Aiyaiyai—I take twenty four hours break and I am knee deep in responses! My answer is simple: there is an explicit call for genocide laid out in a book called Mein Kampf, as well as an explicit racial theory that holds that Aryans are becoming polluted through interbreeding—that unless drastic action is taken, the Aryan will vanish from the world. This book, and similar incitements and theories, long predate Hitler even being a lunatic fringe candidate.
there is an explicit call for genocide laid out in a book called Mein Kampf, as well as an explicit racial theory that holds that Aryans are becoming polluted through interbreeding—that unless drastic action is taken, the Aryan will vanish from the world.
Hitler says a lot of things in Mein Kampf, why single that out? He also says a lot of things in its sequel. Politicians say a lot of things they don’t mean, much like political parties say a lot of things they have no real interest in in their platforms. And your model predicts he would want to kill all races, not Jews in particular. If your best evidence is ‘Hitler talked about killing Jews’, then I’m not convinced that it was the ultimate overriding goal of Hitler, and I find the detailed accounts in his other writings and works like Wages of Destruction much more convincing that he was more concerned with defeating America & the USSR than he was with the Jewish problem.
This is all said long before Hitler was even a lunatic fringe candidate, though I repeat myself. Was Hitler always obsessed with race and Jew-hatred? Yep. Did his actions seem in accord with this? Amazingly so.
Take your comment on the USSR—why did Hitler insist on breaking the pact and invading Russian in winter? The answer is that he regarded Communism as “Judeo-Bolshevism”, a Jewish plot against the Aryan race. Again, why did Nazism never take in the East when people began by welcoming the Wehrmacht’s advance? Because in Nazi racial theory, Slavs were untermenschen. The whole course of the war is completely explicable by thinking that the Nazis actually believed what they said.
This is what I mean about some people not being able to understand that others have a radically different view of the world. You need to explain away just about everything about the Third Reich to imagine that its animating principle was something other than fanatical racism. You have to explain nothing if you make the contrary assumption.
What do you think animated Hitler? For that matter, what do you think animates jihadis?
This is all said long before Hitler was even a lunatic fringe candidate, though I repeat myself.
Hitler said a lot of things long before he became a candidate. He loved to talk.
Was Hitler always obsessed with race and Jew-hatred? Yep. Did his actions seem in accord with this? Amazingly so.
Not amazingly so. The Jewish problem was a back-burner issue which was pursued with minor energy and in a variety of ways like allowing emigration and planning expulsion to Madagascar compared to much bigger issues like re-arming Germany, reducing unemployment, preparing for war with America & USSR, etc. Read through something like Wage of Destruction or Savage Continent, and one does not get the impression at all that killing Jews was Hitler’s top priority, or even fifth top priority. You keep stating this and I’m not seeing it. There’s only a straight line from parts of Mein Kampf to Dachau when you ignore everything else.
On the other hand, you get exactly that impression by reading… what the actual Nazis said, all the way to the top, and the experiences of people living through that period. During the height of the second world war, they insisted on using scarce resources like trains and troops to keep up the Jew killing—they were willing to risk their own war aims to complete this task.
You keep citing these books but you don’t give any evidence from them.
The entire program was to saturate society with racial hatred and frenzy. Children in school were terrified by long harangues about racial purity and so on.
There seems to be nothing that I can say that will convince you, no piece of evidence from the entire action and behavior of the Third Reich that could possibly indicate to you that they meant what they said. The very idea of a Nazi empire was to establish lebensraum for “pure” Aryans to repopulate. Racial ideology wasn’t window dressing in that empire, it was the very cause and basis of that empire.
On the other hand, you get exactly that impression by reading… what the actual Nazis said, all the way to the top, and the experiences of people living through that period.
They also talked a great deal about the threat from Great Britain, France, the USA, and the USSR. You’re completely ignoring this. If a word count were done, which would be bigger? I know what I expect. You’re arguing that Hitler talked about the Jews a lot, which is totally uncontroversial, but does not prove your point: that he talked about Jews the most of all topics that concerned him.
During the height of the second world war, they insisted on using scarce resources like trains and troops to keep up the Jew killing—they were willing to risk their own war aims to complete this task.
You know what would be even more effective for pursuing an overriding terminal goal of killing Jews and nothing else? Not starting that war in the first place.
That’s the problem: all the effort and resources thrown into the concentration camps late in the game absolutely pale in comparison to the efforts put into the war and rearmament—they wrecked the German economy just preparing for WWII, never mind actually running it.
You keep citing these books but you don’t give any evidence from them.
The entire mass of Wages of Destruction, to focus on one, is devoted to marshaling the evidence and details about the reorganization of the German economy and Hitler’s grand strategic plan (as mentioned in his Mein Kampf sequel, which I note you’re not mentioning despite your interest in ‘what the actual Nazis said’) to fight the USA, in which the slave labor camps of millions of people (only some of which were Jews) were a late solution for acute labor shortages and the killings purely tangential. What am I going to do, paste the whole book inline? There’s not any one detail that’s decisive, it’s the whole thrust of the reorganization of German society from the tiny inefficient farmer up to the industrial giants and his activities during the war which combine to show that Jews were a matter more of rhetoric than the overriding terminal end goal to which all of all Hitler’s plans were subordinate, as you claim.
The very idea of a Nazi empire was to establish lebensraum for “pure” Aryans to repopulate.
Which is different from a terminal end-all-be-all goal of ‘killing Jews’.
I think you’re engaged in just motte-and-bailey tactics here: you make the claim Hitler’s sole motivation was killing Jews, and when you get any pushback, you retreat to some well-established fact like ‘a lot of Jews died’ or ‘there was a lot of anti-semitic education’ or ‘Hitler talked about the Jews a lot’, which do not show your main claim.
Just to take your last point, my response is that this is both a strawman and an argument from intimidation. Take this:
“you make the claim Hitler’s sole motivation was killing Jews”
Did I? Where? I said that Hitler’s motivation was his fanatical racism and that the desire to murder the Jews was a large part of that—was, in fact, an inextricable part of that. His racism wasn’t the result of the war, it was the cause of the war. As you admit towards the end.
“You know what would be even more effective for pursuing an overriding terminal goal of killing Jews and nothing else? Not starting that war in the first place.”
Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary “The Führer recognizes the enormous opportunity that the war provides”. Hitler needed the night and fog of war, not to mention the hysteria that war brings, to carry out his plans.
“What am I going to do, paste the whole book inline? ”
Well, quote something from the book rather than just drop its title.
“he slave labor camps of millions of people (only some of which were Jews) were a late solution for acute labor shortages and the killings purely tangential. ”
The mass murder of those considered racially inferior was purely tangential? Well, if that’s the way you think, then that’s the way you think. There is a simple answer to this: the Wahnsee decision was to exterminate the Jewish people, and then the Slavs (there is some evidence that Hitler wanted to depopulate Africa after Europe was conquered), and there were camps that were purely devoted to the business of mass murder, no slave labour involved—Sobibor, Chelmno, Treblinka. The Nazi camps were not like the labour camps of the Soviet Union, they were murder facilities. To argue that the mass murder in the east is tangential is completely ahistoric.
Since the civilized tone of debate has become strained here, I think I will leave it there.
See above—Hitler’s armies didn’t invade Russia until winter.
There’s no problem there whatsoever—Hitler always intended to march against Russia, not least to wipe out or enslave the Slavs. The pact just allowed him some breathing space.
Hitler invaded on June 22, was planning to be done before the frost set in, and was (I think correctly) worried about Stalin’s double cross at some point down the line.
A German invasion backed by a less insane ideology would have won as well, I think.
That’s a common misunderstanding. Barbarossa begins in June, but the push into Russia proper does not happen until the winter. Which is what was predictable if you start such an invasion in June.
Are you talking about the invasion plans? The original estimate was was for the Red Army to fold in a few weeks. Do you have any references for your claim that the Germans planned for a “Russia proper” push to happen in winter of 1941-42?
If you start an eastward invasion in June, you end up in Russia in Winter. Which is what happened. Which is why Hitler’s generals were against it. It’s not difficult to work out—Napoleon did the same thing.
First, in the context I don’t think the difference between Ukraine, Belorussia, etc. and Russia proper is in any way meaningful.
Second, the Russian town of Smolensk fell by late July. By August Novgorod was taken and the Germans got close to Leningrad. The battle for Moscow started in early October.
As opposed to Napoleon, the Germans planned a blitzkrieg—the “blitz” part is there for a reason.
Aiyaiyai—I take twenty four hours break and I am knee deep in responses! My answer is simple: there is an explicit call for genocide laid out in a book called Mein Kampf, as well as an explicit racial theory that holds that Aryans are becoming polluted through interbreeding—that unless drastic action is taken, the Aryan will vanish from the world. This book, and similar incitements and theories, long predate Hitler even being a lunatic fringe candidate.
Hitler says a lot of things in Mein Kampf, why single that out? He also says a lot of things in its sequel. Politicians say a lot of things they don’t mean, much like political parties say a lot of things they have no real interest in in their platforms. And your model predicts he would want to kill all races, not Jews in particular. If your best evidence is ‘Hitler talked about killing Jews’, then I’m not convinced that it was the ultimate overriding goal of Hitler, and I find the detailed accounts in his other writings and works like Wages of Destruction much more convincing that he was more concerned with defeating America & the USSR than he was with the Jewish problem.
This is all said long before Hitler was even a lunatic fringe candidate, though I repeat myself. Was Hitler always obsessed with race and Jew-hatred? Yep. Did his actions seem in accord with this? Amazingly so.
Take your comment on the USSR—why did Hitler insist on breaking the pact and invading Russian in winter? The answer is that he regarded Communism as “Judeo-Bolshevism”, a Jewish plot against the Aryan race. Again, why did Nazism never take in the East when people began by welcoming the Wehrmacht’s advance? Because in Nazi racial theory, Slavs were untermenschen. The whole course of the war is completely explicable by thinking that the Nazis actually believed what they said.
This is what I mean about some people not being able to understand that others have a radically different view of the world. You need to explain away just about everything about the Third Reich to imagine that its animating principle was something other than fanatical racism. You have to explain nothing if you make the contrary assumption.
What do you think animated Hitler? For that matter, what do you think animates jihadis?
Hitler said a lot of things long before he became a candidate. He loved to talk.
Not amazingly so. The Jewish problem was a back-burner issue which was pursued with minor energy and in a variety of ways like allowing emigration and planning expulsion to Madagascar compared to much bigger issues like re-arming Germany, reducing unemployment, preparing for war with America & USSR, etc. Read through something like Wage of Destruction or Savage Continent, and one does not get the impression at all that killing Jews was Hitler’s top priority, or even fifth top priority. You keep stating this and I’m not seeing it. There’s only a straight line from parts of Mein Kampf to Dachau when you ignore everything else.
On the other hand, you get exactly that impression by reading… what the actual Nazis said, all the way to the top, and the experiences of people living through that period. During the height of the second world war, they insisted on using scarce resources like trains and troops to keep up the Jew killing—they were willing to risk their own war aims to complete this task.
You keep citing these books but you don’t give any evidence from them.
The entire program was to saturate society with racial hatred and frenzy. Children in school were terrified by long harangues about racial purity and so on.
There seems to be nothing that I can say that will convince you, no piece of evidence from the entire action and behavior of the Third Reich that could possibly indicate to you that they meant what they said. The very idea of a Nazi empire was to establish lebensraum for “pure” Aryans to repopulate. Racial ideology wasn’t window dressing in that empire, it was the very cause and basis of that empire.
They also talked a great deal about the threat from Great Britain, France, the USA, and the USSR. You’re completely ignoring this. If a word count were done, which would be bigger? I know what I expect. You’re arguing that Hitler talked about the Jews a lot, which is totally uncontroversial, but does not prove your point: that he talked about Jews the most of all topics that concerned him.
You know what would be even more effective for pursuing an overriding terminal goal of killing Jews and nothing else? Not starting that war in the first place.
That’s the problem: all the effort and resources thrown into the concentration camps late in the game absolutely pale in comparison to the efforts put into the war and rearmament—they wrecked the German economy just preparing for WWII, never mind actually running it.
The entire mass of Wages of Destruction, to focus on one, is devoted to marshaling the evidence and details about the reorganization of the German economy and Hitler’s grand strategic plan (as mentioned in his Mein Kampf sequel, which I note you’re not mentioning despite your interest in ‘what the actual Nazis said’) to fight the USA, in which the slave labor camps of millions of people (only some of which were Jews) were a late solution for acute labor shortages and the killings purely tangential. What am I going to do, paste the whole book inline? There’s not any one detail that’s decisive, it’s the whole thrust of the reorganization of German society from the tiny inefficient farmer up to the industrial giants and his activities during the war which combine to show that Jews were a matter more of rhetoric than the overriding terminal end goal to which all of all Hitler’s plans were subordinate, as you claim.
Which is different from a terminal end-all-be-all goal of ‘killing Jews’.
I think you’re engaged in just motte-and-bailey tactics here: you make the claim Hitler’s sole motivation was killing Jews, and when you get any pushback, you retreat to some well-established fact like ‘a lot of Jews died’ or ‘there was a lot of anti-semitic education’ or ‘Hitler talked about the Jews a lot’, which do not show your main claim.
Just to take your last point, my response is that this is both a strawman and an argument from intimidation. Take this:
“you make the claim Hitler’s sole motivation was killing Jews”
Did I? Where? I said that Hitler’s motivation was his fanatical racism and that the desire to murder the Jews was a large part of that—was, in fact, an inextricable part of that. His racism wasn’t the result of the war, it was the cause of the war. As you admit towards the end.
“You know what would be even more effective for pursuing an overriding terminal goal of killing Jews and nothing else? Not starting that war in the first place.”
Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary “The Führer recognizes the enormous opportunity that the war provides”. Hitler needed the night and fog of war, not to mention the hysteria that war brings, to carry out his plans.
“What am I going to do, paste the whole book inline? ”
Well, quote something from the book rather than just drop its title.
“he slave labor camps of millions of people (only some of which were Jews) were a late solution for acute labor shortages and the killings purely tangential. ”
The mass murder of those considered racially inferior was purely tangential? Well, if that’s the way you think, then that’s the way you think. There is a simple answer to this: the Wahnsee decision was to exterminate the Jewish people, and then the Slavs (there is some evidence that Hitler wanted to depopulate Africa after Europe was conquered), and there were camps that were purely devoted to the business of mass murder, no slave labour involved—Sobibor, Chelmno, Treblinka. The Nazi camps were not like the labour camps of the Soviet Union, they were murder facilities. To argue that the mass murder in the east is tangential is completely ahistoric.
Since the civilized tone of debate has become strained here, I think I will leave it there.
Nitpick: Hitler invaded Russia in the middle of summer.
That answer has problems explaining the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.
See above—Hitler’s armies didn’t invade Russia until winter.
There’s no problem there whatsoever—Hitler always intended to march against Russia, not least to wipe out or enslave the Slavs. The pact just allowed him some breathing space.
Sorry, whaaaat?
Hitler invaded on June 22, was planning to be done before the frost set in, and was (I think correctly) worried about Stalin’s double cross at some point down the line.
A German invasion backed by a less insane ideology would have won as well, I think.
That’s a common misunderstanding. Barbarossa begins in June, but the push into Russia proper does not happen until the winter. Which is what was predictable if you start such an invasion in June.
???
Are you talking about the invasion plans? The original estimate was was for the Red Army to fold in a few weeks. Do you have any references for your claim that the Germans planned for a “Russia proper” push to happen in winter of 1941-42?
If you start an eastward invasion in June, you end up in Russia in Winter. Which is what happened. Which is why Hitler’s generals were against it. It’s not difficult to work out—Napoleon did the same thing.
First, in the context I don’t think the difference between Ukraine, Belorussia, etc. and Russia proper is in any way meaningful.
Second, the Russian town of Smolensk fell by late July. By August Novgorod was taken and the Germans got close to Leningrad. The battle for Moscow started in early October.
As opposed to Napoleon, the Germans planned a blitzkrieg—the “blitz” part is there for a reason.
You are not making any sense.
Ok, no longer confused about what’s happening here. Exiting conversation.