[Smokeeaterpilot]

Hey guys I've wanted to hear some discussion on this for a while, just never got around to asking the question. I hope it doesn't come out the wrong and especially hope it doesn't offend anyone.

Everyone reading this is probably already familiar with World War II and the role the Holocaust played in that particular point in history. I think everyone in here can agree that the crimes against humanity that the Nazis committed (along with the Japanese and even the Soviets) should not be condoned. That's not what I am proposing or suggesting.

What I am is trying to look at the role it played in the Nazi's rise to power. Germany came out of a hyper depression following WWI. Debt, devaluing the Deutschmark, starvation etc. The Nazi party was able to bring the country together under the Fear of Communism, Nationalism and antisemitism.

The Third Reich amassed untold wealth from essentially stealing from those it placed in the Ghettos and either sent to forced slave labor or for mass murder.

What I'm asking is, how much "wealthier" did Germany actually "benefit" from the Holocaust. It was able to collect, currency, gold, art, precious metals, gold, etc. Also, provided with an endless supply of slave labor to fuel the "war machine" even though slave labor is hardly quality labor and can never replace skilled craftsmanship.

On the other side, the run this project the Holocaust and Final Solution. It takes personnel, resources, money, etc.

All of that effort took resources away from the front lines instead it going to fuel essentially an ideology. Or did the amount of wealth it produced from stealing, murdering or forcing into labor out produce the costs to run the program.

I'm leaving morality out of this because there is no debate, It was a horrible act that should have never been allowed. But did the Holocaust lead to the downfall of Germany because it took resources away from the war effort or did it produce wealth and labor to keep it going when it should have met its demise earlier?

I sincerely hope this question does not offend anyone. I'm just trying to analyze that point in history from another angle.

 

[WnP]

From what I read somewhere beteween the early 30s until the end of the war thw nazis confiscated 8 billion dollars worth of wealth.

With this wealth they gave back to their economy by replacing those jews with people they considered adequate. But they lost a lot goodwill in ukraine where they were viewed as liberators, as opposed to stalin, when they turned on them.

Bottom line, you get rid of the jews and take their wealth and german people are happy because they have jobs, better standard of living and pride in their country.

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[WnP]

Good article about this.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wor...wealth-helped-fund-the-German-war-effort.html

Good book that talks abou this subject.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0805087265?pc_redir=1395351997&robot_redir=1

From a reviwer of the book on Amazon:

German author Gotz (Goetz) Aly describes National Socialism as a form of populist wealth-redistribution welfare-state socialism. One-third of German taxpayers paid more than two-thirds of the tax burdens of war (p. 293), and businesses were heavily taxed (pp. 60-68). Hitler favored social equality for all Germans (p. 300), and worked to correct social inequities, notably in education (p. 322).Pointedly, National Socialism massively transferred wealth from non-Germans to Germans: "In terms of wartime revenues, internal and external, low- and middle-income Germans, who together with their families numbered some 60 million, accounted for no more than 10 percent of the total sum. More affluent Germans bore 20 percent of the burden, while foreigners, forced laborers, and Jews were compelled to cover 70 percent of the funds consumed every day by Germany during the war." (p. 292). Consequently: "On average, the vast and not particularly affluent majority of Germans enjoyed more disposable income during the war that they had before it." (p. 293). Nazism also appealed to those opposed to traditional moral conventions, and to those inclined towards anticlericalism and anti-elitism (p. 319).Not surprisingly, once voted into power by the German people, Hitler never needed draconian methods to maintain power until the end. Nearly 90% of the German dissenters executed lost their lives after 1941 (pp. 303-304). Unlike Communism, Nazism never demanded absolute devotion (pp. 23-24). In 1937, merely 7,000 Gestapo employees sufficed to handle 60 million Germans, while, in later East Germany, 190,000 surveillance experts controlled 17 million people (p. 29).Jews weren't the only victims of larcenous Nazi policies--far from it: "This land of milk and honey in Eastern Europe was to be conquered not for the benefit of landed Prussian Junkers and powerful industrialists but to provide ordinary people with a real-world utopia." (p. 31).Aly breaks new ground by showing that virtually ALL sectors of German society were involved in the expropriation of conquered peoples' wealth. German soldiers not only sent a considerable amount of looted goods back home (p. 178), but were encouraged to do so (p. 311). Later-writer Heinrich Boll (Boell) wrote much about this (p. 110, etc.). Not mentioned is the fact that, in German-occupied Poland, any German could enter a Polish or Jewish shop at any time and take anything at will without paying.Poles targeted by the Germans for deportation, imprisonment, or execution immediately lost all their properties to the Reich (p. 197, 236). The 8-12 million forced laborers in the Reich, most of whom were Eastern Europeans, toiled under inhumane conditions. They were paid a wage in order to forestall resistance back home, but then the earnings were recouped by the Germans in various creative ways (pp. 156-157).German-occupied Poland actually had to pay Germany for being occupied (pp. 76-77) "with the result that the local population endured acute shortages of grain, potatoes, meat, and other necessities." (p. 77), leading to famine (p. 170). (This enables the reader understand why some Poles didn't aid fugitive Jews and why Poles sometimes betrayed or killed Jews known or suspected of stealing from them). Polish guerilla resistance eventually forced the Germans to slightly reduce the harshness of their exploitation of Poland (p. 160).The Wehrmacht invaded Russia under orders to live off the land, placing 21.2 million Soviet citizens in starvation mode (p. 178). Additionally, millions of Soviet POWs were starved to death by the Germans (p. 175). Aly touches on the eventual Nazi extermination plans against Slavs: "the most extreme proposal envisioned forcibly relocating 50 million Slavs to Siberia. (For years, the German Research Foundation also supported the development of technocratic plans for the slaughter of millions of people. Funds for research in this area were still allocated in the Nazis' final budget for the fiscal year 1945-46)." (p. 30). Yet the term "relocation" had itself already become a euphemism for extermination.One Holocaust myth would have us believe that the destruction of Jews had been so uniquely irrational that the Germans would rather sacrifice themselves than leave Jews alive. In actuality, the deportation of the Jews from the island of Rhodes never did challenge the Wehrmacht's transport needs (p. 268), and there wasn't even talk of German retreat at the time of the Rhodes Jews' deportation (pp. 269-270). Once it did occur, the Rhodes Jews' deportation was itself governed by economic considerations (p. 273).The case for Aly's premise that the Holocaust can't be properly understood without the larceny behind it (p. 285) can be strengthened (see: INTO THAT DARKNESS). Treblinka Kommandant Franz Stangl rejected the presumed Nazi obsession with killing all Jews, citing the creation of "honorary Aryans". Stangl asserted that the Holocaust was actually motivated by financial gain. When confronted with the obvious fact that most Jews weren't wealthy, Stangl retorted with the comment that almost every Jew had some worthy possession that could be confiscated--and that the booty added up.

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[daveccarlson]

Another excellent book about Italian, Japanese, and German autarkies in the 1930s based around food and resources, along with Hans Backe's role in the "Hungerplan" as part and parcel of "Generalplan Ost" is Lizzie Collingham, The Taste of War:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/books/review/the-taste-of-war-by-lizzie-collingham.html?_r=0
Tim Snyder's Bloodlands: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/books/review/Rubenstein-t.html

And also anything by Christopher Browning and Omer Bartov.

Key to any discussion is the geography of the Shoah/Holocaust: west of the Molotov-Ribbentropp line is the "Shoah by gas" and east of that line the "Shoah by bullets." At times Nazi policy vacillated toward a need for labor vs. the genocidal attitude that annihilating European Jewish civilization as somehow a "victory" in the face of increasing desperation on all the fronts.

Hitler's 1920s-era writing suggested massive demographic changes by moving, transporting, deporting, shunting Jewish communities "to Madagascar" or perhaps elsewhere. There were even a few early Nazis that approached Zionist organizations with the view of transferral to colonies in the Levant or British Palestine/Trans-Jordan. Later, the idea was to deport and forcibly remove Jews "beyond the pale" by forcing the remnants of the Soviet state to deal with them along with very many Russians and others considered untermensch. Some Slavs were to be kept as servile labor. By 1940, at Backe's urging, the idea of the Ukraine as Germany's "California" or "India" was to be implemented immediately lest Germany lose the war in two years. Thus, the Lebensraum and Judenrein aspect of Nazi policy was increasingly viewed as necessary to the Reich, not just to deprive the UK of any concievable ally... The fixation on the destruction of the USSR became something of an end in and of itself. Of course, during Barbarossa, the Germans used Einsatzgruppen to murder Jews, intelligensia, communist party members and "commisars." Jews from the West were first confined in ghettos in the east, and further deportations became impossible with the failure of the Soviet state to collapse. Hence the "Hunger Plan"--mostly unrealized--metastisized into the Wannsee conference's "Final Solution" and the construction of death camps like Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek, etc. Auschwitz-Birkenau illustrated all of the periods of the Holocaust: Elimination of Polish intelligensia, slave labor, and at other times a death camp

 

[Clyde]

First, Germany, and much if not all of Eastern Europe, has had a history of antisemitism long antedating formation of the NSDAP. Poland and Russia were particularly prone to that, which was one of the factors in major Eastern European jewish migration to the US in the late 19th and early 20th century.

The NSDAP had a number of antisemites in its leadership (including Hitler) and unquestionably took advantage of the phenomenon both in its rise to power and maintenance thereof post-1933. Until the Nazis started their campaign, most German Jews (most of whom seem to have been assimilated and not very observant by the end of the 19th century) would have not thought that Germany was still significantly prone to that - history suggests they'd have been wrong.

As far as i know, there are no rigorous studies of the net costs of the Holocaust to Germany before and during the War. Some of those costs are difficult to quantify, but they included the immigration of such intellectual luminaries as Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi. Which was surely a bad thing for the Nazis. In terms of more potentially quantifiable things like confiscation of Jewish property - it really seems unlikely it added much. After all, simply conscripting Jewish men of military age and using them as part of the forces would have offered additional manpower and eliminated the drain represented by camp guards, plus eliminating transport diversions that could have been used for production and supply efforts. Worked in WWI... Any other economic effort to support the war could have come from taxation. not as if the gold and art was actually used to obtain money...

But I can't prove most of that by citing statistical data, rigorously compiled and validated.

 

[Poot]

I think it would be hard to quantify wealth lost/gained via Holocaust victims. Hein Klemann and Sergei Kudryashov's OCCUPIED ECONOMIES. AN ECONOMIC HISTORY OF NAZI-OCCUPIED EUROPE, 1939-1945 is very good, and has chapters that detail the use of foreign/forced/slave labor.
Pat

 

[Smokeeaterpilot]

Well you may not get exact numbers. I wouldn't have the research capabilities to determine this but.

Number of soldiers/personnel in the Standard military, SS, Gestapo.

How many were committed to the capture, transportation, management, of the Jews and their destination to the concentration camps.

What percentage of the number of those personnel were committed to Holocaust operations exclusively.

Look at what important theaters of operation were lost due to lacking personnel, equipment, resources. And then look at whether that percentage value of Holocaust personnel if they were redistributed to those those theaters of operations and if it would have made a difference you had "x" number of personnel/supplies/resources added to the original numbers and would it have changed the outcome of that campaign?

Or did those Holocaust personnel bring in revenue to justify their absence from the front lines. As well as justify the cost to carry out their operation.

But if you took the holocaust out of the equation you also have to remove the money amassed to the Reich and determine how that would have altered how large the military would have been because of lost revenue.

Again, I don't have the resources to analyze that scale simulation. So I figure I throw out the "what if" scenario here on the forum.

Again, this is an extremely callous way to approach the holocaust. But just trying to look at it from a different angel.

 

[daveccarlson]

Complicated to say. In 1944 what with Bagration tearing apart Army Group Center and the Normandy break-out, liberation of Paris, and with Eisenhower betting on Monty instead of Patton--which might well have ended the war even sooner had the U.S. been able to cross the Rhine, the Nazi leadership still insisted on transporting Hungary's Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau and mass-murdering them all...

One feature of the purpose-built death camps like Treblinka was that it was staffed by ex-Soviet PoWs recruited into German service with only a very small German administrative staff. As to the "economy of pillage" that the Götz Aly book deals with, I also might recommend Mazzower's book ​Hitler's Empire.

 

[daveccarlson]

PS: One of the reasons the Germans engaged in such whole-sale reprisals for partisan or guerrilla/resistance/straggler attacks was the perception that faced with total over-reach, and with manpower lacking everywhere, it offered a means of cowing a population into quiescence or subservience.

Somewhat ironically, the Germans might have won over a good many Ukrainians what with memories of mass starvation/famine and forced collectivization still fresh... But the promise of the destruction of Soviet power lost its luster as the German leadership wanted to maintain the collective farms, and actually increase the seizure of food to feed their own army and populace. Supposedly the joke went: "Q: What has Hitler accomplished in one winter that Stalin was unable to achieve in twenty years? A: That we came to prefer Stalin..."

 

[hershmeister]

For additional insight into what/how germany shifted from a policy or get the jews to leave, to the wannsee conference of extermination, read the book The Farhud by edwin black.


The Farhud: Roots of the Arab-Nazi Alliance in the Holocaust by Edwin Black http://www.amazon.com/dp/0914153145/ref=cm_sw_r_udp_awd_O3Imtb10HEXPQ

 

[Poot]

PS: One of the reasons the Germans engaged in such whole-sale reprisals for partisan or guerrilla/resistance/straggler attacks was the perception that faced with total over-reach, and with manpower lacking everywhere, it offered a means of cowing a population into quiescence or subservience.

Somewhat ironically, the Germans might have won over a good many Ukrainians what with memories of mass starvation/famine and forced collectivization still fresh... But the promise of the destruction of Soviet power lost its luster as the German leadership wanted to maintain the collective farms, and actually increase the seizure of food to feed their own army and populace. Supposedly the joke went: "Q: What has Hitler accomplished in one winter that Stalin was unable to achieve in twenty years? A: That we came to prefer Stalin..."

Dave,
Exactly.

The same strange ideology said that Soviets PWs would not be allowed to enter the Reich, even to do menial, manual labor or work the harvest due to the fear of them spreading Bolshevist ideas.
This ideology also extended to women: fully half of the female German population aged 15-65 at the time was unemployed, i.e., not utilized in the labor force in any degree, only because the NSDAP viewed the women's place as in the home exclusively.
Pat

 

[car99]

When you think of all the scientists, business owners, and first war combat veterans they threw away, the money did almost nothing for the nazis. That was the worst mistake. A close second was not making use of the Ukrainian underground independence party the Abwehr had supported. Backe's Hunger Plan and their ideology trumped practical consideration. The moral I see is, if you start a war that you probably can't win, you had better make use of every human resource available.

 

[Smokeeaterpilot]

So it seems most people in here agree, that the Holocaust wasted far more resources than it ever produced. They were able to steal billions and provided slave labor. But it took resources, funding and personnel away from the front line. As well as bodies that could be enlisted to fight. Not to mention technological advancements that went to their enemies as opposed to benefiting their own war machine for the sake of ideological views and propaganda.

I know during, WWI Jews were over represented to the national population in the military ranks, (I believe the number was 100,000) and 20,000 received commendations for valor in combat. Don't hold me to that number. It was something I remember reading and unfortunately, didn't put the exact numbers to memory.

Car99,

I don't know if it was a war they couldn't win. I mean you may be right. But I look at the military debacles on account of Hitler rather than tactical defeats. Bombing London as opposed to airfields and radar sights. Allying with Japan and declaring war on the U.S., Dunkirk pocket relying on Luftwaffe instead of Panzers, going after Stalingrad instead of Oil fields to name a few.

It always seemed to me that Germany could have very well won the war in Europe if Hitler left the military up to his Generals rather than making decisions on a Corporal's level of experience in combat.

Again, I could be wrong. Why I'm on here to learn more.

 

[daveccarlson]

A further key to understanding the outcomes is the ad-hoc improvisation and reaction to immediate circumstances:
Initially, Hitler and the leadership thought they could win a series of brief wars provided one or another potential adversaries remained quiescent. Molotov-Ribbentropp pact assures [temporary] German-Soviet peace and the provision of raw materials and resources to the Reich. Germany and the USSR carve up the Baltic. Germany was to get Lithuania while the Soviets would take over Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Moldova/"Bessarabia."
Finland resists.
The British begin to entertain the idea of landing in Norway, ostensibly to aid Finland, to take the railway between Sweden's northern iron mines and Finland's nickel mines and deny these to the Germans.
Hitler browbeats his generals and admirals into the Norway campaign, which succeeds. Hitler's inflated ego and self-delusion increase. But the losses of navy assets in the face of ongoing British naval supremacy means Germany will not be able to launch "Seelöwe" or Sealion to invade the UK... Unless it achieves air supremacy over Britain... Battle of Britain and Blitz ensue, and the Luftwaffe fails to accomplish the necessary objective or to bring the British to the negotiating table.
It was von Rundstedt who held the panzers in reserve at Dunkirk... They had been through a lot, afterall! On paper, the French had very many tanks, and a good many of these like the Somua were very capable/effective vehicles. It was only with hindsight that the miracle of Dunkirk was viewed as a German oversight.
An interesting "what-if?" scenario:
http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/what-if/disaster-at-dunkirk-a-nightmare-fantasy.php?page=all

Part of Hitler's decision to invade the USSR while Britain continued to resist was a desire to remove a Soviet threat to the Romanian oil fields... Later it morphed into ambitions to make the Ukraine a hyper-exploited colony to boost the German Reich. Heck, apparently Hitler even had plans for an autobahn from Berlin to Yalta in Crimea so he could have a seaside holiday spot when the mountain views at berchtesgarten or the bunker views at the Wolfschanze got boring.
The Sixth Army's objective at Stalingrad was to create the southern defensive line called for in the Barbarossa plans along the Volga. The oil of the Caucasus was expected to fall soon after.

As far as the Shoah/Holocaust goes, recall that while the German Jewish community had served during the German Kaiserreich, including even fighter aces--Frankl, Beckhardt--and that Jewish civilization in western and Eastern Europe was largely destroyed, the greatest number of Jewish victims lived in Poland, the Baltic States, Belarus, the Ukraine and Russia.

 

[DocAV]

Aside from the Economic side of this discussion, the very fact that the Deutsche Reichsbahn ( German State Railways) had to divert so much rollingstock (Locomotives and Cattle/Box Cars) to transport the Holocaust victims, Soviet POWs, etc, away from vital War work (transport of Soldiers, Munitions, Food) was a Major contributing factor to Germany's eventual defeat. The Railway system (Used by Bismarck in the Franco Prussian War to facilitate the rapid transit of German Troops to the French battlefields) and again in 1914-18, to shift troops from Eastern Fronts to the West and vice Versa with efficiency and rapidity, all this advantage was lost in WW II, due to the "undercutting" of the Railways by the SS/SD in transporting People to "The Final Solution". Even if the Military Railway Division did miracles in Re-gauging the Eastern Lines into the Soviet Union ( from 5'0'' to 4'8.5") and converting Russian Rolling stock (Much heavier capacity than German stock) to run on the European Gauge, to alleviate "Transhipment": ( mostly by Hand) at "Break of Gauge" Points, thyis did not suffice to make up for the Loss of equipment to Air Raids, and to diversion to "Other non-Military" uses.

The Other Failing was the adherence to "Kuche, Kirke, und Kinder" ( Kitchen, Church and Children) Ideology for German Women up till the later years of the war. Britain ( and Later the USA) immediately employed Women to replace men in all but Technically or Labour-intensive War work, and many civilian job as well...Britain already had the experience of employing women in Munitions in WW I, so the experience was already there, and increased its coverage.

Doc AV

 

[Smokeeaterpilot]

Interesting and valid points concerning the "women in the workplace" mentality as well as the railways taken away from the war effort to transport people to the concentration camps.

daveccarlson - awesome summary on the events.

 

[David Murvihill]

Can't find the link, but a simple comparison of population, coal, steel and petroleum between the various Axis and Allied powers proves that the Axis could not sustain a long-term war, they simply didn't have the ability to outproduce the Allies. Some of their administrative decisions exacerbated their problems.

Hitler was kind of over a barrel with the Jewish question. After all, the Nazis used the Jews as a scapegoat during their rise to power, if they stopped persecuting them and started coopting them during the war it might make the rest of Germany wonder what else they got wrong...

 

[hershmeister]

Can't find the link, but a simple comparison of population, coal, steel and petroleum between the various Axis and Allied powers proves that the Axis could not sustain a long-term war, they simply didn't have the ability to outproduce the Allies. Some of their administrative decisions exacerbated their problems.

Hitler was kind of over a barrel with the Jewish question. After all, the Nazis used the Jews as a scapegoat during their rise to power, if they stopped persecuting them and started coopting them during the war it might make the rest of Germany wonder what else they got wrong...

Lets not tread into alternate history here a the nazi ideology and actions in law changes from 1933-1939 were completely aligned to "unperson" the Jewish people. After the wannsee conference in Jan 1942, the nazi policy shifted from get rid of the jews by encouraging their movement out to the "final solution" of complete extermination. Make no mistake that the nazi's still used slave jewish labor for the war effort. Somehow this seemingly irreconcilable difference didn't bother or stop the nazis from their policy of extermination.

 

[ireload2]

I am always interested to hear answers to the most basic question.

What was the logical basis for the German Nazi anti-semitism?

It seems absurd to give those types of thoughts any mental effort.
For me there are far more important things in life to worry about than religious affiliation.
By murdering 6 million Jews, Germany probably killed a number of Jewish men that would have had the command capability of Major General Maurice Rose.

 

[Clyde]

I am always interested to hear answers to the most basic question.

What was the logical basis for the German Nazi anti-semitism?

It seems absurd to give those types of thoughts any mental effort.
For me there are far more important things in life to worry about than religious affiliation.
By murdering 6 million Jews, Germany probably killed a number of Jewish men that would have had the command capability of Major General Maurice Rose.

There is no LOGICAL basis. Arbitrary. Jews are different, therefore enemies nd to be destroyed.

I suggest that you find a copy of the movie JUDGEMENT AT NUREMBERG and listen to the monolog toward the end by the character "Ernst Janning" (played by Burt Lancaster) and it will offer an insight as to the mechanism that helped seduce the people into looking the other way, or even participating, in the Holocaust - "If the Jews were destroyed, our enemies would be destroyed" - why the Jews were enemies, well, that never made much sense, but logic and facts were never part of the picture, in Nazi Germany, Russia or Poland of the pogroms, or elsewhere and elsewhen.