Dcdrac
Philosopher
- Joined
- Jan 27, 2006
- Messages
- 5,141
You can stick your simplification up your ass. Historical reality is always more complex. There are multiple relationships between the Holocaust and WWII on many levels. We have even discussed some of them in recent weeks. Some examples:
1. The course of the war influenced the timing and pace of the mass murder of Jews, and later on slowed it down because the need for labour in 1944 outweighed the ideological goal of killing Jews.
2. The same units and personnel who killed Jews also killed non-Jews. The same techniques were used to kill both Jews and non-Jews.
3. In many countries occupied by the Nazis (Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia to name but a few), more non-Jews than Jews died - those are absolute numbers.
4. Jews fought in the various campaigns on the Allied side, and some were killed in action or taken prisoner. The killed in action (like the 32,000 Polish Jews killed in 1939, or the 140,000 Soviet Jewish soldiers killed from 1941-45) are not Holocaust victims; Polish and Soviet prisoners of war were treated as Jews and subjected to the Holocaust so are Holocaust victims. As most occupied countries (in western Europe or the Balkans) were overrun quickly, the number of combat deaths was fairly small in comparison to the total population and thus, to the total Jewish population, and is thus irrelevant.
5. Ditto with civilian deaths from collateral damage. The 1939-41 campaigns were relatively brief, and while they killed many civilians, the numbers were proportionately small. Some evidence exists that during the siege of Warsaw, German artillery fire was directed deliberately onto the Jewish districts, but the total loss of life among Jews from collateral damage in the 1939 campaign is not ascribed to the Holocaust.
6. The Nazis had an almost unerring habit of deporting Jews en masse long before the war returned to the relevant countries or regions. By the time that there was a battle of Kharkov in 1943, the Jews of Kharkov had all been machine-gunned into Drobitskii Yar. By the time that there was a battle of Warsaw in 1944, the Jews of Warsaw had all been deported; the thousands in hiding became part of the total civilian casualites of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, the catch being that it's evident that some were killed as Jews when their hiding places were uncovered.
7. Bombing wasn't very effective until well into the war and inflicted relatively few casualties in 1940-42. The Nazis deported the Jews from their cities almost entirely by the end of 1942, in some cases immediately prior to bombing raids whose timing they could not possibly know. The Jewish armaments workers of Berlin were deported at the start of 1943, whereas the prolonged 'Battle of Berlin' was at the end of 1943. Allied air raids on cities like Belgrade took place long after there were no more Jews in Belgrade.
8. The Germans however perceived a connection, albeit delusory, between air raids and Jews, and actually wrote quite a lot to the Nazi authorities suggesting that Jews be held near to threatened cities as hostages in order to stop the Allies bombing the cities. When the Allies bombed Budapest in mid-1944, this was one of a number of factors leading Admiral Horthy to call a halt to the deportations of Hungarian Jews.
9. Many Jews in France were rounded up after 'Barbarossa' as so-called 'communists' and then treated as hostages when the PCF organised resistance, some being shot while others were then deported to Auschwitz as a substitute for increasing reprisal shootings. The choice of Jews as hostages was deliberate and racist, making them Holocaust victims.
10. In Yugoslavia, native resistance led the Nazis to decide to shoot Austrian Jewish refugees interned by the Yugoslav government in a refugee camp at Sabac as 'hostages', a reprisal which targeted entirely the wrong population since Austrian Jewish refugees were not even vaguely part of Tito's popular front resistance movement, and probably couldn't even communicate with Serbian and Croatian partisans for obvious linguistic reasons.
11. From the get-go in Poland, Polish Jews were executed in so-called reprisals without any evidence that they had resisted or helped resistance; they were killed as Jews, because they were Jews, and because the Nazis enjoyed tormenting and killing Jews. From the get-go, the Nazis instituted an antisemitic policy of exclusion and control, meaning that many punishments were exacted on Jews because they fell foul of petty by-laws and regulations applied exclusively to Jews, or which were a direct product of antisemitic ordinances. Executing smugglers caught leaving a ghetto isn't executing smugglers, it's executing people who have been forced into a ghetto because they were Jews.
12. The same consideration means every single ghetto death from starvation is a Holocaust death and not something that can be written off to 'there was a war going on', since the Jews were placed into ghettos deliberately, because they were Jews, and given lower rations, because they were Jews.
13. Likewise in Russia, Nazi units started killing Jews as Jews from the outset, blamed Jews for the resistance acts of other people, and fantasised about a Jewish partisan link that did not exist in 1941. By the time there actually were any Jewish partisans, then the Nazi intention to murder Jews en masse was pretty clear to all concerned, and thus resistance was no longer resistance in its own right, but a matter of survival.
14. Hungarian Jews were conscripted into labour battalions, being deemed unworthy of armed service. Thousands were captured in the destruction of the Hungarian 2nd Army in 1943, and died in Soviet captivity along with Hungarian soldiers. On the other hand, Hungarian Jews in labour battalions were also killed by Hungarian troops as well as Nazi soldiers, because they were Jews.
15. While Jews in the provinces of Hungary were deported en masse not long before the country became a battle-ground, the Jews of Budapest remained in place after Horthy called a halt. By late 1944 the Nazis decided to force march some of them out to Austria to work as slave labourers, but a large ghetto remained, protected to a very limited extent by Raoul Wallenberg and other diplomats. The Hungarian fascists, the Arrow Cross, formed gangs which tormented Jews in the ghetto and also carried out numerous massacres inside the city, which became besieged in 1945. Jews also died because of collateral damage in the siege. The latter are not Holocaust victims in my opinion.
16. Allied bombing in 1944-45 certainly did kill large numbers of foreign workers and concentration camp inmates, thus including Jews, eg a transport of Hungarian Jews being transferred from Auschwitz to Gelsenkirchen in the summer of 1944 was hit by an air raid, killing several hundred; and then there's the sinking of the Cap Arcona, which carried Neuengamme inmates, in 1945, by RAF planes. Numerically, such losses are still insignificant compared to deaths from other causes which can be considered deliberate acts by the Nazis; and they also occurred while the prisoners were in Nazi captivity, making them ultimately the Nazis' responsibility, just as Russian workers dying in Essen died because the Nazis deported them against their will to Essen, not because they chose to labour under Allied bombs.
17. Bottom line is, the Nazis behaved in such a racist and antisemitic fashion from the get-go in all occupied territories that they rapidly escalated to killing Jews qua Jews, reducing the chance that Jews would die for purely war-related reasons. But Jews did die because of war-related reasons. It's not as simple as saying that 5.1-5.3 million Jews died in the Holocaust and the balance died in the war to a total of 6 million. 200-300,000 'war casualties' maybe. Which compared to the population loss of Belgium at 88,000 out of nearly 9 million, is quite high.
17. Any further questions, read and dissect the information found in this Wiki entry, and follow up with reading the relevant entries for the Holocaust in Austria through Yugoslavia.
Nick you forgot there was one nail out of palce at Auchwitz so it could not have happened where did the nail go???
