Core Arguments For and Against the Mainstream Account

[SanityCheck]

Fair, but even ad hoc falls apart when it should shine the greatest, under the Soviet advance. Instead of killing the internees in the east and folding ss personnel into combat units, the Germans elected to salvation march them into Germany proper.

Waste of manpower and resources for a genocide, eh?

The Final Solution was suspended at the start of November 1944 with the end of selections for the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

There were still several hundred thousand Jews alive as labourers across the KZ system, who were still subjected to massacres if they could not be pulled out in time: Palmnicken and Lieberose being two prominent examples. The same had happened in the summer 1944 evacuations, at Klooga in the KL Vaivara complex in Estonia. Jews and non-Jews were killed in various camps in Germany including by gassings, with Auschwitz veterans prominent in some cases like Ravensbrueck. But the default solution for unfit and sick prisoners was to dump them in camp sectors, sub-camps designated as dumping grounds, or in Belsen. It wasn't to release them or turn them over to the advancing Soviet forces. So many 10s of 1000s more died in the final phase.

By autumn 1944, Germany had been kicked out of almost every previously occupied territory, so the value of KZ labour had increased, thus the logic of evacuating labour forces. Organising the systematic killing of a now decentralised KZ labour force in hundreds of subcamps would have been a lot of effort, especially as the expanded guard force were taken from the Wehrmacht, were not so fit for combat service and were no different to the still extant POW camp guard force, which outnumbered them. There were only 37,000 KZ guards in January 1945, watching 700,000 prisoners, Jews and non-Jews alike. Half or more were new to the role in 1944, but still managed to carry out numerous shootings on evacuation marches and in cases like Palmicken and Lieberose, alongside Volkssturm and other totally untrained and inexperienced German men who killed in 1945 for assorted reasons.

1945 was chaos and also contradictory, since there were also initiatives from Himmler to use KZ prisoners and Jews as bargaining chips. The Nazi regime was twitching like a corpse, especially by March-April 1945.

Ultimately, the genocide had already happened, since the surviving Jewish KZ inmates of 1944-45 were a small fraction of the more than 5 million who had been firmly in German hands and been overwhelmingly killed in 1941-summer 1944.

[TlsMS93]

“The Final Solution was suspended at the start of November 1944 with the end of selections for the gas chambers at Auschwitz”.

Are you seriously going to play the Kurt Becher card for this alleged end of the Final Solution?

The Germans were unable to evacuate their own population in the face of the advancing Red Army, so they were going to make an effort to evacuate Jews?

[Churchill]

1.)Ultimately, the genocide had already happened,
2.)since the surviving Jewish KZ inmates of 1944-45

[Edited original text above for clarification]

Statements 1.) and 2.) appear to contradict one another. Can you explain what you mean here?

[Stubble]

At Auschwitz, for example, it would have been little effort to nail the doors shut and torch the prisoner barracks while the internees slept.

If the effort had been genocide, I don't believe the effort would have been spent on the salvation marches.

Conditions at belsan deteriorated as the war progressed because of allied bombing. There is a direct and demonstrable correlation between deaths in the camps and allied tonnage dropped.

That screams something at me, and it's not genocide.

[borjastick]

At Auschwitz, for example, it would have been little effort to nail the doors shut and torch the prisoner barracks while the internees slept.

If the effort had been genocide, I don't believe the effort would have been spent on the salvation marches.

Conditions at belsan deteriorated as the war progressed because of allied bombing. There is a direct and demonstrable correlation between deaths in the camps and allied tonnage dropped.

That screams something at me, and it's not genocide.

Please Mr Stubble I must warn you against using logic, common sense and facts. These believers don't like it when we do that, they go a bit dizzy and start dribbling and some have been known to wet their pants.

[SanityCheck]

“The Final Solution was suspended at the start of November 1944 with the end of selections for the gas chambers at Auschwitz”.

Are you seriously going to play the Kurt Becher card for this alleged end of the Final Solution?

Becher isn't needed since there are no more selections on arrival or inside Auschwitz from November 1944. Eduard Wirths also expressed relief that 'the whole thing' was over in a letter after this date.

The Germans were unable to evacuate their own population in the face of the advancing Red Army, so they were going to make an effort to evacuate Jews?

KZ inmates, POWs, inmates of regular prisons in Silesia, foreign workers, a lot of evacuations were going on.

Not sure what your point is, since the evacuations of Stutthof, Gross-Rosen (partially) and Auschwitz triggered in January 1945 are documented facts. Auschwitz had been run down in 1944 to 67,000 inmates from a much higher total in the summer of 1944 by transfers westwards. 7000 were left behind, 500 killed in the camps and the rest marched westwards to railheads.

The nearby Stalag VIII camps were also evacuated at the same time.

[SanityCheck]

1.)Ultimately, the genocide had already happened,
2.)since the surviving Jewish KZ inmates of 1944-45

[Edited original text above for clarification]

Statements 1.) and 2.) appear to contradict one another. Can you explain what you mean here?

Genocide does not equate to 100% extermination. The original definition by Lemkin was broader and more indirect, the UN convention on genocide explicitly includes 'in whole or in part'. If we expect 100% extermination before using the term genocide, then there never has been a genocide in modern history, as there are always survivors of some kind, and many who are subjected to forced labour, kidnapping/transfer and other phenomena short of killing.

Using Hilberg's figures for the sake of simplicity, in 1945 he estimated 100,000 Jews dying out of 5.1 million. If we use 300,000 as the number for Jews alive under direct German control in KZs at the end of 1944 (which may be too high), then one third died. But the 300,000 alive as labourers contrasts with 5 million deaths in this estimate. That is a death rate of over 94% for the Jews who were under direct control - in ghettos, camps, etc.

One can contrast the 300,000 labourers also with the 2.5-2.6 million estimated as killed in extermination camps and the 2 million plus shot, the number of labourers surviving was clearly a small fraction.

But do explain what term we should use for 90% kill-and-let-die rates.

[SanityCheck]

At Auschwitz, for example, it would have been little effort to nail the doors shut and torch the prisoner barracks while the internees slept.

If the effort had been genocide, I don't believe the effort would have been spent on the salvation marches.

Conditions at belsan deteriorated as the war progressed because of allied bombing. There is a direct and demonstrable correlation between deaths in the camps and allied tonnage dropped.

That screams something at me, and it's not genocide.

Again: genocide is not 100% extermination. Selecting 75% of arrivals at Auschwitz and using 25% as labourers is extermination and genocide. The further decimation of the labourers is also genocide, the situation in January 1945 was that extermination, the Final Solution as it became, selecting unfit Jews to be killed on arrival or after they were deemed too sick or weak to recover, had ceased in November 1944.

So the remaining Jews in the KZs had undergone at least one selection to be kept alive as labourers. Every contingent whether routed via the Baltic KZs (Kauen to Dachau-Kaufering via Stutthof) or camps in Poland or Auschwitz had lost most of the town's population in earlier massacres, deportations, selections.

Auschwitz transferred 10s of 1000s of Jewish and non-Jewish prisoners in the last months of 1944, so there were only 67,000 prisoners left when the camp was evacuated. Not all were Jews. Meanwhile, there were between 100-200,000 Jews already in concentration camps to the west who had been transferred in 1944, so the majority of Jews alive as labourers in German hands in January 1945 were not in Auschwitz.

For the Hungarian Jews, 25% were selected on arrival at Auschwitz between May and July 1944 to be used as labourers, and they were shipped westwards in those months, 110,000 out of more than 400,000 deported. So, as usual, the 75-25 rule applies. The 110,000 selected as labourers suffered massive attrition in the 10-12 months in German captivity, but as they were last in, their survival rate was over half of the 110,000.

For 1942 transports, the number of survivors counted after the war might be in single or low double figures out of 1,000.

Semantic and definitional goalpost-moving won't help you, unless you have a new term for massacring a supermajority of a particular cohort. 75% of Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz in 1944 were massacred using Zyklon B. 75% of Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz in 1944 were murdered en masse using Zyklon B. Lots of alternatives to genocide or extermination, aren't there.

[TlsMS93]

“The Final Solution was suspended at the start of November 1944 with the end of selections for the gas chambers at Auschwitz”.

Are you seriously going to play the Kurt Becher card for this alleged end of the Final Solution?

Becher isn't needed since there are no more selections on arrival or inside Auschwitz from November 1944. Eduard Wirths also expressed relief that 'the whole thing' was over in a letter after this date.

The Germans were unable to evacuate their own population in the face of the advancing Red Army, so they were going to make an effort to evacuate Jews?

KZ inmates, POWs, inmates of regular prisons in Silesia, foreign workers, a lot of evacuations were going on.

Not sure what your point is, since the evacuations of Stutthof, Gross-Rosen (partially) and Auschwitz triggered in January 1945 are documented facts. Auschwitz had been run down in 1944 to 67,000 inmates from a much higher total in the summer of 1944 by transfers westwards. 7000 were left behind, 500 killed in the camps and the rest marched westwards to railheads.

The nearby Stalag VIII camps were also evacuated at the same time.

“All finished” is that exhausting work of separating people into the various camp blocks and also because the camp population will no longer increase from then on and all the problems that this generates will no longer occur. And what we have most of is examples of people going to the left and appearing alive there in front.

The majority of the registered prisoners were not Jews, as to what happened to them nobody knows, you support gassing, even though Jews who are obviously unfit for work are registered there, we support transfer to other places

[SanityCheck]

“The Final Solution was suspended at the start of November 1944 with the end of selections for the gas chambers at Auschwitz”.

Are you seriously going to play the Kurt Becher card for this alleged end of the Final Solution?

Becher isn't needed since there are no more selections on arrival or inside Auschwitz from November 1944. Eduard Wirths also expressed relief that 'the whole thing' was over in a letter after this date.

The Germans were unable to evacuate their own population in the face of the advancing Red Army, so they were going to make an effort to evacuate Jews?

KZ inmates, POWs, inmates of regular prisons in Silesia, foreign workers, a lot of evacuations were going on.

Not sure what your point is, since the evacuations of Stutthof, Gross-Rosen (partially) and Auschwitz triggered in January 1945 are documented facts. Auschwitz had been run down in 1944 to 67,000 inmates from a much higher total in the summer of 1944 by transfers westwards. 7000 were left behind, 500 killed in the camps and the rest marched westwards to railheads.

The nearby Stalag VIII camps were also evacuated at the same time.

“All finished” is that exhausting work of separating people into the various camp blocks and also because the camp population will no longer increase from then on and all the problems that this generates will no longer occur. And what we have most of is examples of people going to the left and appearing alive there in front.

The majority of the registered prisoners were not Jews, as to what happened to them nobody knows, you support gassing, even though Jews who are obviously unfit for work are registered there, we support transfer to other places

This really isn't responsive to what I wrote. Registered KZ inmates who were Jewish had undergone selections and been separated from Jews deemed unfit for work. Your side cannot account for the whereabouts of the unfit, but that is irrelevant to the issue of why the SS might evacuate labouring Jewish prisoners when they had already moved even larger numbers of Jewish labourers westwards from May-December 1944 to work in the Natzweiler, Buchenwald, Dachau etc camp complexes.

The SS oversaw the KZ system which held 700,000 inmates as of January 1945, most not Jewish, but several hundred thousand were Jews. It had the belief that these prisoners should be moved to work sites which constituted an SS contribution to the war effort.

The Wehrmacht's POW camp system also moved prisoners westwards, while it was technically by then under Gottlob Berger, the Wehrmacht had its own chain of command and ability to secure transport priorities.

The prison system under the Reich Justice Ministry also moved prisoners westwards. Like the SS, it also oversaw massacres of prisoners who couldn't be moved in time, at Lodz and at Sonnenburg in 1945.

The civilian administration, the NSDAP with its Gau structure and the corresponding provincial state authorities, was in charge of the German civilian population.

Economics ministries and agencies were responsible for moving factories and to an extent, workforces.

Somebody's incredulity over why the SS decided to move KZ prisoners westwards is not an argument of any kind. The different factions and agencies were competing for transport and also had to time their evacuations, especially as the NSDAP was also responsible for mobilising the Volkssturm and enlisting civilians as trench-diggers. It was potentially defeatist to evacuate whole populations prematurely. It was also harder to pool villages into treks that might be able to reach railheads and which might be competing for road space with military convoys. Towns, too. Much easier to evacuate camps where thousands of POWs or KZ inmates were already regimented into barracks and could be marched off as blocks, unlike marching off families with Opa, Oma and the Kinder.

[Stubble]

At Auschwitz, for example, it would have been little effort to nail the doors shut and torch the prisoner barracks while the internees slept.

If the effort had been genocide, I don't believe the effort would have been spent on the salvation marches.

Conditions at belsan deteriorated as the war progressed because of allied bombing. There is a direct and demonstrable correlation between deaths in the camps and allied tonnage dropped.

That screams something at me, and it's not genocide.

Again: genocide is not 100% extermination. Selecting 75% of arrivals at Auschwitz and using 25% as labourers is extermination and genocide. The further decimation of the labourers is also genocide, the situation in January 1945 was that extermination, the Final Solution as it became, selecting unfit Jews to be killed on arrival or after they were deemed too sick or weak to recover, had ceased in November 1944.

So the remaining Jews in the KZs had undergone at least one selection to be kept alive as labourers. Every contingent whether routed via the Baltic KZs (Kauen to Dachau-Kaufering via Stutthof) or camps in Poland or Auschwitz had lost most of the town's population in earlier massacres, deportations, selections.

Auschwitz transferred 10s of 1000s of Jewish and non-Jewish prisoners in the last months of 1944, so there were only 67,000 prisoners left when the camp was evacuated. Not all were Jews. Meanwhile, there were between 100-200,000 Jews already in concentration camps to the west who had been transferred in 1944, so the majority of Jews alive as labourers in German hands in January 1945 were not in Auschwitz.

For the Hungarian Jews, 25% were selected on arrival at Auschwitz between May and July 1944 to be used as labourers, and they were shipped westwards in those months, 110,000 out of more than 400,000 deported. So, as usual, the 75-25 rule applies. The 110,000 selected as labourers suffered massive attrition in the 10-12 months in German captivity, but as they were last in, their survival rate was over half of the 110,000.

For 1942 transports, the number of survivors counted after the war might be in single or low double figures out of 1,000.

Semantic and definitional goalpost-moving won't help you, unless you have a new term for massacring a supermajority of a particular cohort. 75% of Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz in 1944 were massacred using Zyklon B. 75% of Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz in 1944 were murdered en masse using Zyklon B. Lots of alternatives to genocide or extermination, aren't there.

There is some meat in that to chew on and mull over. I'll get back to you. I have more reading.

[Churchill]

1.)Ultimately, the genocide had already happened,
2.)since the surviving Jewish KZ inmates of 1944-45

[Edited original text above for clarification]

Statements 1.) and 2.) appear to contradict one another. Can you explain what you mean here?

Genocide does not equate to 100% extermination. The original definition by Lemkin was broader and more indirect, the UN convention on genocide explicitly includes 'in whole or in part'. If we expect 100% extermination before using the term genocide, then there never has been a genocide in modern history, as there are always survivors of some kind, and many who are subjected to forced labour, kidnapping/transfer and other phenomena short of killing.

I don't think however this really addresses the apparent contradiction between statements 1.) and 2.). I don't think the legalistic vs ordinary language usage of the term genocide is what I was asking about. You seem here to be describing profoundly contradictory behaviour regarding German policy towards Jews. Its something like reading a history claiming that German policy from 1941 was to defeat the USSR until 1944 they suddenly switched to attempting to join the USSR while in the middle of fighting a war against them.

Was German policy to kill only a portion of Jews in Eastern Europe with a definite point of stopping; or was the policy to kill all Jews - the change being unplanned?

[Also, judging from this thread, you seem very knowledgeable on this subject, do you have any suggestions re adding to core arguments for or against the mainstream account?]

[SanityCheck]

[Edited original text above for clarification]

Statements 1.) and 2.) appear to contradict one another. Can you explain what you mean here?

Genocide does not equate to 100% extermination. The original definition by Lemkin was broader and more indirect, the UN convention on genocide explicitly includes 'in whole or in part'. If we expect 100% extermination before using the term genocide, then there never has been a genocide in modern history, as there are always survivors of some kind, and many who are subjected to forced labour, kidnapping/transfer and other phenomena short of killing.

I don't think however this really addresses the apparent contradiction between statements 1.) and 2.). I don't think the legalistic vs ordinary language usage of the term genocide is what I was asking about. You seem here to be describing profoundly contradictory behaviour regarding German policy towards Jews. Its something like reading a history claiming that German policy from 1941 was to defeat the USSR until 1944 they suddenly switched to attempting to join the USSR while in the middle of fighting a war against them.

Was German policy to kill only a portion of Jews in Eastern Europe with a definite point of stopping; or was the policy to kill all Jews - the change being unplanned?

The entire Final Solution in Europe and Poland was premised on selection - dividing between those fit for work and those unfit for work. This is clear from the Wannsee protocol which is conspicuously silent about the fate of the unfit but discusses the use of able-bodied Jews as workers. This was recognised in the United Nations declaration on the extermination of the Jews in December 1942 as well - i.e. it was already apparent to outside observers then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Dec ... ed_Nations

Selection and keeping some Jewish forced labourers alive was thus standard policy in Poland and in Auschwitz. It was also enacted in Lithuania and Latvia, whereas Belarus, Ukraine and Russia were subjected to total extermination (barring a tiny number sent west from Minsk, but none whatsoever from the Reichskommissariat Ukraine).

If you have another term for the massacre of a supermajority of a cohort (to the tune of 75% or more) that isn't genocide or extermination, then do let everyone know.

[SanityCheck]

apropos evacuations from eastern Germany in 1944-45, the numbers run into the many millions, so multiple times the KZ population in January 1945. This summary notes also the 'defeatism' issue and difficulty of achieving a total evacuation of the civilian population, but the numbers involved really were quite large.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_ev ... e#Overview

[TlsMS93]

Declaration of the United Nations, namely the USA and Great Britain, the same ones who claimed that Germany had a plan to conquer and divide South America to make these countries mobilize to the side of the Allies. This joint declaration had the same intention, to strengthen the war effort, to justify absurd war actions to stop the barbarity. Do you really think that the Allies knew about the content of the Wannsee Protocol as early as 1942? By the way, which copy of this protocol is the real one?

45% of the Jews were not touched by the Germans according to Wikipedia itself. According to Wannsee, only 10% of French Jews were touched, what justifies this? By the way, taking the Wannsee figures seriously is naive. If the Germans touched 3 million, it was a lot, 2 million in the General Government and 1 million on the Eastern Front and that in terms of deportation and some mass shootings for partisan reasons. Korherr mentions that the Jews had an enormously high age range, which contributed to the number of people unfit for work being enormous and therefore more subject to death by disease and hunger.