As Nick pointed out, it's not an anomaly when you are implementing a not universally agreed upon policy such as deporting the Jews.
It's only an anomaly when the Final Solution to the Jewish Question is miscast as a plan to exterminate all the Jews. That is where Nick failed.
Except I didn't fail. You, however, have failed basic logic. Your first quoted sentence is the correct answer. Your second quoted sentence reverts back to the lunatic argument that the character of the Final Solution can be determined by the treatment of people who weren't mean to be subjected to the Final Solution at that particular moment in time.
I even stated in the post which you decided was 'excellent' that the sole issue at stake is what the term Final Solution meant.
It's really not that hard to understand. Lots of Jews from Berlin were deported during the 'factory action' to Auschwitz - thousands of them, multiple transports. On arrival at Auschwitz, they were selected. The majority were sent to the gas chambers, a proportion were registered to work as slave labourers. The Rosenstrasse protest doesn't change anything about this core fact.
This basic policy constituted the Final Solution as it was experienced by deportees from western and central Europe. Nigh on the entire world knows that Jews were selected at Auschwitz. That is how the Final Solution is understood. It is comprehended as a step by step process whereby the Nazis had prioritised the deaths of 'useless mouths' and delayed the deaths of Jews who could be useful to them or who belonged to privileged categories. Nobody sane bats an eyelid at this because it conforms to actua Nazi actions and their stated policies.
That's how the Final Solution was spelled out on many occasions in the sources. In the Wannsee conference protocol, there is no discussion of the fate of the unfit, none whatsoever; only the able-bodied Jews were meant to go 'roadbuilding to the east'. There is utter silence on the fate of the unfit, which is suspicious enough given that the 'able bodied' were supposed to be finished off if they survived slave labour.
But there are other sources spelling out explicitly the calculus: unfit to be killed, fit to be spared for work. INCLUDING from Auschwitz, during the 'factory action'. There are rare surviving documents stating that x number were registered and y were 'gesondert untergebracht', specially accomodated, a nonsense cover story. And one document even says x were registered and y were 'sonderbehandelt', specially treated, a fixed euphemism in LTI by early 1943 which can mean nothing other than their death. A death which took place at a camp where crematoria were being completed which would be able to carry out 'simultaneous cremation and special treatment' in a 'gassing cellar', fitted with gastight doors equipped with all manner of accoutrements that mean sane people know there were gas chambers at Birkenau.
All this confirmed a thousand times over from other sources - from survivor witnesses, SS witnesses, underground reports and much else. Not to mention confirmed by the words of Heinrich Himmler, as LemmyCaution has been pointing out.
You don't seem to grasp the difference between idea and act. The Nazis demonstrably wanted to carry out a genocide of European Jews. They said as much repeatedly. That's the kill 'em all bit. There are numerous sources confirming that this would be the medium to long term result. The discussion of sterilisation of Mischlinge in the Wannse protocol is completely unintelligible if one does not recognise that the wiping out of the Jewish people biologically was the intended Nazi goal.
The Final Solution wasn't carried out on the basis of 100% extermination. It was carried out on the basis of selection, of the accelerated extermination of the unfit and the slower death of the able bodied, who would in the end be finished off, as spelled out in Wannsee.
During and after the major deportations, plenty of Nazis, Himmler included, referred to 'the extermination of the Jews' using Vernichtung, Ausrottung and even more explicit terms like 'kill'. Notice the sentence construction and when the phrases are being used. Jews must be exterminated is a future tense goal.
Extermination of the Jews means that Jews were being killed en masse and is used retrospectively, eg in the Posen and Sonthofen speeches.
The Nazis, including Himmler, knew perfectly well that they were keeping a minority of Jews alive; what they were celebrating and acknowledging by saying 'extermination of the Jews' is the simple fact that they had killed millions of them. Himmler even addressed the issue of sparing some for labour in several of his speeches. He also reiterated the goal of wiping all Jews out everywhere - eventually.
By the end of 1943, the overwhelming majority of Jews in Nazi hands were dead. There were less than 50,000 kept alive in the occupied Soviet territories, all locked up in concentration camps. Several million more had died. The disproportion speaks for itself. In the Government-General and Bialystok, there were fewer than 80,000 Jews left alive legally whereas before there had been 2.2 million in those territories. The drop speaks for itself, but is also confirmed by God knows how many other sources. Killing nearly 2 million Jews and leaving less than 80,000 alive is prima facie, extermination. That's how contemporaries saw it - both in the outside world, among the occupied peoples and how the Nazis saw it. Your redefinition of extermination to apply only and exclusively to total death is a strawman.
The Nazis told themselves that they had dealt 'world Jewry' a punishing blow by wiping out virtually the entire Jewish population of Eastern Europe. Those communities were seen as the breeding-grounds for 'world Jewry' since historically they had the highest fertility, such that massive emigration did not diminish the number of East European Jews. Suspending Aktion Reinhard in the autumn of 1943 reflected the fact that the job was essentially done. A handful of work-ghettos and labour camps remained; Jews too badly needed as labourers for even the most committed ideologues to persuade the more pragmatically-minded Nazis to let them be killed.
And then the war situation changed again. In 1944, Hitler
reversed Nazi policy and allowed Jews to be brought back to the Reich due to the labour shortage. Most were Hungarian Jews - but the Nazis still bumped off 75% of the Hungarian deportees. The other survivors were brought back, too, and decimated in 1944-45 across Germany and Austria in the now bloated concentration camp system. The Final Solution proper was suspended in October 1944 with the dismantling of the gas chambers at Auschwitz. That didn't stop the killing of Jews in less systematic ways through to May 1945, but it meant that the survivors now had some chance to make it through to the end of the war alive.
That was because the Nazis were
losing. They had decided on the Final Solution when they thought they were
winning. The moment 'after the war' when the survivors would have been killed wasn't going to come any more. It was politically incorrect to say so, and some diehards never got the message. But Eichmann knew by the end of 1944 that it was all over; Himmler knew at the latest by early 1945, and started negotiating using Jewish hostages as collateral. The Final Solution was
over by then; the Holocaust didn't end until May 1945.
The end result, as I've pointed out to you before, was that the Nazis singlehandedly killed 5 million Jews (more were killed by Romanians and are supplementary to that figure) and left significantly fewer than 300,000 alive to be liberated from labour and concentration camps.
That means that for every 16 Jews subjected to the Final Solution who died, one lived to see the end of the war. That was the Final Solution. If you are seriously arguing that a 16:1 ratio doesn't constitute extermination, you need your *********** head examined.
