No Holocaust

[David1819]

Wow what a question!. Just to clarify this is not intended to offend anyone nor am I denying the tragic events took place.

What if, After inspecting the mass killings in 1941 in the east Himmler and the SS high command fail to come up with a systematic industrial approach to exterminate the Jews. The mass shootings already demoralising his men the lack of a non personal execution method "such as gas chambers". The hole idea is abandoned and the Jews will simply be forced to migrate out of the Third Reich once the war is over.

WW2 ends in 1945 allied victory exactly how it did end. So what is Hitler's Legacy? How would Nuremburg go down? Would Himmler commit suicide once surrendered? would Israel exist? what else would be different?

[wm]

It's not only the Holocaust. The Intelligenzaktion, AB-Aktion, Nacht und Nebel, Heu-Aktion, kidnapping of children, concentration camps, slave labor, Kinder KZ, Lidice, Commissar Order, the naked aggression on Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Netherlands, Belgium, Yugoslavia - happened too. According to the Hague Conventions the entire Nazi leadership could be hanged for those - repeatedly.

Israel was going to happened. The Jews were serious about it, and had broad support anyway. The Polish Government supported and trained Jewish insurrectionists before the war, and would support them after the war too.
And the USSR and the entire Soviet Block supported the creation of the Jewish state for reasons unrelated to the Holocaust.

[henriquecassis]

If you read the first Rosemberg book you will see that nazis think that the creation of Israel is best choice, the book is called The track of the jew through the ages, but it would be made before the war...they saw jews as the enemy inside, as the people who took advantage for themselves when the german people need to be strong and go on with difficults, as the 1917 crises.....so their presence in german through the war was impossible... himmler, hitler did not commited suicide because of the jews, the russians, american(more tolerate) saw the jews as a bad thing too, almost all the europe was against them, they commit suicide because their ideals of life was lost, as magda goebbels and their family. Thisis a non political view, just for history study. Regards.

[henriquecassis]

So it was impossible to have different way of things.....

[wm]

Antisemitism was at odds with the core tenets of communism, so in the Stalinist Russia was forbidden, and they meant it (in the US it was the same although with less severe consequences).
Some Jews eventually were persecuted, but they were simply next in line by then.

The US and the rest of the world ( both still economically weak because of the Great Depression) didn't want the mass of poor Jewish emigrants on their territory - and in fact any other poor emigrants. But rich emigrants, Jewish or not, were OK.

In Europe at that time it wasn't like the natives hated Jews, but among themselves they embraced love, peace, and tranquility. The various political groups spewed hate against each other eagerly. And the Jews as an important political, economical entity got their share too.
Much of that "all were against them" is really from historians that are blindly collecting injustices, real or imagined, committed against the Jews, and nothing more. They don't want to accept that the rest didn't have any better.

[wenty]

I think you could write a whole book on that "what if" and the reverberating effect it has had on the decades since, but I think at its most basic level, it would have made Germany much more of a powerhouse on the military front during the war, especially during the latter part.

Germany was so focused on the expulsion and extermination of the Jews, and threw so many resources into it that could have been better used by the military, especially when they really started to struggle by around 1944. If the military had had all those extra troops, trains, trucks and so on and so forth at their disposal, surely that would have made them a much greater threat from a militaristic point of view?

Cheers,
Adam.

[wm]

It's really a myth. The resources used were few, and insignificant.
For example the 300,000 residents of the Warsaw Ghetto were sent to their deaths by a few low ranking SS-officers, comfortably working in a a small flat. And then gassed by a team smaller than the number of cooks in a German infantry division.
Every day a train or two were used, in a city where hundreds of trains arrived or departed every day.
Most of the work was done by the Jews themselves, the Judenrat, the Jewish Police, various small security units that were around anyway, and a few collaborationist units of no military value whatsoever.

[wenty]

WM,

It's not about the personnel so much as the transport, although it was essentially all hands on deck in the latter stages of the war.

As I said, think about the sheer amounts of trains, trucks, etc etc and the materials required to operate them which were used for transporting prisoners to and from the various concentration / labour camps. Especially in 1944. If they had been redirected for use by the military rather than chasing this frenetic genocide, then the Germans would certainly, IMO, have had a much better chance of changing the tide of the war. I won't say they would have won it, but if they had used their resources better then they would have stood a much better chance of victory.

Just think, if they had done this and the war had survived for another year, for instance, new weapons like the V1 and V2 rockets could have been far more effective than just being a last gasp attempt at destruction.

Cheers,
Adam.

[David1819]

the sheer amounts of trains, trucks, etc etc would still be used in labour and manufacturing situations. The forced labour would still be used.

However it is the systematic gassing that really puts the biggest stain on the Third Reich's legacy

[wm]

It would be easy for the Allies to match the performance of the V2s - by attaching a half-million dollar check (in today's money) to every one-ton bomb dropped on Germany.

And to move a million people, 10000 boxcars were needed for a few days, or 1000 for a month.
It seems a lot, but Germany probably had about half a million railroad cars - if not more. So it was just a drop in the bucket.

The assumption is, I suppose, the Holocaust was illogical and harmful to the economy.
But it's not the case, disregarding any moral issues, the Holocaust was also a cost-effective measure for conserving food, and the Nazi economy was in short supply of food all the time. The Poles were next in line (although there were destined to be starved not gassed), only the bumper crops of 1943 saved them.

[wenty]

David:

I agree with you, but i'm referring simply to the transports and materials which were used in transporting prisoners as opposed to what was / could have been used for military purposes.

WM:

1944 was an extremely productive year for Germany. From a production point of view, it was probably their peak. However, by 1944 they were in huge amounts of trouble in the war itself. And yet efforts were ramped up at the same time to exterminate more and more Jews.

Never mind just the transports themselves, think of the personnel that were being used. Think of the fuel and other raw materials that were being used to try and keep reaching record figures in the Holocaust.

Fuel alone was a vital asset - late in the war, Germany was running out of it. It was an effort just to find enough fuel to burn Hitler and Eva Braun's bodies after their suicide. Imagine how much of this it would have taken to run all of the transports who were taking prisoners from concentration/labour camp to camp.

ALL of that could have been redirected to the war effort, instead of forcing young children and old men to fight for Germany. Purely from an objective point of view, Germany could have done much more to prolong the war and therefore make their new weapons more effective.

If you're in any doubt, just take a look at the production levels vs raw material use vs military/genocide reasons, especially in 1944.

Cheers,
Adam.

[BDV]

The assumption is, I suppose, the Holocaust was illogical and harmful to the economy.

There was method/logik to the Holocaust madness. What's illogical is applying that logik in a pre-Endsieg situation.

But it's not the case, disregarding any moral issues, the Holocaust was also a cost-effective measure for conserving food, and the Nazi economy was in short supply of food all the time.

So jews were unnütze Esser in your opinion?

The European Jewry's contribution to European economy went far beyond what your belief appears to be. No less than an Axis honcho of impeccable antisemitic credentials, Miklos Horthy stated that:

it is impossible, in a year or two, to eliminate the Jews, who have everything in their hands, and to replace them with incompetent, unworthy, mostly big-mouthed elements, for we should become bankrupt.

[wm]

But it happened. The Jews had been forced to emigrate or had been replaced in Germany by 1939, in the occupied territories in 1939/40, in Hungary in 1941. There were all stripped of any influence in economy well before the Holocaust.
One of those replacement business leaders was for example Oscar Schindler, he was doing OK.
The Holocaust wasn't harmful because any possible damage had been done already.

Horthy's credentials weren't impeccable, he strongly resisted and delayed the deportations of Hungarian Jews,a and in the end stopped them entirely saving a quarter of a million people.

[wm]

Never mind just the transports themselves, think of the personnel that were being used. Think of the fuel and other raw materials that were being used to try and keep reaching record figures in the Holocaust.

But the trains, and the trucks (rarely used) ran on coal, and Germany had plenty of coal.
And as I said it was a drop in the bucket, in Hungary it was four trains per day, a negligible number.

[LWD]

From what I recall reading in Wages of Destruction Germany had an energy problem and that included coal. For one thing coal production required trained workers and many of them had been drafted. By late in 44 Germany was also haveing a serious problem getting weapons from the factories to the front which suggest at least at that point there was a problem with log assets.

But it happened. The Jews had been forced to emigrate or had been replaced in Germany by 1939, in the occupied territories in 1939/40, in Hungary in 1941. There were all stripped of any influence in economy well before the Holocaust.
....

That's not quite right from what I've read. Indeed weren't there Jewish workers in Berlin working in munitions plants well into the war?