Holocaust:True Or False ?

[Zidon]

Originally Posted by deepsepia

...By 1920, Jews were widely intermarried, held important State positions, and generally held in high esteem. Intermarriage rates in Germany circa 1920 were similar to those in the US today, indicative of a general lack of interest by both Jews and Gentiles in that distinction....

yup, that's why I say it's irrational.
but the kernel of being jewish was always there, even when the jews thought they dissolved it.

Originally Posted by scoundrel

...The British reasons for refusing to allow and for opposing the Zionist project were correct; at the time I myself would have taken the same line and would almost certainly have supported the use of force to prevent Jewish mass emigration to Palestine. ....

scoundrel, can you elaborate on that?
it wasn't just pressure from the local arabs?

Originally Posted by SanteeFats

.... a lot of people world wide just don't like the Jew's .......

Santee, hope it's ok I took just this one line from your text, but I think you called it right, and that many just won't admit it.

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by SanteeFats

Okay Deep then what do you think caused all the anti-Jewish and other ethnicities that ended up being slaughtered in Nazi Germany. I mean if so few of the upper echelon of the Nazi high command could care less why the camps and the butchering?

Obedience.

That's the German answer, and I think its the right one.

Germans were trained to obey, and when a nasty piece of business got his hands on the controls of the machine, they obeyed, efficiently and mercilessly.

Contrast with Italy. On an individual level, Mussolini's Black Shirts were capable of murder; but Italians had other loyalties, and were markedly less obedient-- murder they could accomplish, mass murder was harder. Friendship, family ties, religion-- Italy had other lines of loyalty and affiliation.

German obedience is a trait that goes back at least as far as Frederick the Great, the idea that all the citizens of the state are instruments of the will of the sovereign. That idea was further developed by Napoleon in France, but its in Hitler that it reached it apogee. If he said "hate the Jews and kill them" . . . that's what State and the people who were its instruments did.

That's not to say that you can't find other roots of German anti-semitism, but but if, say, Goering rather than Hitler had become the leader of the NDSAP in 1930, would there have been a Holocaust? I doubt it.

[Zidon]

deep, I fully disagree,

the obedience (and cold efficiency!) is a great contributor, but not a necessity.

your comparison to Italian potential versus german reality is like a 4 cyl. Fiat versus 12 cyl. Mercedes (pun intended), the german killing engine is the best and most reliable in the world, but both are working engines.

You needed an engine for the holocaust.

Or take the Armenian and Yugoslav holocausts, the killers were so obedient?

Or other way around, there were assassination attempts on adolf's life, they weren't all ants…

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by Zidon

deep, I fully disagree,

There are historians who take a different view than I do -- Daniel Goldhagen's "Hitler's Willing Executioners" would be the best example of a different view than mine. Goldhagen looks at the anti-semitism of "ordinary Germans" and sees that as the engine. I disagree with his argument, as do others-- but its well argued.

Understanding why historical events like revolutions and slaughters happen doesn't produce a scientific proof for an answer. The French Revolution is still contentious centuries later.

Originally Posted by Zidon

the obedience (and cold efficiency!) is a great contributor, but not a necessity.

your comparison to Italian potential versus german reality is like a 4 cyl. Fiat versus 12 cyl. Mercedes (pun intended), the german killing engine is the best and most reliable in the world, but both are working engines.

You needed an engine for the holocaust.

But the reason that the German State was a 12 cylinder Mercedes and the Italian a 4 cylinder Fiat is that the Italian State didn't obey Mussolini as the German obeyed Hitler. Italians had many loyalties, and when they conflicted, they were unreliable instruments of the State (to be fair, Mussolini also never ordered a Genocide).

Originally Posted by Zidon

Or take the Armenian and Yugoslav holocausts, the killers were so obedient?

Or other way around, there were assassination attempts on adolf's life, they weren't all ants…

I would say that genocides are very much sui generis. I wouldn't assume that the German case has anything much to do with Rwanda, nor Rwanda with Cambodia, nor Cambodia with Armenia. Each has to be studied in their own historical and social context.

What I would observe about the Holocaust is that it was a distinctly orderly act of State violence against people, by a very well organized state. Its probably most directly comparable to what occurred under the Khmer Rouge.

But what's interesting is what didn't happen -- relatively few acts of violence against Jews by German civilians. That is, it wasn't a pogrom, didn't resemble places in Eastern Europe where ordinary citizens killed their Jewish neighbors.

There's room for historical inquiry and disagreement on this issue, and as I say, there are folks who take a position different than mine.

My view of history is that its more contingent and less "determined", that is, that if you "re-ran" it several times, you'd get several different answers. Others see it differently, that if you "re-ran" the twentieth century ten times, you'd get ten Holocausts.

I don't know how you prove either argument-- we don't get to do "history experiments"

[Zidon]

that's why I said the standard anti-semetic "reasons" seem less relevant here than in the eastern European pogroms, which had a more sine-wave "passion".

you might correct me on this, but I think the '38 Kristallnacht-Crystal Night

encompasses the whole "engine", including the active participation of local germans.

It had the whole chain, from the twisted and so controlled leadership all the way down to the german street people, obedient as you say, the system functioning.

That's whats so scary in the holocaust, there was such synergy. not just obedience, it was IMO beyond that.

I do think there is some kind of unifying force in all genocides, sort of like in the tower of babel.

[SanteeFats]

Here is a bit:
The systematic disenfranchisement and exclusion of German Jews began soon after the NSDAP’s seizure of power in January 1933. The first pogrom against the Jews during this period broke out on 9 and 10 November 1938 and was referred to as Reichskristallnacht or Kristallnacht (night of broken glass). But this incident was anything but a spontaneous expression of violence. Members of the NSDAP and the Gestapo (the secret security police of the NSDAP) as well as paramilitary organizations such as the Sturmabteilung (SA) started fires in synagogues across Germany and plundered Jewish businesses. In the process they murdered one hundred German Jews. The German police had received orders that under no circumstances were they to intervene on behalf of the Jews. A small portion of the population participated in the pogrom, especially the plunder, while most Germans observed the events passively without participating. The NSDAP government had attempted to portray the pogrom as a spontaneous reaction by the Germans to the assassination of a German diplomat by a Jewish conspirator in Paris. The NSDAP government had three goals in the November pogrom. Initially forces within the party for whom existing anti-Jewish measures were insufficiently radical were to be mollified. Moreover the Nazi leadership sought to further intimidate the Jews and encourage their emigration. Finally, the pogrom accelerated the systematic persecution and dispossession of the Jews, a process referred to as “aryanization.”
During World War II members of the NSDAP, or Nazi Party, committed countless pogroms against Jewish populations in occupied areas of eastern Europe. The local populations generally cooperated willingly with the occupiers and permitted themselves to be dragged into deeds of violence against their Jewish neighbors. On occasion, such as in the Polish town of Jedwabne, the local population did not wait for the arrival of the German conquerors and murdered the Jewish population on their own initiative. The prospect of taking over Jewish property was every bit as much to blame for this turn of events as historically deep-rooted anti-Semitism.
The czarist pogroms in Russia and the November 1938 pogrom in Germany all occurred with government participation in the planning and the violence. Nonetheless, the involvement of the population in Russia was considerably greater than in Germany, since the integration of Jews into German society was considerably more advanced than in Russia. Thus the aim of the 1938 pogrom was not so much to push social and political problems into the background and unite a politically and socially divided populace.


So it seems that some German civs did help murder Jews.

[howerd]

I've also seen tangible evidence of the holocaust in Israel. People with numbers tattooed on to their arms but I'd bet to some people that proves nothing. Yeah & film of walking skeletons in the liberated death camps proves nothing either? Get real!

[scoundrel]

Originally Posted by Zidon

scoundrel, can you elaborate on that?
it wasn't just pressure from the local arabs?

Part of the outcome of WW1 was that the former Ottoman Empire was partitioned. For our sins, we British got lumbered with Palestine.

Dealing with long standing tensions and animosities between the existing communities was bad enough. It was a widely held view in the British establishment and especially in the Conservative Party that Britain did not need an influx of Zionist settlers openly bent on siezing control of Palestine and claiming ownership of land which was not their property on the basis of the Old Testament. Quite apart from the injury and the affront to the existing Palestinian population, it was a threat to Britain as the governing power in Palestine and also a guaranteed source of new tension and violence which Britain would be forced to keep under control. The Zionist project was directly against British interests as these stood between 1918 and 1948. It was natural for the British side to oppose it.

Britain's long term objective was to establish a majority Arab independent Palestine occupying the territory which is now mainly inside Israel. This was going to be the Palestinian state and the homeland of the population who had been living there for 1,500 years plus. The influx of Zionist settlement undermined British policy goals and sowed the seeds for a conflict which has never ended since Britain withdrew from Palestine, her policy in tatters. But once the fact of the mass murder of Jewish communities all over Europe became apparent, there could be no justification for refusing entry to any of them who reached any British territory, including Palestine.

The validity of Britain's resistance to Zionism (as seen from a British point of view) became obvious after the end of WW2, when the King David Hotel was bombed, and subsequently when the Stern Gang kidnapped and murdered two British NCOs in a foul act which closely mirrors tactics in vogue with ISIL and Hamas today. Had Britain successfully prevented Zionist settlement in Palestine, the Jewish uprising of 1946 would not have happened. It was a predictable outcome of the Zionist project and is the reason why Britain resisted Jewish settlement of Palestine until bigger world events forced Britain to change her policy.

[Dr Pepper]

Originally Posted by scoundrel

British policy in the inter-war period and into the war intself was to seek to prevent the establishment of a Zionist state called Israel. The British foresaw very accurately what might be the consequences if this Zionist state called Israel was established; though without yet knowing how much the presence of huge oil reserves in the middle east would complicate the matter even more. What the British didn't foresee in the 1930s was that a systematic and methodical attempt would be made to exterminate the bloodline of the entire Jewish people.

The British reasons for refusing to allow and for opposing the Zionist project were correct; at the time I myself would have taken the same line and would almost certainly have supported the use of force to prevent Jewish mass emigration to Palestine. But once it became necessary to rescue people from a concerted effort to wipe out their entire blood line, it was no longer ethical to oppose any movement of these people to anywhere beyond the reach of their would-be killers and I would have thrown in the towel and sucked it up; the establishment of Israel was quite inevitable as an effect of the holocaust.

During my UN tour in Israel, I ended up pulling (as every UNMO did) a regular stint as Duty officer in the HQ. One of the few perks of the job was getting first dibs on the english language 'Jerusalem Post' when it was delivered each morning. On one occasion (it was in Nahariya-so the second half of my tour-making it late 1999 or early 2000) there was a bit of a kerfuffle-the Vatican had just released some official documents-including a letter from Pius XII (the wartime pope) in which he stated 'he could see no good reason for the establishment of an ethnic Jewish state in Palestine-no other race in history has returned to its original homeland 2000 years after it left...' [this is a summary of the statements made] -there was a lot of editorial comment-all of it negative-along the lines of 'we always knew he was an antisemitic bastard-now here's the proof'....whereas in my opinion he had a valid point.

I'm with scounds-the Holocaust made the establishment of Israel inevitable. In its absence we might still have the state of Palestine. Incidentally it is not a forgone conclusion that a jewish state would have been established in Palestine-at one stage serious consideration was been given to Madagascar , Kenya and Uganda as possible future jewish homeland. The idea didn't gain much traction-and was finally picked up by the Nazis themselves as a concept, before embarking on the final solution. The groundwork was laid earlier with what has come down to us as the 'Balfour declaration' (Wiki has some interesting summaries)-even at the time various parties pointed out the likely problems with the concept..

[Zidon]

thanks for the answer scoundrel,

don't mean to drag you into endless debates, but I must remark:

Originally Posted by scoundrel

...Britain's long term objective was to establish a majority Arab independent Palestine occupying the territory which is now mainly inside Israel. This was going to be the Palestinian state and the homeland of the population who had been living there for 1,500 years plus. .

to my knowledge ever since ancient times of Moses/jews leaving egypt entering Cnaan there was always a Jewsih settlement in the land, from great kingdoms (David-Solomon) to just bare trickles, but always something. so that would be around the 4,000 year mark?

besides I have to say that though I'm not a bible observer, the fact that both christianity and islam accept the old testament (and it's history, which often gets validated) is not trivial.

Originally Posted by scoundrel

...But once the fact of the mass murder of Jewish communities all over Europe became apparent, there could be no justification for refusing entry to any of them who reached any British territory, including Palestine..

but the British did refuse entry to many, sending back, or to cyprus etc.

it was said before regarding the difficulties of the allies attention for the concentration camps, understood.

but imagine these horror survivors on those ships finally hoping for some haven and getting the british treatment of the time...

all the above is of course related to what you say on the Jewish-zionist terror groups, though I wouldn't compare to hamas etc. cause I believe they aimed for army-goverment, had a rational "western" goal, and didn't specifically target civilians.

if there is anything I've learned, it's that when a local native minority wants independence and is denied it but will pursue it through guerrilla warfare, it will eventually get it's independence, which is fair.

that applies both to arab-palestine and to jewish-israel (of the era you speak of).