Did Hilter prioritize the jewish trains over military trains ?

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Re: Did Hilter prioritize the jewish trains over military trains ?

#16

Post by michael mills » 05 Jun 2019, 05:15

Which of course wasn't the only one statement in which Hitler was not only showing his knowledge but also setting or confirming the policy. E.g.:

"If the Jews there don't want to work they will be shot...If they cannot work, they must rot. They should be treated like tubercular bacillus which could attack healthy bodies. That is not cruel—if one keeps in mind that even innocent natural beings like hares and deer must be killed so that no damage occurs."
That statement, made to Horthy in April 1943, did not reflect the stage reached by that date. It reflects an earlier stage, with the Jews unfit for use as forced labour imprisoned in the Polish ghettos and slowly wasting away from malnutrition. There is no hint of an active killing of the non-working Jews, a stage that had almost reached completion as of April 1943 in the General-Government.

Also, there is a third group of Jews that Hitler did not mention, namely those fit for labour who were not resisting and were being employed in war production. Why he did not mention that group, which was important to the German war effort, is unclear; it may be that his sole purpose was to impress on Horthy what should be done with Jews who were not prisoners working for Germany as forced labourers, as was still the case with the Jews of Hungary, rather than to describe the total situation.

If Hitler was not concealing his knowledge of what was happening in Poland in April 1943, the description he gives of the conditions for Jews in that country suggests that he was not being kept up to date with the situation on the ground.

Including the one that can be best characterized as Hitler's decision to kill the European Jews (I think this is the one existing that you meant).
Which one is that? There is no statement by Hitler in which he uses words to the effect that he had specifically ordered the killing of all Jews under German control. There are only statements in which he says that the war which the Jews had allegedly caused was going to result in their destruction.

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Sergey Romanov
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Re: Did Hilter prioritize the jewish trains over military trains ?

#17

Post by Sergey Romanov » 05 Jun 2019, 09:44

> That statement, made to Horthy in April 1943, did not reflect the stage reached by that date.

His point was that Jews had to die, that is all.


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Re: Did Hilter prioritize the jewish trains over military trains ?

#18

Post by Sergey Romanov » 05 Jun 2019, 09:46

> Which one is that?

The one written down by Goebbels.

> There are only statements in which he says that the war which the Jews had allegedly caused was going to result in their destruction.

And it relates his decision to be the tool of that destruction.

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Re: Did Hilter prioritize the jewish trains over military trains ?

#19

Post by michael mills » 05 Jun 2019, 13:19

What Goebbels wrote in his diary in December 1941 expresses the spin he put on what Hitler said at a meeting of the leading officials in Germany and German-occupied areas. The question is whether that "spin" accurately reflected what Hitler said, or what he intended.

Bear in mind that it was Goebbels who dug up the visual recording of Hitler's Reichstag speech of 30 January 1939 and included the clip of Hitler's "prophecy" about the "destruction of the Jewish race in Europe" in the case of a new world war in his propaganda film "The Eternal Jew". He also put his own spin on that "prophecy", to the effect that Hitler was promising to bring about that destruction himself, which the context of that part of his speech shows quite clearly was not the case (in fact, Hitler was implying that the peoples of Europe, enraged that the Jews had plunged them into a new war, would bring about the "destruction", which he compared to what had already befallen the Jews of Germany, ie expulsion rather than physical extermination).

It may well also have been Goebbels who reminded Hitler about the "prophecy", which he had forgotten, and convinced him that it had been made on 1 September 1939, the date of the invasion of Poland, a misdating that Hitler subsequently repeated.

That at least is the theory of the late Hans Mommsen as to why Hitler misdated his "prophecy" in subsequent speeches, ie that Hitler had forgotten it, until Goebbels reminded him, but with the wrong date. If Mommsen is right, it would appear that Goebbels envisaged Hitler as the person he wanted him to be, the person who would bring about the physical extermination of the Jews, and interpreted what Hitler said in that light.

Of course Hitler was committed to making Germany "Jew-free", but the fact that he did things such as endorsing the emigration of German Jews to Palestine, and Jewish emigration in general, shows that he was not absolutely committed to physical extermination as the means to achieve that end. He did however give his consent to specific extermination campaigns suggested by his subordinates, as for example when Himmler suggested to him some days after the above meeting that Soviet Jews should be "exterminated as partisans".

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Re: Did Hilter prioritize the jewish trains over military trains ?

#20

Post by Sergey Romanov » 05 Jun 2019, 21:14

Incorrect, the text is clear about Hitler's determination to literally kill the Jews who he could lay his hands on (hence the juxtaposition with the German victims). Elements of the speech were also mirrored by Hans Frank a few days thereafter, in the same genocidal context

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Re: Did Hilter prioritize the jewish trains over military trains ?

#21

Post by David Thompson » 06 Jun 2019, 01:28

Interested readers -- For an extensive discussion of the Hitler-Horthy meeting at Klessheim and its meaning, see:

David Irving and the Klessheim Conference
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=17408

For another observer (Alfred Rosenberg) who got the same impression as Goebbels from Hitler's remarks in December of 1941, see Document 1517-PS in Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression. Volume IV: US Government Printing Office, District of Columbia: 1947. pp. 55-58. at
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 853#552853.

Also see the discussion in Primary evidence about Hitler
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?p=627237

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Re: Did Hilter prioritize the jewish trains over military trains ?

#22

Post by michael mills » 07 Jun 2019, 09:14

....….the text is clear ].......
It is a text by Goebbels, the interpretation he placed on what Hitler said. And it is Goebbels who made the connection between what Hitler said in December 1941 and what he said in his Reichstag speech on 30 January 1939. We do not know whether Hitler himself made that connection at all.

As for what Frank said to the members of his cabinet a few days later, the context is not clear. From his words, namely "We cannot use them in Ostland or the Reich Commissariat, liquidate them yourself", it appears that he must have asked the two Reich Commissars, Lohse for Ostland and Koch for Ukraine, if the Jews of his sphere, the General Government, could be deported into their spheres, Ostland and Ukraine, and they refused, telling him that if he wanted to get rid of "his" Jews, he would have to do it himself. Frank had previously made the same request to Rosenberg, who had told him that the deportation of Jews into the conquered Soviet territory could not begin at the present time.

The words used by Frank do not sound like an order given by Hitler. Furthermore, Frank did not say that they were spoken by Hitler; he does not say who spoke them, but the context suggests that it was most likely Lohse and Koch, or perhaps Rosenberg, the officials responsible for the administration of the Occupied Eastern Territories.

It is obvious that Hitler must have said something along the lines that the Jews deserved to be punished for (allegedly) having started the war, but whether he actually issued a comprehensive extermination order is questionable. The immediately following events show that a mass deportation into conquered Soviet territory, something that seems to have been proposed by Heydrich at the beginning of 1941, was still under active consideration.

In any case, the initiative for a comprehensive massacre of Soviet Jews appears to have come from Himmler, in the suggestion he made at a meeting with Hitler later in December 1941 that those Jews be "exterminated as partisans", a suggestion to which Hitler apparently agreed.

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Re: Did Hilter prioritize the jewish trains over military trains ?

#23

Post by Sergey Romanov » 07 Jun 2019, 19:24

> It is a text by Goebbels, the interpretation he placed on what Hitler said.

Incorrect, there's no suggestion that it's anything other than what Hitler said and Goebbels reproduced.

Goebbels' own idea of the Final Solution was closer to Madagascar, as he would show later in his diary.

> As for what Frank said

You have missed the point entirely. Frank mirrored some of what Hitler said, thus confirming Goebbels' diary entry.

For example:

"We must put an end to the Jews, that I want to say quite openly. The Führer once spoke these words: if united Jewry should once more succeed in unleashing a world war, then the peoples who have been incited to this war will not be its only victims, because the Jew in Europe will also have found his end... Before I continue to speak I would ask you to agree with me on the following principle: we want to have compassion only for the German people, otherwise for no one in the whole world. Others have had no compassion for us. As an old National Socialist, I must also say: if the Jewish tribe were to survive the war in Europe, while we had sacrificed our best blood for Europe’s preservation, then this war would be only a partial success."

This closely repeats Hitler's formulations both in phrasing and in structure:

"Concerning the Jewish question, the Führer is determined to make a clean sweep. He prophesied to the Jews that if they were once again to cause a world war, the result would be their own destruction. That was no figure of speech. The world war is here, the destruction of the Jews must be the inevitable consequence. This question is to be viewed without sentimentality. It is our duty to have sympathy not for the Jews but only for our own German people. If the German people have now again sacrificed 160,000 dead on the eastern front, then the authors of this bloody conflict must pay for it with their lives."


It doesn't matter that he repeats them without ascribing them to Hitler, the origin is clear.

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Re: Did Hilter prioritize the jewish trains over military trains ?

#24

Post by Gorque » 09 Jun 2019, 03:19

Pardon me for butting in, but what does it matter whether or not he (Hitler) issued any directives regarding the organized murder of Jews. The fact that he did nothing to stop an illegal, nevermind immoral act, does not excuse him from culpabilty. He was the head of state and, from prior enacted edicts, ruled by fiat. Therefor, whether he approved the actions undertaken by his underlings or not, his inaction to stop them proves his guilt.

Back to the topic: Did he prioritize the shipments? IMHO, based on the length of time some would take to reach their destinations; No. But that is just my opinion.

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Re: Did Hilter prioritize the jewish trains over military trains ?

#25

Post by AdolfDettmer » 11 Jun 2019, 20:29

From what I have studied there was no prioritization, but one can argue that any use of the Reichs relatively limited rolling stock for the Holocaust was a prioritization of the Holocaust over the war effort.

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Re: Did Hilter prioritize the jewish trains over military trains ?

#26

Post by Sid Guttridge » 13 Jun 2019, 12:28

Hi Guys,

The problem arises from the thread title.

As there is no paper trail leading all the way to Hitler that proves definitively he ordered the so-called "Holocaust", then there is hardly likely to be any evidence of him prioritizing trains for this purpose.

However, the "Holocaust" undoubtedly happened, so it is an entirely legitimate question to ask whether the Nazis prioritized Jewish trains over military trains.

One thing seems sure - the German armed forces needed all the trains they could get, so the mere existence of the Jewish transports was presumably detrimental to military efforts.

Cheers,

Sid

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Re: Did Hilter prioritize the jewish trains over military trains ?

#27

Post by Boby » 13 Jun 2019, 15:35

If the trains diverted to jewish deportations were so crucial, how is possible that the germans failed to extract at least the same amount among the thousands running daily over Europe?

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Re: Did Hilter prioritize the jewish trains over military trains ?

#28

Post by Sergey Romanov » 13 Jun 2019, 18:31

> As there is no paper trail leading all the way to Hitler that proves definitively he ordered the so-called "Holocaust",

There is a trail showing he made a decision-in-principle to expand the Holocaust (which started shortly after the invasion of the USSR) from certain select groups of Jews to all the European Jews he could get a hold of (this is discussed above).

There's of course no evidence that Hitler was intimately involved in the logistics or implementation details of the Holocaust.

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Re: Did Hilter prioritize the jewish trains over military trains ?

#29

Post by Gorque » 14 Jun 2019, 04:34

Of course not. There were those that were in the regime that were interpreting his utterances as to what he desired and, providing he did not contravene the actions being taken, became the official regime policy. A very convenient method of accomplishing his desires by way of his toadies.

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Re: Did Hilter prioritize the jewish trains over military trains ?

#30

Post by Sid Guttridge » 15 Jun 2019, 13:00

Hi Gorque,

I think the phrase sometimes used for this phenomenon is "working towards the Fuhrer".

Cheers,

Sid.

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