I say the Rosenstrasse incident whereby Jewish men were arrested and were about to be exterminated but were released to their families instead is kinda tough to explain in the context of a plan to exterminate all the Jews. You say the Rosenstrasse incident isn't problematic because the plan to exterminate all the Jews excluded German and Austrian Jews married to Aryan women who were exterminated only upon the death or divorce from his spouse.
You do realize that you're once again disputing a point by confirming it? If these men were exempt from extermination until their German wife died or divorced them--at a milieua in which divorce wasn't nearly as common as it is today and in which the wife usually outlives the husband--they were exempt from extermination.
If we consult your recommended oracle for all knowledge--wikipedia--we learn that the Gestapo had arrested the last of the Jews in Berlin during the Fabrikaktion. Around 1,800
Jewish men, almost all of them married to non-Jewish women (others being the so-called Geltungsjuden), were separated from the other 6,000 of the arrested, and housed temporarily at Rosenstraße. The reason for the separation of these men was that they were not to be exterminated since they were exempt from extermination because of their privileged status as spouses of Germans. Rather, they were being held for a period of time so that new officials of the various legal Jewish organizations could be selected from among them, to replace those of the existing officials who were not married to Germans had been dismissed from their posts prior to extermination. However, the purpose of their confinement was not publicly known, and the rumor spread that they were to be deported, along with the unprivileged Jews who had been arrested; because of that rumor, the wives and other close relatives of many of them turned up on the street near the building. For a week, the protesters, mainly women, demanded their husbands back by holding a peaceful protest.
Once the process of selecting new officials for the Jewish organizations had been completed, the men confined were released, giving rise to the incorrect impression that their release had been due to the women's protest.
That's pretty much my understanding of what went down during that fateful week--which does nothing to help support the extermination thesis. In fact, wiki further undermines the ridiculous extermination of all the Jews thesis with this explanation that the men were rounded up so they could take over the reins of the Jewish organizations that were about to be stripped of their leadership by all the unpriviledged Jews being exterminated. If the Nazis planned to exterminate all the Jews, why plan for the sjccession?
Then there's the explanation for the incident on the travel website that CM pointed us to. This explanation is too stupid for commentary but I guess there are really people out there who are dumb enough to fall for it. Suffice it to say, why would the Nazis plan to kill all the Jews except for the the ones who were schtupping German women? If they wanted to kill all the Jews, those Jews who were defiling German women and creating half-breeds would be the first on the list.
The German wives might be sad if their husbands were exterminated but why would the Nazis care what German women who were married to Jews thought? If the plan was exterminating all the Jews, ALL the Jews would be exterminated and any women who protested would be exterminated along with them.
The only way the Nazis would change their extermination plan on account of these women is if these women held a gun to Hitler's head. I've never had a gun held to my head so I don't know for sure but I think I would do anything a person who held a gun to my head told me to do. So if the women held a gun to Hitler's head, then the holocaust happened. For sure.
The above rant is little more than a string of arguments to incredulities and coulda-woulda-shouldas.
uke2se has already recommended you read up on the Nuremberg Laws and the Wannsee Conference. That was after I drew your attention to the extensive discussion of these issues in Hilberg, whose book you have claimed repeatedly to have read and opined about on numerous occasions.
It is really not difficult to grasp the fact that the Nazis treated German and Austrian Jews with a degree of circumspection that was utterly absent in Poland and the occupied Soviet Union. That's because whereas the aim was a total solution, in practice separating German and Austrian Jews from the 'Aryan' population was always going to be tough due to the degree of intermarriage and the existence of mixed-race (by Nazi standards) offspring, as well as the fact that contrary to antisemitic propaganda since WWI, there were quite a few war veterans among German and Austrian Jews. This caused even hardened Nazi ideologues to complain when German Jews with Iron Crosses were deported to Minsk in the autum of 1941.
As a result of the complaints, protests and appeals from different factions of the regime, together with the Nazis' basic confusion over how to draw the line, the implementation of the Final Solution was an inevitable political compromise. It's really not hard to find examples of compromise in political history; the question is why you think that the Third Reich was somehow above politics and why the Final Solution would be immune to political pressures. It certainly wasn't in the satellite states since the Nazis had to rely on diplomacy to get their victims, and quite a few satellite states refused. It wasn't free of politics in Poland or the Baltic States, since some Nazis wanted to keep some Jews alive for labour whereas other Nazis wanted to kill 'em all, as is very clearly spelled out in the Jaeger report.
And it wasn't free of politics in Germany, since the Nazi leadership made a number of calculations about what it could get away with and whether there would be opposition, protest or complaint. The German public didn't especially like the introduction of the yellow star and this caused a certain unrest; so the Nazis decided not to publicise the deportations. They covered it up. There were no stories in the Nazi press about the deportation of German Jews. That was a political decision since the press was centrally controlled. That's just an example of how this process was going to be subjected to a dozen different influences when it came time to implement the Final Solution.
1. Mischlinge were exempted from deportation unless they belonged to the Jewish religious community, in which case they were deported
2. Elderly German and Austrian Jews and WWI veterans with decorations went to Theresienstadt, where they were meant to be left to die 'peacefully', as Himmler stated to Kaltenbrunner in early 1943. Quite a few were deported onwards from Theresienstadt, but this was not done consistently. The decision to set up Theresienstadt as an old people's ghetto was the result of complaints from the east when elderly German Jews turned up and caused Nazi leaders in the east to get upset. It also proved useful for PR reasons later since Theresienstadt became a Potemkin village.
3. German Jews working in armaments - who due to wartime labour shortages came to quite a sizeable minority of the total community - were exempted from deportation in October 1941 after pressure from OKW; Hitler decided in September 1942 that they would be replaced by Poles and Russians, and this was then carried out in February-March 1943, which is why that operation is called the 'factory action'.
4. Jews in mixed marriages were also exempted from deportation at Wannsee.
5. Everyone else was deported in 1941-2.
That was the shape of the Final Solution from early 1942. This is perfectly well documented; deportation = being subjected to the Final Solution; exemption = not being subjected to the Final Solution. Everyone other than you and Clayton seems to be able to get this perfectly well.
To the extent that there is any argument here at all, it is over what the Final Solution meant after Wannsee. Deniers handwave and say 'resettlement'. Everyone else says that this meant death, either quickly for unfit Jews or more slowly for able-bodied Jews (as spelled out in Wannsee).
An exemption from the Final Solution cannot be used to call into question what the Final Solution meant. It's utterly illogical to make such a claim, but surprise, that's precisely what you're doing.
You're incidentally wrong to say that divorce was rare for the group of mixed marriages. Considerable pressure was brought to bear on the 'Aryan' spouses; so that quite a few decided that they would abandon their husbands or wives and leave them to their fate. That happened to one well known diarist, Lili Jahn. Her husband divorced her and she was deported and did not come back. Whereas Viktor Klemperer's German wife stood by him right to the end of the war.
Evidently the Nazis' sense of what they could achieve was different to yours. They didn't bother with many exemptions in the occupied territories; in the occupied Soviet Union, Russian wives of Jewish husbands were simply thrown into the temporary ghettos and many petitioned to be allowed to divorce them, which was basically ignored since it was an administrative hassle for the simplified occupation administration. Most of the satellite states also exempted mixed-marriages and Mischlinge, following the German model. Some also exempted converts, which was very prominently
not something that the Nazis did in Germany or in the directly occupied territories.
I'm really at a loss as to where this line of unreasoning gets you. The conventionally accepted history states that ca. 200,000 German and Austrian Jews died after being deported from Germany and Austria, in a wide variety of locations. They were shot in Kaunas, in Riga, in Minsk, gassed in Maly Trostinets, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Auschwitz; they died of maltreatment in Majdanek and countless ghettos and labour camps, including in Theresienstadt.
There were survivors from those deportations because the Final Solution meant, from Wannsee onwards, that able-bodied Jews would be used for slave labour. That's why the 'factory action' sent more than 15,000 Berlin Jews to Auschwitz in February-March 1943, where they were selected on arrival, with a high proportion being sent to the gas chambers while a considerable minority went to Monowitz to slave there, whereupon many more died.
That's the accepted history. You're not going to get very far challenging the accepted history if you bring up points that are irrelevant to the issue of how 200,000 German and Austrian Jews actually died. The gambit of 'this Jew survived, therefore none of the other Jews died' is as silly now as when the first denier repeated this fundamental strawman of the history.
Sure, you can point to some historians and some commentators who think that the Rosenstrasse protest 'saved' the Jewish husbands in mixed marriages from extermination. But Stolzfus is wrong. The memorial is a feelgood spin on an especially grim story of man's inhumanity to man. Wolf Gruner demolished the Rosenstrasse myth about 7-8 years ago and his work is convincing. That's why Evans and Friedlander agree with him.
But please, keep digging. Your know-nothingism and utter ignorance of the history is most entertaining.
