If Hitler didn't exist, would the Holocaust have happened? [Moved from Story Experts]

blacbird said:

All too true. But what sets the Nazi Holocaust is the planning, the industrial-scale methodical extermination machine for which Adolf Hitler was the central instigator. He was Chairman, and put in place Heinrich Himmler, to be CEO of the operation. And Himmler was damn good at his job.

I can't really come up with a truly parallel instance of this kind of thing, at this level, in human history. Certainly there were despots like Stalin who actually are accountable for even greater numbers of murders, but none that I know of so efficiently organized an effort to single out particular groups of people as fodder for the machine.

So, no, I don't buy into the idea that "if it hadn't been Hitler, it would have been someone else." Not for the concept and structure of the execution industry that was established.

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Agreed.

There's a difference between Hitler NEVER existing. And Hitler being killed at some point.

If he had never been born, there would never have been a holocaust IMO.

He was one of a kind monster.

And put together a very unique monstrosity.

this looks frighteningly similar to a writing related thread.

Bravo said:

writing related thread.

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What are those?

Smiling Ted said:

So...six million Jews, but 14 million Gentiles hiding them. What did the Christians do? Take turns?

"It's Tuesday, I'll hide Chaim in my attic. Christopher, you get him Wednesday and Thursday, and Christine, you take him for the weekend."

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apparently gentiles were falling all over themselves to save the jews....

Noir said:

In my story a time traveler goes back in time to kill Hitler... the story then revolves around him living the past out without Hitler. In my very limited knowledge of WWII, it seems like it still would have happened but not at that scale.

Was there a commander/general/second-in-command that would've taken the helm and went ahead with the Holocaust?

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There's no definitive answer here. Anyone that says it still would have occurred or would not have occurred is speculating. As has been noted, the circumstances that led to the rise of Hitler and the Holocaust would still exist.

As to "what-ifs," consider this: the time traveler assassinates Hitler, say, while Hitler is in prison (captive target, you know). Hitler becomes a martyr and Himmler takes over the Nazi party, rising from obscurity much earlier. And with him goes Reinhard Heydrich. Unlike Hitler, Himmler succeeds in actually defeating Hindenburg in the '32 election. Himmler and Heydrich begin preparing their answer to "the Jewish Question" much, much earlier.

Long and short: the Holocaust is ten times worse, Germany flattens the Soviets and never falls in WWII.

You could do another scenario: What if Heydrich hadn't been killed? He was by all accounts about as coldly ruthless as any of Hitler's inner circle. I've seen speculation that Hitler was secretly relieved once Heydrich was gone, not an unusual emotion from dictators who become leery of certain ambitious underlings (Castro and Che Guevara, Stalin and Trotsky, etc.). What if Heydrich lives, overthrows Hitler and becomes Führer?

That works, too. And it's Heydrich's nature that caused me to include him in my scenario. If Himmler and Heydrich had found common ground earlier on, they would have been even more formidable. Hitler's assassination could be such ground.

blacbird said:

You could do another scenario: What if Heydrich hadn't been killed? He was by all accounts about as coldly ruthless as any of Hitler's inner circle. I've seen speculation that Hitler was secretly relieved once Heydrich was gone, not an unusual emotion from dictators who become leery of certain ambitious underlings (Castro and Che Guevara, Stalin and Trotsky, etc.). What if Heydrich lives, overthrows Hitler and becomes Führer?

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Been done already...kinda!

Ah! Many thanks, Zoomer. I didn't know of this novel. Now I gotta get a copy and read it.

It was unrelentingly grim!

Another scenario would be if the "career nazis" like Erwin Rommel and Karl Dönitz and such who were more nazis for expediency than for deep rooted ideological belief. They were a factor as well, as represented by the Stauffenberg attempt on Hitler's life. Though, I stress that even these people were pretty anti-semitic. Dönitz is known to have said that he'd "rather eat dirt than see my grandchildren grow up in the filthy, poisonous atmosphere of Jewry".

But it's all speculation. Europe wasn't, and isn't, like the US. The OP would have to study the interelationships under the surface - such as the close relations between the german royal family and the british. It's not so easy to say "if x happened, there would be no holocaust."

By WW II concentration camps were standard fare in Europe. You'd already had the extermination of the Don Kossacks by Lenin and Trotskij, and the fabricated famine in the Ukraine. You also had the armenian genocide. Even Britain had concentration camps in Cyprus, after WW II when they interned jews fleeing to Palestine.

Reminds me a short story I wrote two years ago and posted on SYW.

In my story, Without Hitler the Holocaust would have happened but on the hands of the Soviets against undesirable threats to the URSS. (Russia had their fair share of anti-semitic feelings, just check out the Doctors' Plot), the Nazi Party, lacking such charismatic figure never had the strength as had in our world and WWII is known as the Anglo-Soviet War, basically consisting of UK and France allied with Italy and Spain to stop the URSS.

Oh, and the Jewish ended up founding a state in Manchuria... a proposal on the real world where Japan were trying to bring people to their colonies.

My knowledge of WWII is a tad sketchy, but I doubt my thoughts is very "far off".

It's somewhat frowned upon to provide links to other forums, but if it will make this thread die any quicker I invite you to all to check out a (rather detailed) chronology of history with Hitler removed.

Noir said:

In my story a time traveler goes back in time to kill Hitler... the story then revolves around him living the past out without Hitler. In my very limited knowledge of WWII, it seems like it still would have happened but not at that scale.

Was there a commander/general/second-in-command that would've taken the helm and went ahead with the Holocaust?

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Not sure if this has been mentioned yet, but there a concept called the temporal paradox.

If you go back in time to kill Hitler, and everything goes to plan (no Holocaust), you then have no reason to go back in time and kill Hitler in the first place, so you don't go back in time and kill Hitler, and then history as we know it plays out, so then you do go back in time to kill him, are successful in stopping the Holocaust, and then there's no Hitler for your future self to kill Hitler, and so you go back... ad nauseum. I think this makes sense?

So I'm thinking the only way that plot works is if the character is unsuccessful in preventing a genocide that's so horrific it makes them want to go back in time and kill whoever is the head of the monster.


I think...

Slushie said:

If you go back in time to kill Hitler, and everything goes to plan (no Holocaust), you then have no reason to go back in time and kill Hitler in the first place, so you don't go back in time and kill Hitler, and then history as we know it plays out, so then you do go back in time to kill him, are successful in stopping the Holocaust, and then there's no Hitler for your future self to kill Hitler, and so you go back... ad nauseum. I think this makes sense?

So I'm thinking the only way that plot works is if the character is unsuccessful in preventing a genocide that's so horrific it makes them want to go back in time and kill whoever is the head of the monster.


I think...

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You just made my head hurt real bad . . . I think.

Where's my Talisker?

Maxinquaye said:

Another scenario would be if the "career nazis" like Erwin Rommel and Karl Dönitz and such who were more nazis for expediency than for deep rooted ideological belief.

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When Rommel captured several hundred Jews in the First Free French Brigade after the epic defense of Bir Hachem, he disobeyed specific orders to single out the Jews and quietly insisted that all prisonners of war be treated as prisonners of war.

Slushie said:

Not sure if this has been mentioned yet, but there a concept called the temporal paradox.

If you go back in time to kill Hitler, and everything goes to plan (no Holocaust), you then have no reason to go back in time and kill Hitler in the first place, so you don't go back in time and kill Hitler, and then history as we know it plays out, so then you do go back in time to kill him, are successful in stopping the Holocaust, and then there's no Hitler for your future self to kill Hitler, and so you go back... ad nauseum. I think this makes sense?

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You're assuming time, or more to the point, history only moves along one straight line. Imagine instead a multi-dimensional concept of time. Killing Hitler would make history change directions (or rather create a parallel timeline, going in the same direction, but in a diiferent spot in spacetime). Our time traveler comes from one timeline's future, moves back along his timeline, kills Hitler, then moves forward, along with everybody else, along the timeline this created. Of course, he could never come back home to his own future. But the thing is, he didn't actually destroy the future of his timeline, he just made it Not The Future They're Moving Toward.

That way, he wouldn't make himself unborn or destroy his reason for going back in the first place. It's all still there, in a future that's not going to happen but that he came from anyway. Heck, he could even marry his grandma without becoming his own grandpa. It would mean he'd never be born in this new timeline, but that won't matter for the one he came from.

Easy.

Smiling Ted said:

So...six million Jews, but 14 million Gentiles hiding them. What did the Christians do? Take turns?

"It's Tuesday, I'll hide Chaim in my attic. Christopher, you get him Wednesday and Thursday, and Christine, you take him for the weekend."

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Wow. So there's now an urban myth that the Nazis killed 14 million German Christians?

Interesting since total German (civil and military) loses for the war are estimated at 7 million or so and that includes 6 million in military loses.
So each dead christian (about 1 mllion at the most) must have somehow been cycled through 14 camps to get the total up to a respectable 14 million.

Murderous anti-semitism thrived in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Croatia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, and other eastern Euorpean places well into the 1930s and after WWII as well, as documented in Poland and Lithuania. If I remember correctly, in 1937, the Cardinal of Poland advocated converting one-third of its Jews, expelling one-third, and killing one-third. They were about 10% of the population. No surprise where the main death camps were located. Note that I left out the Serbs and Bulgarians.

There seems to have been a tide of History that no matter who became a leader somewhere in Europe, tribal hatred of non-members would have first led to massacres of Jews first, organized or not, and then other "inferior" ethnic groups.

Ah, German planning and efficiency.

donroc said:

Ah, German planning and efficiency.

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If anything the Germans can be credited with being somewhat more fastidious than their fellow antisemites. Supposedly during the Arrow-Cross-flaming-Iron-Guard (greenshirt? I can't keep my fascists straight)
take-over in Roumania the hardened SS troops the Nazis sent in were
so sickened by what they supposedly wanted to witness that they intervened so that the slaughter would be conducted in a way less disturbing to the more professional and less purely enthusiastic sensibilities of the SS.

Max Vaehling said:

You're assuming time, or more to the point, history only moves along one straight line. Imagine instead a multi-dimensional concept of time. Killing Hitler would make history change directions (or rather create a parallel timeline, going in the same direction, but in a diiferent spot in spacetime). Our time traveler comes from one timeline's future, moves back along his timeline, kills Hitler, then moves forward, along with everybody else, along the timeline this created. Of course, he could never come back home to his own future. But the thing is, he didn't actually destroy the future of his timeline, he just made it Not The Future They're Moving Toward.

That way, he wouldn't make himself unborn or destroy his reason for going back in the first place. It's all still there, in a future that's not going to happen but that he came from anyway. Heck, he could even marry his grandma without becoming his own grandpa. It would mean he'd never be born in this new timeline, but that won't matter for the one he came from.

Easy.

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Okay, I think I see what you're saying. And the split to the new time line could happen just as soon as the character alters one tiny thing in the past, well before killing Hitler. So basically as long as the plot doesn't have the character go back to the original future, no problems.

John Jakes did a story like this, about the US Civil War. Can't remember the name.

Williebee said:

John Jakes did a story like this, about the US Civil War. Can't remember the name.

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Millions of Dead Confederates? That's a band name (MDC) or a hedge fund name (MEGACORPUSMDC)?

For the Union Dead? No, that's Robert Lowell?

Alternative Nazi Confederate Aliens? The Same Nazi Confederate Aliens? All New Nazi Confederate Aliens? That's Harry Turtledove, right?

I give up.

Counterfactual history is kinda hard to do. What if, due to Hitler's absence, a particularly charismatic politician arose and happened to be opposed to anti-semitism? If he was a yes-man until he got into power, like Hitler, he could have slipped through and then used his influence to limit or prevent any Holocaust.

What if Hitler's absence allowed Ernst Rohm--I know my spelling is probably wrong, but I'm talking about the SA leader guy--to start a big rebellion, except that when the non-Hitler government put it down, they used it as an excuse to crack down on Nazism and public support turned toward liberal democracy or Communism?

No real way to say for sure. But anti-semitism and eugenics were definitely present before the Nazis.

movieman said:

Well, Churchill gave half of Europe to the communists, so if he wasn't left-wing he was certainly their best friend on the right.

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He didn't "give" it to them so much as acknowledge the reality that they had it.

GeorgeK said:

You forgot the approximately 7 million Catholics and another 7 million Lutherans who died in the camps because they were "collaborators" in hiding the Jews etc in their attics.



There were also Soviet death camps at the same time where probably more people died than in Hitler's camps. The problem is that normally history is written by the victor. Germany lost and so there are better records.

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Er, got to quibble on both of those.

The 3-4 million non-Jews who died in the Holocaust includes the Catholics and Lutherans and quite a few others. There definitely weren't 14 million Christians killed in the Holocaust. There weren't even 14 million people killed total, according to most accepted numbers.

Very specific nuance here. Stalin's labor/death camps accounted for a lot of dead people, but I'm not sure they exceeded the number who died in Hitler's camps. (Not sure they didn't, either.) Stalin _did_ probably kill more people than Hitler, but a lot of that comes from other things like forced starvation in Ukraine and things like that.

Maxx said:

Millions of Dead Confederates? That's a band name (MDC) or a hedge fund name (MEGACORPUSMDC)?

For the Union Dead? No, that's Robert Lowell?

Alternative Nazi Confederate Aliens? The Same Nazi Confederate Aliens? All New Nazi Confederate Aliens? That's Harry Turtledove, right?

I give up.

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North and South?