On the 65th anniversary of D-Day, is it time to let it go?

[Patrick Degan]

I am constrained to point out that Eichmann's Madagadcar Project was simply the internal exile policy writ large —shipping the Jews off to a confined ghetto where they would be carried off by disease and starvation. Given that Madagascar was, in that time, a disease-ridden jungle hellhole which was to be administered as an SS police state, in which the Jews would be set to slave labour projects building roads and clearing swamps, and for which no adequate provision for food supply and health care was made, the practical effect would have been the same as what was always laid out as the Nazi programme: extinction of the Jewish population. Only it would have been taking place far away, over the course of years. Out-of-sight, out-of-mind.

I should also point out that facilities such as Auchwitz don't simply spring into being overnight. They have to be planned out, have resources allocated for their construction, and built up. Auschwitz I was open for its grisly business in 1940, a full two years before Wannsee, and Auschwitz II —the full industrial-scale extermination facility— began construction in October of 1941.

Furthermore, the only thing Wannsee was for was to establish the exact bureaucratic chain of authority over the extermination programme, not to decide whether to have a dedicated programme or not. At no point was extermination not an option for the Nazis.

The transcripts for the Nuremburg War Crimes Tribunals can be found at Nizkor.org. Special attention should be given to the Red Set —Nazi Conspriacy and Aggression— and the sections regarding The Persecution Of The Jews, The Concentration Camp Programme of Extermination Through Work, and War Crimes of the Gestapo and SD.

I will reiterate this for the benefit of those who are attempting to nitpick "intentionality": AT NO POINT WAS EXTERMINATION NOT AN OPTION AS FAR AS THE NAZIS WERE CONCERNED. This is not an argument that there was a complete top-down, laid-out-as-early-as-1920 Master Plan for the extinction of the Jews, but it was always the object of the Nazi leadership that it be accomplished and Hitler always had final approval over any aspect of the Final Solution, even if it was approval as vague as a "get the job done by whatever means necessary" statement. Criminal intent existed in the pages of Mein Kampf and from the moment the Nazi government seized power and began their conspiracy of aggression against the rest of Europe.

[Darth Wong]

However, you agree with Darth Wong's basic point that the main idea was getting rid of the Jews at all costs; and despite the consideration of "alternatives", their financial and logistical infeasibility was already determining the way towards the solution Hitler himself looked as one of the most preferred options.

In effect I would agree with the principle of your reasoning; while there was no set plan, the situation of the war points towards a Judaeocide eventually being concluded to be the "best" solution. It is not that they have no inhibitions towards mass murder; rather, these are overcome gradually as the war progresses, as they tredge the path towards all-out genocide step by step (in a simplified manner, pogroms>ghettos>starvation>Special Troops>Wannsee>gassing). If Germany had been more successful early on, there might be a difference (they will then feel that they can "afford" to be "nicer" to the Jews, the Madagascar Plan might look less infeasible and so be tried somehow, access to grain from abroad will mean less need to starve the Jews and Poles, cutting the destructive chain earlier, and so on), but as I said in an earlier post, in a scenario like @ it grows more likely by the year. By the time of any action against the USSR they would most likely have reached the point of no return.

You have still not presented a shred of evidence that they ever had any inclination to be "nicer" to the Jews in the first place. The fact that they planned to move them around doesn't prove a damned thing; they were planning to work them to death as slave labour, remember?

Hitler himself regarded them as an abomination to be destroyed: this is another fact which you have no real answer to, other than to vaguely suggest that Hitler did not have absolute authority even though he did. The fact that he couldn't micromanage everything in the entire Nazi regime does not mean he did not have absolute authority.

[Jade Falcon]

*snip*

Patrick, I'm not arguing the intention, I maybe just worded it poorly. Wannsee seemed to make the program more 'organised' because there was already exterminations going on, as mentioned in the film among other sources, but Wannsee seemed to be more an attempt at streamlining and speeding up the process.

The Lawrence Rees documentary I mentioned does make mention that facilities like Auschwitz don't just spring up overnight, and that in fact Auschwitz I, the "Stammlager" was built round a set of Polish Barracks. Auschwitz II, the one that is seen in so many images obviously didn't come into being until later, not to mention the ton of satellite camps that were also established once IG Farben had their facility in the area.

If you haven't seen the documentary I refer to, it makes interesting viewing, there are clips on Youtube, and probably the entire thing if you look, unfortunately there are the comments which say the whole program and the camps themselves are elaborate fakes, but comments like that can only be treated with the contempt they deserve.