When did the Holocaust begin?

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Sergey Romanov
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Re: When did the Holocaust begin?

#61

Post by Sergey Romanov » 23 Jun 2018, 10:25

Sailor Haumea wrote:
Sergey Romanov wrote:> I disagree with the assertion that the Holocaust is synonymous with the Shoah.

You can hold that as a personal opinion if you want. However specialists - like Yad Vashem and USHMM - define the Holocaust acc. to its original meaning as the word began to be used in the 1960s: it denotes the murder of Jews.

> Gypsies and the disabled were also targeted for genocide, as well as many Slavs across Eastern Europe.

This has zero to do with the meaning of the word Holocaust, which pertains to the Jewish genocide. The genocide of the Roma has its own term. Extermination of the disabled as the disabled doesn't fall under the UN definition of genocide.
Erm, the USHMM uses a broad definition: http://www.ushmm.org/remember/office-of ... or-affairs
> The Museum honors as a survivor any person who was displaced, persecuted, and/or discriminated against by the racial, religious, ethnic, social, and/or political policies of the Nazis and their allies between 1933 and 1945. In addition to former inmates of concentration camps and ghettos, this also includes refugees and people in hiding.
It quite obviously doesn't.

https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.ph ... d=10005143

https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.ph ... d=10007867

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Sergey Romanov
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Re: When did the Holocaust begin?

#62

Post by Sergey Romanov » 23 Jun 2018, 10:26

What is more or less "important" is a matter of subjective judgment.


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Re: When did the Holocaust begin?

#63

Post by Sailor Haumea » 29 Jun 2018, 01:25

Sergey, I'm curious as to when you believe Hitler first authorized mass killings, i.e. when Hitler shifted from deportation to genocide. It seems certain that it must have been before July 31, 1941 (Göring's order for Heydrich to start planning the Final Solution). Do you think that the decision was made in the planning stages of Operation Barbarossa, or after the invasion had already begun?

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Sergey Romanov
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Re: When did the Holocaust begin?

#64

Post by Sergey Romanov » 29 Jun 2018, 08:47

It is the current historical consensus that the decision to kill the Soviet Jews was arrived at through incremental radicalization after the invasion of the USSR, certainly not before it (at the start mostly male Jews of the draft age were killed).

It did not have to be before July 31 (or at least I fail to see the logical connection).

Further several months of incremental radicalization led to a decision-in-principle to murder all European Jews (as announced by Hitler in December of 1941).

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Re: When did the Holocaust begin?

#65

Post by michael mills » 26 Jul 2018, 08:46

There seems to be a lot of arguing about semantics here. Perhaps the way out of such ping-pong argumentation would be to discard the word "holocaust", and use a more descriptive term, such as the organised extermination of sizable groups of Jews. The question could then be interpreted as the beginning of any local extermination actions, or the beginning of a comprehensive extermination action organised from the centre of the German Government.

In that regard, it needs to be borne in mind that there were distinct oscillations in the intensity of the extermination actions, with the pendulum swinging backwards and forwards between killing as many Jews as possible and preserving as many as possible for slave labour. By 1944, for example, there was greater emphasis on preserving Jews for slave labour, and categories of deported Jews who previously would have been killed on arrival were being held in Auschwitz for distribution to various places of employment. Of the 100,000 Jews placed at the disposal of the Jaegerstab for employment in the program of building jet fighters, large numbers were persons normally classed as infit for labour, eg old men, women, children; we know that from a complaint made by the Jaegerstab about the quality of the Jewish workers being sent to them from Auschwitz.

Furthermore, there were also specific groups of Jews who were never subject to comprehensive killing actions. For example, the German Jews deported to Riga were occasionally subjected to culls, which took the lives of those least usable for labour, and there was ongoing wastage from natural causes, but by the middle of 1944, the time of the German evacuation of that city, about half of them were still alive, at which point, instead of being massacred, they were taken by sea back to Germany and placed in concentration camps there. The survivors of the Kaunas Ghetto, both German and native Jews, were similarly evacuated to Germany.

Thus, despite the several millions killed, the extermination actions were never absolutely comprehensive.

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Re: When did the Holocaust begin?

#66

Post by Sid Guttridge » 27 Jul 2018, 06:52

Hi michael,

I would suggest that it is impossible to define a specific start date, as the attempted extermination of all Jews was just the extreme end of a continuum of rising pressure on them from the time the Nazis came to power, which from early on was resulting in a higher differential death rate for Jews, albeit initially involving very small numbers.

Some Jews died in Dachau as early as 1934, long before mass extermination became policy, but there seems no useful reason to differentiate between them and those who died en masse in, say, Auschwitz in 1944.

The so-called "Holocaust" was unoubtedly the conclusion of a steady escalation of earlier policies. However, it was not a necessary conclusion while other alternatives to dealing with the Nazis' self-identified "Jewish Problem", such as managed migration or mass expulsion, were available. The outbreak of war made such alternatives unviable for the duration and it was then that the Nazis turmed to direct mass murder of the Jews in their custody.

So, higher differential death rates for Jews were apparent quite early, large scale deaths began in 1939-41, but actual extermination en masse seems to have only become a realisable policy in the wake of the Wannsee Conference.

Cheers,

Sid

P.S. It seems that only about 10% of the Jews in the Kovno Ghetto survived to mid 1944, so those who were thereafter taken to Germany look like unfinished business rather than a reprieve. Indeed, whatever the local variations, any Jewish survivors from Nazi custody only seem likely to have escaped death due to the outcome of the war.

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Re: When did the Holocaust begin?

#67

Post by michael mills » 27 Jul 2018, 11:26

Some Jews died in Dachau as early as 1934, long before mass extermination became policy, but there seems no useful reason to differentiate between them and those who died en masse in, say, Auschwitz in 1944.

There was a difference. Jews sent to Dachau in 1934 were not targets of a general anti-Jewish campaign, but were sent there in the context of the suppression of political enemies, ie because they were Communists or Socialists or members of other groups opposed to National Socialism. Deaths of Jews imprisoned in Dachau for political reasons were no different from the deaths of non-Jewish prisoners. Furthermore, the killings in concentration camps of individual non-Jewish prisoners never developed into a program of mass killing of members of the ethnic group to which those prisoners belonged.

It seems that only about 10% of the Jews in the Kovno Ghetto survived to mid 1944, so those who were thereafter taken to Germany look like unfinished business rather than a reprieve.
I think you are missing the point. When the Germans retreated from Kaunas, they could simply have killed the surviving Jews held in the ghetto there; that would have been a quicker and easier solution, since there was no need for the Germans to go to all the trouble of shipping them to concentration camps in Germany. The fact that the Germans did not take the easier option of massacring the survivors in Kaunas suggests that the imperative of physically exterminating the Jewish population had become somewhat weaker.

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Sergey Romanov
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Re: When did the Holocaust begin?

#68

Post by Sergey Romanov » 28 Jul 2018, 13:08

michael mills wrote:
26 Jul 2018, 08:46
There seems to be a lot of arguing about semantics here. Perhaps the way out of such ping-pong argumentation would be to discard the word "holocaust", and use a more descriptive term, such as the organised extermination of sizable groups of Jews. The question could then be interpreted as the beginning of any local extermination actions, or the beginning of a comprehensive extermination action organised from the centre of the German Government.

In that regard, it needs to be borne in mind that there were distinct oscillations in the intensity of the extermination actions, with the pendulum swinging backwards and forwards between killing as many Jews as possible and preserving as many as possible for slave labour. By 1944, for example, there was greater emphasis on preserving Jews for slave labour, and categories of deported Jews who previously would have been killed on arrival were being held in Auschwitz for distribution to various places of employment. Of the 100,000 Jews placed at the disposal of the Jaegerstab for employment in the program of building jet fighters, large numbers were persons normally classed as infit for labour, eg old men, women, children; we know that from a complaint made by the Jaegerstab about the quality of the Jewish workers being sent to them from Auschwitz.

Furthermore, there were also specific groups of Jews who were never subject to comprehensive killing actions. For example, the German Jews deported to Riga were occasionally subjected to culls, which took the lives of those least usable for labour, and there was ongoing wastage from natural causes, but by the middle of 1944, the time of the German evacuation of that city, about half of them were still alive, at which point, instead of being massacred, they were taken by sea back to Germany and placed in concentration camps there. The survivors of the Kaunas Ghetto, both German and native Jews, were similarly evacuated to Germany.

Thus, despite the several millions killed, the extermination actions were never absolutely comprehensive.
There were always 2 contradictory vectors, one saying "I want more Jews killed", the other "I want more workers", so the actual fate of the Jews depended on which one prevailed at which point. The end fate of the European Jews was wholesale extinction tho, this is clear even from the Wannsee protocol.

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Re: When did the Holocaust begin?

#69

Post by Terry Duncan » 28 Jul 2018, 16:41

michael mills wrote:
27 Jul 2018, 11:26
It seems that only about 10% of the Jews in the Kovno Ghetto survived to mid 1944, so those who were thereafter taken to Germany look like unfinished business rather than a reprieve.
I think you are missing the point. When the Germans retreated from Kaunas, they could simply have killed the surviving Jews held in the ghetto there; that would have been a quicker and easier solution, since there was no need for the Germans to go to all the trouble of shipping them to concentration camps in Germany. The fact that the Germans did not take the easier option of massacring the survivors in Kaunas suggests that the imperative of physically exterminating the Jewish population had become somewhat weaker.
Surely this simply indicates that the Germans were unwilling to conduct an open massacre at a stage where the war was clearly lost, those involved in earlier massacres were facing war crimes trials when the war was over, so they decided to shift the intended victims to places they could be killed far less openly? We know the Germans even set up a special unit to remove all traces of earlier massacres, nout out of regret for having conducted them, but to conceal them entirely, so why would not moving the people from Kaunas fit in with this behaviour perfectly?

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Re: When did the Holocaust begin?

#70

Post by michael mills » 29 Jul 2018, 00:48

At about the same time as the survivors of the Riga and Kaunas ghettos were being evacuated back to Germany, the Jewish workers in the camps in Estonia were massacred and their bodies burned on giant pyres, after a sudden breakthrough by the Red Army. The remains were discovered by the Red Army, and photographic evidence exists.

The pattern seems to be that where the Germans had sufficient time to evacuate their Jewish prisoners they did so, but where they had to leave suddenly they killed them.

One explanation for the evacuation of Jews back to Germany could be that Himmler was trying to preserve as many Jews as possible for use as bargaining chips in his attempts to open negotiations with the Western Allies on a compromise peace. He had been trying to "sell" Jews to the Allies as far back as 1942 (the "Europa Plan" in Slovakia), and the "escape" of Danish Jews to Sweden, which was colluded in by the German occupation authorities in Denmark, was most probably a similar attempt to open negotiations. The best-known attempt to "sell" Jews was of course the "trucks for Jews" proposal made by Eichmann in Hungary in 1944, at about the same time as Jews were being evacuated from Riga.

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