WI the nazis enslaved the jews instead of gassing them? With extremely harsh treatment how many jews will die in nazi slave camps? How will this effect the founding of israel? Will the jews who worked at slave camps any usefull arms making skill, though i really doubt it. If they do will it make a difference in israeli arms industry?
WI Nazis enslaved the jews
- Thread starter S. Amir
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Brilliantlight
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S. Amir said:
They DID enslave them before they gassed them. What if they didn't gas them? Most likely a somewhat larger Israel.
S. Amir said:
Depends a lot on the particulars of life in the slave camps. In fact, the idea of simply working the Jews to death was popular among certain Nazis. They called it "attrition", I believe. If the Nazis are still Nazis, the conditions in slave camps won't be much different than in death camps; there just won't be the final gas chambers. Still, such purely death camps as Sobibor will also be eliminated. I'm guessing the total number of survivors will be 25-50% above OTL, but many of them will be in terrible shape, and will either die after the war or be too disabled to make a trip to Palestine.
Immediate effects: a number of Nazis may be able to get off at Nuremberg by claiming they did not intend genocide. The big fish will still hang, but some of the folks who get off may give organizations like ODESSA a very big boost. Expect that the racialist right in Europe will be stronger in the '50s, and will have even more fun ties to the CIA. Holocaust denial will get an earlier start, and will seem more credible.
Emigration to Palestine will therefore be higher, both because there are more folks to emigrate, and that Europe is a more hostile environment. Ballpark, figure about 10-20% more people in country when Israel declares its independence. The process will also be a bit different. With that many more Jewish settlers, it is very unlikely that anyone will agree even temporarily to the UN partition plan. The war will start not on the day the plan is supposed to go into effect, but when the negotiations finally break down. It will probably be obvious this is going to happen, giving both sides the chance to be fully prepared. In OTL, the Arab forces were pretty nearly prepared, and the Jews were not, and still the Jews won handily. Expect that the Israeli victory in '48 to be even larger. Chances are that the West Bank is part of Israel from the get-go.
Medium Term: Hmmm, radical right movements in Europe will be a lot stronger all through the '50s and into the '60s. This will have a huge impact on the French wars in Indochina and Algeria. Indeed, I think that in this TL, the generals' coup may really go off, giving us a type of Fascist France from about 1960 until at least 1968. This will have unpredictable effects on relations between Europe and the United States. The Eurofascists of the '50s will have to choose between their anti-Communism on the one hand and their anti-Semitism on the other, given that the United States supports Israel but opposes the USSR. My guess is that they will swallow hard, and keep supporting the US into the '60s, at least.
In the United States, guys like William Dudley Pelley and George Lincoln Rockwell will have more credibility, and more money, but not much more support. Through the '50s this will have not seem to be having much effect. Initially, the American Nazis will not be any more visible than they were in OTL. However, with extra funding and more credibility, expect them to organize better, so that a strong, unified, and very evil American racialist movement will appear by the late '60s.
In other parts of the world, radical right factions will also be anywhere from very marginally to quite a bit stronger. This will be particularly true in Latin America, which could well be mostly openly neofascist by 1965.
Longer Term: Israel will do a lot better in its wars in 1967 and 1973, probably leading to the capture of Amman and Damascus, and client-state status for Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon. Meanwhile, American relations with France, at least, will probably sour. I would expect that West Germany, Britain, Denmark, and the Low Countries would remain loyal to Washington, while France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Greece, along with a number of South American countries, will form a neofascist bloc.
Inside the US, I doubt that the racialist factions would be able to effect the election of 1960, even as narrow as it was, so Kennedy still gets in. He may get assassinated even earlier, though, by a _real_ conspiracy, instead of the mob. Johnson will be even less likely to pursue radical right policies, and will be the president to see the breach with France. We will see a Civil Rights movement, just as in OTL. It will, however, be met by very well-organized violence, along with political opposition. MLK may well get assassinated earlier, maybe ca. 1965. In that event, race relations will likely be MUCH worse than in OTL, and we will see something like actual civil war in many parts of the country, with white and Black militias trying to slaughter each other, and the government trying to keep the peace, but showing too much favoritism toward the whites to do it effectively. Meanwhile, the Vietnam War will probably still be going on, but it will be even more divisive, given the civil war at home. There may well be mutinies in some units in Vietnam, either Black soldiers opposed to a "white man's war", or else whites wanting to go home and fight the Blacks.
1968 will be a decisive year, with a three way election between Democrats under Humphrey, Republicans under Nixon, and a White People's Party under George Wallace. The White People's Party will be quite large and well-organized, and supported by armies of goons. It will, however, take away from what would have been the Nixon vote in OTL, so I imagine that Humphrey will win. After the victory, expect very sweeping Civil Rights legislation, a rapid withdrawal from Vietnam, and an attempt to crush the right-wing militias. If this succeeds, and it will be about a 50-50 shot, then Humphrey will get re-elected and go down in history as a great American hero. If not, expect his presidency to unravel.
At about the same time, student riots much like those of OTL may well rock France. With real, live fascists in power, it is likely that the workers of Paris really will join the rioters, as they very much didn't in OTL 1968. The government may try to crush these much larger riots, but they probably can't depend on their own troops, so it is more likely that they will just flee. With the fall of the French Generals, the neofascist bloc will also start unraveling, in Italy, Portugal, and parts of South America.
By the mid-late '70s, the West will be trying to put NATO back together, and to prevent the Soviet Cold War victory that only division in the Western house could even make possible.
Could this decrease support for Israel? People would say "They were only worked to death, how does that make them different than Slavs? It's not as if they were actually trying to kill them all off."
Less guilt means less upport, less willingness to partition plan and less tolerance if Jews still try to declare their state.
Less guilt means less upport, less willingness to partition plan and less tolerance if Jews still try to declare their state.
aktarian said:
Good point, but I doubt it. Without deliberate genocide as a backdrop (which was virtually unthinkable in a world without it), the mass enslavement and "attrition" would still seem like the worse possible thing a "civilized" western State like Germany could come up with. There would probably still be a sense by the western allies that Jews were owed a homeland. After all, the "Slavs" will have homelands after the war (Russia, Yugoslavia, etc) so why not the Jews if they want one? However, the west (particularly the US) might not give Israel as much blanket support as it did in its early wars.
However, you do indirectly raise another point. Absent the holocaust, there will be little morally to distinguish Hitlerism/Fascism fron Stalinism/Communism in the west's eye. In fact, given the fact that in other ways (more toleration of religion and private enterprise, etc) the Nazis might seem preferable to Communists. This might lead to a dissolution of the anti-Nazi alliance sometime during the war (improbable, perhaps), or immediately after as the west and Soviets can't agree on how to deal with war crimes issues and punishment of Germany (much more likely). This might lead to an early war between the Soviets and West, when these disagreements lead to an earlier partition of Germany - with this ATL's West Germany being much less thoroughly de-Nazified and much more militarized, Franco's Spain accepted immediately into the western alliance, and right wing organizations in the Balkans like the Croat fascist and anti-Tito Yugoslav partisans supported as "freedom fighters". I'd wager WW3 by 1948, with a collapse of Stalinism in the early 1950's.
Now, in this ATL, an interesting possibility emerges for the Middle East (which admittedly contradicts my first paragrpaph). Israel, which will very likely be founded (as it was in OTL) by generally leftist - socialist - and secularist - Jews from cenral and eastern Europe, might tend to align itself with the Soviet Union rather than a west which was "soft on Naziism", while the west would seek allies and supporters among conservative royalist and nationalist Arab groups. This would not be good for the long term survival of Israel, but could do wonders for the development of stable and modern western-oriented Middle eastern states along the lines of Turkey, Farouk's Egypt, and the Shah's Iran.
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It could hardly make any difference, unless we go further and presume no mass murder of any kind. Yes, that means Poles, Gypsies, Russians, etc. which requires a wholesale transformation of the character of Nazi Germany. Basically the issue becomes 'what if the Nazis weren't genocidal'.
Grimm Reaper said:
I agree, that is exactly what the question is really about. Without the holocaust, the Nazis are simply another brutal, totalitarian regime which kills millions of people in work camps through overwork,malnourishment, and neglect - but does not single out a a few groups like Jews and Roma for special industrialized killing. In this case, it may make a big difference as the post war world shapes itself with an equally bad Stalin still in power.
They regularly pissed on the control mechanisms for the V rockets that the Nazi's made them produce.S. Amir said:
Are you kidding? Urine and sensitive electronics? Piss on the insides of your computer, and tell me what happens.Valamyr said:
It's not going to have much of any effect on the war itself; IOTL the Allies either didn't believe what they heard about the death camps, or simply didn't care. Otherwise, they would have bombed the train tracks or the camps themselves during 1944-45. And besides, by the time we were invading Germany and liberating camps, the war was pretty much over anyway. Whether we found mass graves and walking skeletons or just walking skeletons, no battles or wartime policies would have gone differently as a result.
And I don't think you'll see this turning into an immediate war with Russia either. Truman was no hothead, even though Stalin was; it would take two hotheads AND a spark to provoke yet another global war, especially on the heals of WWII. While ATL historians might have a bit more trouble justifying our shotgun alliance with the USSR without some ethnic cleansing from our mutual enemy to provide some 20/20 hindsight, the Nazis still come off as the overall bad guys of WWII. Remember, the term "genocide" didn't even exist until we realized that's what we should call the Holocaust; as has been said, working people to death without outright gassing them would remain the most evil thing that any nation could do. You just have a lowered bar of Evil in this ATL.
Another direction for discussion: if the Nazis aren't remembered as being evil for systematic ethnic cleansing, than they will be remembered as being evil for being nationalist warmongers. Rather than legitimizing rightist movements, could this actually lead to a backlash against militaristic political stances? I'm pretty ambivalent on this myself; I just wanted to throw it out there.
On a completely different topic, wouldn't "Lowered Bar of Evil" make a great name for a punk group?
And I don't think you'll see this turning into an immediate war with Russia either. Truman was no hothead, even though Stalin was; it would take two hotheads AND a spark to provoke yet another global war, especially on the heals of WWII. While ATL historians might have a bit more trouble justifying our shotgun alliance with the USSR without some ethnic cleansing from our mutual enemy to provide some 20/20 hindsight, the Nazis still come off as the overall bad guys of WWII. Remember, the term "genocide" didn't even exist until we realized that's what we should call the Holocaust; as has been said, working people to death without outright gassing them would remain the most evil thing that any nation could do. You just have a lowered bar of Evil in this ATL.
Another direction for discussion: if the Nazis aren't remembered as being evil for systematic ethnic cleansing, than they will be remembered as being evil for being nationalist warmongers. Rather than legitimizing rightist movements, could this actually lead to a backlash against militaristic political stances? I'm pretty ambivalent on this myself; I just wanted to throw it out there.
On a completely different topic, wouldn't "Lowered Bar of Evil" make a great name for a punk group?
Ilta said:
i tend to believe the opposite.
From my point of view, the nazis are linked with a) the holocaust AND with right-wing militaristic political stances. *
And the leftists are therefore able to make at least a shallow equation in the way of right-wing = militarist = fascist. Until 1989, the equation was longer, featuring also = capitalist.
* martin hohmann memorial footnote: with the term "are linked" I don´t want to express any denying of the holocaust