WI no death camps?

This is just an idea, but suppose that in the Third Reich there were no death camps - only labour camps. There is no 'crusade' to rid the world of Jewry, but there IS still one to rid the world of Bolshevism. Would there be any appreciable difference in the war? By the way, this post is not intended to be
historical revisionism.
 
Well, there'd still, even without the death camps, have been the litany of other Nazi atrocities in Germany and thruout occupied Europe.
 
Out of curiousity, what are the Nazis going to be doing with all those "undesirables" in their midst? Would we see a greater expansion of the ghetto system in the major cities? I was under the impression that the reason that the Nazis didn't use labor camps was that they felt that most of the people incarcerated were physically unsuitable for hard manual labor.

Mind you, I don't know much about this period, so I may be wrong.
 

Xen

Banned
Without the death camps the Nazi's could use war as an excuse to rid Germany of the undesirables by giving them wastelands in Siberia as "homelands".

Or they could use them as cannon fodder!

The more pressing question without the Holocaust will the Jews get the sympathy needed to gain western support for the state of Israel? I suppose the conditions in the camps could be so bad, especiall at the end of the war with the Germans not feeding the slaves so they could feed the soldiers instead causing disease and famine to spread throughout. Hundreds of thousands of Jews and other "undesirables" die in these conditions, while over a million are near death when the allies arrive. They could probably still gain support for their cause in Palestine.
 
Well, even without the extermination camps, Nazi labour camps were pretty grim places. That, BTW, is what they did with their 'undesireables' - put them into the KZ. Certain areas of camps during wartime could have attrition rates of over 1% per DAY from starvation, disease, and dangerous labour!

You also have to keep in mind that the Nazi leadership was perfectly happy to kill millions of people outside the gas chambers. There is a particularly ghastly piece of film from early 1941 where a German plane flies low over a sea of Soviet prisoners - allegedly somewhere in the region of 500,000 men. The horrible thing is to realise that four weeks later, not one of them was still alive. So death rates would still have been terrifyingly high.

As to the Nazi government's policy, I assume they would have continued as before - starvation, ghettos, pogroms, the occasional mass execution, massive forced labour etc. Incidentally, I don't believe the death camps were ever a long-term plan. Most Nazis simply didn't care what happened to Jews and other 'subhumans'. Killing them factory-style must have struck them as hygienic. If there had been other options, they'd most likely have taken them, too, or at least considered them.

The real clincher comes after the war. I think it would have made a world of difference for the debate in postwar Germany. Without Auschwitz, the enormity of Nazi crimes could be considered comparable to those of Stalin. That means much more credibility for right-wing revisionists and demands for 'the borders of 1938' and similar c**p (sorry). Equally, support for Israel might have been lower and Antisemitism and racism in general remained more acceptable in the social mainstream.
 
Could the Germans strike an agreement with the Allies in 1943 for example and join forces against the Soviet Union, while France, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, Yugoslavia, Greece, Poland, Romania, etc regain their independence?
 
A lot of the reason for the Jewish migration was simply the number of displaced persons who no longer felt that they could realistically return to their homes. I think that a reduction to labor camps wouldn't change this feeling, simply increase the number of immigrants by three million or so.
 
And then we could see the conflict between Jews and Arabs grow even bigger - Israel will have to annex more territories after its War of Independence. Maybe even the Westbank, Golan and Gaza aren't enough, and they'll have to expand into the Sinai. Result: Even more Palestinensian refugees.
 
I don't think it'll so much be a "will have to annex more" as a "can annex more". With 100% military participation, 3 million extra immigrants is a substantial increase in fighting force. I wouldn't be all that surprised if the Israelis managed to surpass the OTL '67 borders in '48.
 
With that many more people, I think Israel now would be making the Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Slovenes, Italians, Swiss, and other border nations of Austria very nervous. Maybe the Germans, too.
And Yiddish would have more speakers than Hebrew.
 
Israel has never really been an expansionist state. Its concerns have been security and particular holy sites, not lebensraum; that's why Jerusalem and the Golan are non-negiotable, while the Sinai was given up almost without protest. The only real concern neighboring states would have would be that the more powerful Israel would both need to seize a larger portion of the already limited freshwater supply in the region, and be able to do so more easily.
 
if the germans had not tryed to extermanate the jews they would of had alot of recruts for there army alot more people about 1 and a half million problly thats alot of people
 
Codeman said:
if the germans had not tryed to extermanate the jews they would of had alot of recruts for there army alot more people about 1 and a half million problly thats alot of people

That's assuming they would have allowed them to serve. Thousands of German Jews gained decorations for valour in WWI only to have them retroactively stripped by the Nazis. They were struck from veterans' lists or expelled from the Reichswehr. I don't see this regime turning to their sons.
 

Leo Caesius

Banned
That's interesting. I'm reminded of Franz Rosenthal, who was perhaps the greatest Semitist of the last century (he died in 2003), and was nominated for the Lidzbarski Prize for Semitics in 1938, I believe. The Nazi regime would not permit the Committee to award it to him, as he was Jewish. The irony of this is that Mark Lidzbarski, for whom the award was named, was himself Jewish, and that it was an award for Semitic studies. :rolleyes:
 
Carlton,

What's wrong with "the borders of 1938"? Did that include occupied Bohemia/Moravia, or just Germany proper, East Prussia, Austria, and the Sudetenland?

If it didn't include non-German lands, I don't see the problem.
 
One option that might have been benefical to many.
Germany didn't want the Jewish population
Jews wanted to return to their home in Israel
That territory was control by Britian
That territory was near to oil resources.
What if Germany had supported the 'homeland' for Jews used them to assist in forcing a victory in the Middle East.
It wouldn't mean any less anti-Jewish feeling, just a pragmatic way of solving the problem that would create some interesting political ramifications.
 
MerryPrankster said:
Carlton,

What's wrong with "the borders of 1938"? Did that include occupied Bohemia/Moravia, or just Germany proper, East Prussia, Austria, and the Sudetenland?

If it didn't include non-German lands, I don't see the problem.
I think that the main objection is to the lands that are NOW non-German, over the Oder-Neisse Line...
 
Forum Lurker said:
Israel has never really been an expansionist state. Its concerns have been security and particular holy sites, not lebensraum; that's why Jerusalem and the Golan are non-negiotable, while the Sinai was given up almost without protest. The only real concern neighboring states would have would be that the more powerful Israel would both need to seize a larger portion of the already limited freshwater supply in the region, and be able to do so more easily.
Whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting. That's the problem with the West Bank. The Palestinians are willing to compromise on the land, but not on the water. They want half the water of Israel and Palestine, and the Israelis are only willing to offer five percent of the water, but 40% of the land, IIRC.
The problem for the Israeli government is that they need the Palestinians to keep the land so that Israelis can't build on it and lower land prices in Israel. The popular support for higher land prices by land owners in Israel is almost as important for the Israeli political structure as it is for the US political structure
Giving the land back to the Palestinians helps keep land prices up in Israel. That's also why the settlements are so difficult about losing their land. They convert some olive trees into condos at huge profits, and then the government tries to demolish their settlements.
'Seeing Like A State' goes into this subject on a limited basis. The last chapter of O'Rourke's 'Parliament of Whores' talks about the American variety of land socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor.
It's amazing how much religious and ethnic strife is really about who gets to keep the government subsidies.
 
The most important subsidies in Israel, though, are the ones to the ultra-Orthodox yeshivas. There's a substantial block of votes which goes to any coalition willing to sustain those subsidies, and a few other, relatively minor, measures to strengthen the ultra-Orthodox.

On the other hand, with three million more Jews and their grandchildren, they might have the resources available to make a practical Mediterranean desalination plant, and that'd help a great deal.
 
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