- Contrary to the usual mystification of the Holocaust, the Nazis never actually tried to kill all the Jews! Even at the height of the Holocaust itself (1942-1944), Hitler personally approved the release of Jews for money (Wasserstein 2014; See also Loeb 2008, Porat 1990, Shulman 1982).
- Do not confuse political posturing with actual deeds. If the Nazis insisted on the death of every accessible Jew, they were totally incompetent. Fully 200,000 Jews remained alive in German concentration camps at the end of the war (Waxman 2006).
- In fact, two to three million Jews, within geographic range of the Third Reich, were left alive (Jensen 2003). If the Nazis were serious about destroying all European Jews, shouldn’t they have done better than that?
- Nor was it a question of “running out of time”. Ironically, the Nazis had the capability of killing Jews at a considerable faster rate than they did (Aronson 2004) and they enjoyed the power to do so for many years.
- It is not proved that Nazi Germany ever had an aim of conquering the whole world, and to even potentially be able to kill all the world’s Jews (Ferguson 1997).
- In fact, even in his wildest fantasies, Hitler never envisioned a Jewish-free world. He acknowledged that Jews would still exist 200 years in the future (Cameron 2000).
- The planned Nazi “Museum of An Extinct Race” is a myth (Veselska 2016).
- We hear that, “never before in history had people [Jews] been killed on an assembly-line basis.” Really? Why can’t the systematic shooting of Katyn Poles be defined as an “assembly-line” killing? And what does it matter? Victims are victims.
- Ironically, the Nazis had perfected their “assembly-line” or “industrial genocide” system (of gas chambers and crematoria) for use against the handicapped, and not on Jews. Only years later did they divert it for use against Jews (Horwitz 1990).
- We are told that the Holocaust was a uniquely “irrational” genocide in that this is the only time in history that a genocidal power knowingly crippled itself by conducting a genocide. This is total nonsense. At no time did Nazi Germany harm itself economically or militarily by conducting the Holocaust (Aly 2003).
- Contrary to Holocaust storytelling, the Germans never prioritized the transport of Jews over military railroad traffic. The exact opposite was the case (Silberklang 2014).
- Ideology vs. material gain: Can these motives be dichotomized? Who decides that only material gain alone can make a genocide “rational”? In any case, the Germans killed millions of Jews with the full knowledge that the significant wealth of the murdered Jews would pass to them (Cesarani 2015).
- The German historian Eberhard Jackel said, “never before in history was a particular human group…singled out to be killed as rapidly as possible using ‘every possible means of state power’ to do so.” This is another mystification of the Holocaust and is total nonsense. Far from needing “every possible means of state power”, the Holocaust imposed a very minimal burden on available German resources. The killing off of an unarmed, mostly urban population, especially under the conditions of wartime mobilization, was no challenge (Aronson 2004).
- The Wannsee Protocol is a technicality and does not make the Holocaust special. The Nazis easily conducted genocide against non-Jews (e. g, Gypsies) without prior Wannsee-style conferences (Knesebeck 2011).
- Jews in Reich-controlled territories who were foreign nationals were not put to death and were even exempt from wearing the Jewish Star (Berg 2007). Clearly, practical matters were more important to the Nazis than killing all possible Jews.
- The standard claim that Jews were the top victims of the Third Reich is only partly true. Note that the Nazis treated African-German Mischlinge [part African part German] individuals worse than they treated Jewish-German Mischlinge [part Jewish part German] individuals (Pendas 2017).
- Furthermore, the Nazis killed few if any western Allied Jewish POWs in captivity (Morris 2006), against over 3.3 million captive Soviet POWs (Buchheim 1968). This meant that, in Nazi German eyes, a British Jewish or American Jewish POW had a greater right to live than did a Slavic POW!
- The Nazi use of Jewish forced laborers is not, as usually told, some kind of afterthought forced by German military reverses. In fact, already in early 1939, before the war, the Third Reich stopped excluding all Jews from German society and started allowing Jews to be freely used in German industry (Lochner 1942).
- Holocaust demystified: The Nazi utilization of Jewish forced labor was elective. At no time was Jewish forced labor indispensable to the German war effort! (Cesarani 2015, p. xxxiii).
- Ironically, the Nazis sometimes killed essential Jewish laborers while leaving nonessential Jewish laborers alive (Silberklang 2014; Sofsky 1999). Go figure.
- Jewish forced laborers were not generally subject to atrocious working conditions that would have hastened their deaths. (Buggeln 2014).
- Holocaust demystified: There was no self-consistent Nazi policy in treating the Jewish inmates of concentration camps any worse than non-Jewish inmates. For example, in Auschwitz, Jewish inmates were sometimes treated better than Slavic inmates (Szmaglewska 1947).
- So what that the Nazis “wasted” all the Jews they could have used productively. The same was true, for example, of the 3 million Russian POWs that the Nazis killed (Lower and Rossini 2017).
- The Nazis did not necessarily treat all Jews as existential enemies. Quite a few German Jews were deliberately re-defined by the Nazis as non-Jews. They were declared “Honorary Aryans” (Rigg 2004).
- Holocaust demystified: In the Third Reich, you could get the death penalty for murdering a Jew (Feldman and Seibel 2005). So, Jews, in Nazi eyes, were still human beings.
- Holocaust demystified: Individuals in Nazi Germany suspected of being Jews, but having an uncertain paternity, were given the benefit of the doubt, and not recognized as Jews. (Pegelow 2006).
- Furthermore, the Nazis sometimes accepted outright legal fiction–of Jewish petitioners who said that their Jewish fathers were not their real fathers (Marwell 2020; Pegelow 2006). This unknown paternity fiction redefined these Jews as Jewish-German Mischlinge, thereby deliberately sparing them the full consequences of being Jews.
- Contrary to the premise that Nazis would never rehabilitate a Jew (while Communists were “better” because they sometimes rehabilitated class enemies), certain Germans with considerable Jewish blood could “earn off” their Jewishness by meritorious service to the Third Reich (Bukey 2011) or even by exhibiting an “Aryan mental attitude”. (Noakes 1989).
- The Nuremberg Laws had a built-in leniency towards Jews, imposing a more restrictive definition of a Jew than that by the Jews themselves! That is why a significant fraction of Nazi-designated First- and Second-Degree Jewish-German Mischlinge were halachically Jewish. (Rigg 2004).
- Holocaust demystified: Contrary to the “cumulative radicalization” narrative about Nazism, some Nazi policies against Jewish-German Mischlinge became less discriminatory with time. (Noakes 1989).
Sources: jewsandpolesdatabase.org
Aly. 2003. Architects of Annihilation, pp. 210-213.
Aronson. 2004. Hitler, and Allies, and the Jews, p. 290
Berg. 2007. The Diary of Mary Berg, p. 251
Buchheim. 1968. Anatomy of the SS State, p. 523, 531
Buggeln. 2014. Slave Labor in Nazi Concentration Camps, pp. 1-2, 63
Bukey. 2011. Jews and Intermarriage in Nazi Austria, p. 17
Cameron. 2000. Hitler’s Table Talk, p. 236
Cesarani 2015. Final Solution, p. xxxiii
Feldman and Seibel. 2005. Networks of Nazi Persecution, p. 134
Ferguson. 1997. Virtual History, p. 340
Horwitz. 1990, In the Shadow of Death, p. 200
Jensen. 2003. Denmark and the Holocaust, p. 33
Knesebeck. 2011. The Roma Struggle for Compensation in Post-War Germany, p. 15
Lochner. 1942. What About Germany?, p. 241
Loeb. 2008. Dealing With Satan, p. 114, 208
Lower and Rossini. 2017. Lessons and Legacies XII: New Directions to Holocaust Research and Education, p. 382
Marwell. 2020. Mengele: Unmasking the Angel of Death, p. 36
Morris. 2006. Untold Valor, pp. 78-79
Noakes. 1989. The Development of Nazi policy Towards the German-Jewish “Mischlinge” 1933-1945. LEO BAECK INSTITUTE YEARBOOK 34(1)327
Pegelow. 2006. Determining “People of German Blood”. CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN HISTORY 15(1)55-56
Pendas. 2017. Beyond the Racial State, p. 277
Porat. 1990. The Blue and Yellow Stars of David, p. 251
Rigg. 2004. Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, p. 18, 203, 283
Shulman. 1982. The Case of Hotel Polski, pp. 192-193, 215
Silberklang. 2014. Gates of Tears, p. 319, 436
Sofsky. 1999. The Order of Terror, pp.252-254
Szmaglewska. 1947. Smoke Over Birkenau, p. 247
Veselska. 2016. The “Museum of an Extinct Race”–Fact vs. Legend. JUDAICA BOHEMIAE 44(2)41-85
Wasserstein. 2014. The Ambiguity of Virtue, pp. 167-170
Waxman. 2006. Writing the Holocaust, p. 90
