LemmyCaution
Master Poster
- Joined
- Mar 8, 2011
- Messages
- 2,857
I for one think that your descriptive of team Holocaust claiming the Nazis wanted to kill all Jews is a simplification of the truth and is not accurate.
I, for two, agree with you. Dogzilla and Mr Moore have for a long time here tried to sell a vision of reality in which goals do not evolve, tactics do not change, actions do not take time, alliances need not be formed and participants do not need to be engaged, communication does not take time and logistics do not cause require steps and stages, resistance and obstacles are not encountered, suprises do not occur, and now Jews never existed. It is beyond daft.
As to your post above, the National Socialist selection principle, derived from a corrupted version of Darwinism and applied using racial and crude biological-criminal criteria to the whole of society, is a key concept, IMHO. Jews were selected out, as were other groups (as in the T4 program, the Asocial Aktion, actions against Zigeuner) for elimination. Strategies to effect elimination were tried, experimented with, put into use in different times and places until, in the case of the Jews, an overall approach took hold and was agreed. The prototype for selection of the Jews is, of course, the ramp at Birkenau. But selection always took many forms, in different times and places, even as the overall strategy of the Final Solution was implemented: Jewish victims were selected out from camps in 14f13 and shipped to euthanasia centers for liquidation; in Warsaw, Jews were selected in situ with those chosen for death taken first to the Umschlagplatz and those for labor packed into workshop-camps in the reduced ghetto; within Germany the selection principle - on account of factors you mention - and France - as Nick explained - was implemented differently to its implementation in the East; at Birkenau most Jews were selected for the gas chambers or labor on arrival; within the camps, Jews who could not work due to weakness, age, or illness were taken from hospitals and work sites for execution; along the DG-IV, workers who could not keep up were pulled off construction jobs and shot behind buildings or in wooded areas; in Vilna successive selections reduced the Jewish population which was first jammed into two ghettos and, when a major selection took place in fall 1941, most of the Jews in the non-working ghetto were selected for Ponar and death by shooting; German Jews were mistakenly selected at Kovno in fall 1941 and shot, at a time before Himmler thought it opportune to be slaughtering Reich Jews; in Lodz the Eldest of the Jews was forced to carry out selections of the old, the infirm, and the young for shipment to Chelmno - and he explained his predicament and reasoning to the ghetto population; and so on.
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