Sources: Quoting from Adam Tooze's "Wages of Destruction", but also drawing on Richard Evans' "Third Reich Trilogy" and Ian Kershaw's "Hitler: 1889-1936"

[–]HAESisAMyth[S] 2ポイント3ポイント  (3子コメント)

What was to be gained by using death/extermination/labor camps instead of using all resources directly towards to war?

If Hitler was surrounded by foes why does he waste the double manpower of those he killed and those that killed? Why not have everyone killing British/Soviet/USA troops?

[–]Georgy_K_ZhukovModerator | Post-Napoleonic Warfare & Small Arms | Dueling 11ポイント12ポイント  (2子コメント)

Well, the labor camps were, in a sense, directing resources towards the war! Civilians from all over Europe were brought back to Germany to work the farms and factories, freeing up German men for the military. Some were conscripted from occupied territories such as France, at least payed a nominal wage, but plenty more were slaves, working away in the thousands of labor camps and satellite sites created through the Third Reich, and they numbered in the millions, with nearly six million foreigners utilized as laborers, forced or otherwise, in Germany by the end of 1942, and almost double that number by war's end.

But obviously, while there is a level of logic - cruel and disturbing certainly - to forced labor, extermination is of course a whole 'nother beast, and you are right that there is a glaring question as to why tens of thousands of personnel would be detailed to carrying it out instead of doing something, you know, more productive. But what is important is that the Holocaust didn't come about in a vacuum. The Hitler didn't just wake up one day and say "OK, might as well kill the Jews".

As I noted, race was a key component of Hitler's ideas, and Nazi party philosophy in general, and anti-Jewish policies were implemented from the very start of Nazi rule in Germany as part of their push for "racial hygiene". Through the decade, Jews were kicked from the civil service, stripped of their citizenship, shunted from public life and employment, even stripped of their livelihoods, as Jewish owned businesses were forced to "Aryanize", that is, be sold to an Aryan owner at bottom-barrel price (with healthy profit for the state as well). Those who were able to emigrated, at great cost as they had to pay the "Reich Flight Tax". To look at one example detailed in the book "Fromms" by Gotz Aly, that one family alone show that in several stages of takeover of business and driving from Germny, the state profited a sum of 2,086,860.69 Reichsmark off of the Fromms family, although as some things aren't included in the official accounting, Aly estimates it might have gone over 3 million. This comes out, roughly, to 30 million Euros in spending power today (Aly's conversion, not my own) stolen by the state from just a single Jewish family and their business, and still, I believe, doesn't include the amount pilfered by the private individuals who "Aryanized" the company (which, for the prurient of you, made condoms).

On a larger scale, as mentioned in "Fromms", a single auction, held on on May 17, 1943, and selling off household goods taken from Jews who had been evicted from Berlin, netted 13 million Reichsmark (130 million Euros). In 1938 alone, the Reich Flight Tax brought in 340 million Reichsmark (assuming Aly is correct in conversion, that is 3.4 billion Euro or so), and the Flight Tax is only a small portion of the total income pilfered from the Jews. For comparison, when the Fromms left Germany, they paid 515,972.00 in Flight Tax, and that is only 1/4 of the total amount that they ended up turning over just to the state. So anyways, that was what was going on in the 1930s. Progressively harsher and harsher policies against the Jews, and many of them did flee, which really was fine with the Nazis as long as they had milked them for as much money as possible. But the same can't be said after 1939.

German Jews, mostly, were assimilated Jews who had been attempting to fit in with German society, but the same can't be said for the Jews of the Eastern territories that Germany entered, more likely to be unassimilated communities, not to mention considerably poorer than their mostly middle-class German counterparts. They had no fortunes to strip from them, and regardless, in the midst of war, there would have been less reason to play it slow as in the 1930s. The German plan for their new Eastern colonies involved serious depopulation as it is, and the Jews were the very bottom of the pecking order. There was little sense in sustaining that population if they didn't figure into the long term plans for German colonization. To again defer to Tooze:

However, in Eastern Europe, the epicentre of the Holocaust, the Judaeocide was not an isolated act of murder. The German invasion of the Soviet Union is far better understood as the last great land-grab in the long and bloody history of European colonialism. Destroying the Jewish population was the first step towards rooting out the Bolshevik state. What was to follow was a gigantic campaign of land clearance and colonization, which also involved the ‘clearance’ of the vast majority of the Slav population and the settlement of millions of hectares of eastern Lebensraum with German colonists. Complementing this long-term programme of demographic engineering was a short-term strategy of exploitation, motivated by the ‘practical’ need to secure the food balance of the German Grossraum. The attainment of this entirely ‘pragmatic’ objective required nothing less than the murder, by organized famine, of the entire urban population of the western Soviet Union. As Hans Frank and Herbert Backe had already demonstrated in the General Government in the spring of 1940, Hitler and his regime were determined that in this world war, it would not be the Germans who were starved into defeat.

But again to return to the point you raise, it was an incredible waste of labor, which points to the ideological fervor of elements within the Nazi party who pushed hard for the end of the Jews. While certainly plenty were put to use in some way or other, the extermination of Jewry, at least from 1942 onwards, was placed above the work potential of at least 2.4 million laborers (this is excludes the young, old, and infirm), double that if we include non-Jewish victims such as Soviet POWs and Poles. There was some nod to the labor potential, since the extermination was conducted in waves, sending off the least useful first, and sparing the "indispensable core". Goebbels noted in 1942 regarding the Lublin region that "60 per cent will have to be liquidated, whereas only 40 per cent can still be employed as labour". Those capable of eeking labor from were usually consolidated in places such as the Lodz Ghetto, but even they eventually would cleared out by 1944. And of course, that is assuming they survived, since as made clear at the Wannsee Conference where the "Final Solution" was laid out, those spared an immediate train to Treblinka were still, essentially, subject to extermination as well, just by being literally worked to death.

So that is the sum of it. In many ways the Holocaust was illogical, and can be viewed as ideology trumping practicality, but not entirely. Extermination was not done blindly, and those who could be used to slave away for a time were temporarily spared. But only temporarily, and not at a rate that would have allowed Nazi Germany to exploit the Jewish labor pool to its full potential. And additionally, as touched on by Tooze, while the Jews, being the the lowest of Untermenschen to the Nazi ideologues were the first to be targeted, had Operation Barbarossa succeeded, they would have only been the first target of the mass depopulation of the entire region of the western Soviet Union, which would have left only a remnant of the Slavic people there, to be subservient underclass to the German farmer elites.

[–]HAESisAMyth[S] -2ポイント-1ポイント  (1子コメント)

I guess you can't make people fight if you don't feed them. So the Germans were using the healthy Jews/Soviets/POWs as their workforce, and exterminating those who could not carry their weight.

The quotation about Germany not starving during this World War, was this a big factor the first time?

And to the extermination methods, one issue that is continually raised by revisionist is the ability of Zyklon-B to be effectively used. http://vho.org/GB/Books/trr/ Sites like this, about the same man, have theories on why it would not have/could not have worked, and I remember seeing other websites referring to the Krematoria not being able to handle volume, and propaganda of mass graves that haven't been verified, and the Mobile Gas Truck.

Is Germar Rudolph reliable? Is vho.com reliable? Or codoh or ihr?

Sorry for pestering you, but you have been extremely informative and non-judgmental of my skepticism/ignorance

[–]Georgy_K_ZhukovModerator | Post-Napoleonic Warfare & Small Arms | Dueling 7ポイント8ポイント  (0子コメント)

Well, I'm not sure if healthy is the word, since they were kept alive on starvation rations, and those "only" in labor camps died by the dozen due to the conditions, which is why it is known as "extermination through labor". Working them to death isn't metaphorical in this case.

I'm not familiar with VHO, but it is repeats the canard that Zyklon-B couldn't kill someone, you can be assured they are unreliable. IHR certainly is unreliable, pushing clear denialist/revisionist agenda and being closely associated with David Irving, probably the most infamous figure in that camp due to his high profile trials (I would recommend either Evans' "Lying About Hitler" or "History on Trial" by Deborah E. Lipstadt for a close look at that specifically). Likewise, Germar Rudolph is as a convicted Holocaust denier (I would add as an aside that I don't agree with the laws in certain countries that make denial illegal, but that is neither here nor there for this discussion), it can be readily dismissed for cherry picking and ignoring evidence.

As for why they aren't reliable, well, we have mountains of evidence provided by the Nazi regime and the perpetrators themselves. One of my favorite sites is this one with provides a very incomplete, but nevertheless compelling list of published evidence relating to the mass killings carried out at Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau (only one of the seven camps used for primary extermination), with most of it coming from recovered German documents, both official and personal, since many of those involved wrote accounts. such as Franz Stangl, an SS officer who visited Belzec in 1942 (and would become commandant of Sobibor), described the scene there:

I went there by car. As one arrived, one first reached Belzec railway station, on the left side of the road. The camp was on the same side, but up a hill. The commandant’s office was 200 metres away, on the other side of the road. It was a one-storey building. The smell . . . Oh God, the smell. It was everywhere. Wirth wasn’t in his office. I remember, they took me to him . . . He was standing on a hill, next to the pits . . . the pits . . . full, they were full. I can’t tell you; not hundreds, thousands, thousands of corpses . . . One of the pits had overflowed. They had put too many corpses in it and putrefaction had progressed too fast, so that the liquid underneath had pushed the bodies on top up and over and the corpses had rolled down the hill. I saw some of them . . . oh God, it was awful.

This was before they began cremation, which was implemented only after the camp had closed. We know that early on the burnings were carried out over open air pits covered with grilles, which disposed of ~700,000 bodies which had previously been buried at Chelmno, Belzec, and Treblinka.

As for Zyklon-B, well, it does work as a disinfectant, and we even have evidence it was used as such, but concentrating on that is a poor attempt to evade its deadly properties, which by some accounts were noted by SS guards at Auschwitz who accidentally killed a cat while delousing their uniforms. Following this, it was tested several times on Soviet POWs with success. Two gas chambers were built, able to handle 800 and 1,200 people, and it was put into use in late March, 1942, and an additional once was added to Birkenau soon after. We also know that the facilities were not only designed by "Topf and Sons", but their plans for the Crematoria remain, which provide some of the most compelling written evidence we have for their purpose The Crematoria certainly did get overwhelmed, as you note, but this is meaningless. When this happened, as at the earlier camps, cremation was continued on open-air grilles, which were used for the disposal of some 100,000 bodies in 1942 alone.

People who have tried to argue that Zyklon-B either didn't happen or even that it simply couldn't work, such as Fred Leuchter, Walter Lüftle, and the aforementioned Germar Rudolph make up a small minority, with little basis in reality for their scientific proofs, and even they have had a hard time standing behind them, as for instance Leuchter was forced, under oath, to recant his claim that guards dropping the Zyklon-B pellets would be unable to survive themselves. Perhaps most damning is that while they make claims about tests conducted, the gas chambers at Auschwitz were reduced to rubble in late-1944, and exposed to the elements for a half-century before tests were conducted. Gas chambers at the site now are reconstructions (Deniers like to point this fact out, as if it is a secret. But it really isn't one), which incorporate some original material in places. Testing of what material remains either in the reconstructions or from rubble on site should be expected to demonstrate much lower levels than would have been present in the original structure c. 1944. And regardless, as noted, we have documentation anyways. In a report concerning inspection of the sire by a "Topf and Sons" engineer the SS reported in Jan. 1943:

Crematorium No. 2. The completed furnaces have been started up in the presence of Engineer Prüfer from Messrs. Topf (of Erfurt). The planks cannot yet be moved from the ceiling of the mortuary cellar on account of frost, but this is not important, as the gassing cellar can be used for that purpose. The ventilation plant has been held up by restrictions on rail transport, but the installation should be ready by February 20th.

and a few months later a file notes:

order of 6/3/1943 concerning the delivery of a gas-tight door 100x192 cm for cellar I of Crematorium III, to be produced to the identical pattern and dimensions as the cellar door of Crematorium II which is situated opposite, with peephole of double 8 mm glass, with rubber sealing strip and frame.

As for the gas vans, we also have documentation of those, although it should be understood that they were created not to be more efficient, but because of concerns by the leadership that the continual shooting of men, women, and children, even Jews, was having a great negative effect on their psyche. The vans provided an impersonal distance. It was, I believe, first suggested by Arthur Nebe, an Einsatzgruppe commander. As with other aspects, people couldn't help but write about their experience, so to quote from one van operator, Anton Lauer of Police Reserve Battalion 9:

It did not seem as if the Jews knew that they were about to be gassed. The exhaust gases were fed into the inside of the van. I can still today hear the Jews knocking and shouting, “Dear Germans, let us out.”

And from another operator describing the effect:

When the doors were opened a cloud of smoke wafted out. After the smoke had cleared we could start our foul work. It was frightful. You could see that they had fought terribly for their lives. Some of them were holding their noses. The dead had to be dragged apart.

We also know that a van was sent to Serbia in early 1942 to kill the 7,500 Jews held at Sajmiste, essentially the entire Jewish population, which drew the prideful boast from Harald Turner, the SS commander there, that he has completely solved the "Jewish Question" in Serbia.

So anyways, sum is that none of those are in anyway reliable sources, and in order to believe them with any level of credence requires the casual dismissal of mountains of evidence including written documentation and the words of the perpetrators themselves, which rightfully puts them onto the fringe of conspiracy theorists, since it essentially requires the coordinated actions of thousands upon thousands of people putting together a coordinated, convincing story - including not just survivors who must thus be lying but perpetrators who had little to gain - and of course the fabrication of tons and tons of documentation and even physical evidence on a simply massive scale.

Mostly same sources as before, addition of "Fromms" by Aly, and also "Denying History" by Shermer.

Edit: Added some more stuff on Zyklon-B

[–]HAESisAMyth[S] -1ポイント0ポイント  (3子コメント)

Thank you for the well-sourced very informative response.

In reference to Lebenstraum, were the lands Hitler wanted part of any previous German empire?

Hitler seems to have been focused on creating a compteting superpower with the US, or at least used the US as an image of an attainable ideal. Did he believe he could create this 2nd superpower? Or was is bellicose rhetoric?

What is Hitler's second book? Never heard of it.

[–]Georgy_K_ZhukovModerator | Post-Napoleonic Warfare & Small Arms | Dueling 7ポイント8ポイント  (2子コメント)

No, it went far beyond lands that were historically Germanic. Pretty much it would include most of what had been the European Russian Empire. Slavs rates low on the racial hierarchy in the minds of the Nazis, so they saw nothing wrong with wresting the land away and populating it with a German ruling class. Might makes right, and racial survival was paramount in their world.

And no, it wasn't rhetoric, he really did see the endgame as creating a German superpower to take on the US, but militarily as well. He was creating an Empire to take on American hegemony, and:

The final decision in the struggle for the world market will lie with force.

Hitler's "Second Book" was going to be the sequel to Mein Kampf. It was written in 1928, but sales of Mein Kampf were doing terrible at that point, and the publisher believed that release should be delayed for that reason. As you might surmise, in the end it was never published, and never had a proper title, hence the "Second Book" moniker, but while Mein Kampf is more concerned with his domestic policies, so to speak, the "Second Book" focused on foreign policy much more. Although much of it was reworkings of speeches he gave so doesn't point to a new evolution in his views at that point, it nevertheless offers an important and centralized window into his thoughts and long term plans.

[–][削除されました]  (1子コメント)

[deleted]

    [–]Georgy_K_ZhukovModerator | Post-Napoleonic Warfare & Small Arms | Dueling 2ポイント3ポイント  (0子コメント)

    Yes, there was some German settlement there, but I don't that that exactly qualifies it as historically German, nor, as you mention, am I aware of the Nazis using that to claim right to the region.