How Much Did the Holocaust Hurt the Third Reich?

[Big Orange]

Like any other ethically bankrupt and ridiculous ideologists (Randroidism anyone?), the Nazis must've ultimately hurt themselves by hurting others, namely squandering much of their resources on eradicating "undesirables" - think of the sizable number of ground troops involved, the railways being strained, and the intensive construction of death camps. Of course the Holocaust was inherently connected to the Third Reich's unsustainable war efforts as well - from the summer of 1941 onwards the Third Reich threw the last vestiges of restraint out the window with their craven abuse of Soviet POWs and civlians, in addition to the escalation of the SS's murder machine with SS death squads wandering the Soviet countryside slaughtering Jewish peasants that had done no harm to the Germans and Austrians. The Imperial Japanese painted themselves into a similar corner with their genocidal brutality as well, slaughtering millions of fellow Asians they claimed to be liberating from the Western powers.

How impractical and damaging to their strategic influence was the Nazi's policies of anti-Semitism, racism, and genocide?

[Pablo Sanchez]

How impractical and damaging to their strategic influence was the Nazi's policies of anti-Semitism, racism, and genocide?

I don't think it's possible to divorce the actions and consequences of Nazi racism from any of their other activities, because racism was the core of their ideology. If you're thinking about a counterfactual "what if the Nazis weren't so racist?" the answer is that in such a case they would not have been Nazis as we understand the term. The Holocaust itself required the detailing of resources to a task that was military useless, although in the context of the war effort going on at the same time, the size of this waste was probably significant but not critical--that is, the Germans still would have lost the war.

The most serious problem was probably that racial ideology prevented them from exploiting tensions within the USSR to their own benefit. Many people in the Baltic states and Ukraine had no love for Stalin and, given the opportunity, would have happily supported the German war effort. It's impossible to say what effect this kind of divide-and-conquer strategy might have had on the outcome of the war, but it would have at least been helpful.

But this just returns me to my original point: the primary Nazi motivation for even entering the USSR in the first place was to make land available for colonization, so can you say that it "cost" them anything, if the entire situation was a product of it anyway?

[Starglider]

I don't think it's possible to divorce the actions and consequences of Nazi racism from any of their other activities, because racism was the core of their ideology. If you're thinking about a counterfactual "what if the Nazis weren't so racist?" the answer is that in such a case they would not have been Nazis as we understand the term.

True, but it isn't too far fetched to imagine Hilter taking a strategy of 'conquer first, then purge', i.e. delaying implementation of the 'final solution' until the major external threats had been dealt with. The whole Nazi leadership was drunk on their own (perceived) success as of 1941, not to mention paranoid about the Jews sabotaging their state from within, but different circumstances might've lead to a bit more caution in expending resources.

[Stark]

Is it really? The purge was the number one or two priority of his whole philosophy. If he was a more rational or reasonable person he wouldn't have been Hitler.

[Samuel]

You can't be serious.

He is. Of course, not killing the Jews won't help them that much.

The problem with this question is the one that causes Thanas to come and kick out threads- namely they have to act in such a way that would prevent them in getting power in the first place.

There is not really anyway the Nazi's batshit insanity (seriously, these guys got an entire chapter of Science Gone Insane devoted to them).

It is reasonable for Big Orange to ask how much it cost them though- if I remember correctly, they killed a bit over 10 million people.

[Stark]

Sorry, I just can't imagine anyone taking TBO politics seriously.

It's unquestionable that it was a huge waste of resources to commit these horrible crimes (regardless of whether it'd make any difference, as Pablo says) but trying to take a historical movement like Nazism and them magically changing it in a simplistic way tells us nothing about history. I believe Shep has talked before about the number of troops etc the Nazis had invovled in worthless atrocities rather than fighting.

[Pablo Sanchez]

Let's suppose that Nazi Germany doesn't purge the Jews, and does significantly better as a result. 1947 comes along, and see TBO.

Regardless of the reference to fan-fiction, or the fact that the purge of Jews was only one part of the Nazi racist atrocity actions, this is an important point. The Nazis were so outclassed that their defeat was effectively inevitable, so that in such a case can the Holocaust really be said to have "cost" them anything, apart from their humanity?

True, but it isn't too far fetched to imagine Hilter taking a strategy of 'conquer first, then purge', i.e. delaying implementation of the 'final solution' until the major external threats had been dealt with. The whole Nazi leadership was drunk on their own (perceived) success as of 1941, not to mention paranoid about the Jews sabotaging their state from within, but different circumstances might've lead to a bit more caution in expending resources.

What circumstances?

The Nazis at no point had a serious grasp of their own responsibilities or the realities of what they were doing, which is a large part of the reason that the Holocaust could even happen at all. The exceptional capabilities of the holdover Junker-run military as well as good luck conspired to delay their rude awakening until several years into the war. The traditional military leadership of German was extremely capable, but the political leadership (that is, ranking Nazis) was a collection of thugs.

It's unquestionable that it was a huge waste of resources to commit these horrible crimes (regardless of whether it'd make any difference, as Pablo says) but trying to take a historical movement like Nazism and them magically changing it in a simplistic way tells us nothing about history. I believe Shep has talked before about the number of troops etc the Nazis had invovled in worthless atrocities rather than fighting.

Well, you'd have to get Sheppard here for that story, but I doubt that the manpower engaged in useless atrocities could have added up to more than a handful of line infantry divisions, especially considering that a large part of the legwork was done by foreign auxiliaries. Like I said, a notable addition but not war-winning.

I think that as a counterfactual exercise the best proposal is to go way back to the Weimar era and say "No more Nazis" for whatever reason (maybe Hitler got blown up in WWI or something) and instead there's a Mussolini-style fascist party with ties to the old military that barely gives a shit about race. But even from this starting point the divergence is so huge that it's a useless exercise.

What prevents D-Day?

If, for whatever bullshit alt-hist reason, the Nazis won the Eastern Front, they could have stacked so many divisions on the Atlantic Wall and in reserve that no landing would have been possible.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

I think the bigger question to ask is whether if the Nazis weren't as racist, would their invasion of the Soviet Union have been different? I would fancy that the partisan fight might have been very different?

[Stark]

It's unquestionable that it was a huge waste of resources to commit these horrible crimes (regardless of whether it'd make any difference, as Pablo says) but trying to take a historical movement like Nazism and them magically changing it in a simplistic way tells us nothing about history. I believe Shep has talked before about the number of troops etc the Nazis had invovled in worthless atrocities rather than fighting.

Well, you'd have to get Sheppard here for that story, but I doubt that the manpower engaged in useless atrocities could have added up to more than a handful of line infantry divisions, especially considering that a large part of the legwork was done by foreign auxiliaries. Like I said, a notable addition but not war-winning.

That's what I was getting at; Shep has talked in term of a few divisions, which isn't anywhere near enough to make a difference (unless you magically teleport them into a particular battle), so the difference isn't particularly relevant.

[K. A. Pital]

Actually the waste of resources for slaughter was much less draining on the Nazi war machine than people can think. It's bad consequences were a massive rise in partisanship, but the forces the Nazis dedicated to the tasks of eradicating humans in newly conquered lands weren't all that overwhelmingly large.

The Nazi's won't do much better without the annihilatory policies; they are too outclassed by the Allies for that to matter.

[Thanas]

Without that racism, there wouldn't be a Nazi party, which translates to no attack on the SU. At worst, there would be a war with the west over Poland, but considering that more moderate forces would be in power I very doubt if it goes any further than the sudetenland business.

[Sea Skimmer]

The Nazi murder empire had an inherent food shortage, a very big one, and one which only got worse after the conquest of France and Yugoslavia. The only way to solve it was to conquer Russia, obtain a peace with England to resume imports of food and above all fertilizer, or get rid of people. Option 2 was rejected by Britian, so the Nazis went for Option 1 which was the whole plan all along anyway. It’s no coincidence that the Wannsee Conference then took place just after the Nazi defeat at the gates of Moscow, a defeat which even the most optimistic Nazis realized meant Russia would not be defeated for at least another year. A year is a long time to go hungry, and since the US was by then in the war Hitler had to ensure his Aryan super race would not be weakened by a year of hunger before facing it down. This food shortage BTW will affect any German government which goes to war, and the high cost of importing food even before the war was a factor behind the Nazis killing the disabled and eldery before the war. They needed the money to spend on importing raw materials for weapons.

Hitler was keenly aware that Germany had collapsed in WW1 because the government had failed to ensure a food supply for German workers at home. Killing Jews was one way to make more food available for Germans. The Nazis also simply intended to let a large portion of the Polish population in the Government General portion of occupied Poland starve, and introduced polices by which the least productive forced laborers were denied food, the resulting surplus being used to better feed the most productive.

The number of personal involved in the Holocaust is not really strategically significant, and while it was actually a major burden on the railway system to move all the Jews around to be killed, that wasn’t that significant overall either. The death camps themselves would have mostly been built anyway, several of them were begun as simple slave camps, from which it was planned slave gangs would set out to begin the task of rebuilding the Ukraine into a German colony. If the Germans hadn’t planned on working all the slaves to death, then they’d actually have to spend MORE resources building better camps for paid workers.

So basically Hitler put his back to the wall with his insane polices and wars, and ended up in a situation when his own racism actually coordinated with a strategic requirement. It was just going to happen unless you take the Nazis out of the equation and all history from 1933 on is different like I know everyone is already saying.