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

eugenics was not a "left wing movement".

movieman said:

That said, the ideas of eugenics and death camps for unpopular minorities seem to have been popular among left-wing intellectuals at the time,

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Erhh. No. The support for eugenics was not limited to, nor more prevalent among "left wing intellectuals" than those on the right.

E. G. would you consider Sir Francis Galton, Sir Winston Churchill, John Keynes, Charles Davenport, Alexander Graham Bell, Andrew Carnegie or Calvin Coolidge to be "left wing"?

The truth of the matter is that eugenics, like racism, patriotism or other forms of elitism, offers something for all. To quote faqs.org: "Proponents of eugenics often play on nationalist fears of a diluted racial stock, combined with the idealism of building a better society. // Social progressives saw eugenics as a tool for social improvement and reform,while conservatives saw eugenics as a tool for limiting the lower income groups and the cost of caring for them."

Maxx said:

Also, I'm not so sure that the traditional antisemitism of the Church (or of Christianity or of The Gospel of John or other olde antisemitic conconctions) is really exactly the same thing as whatever propelled the holocausts of the 1940s.

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How do you mean?

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.

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Agreed. However, the notion of removing population segments and placing them under incarceration to stop them from breeding, while at the same time utilizing them as slave labor was widespread.

If Himmler, Heydrich and Hitler had been removed, perhaps there would be no Treblinka or Belzec, but certainly some Dachau and Mauthausen where the inmates were not deliberately exterminated, but simply used up and when no longer productive, disposed of.

PeterL said:

There are many people in history who might have done interesting things, if they had lived longer, and there are people whose earlier deaths probably would have changedhistory, conside Jesus...

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MAD TV already did that. In a Terminator parody.

KQ800 said:

Agreed. However, the notion of removing population segments and placing them under incarceration to stop them from breeding, while at the same time utilizing them as slave labor was widespread.

If Himmler, Heydrich and Hitler had been removed, perhaps there would be no Treblinka or Belzec, but certainly Dachau and Mauthausen where the inmates where not deliberately exterminated, but simply used up and when no longer productive, disposed of.

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According to a recent reassessment (Adam Tooze's The Wages of Destruction ), the idea of extermination by various means was more fundamental to the aims of the Nazi regime than slave labor or even military or economic rationality. For example, 3 million Russian POWs were allowed to starve when they would have been happy to work and Treblinka (mostly a pure killing camp) was running full blast before Auschwitz (where there was some slave labor) and Leningrad was supposed to be starved and leveled rather than captured.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/aug/12/featuresreviews.guardianreview16

Maxx said:

According to a recent reassessment (Adam Tooze's The Wages of Destruction ), the idea of extermination by various means was more fundamental to the aims of the Nazi regime than slave labor or even military or economic rationality. For example, 3 million Russian POWs were allowed to starve when they would have been happy to work and Treblinka (mostly a pure killing camp) was running full blast before Auschwitz (where there was some slave labor) and Leningrad was supposed to be starved and leveled rather than captured.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/aug/12/featuresreviews.guardianreview16

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Yes. I made my remark with that in mind. The upper echelon of nazis with the troika of H:s were not rational about their racism.

However. Even with that taken into account the general support for the idea of ethnic cleansing was strong and widespread so, as I said; EVEN IF you removed the three most driven murderers, the camps would have been put into effect and used, killing people slowly through slave labor rather than outright executions.

No, if you read and account for the rise of the Third Reich, there is no question that Hitler set upon gaining power by blaming Jews for the woes of the nation. His in power only fueled his obsession to destroy the race.

There are several accounts in which top military advisors tried to persuade him that this obsession was expending to many resources, and hurting the expansion of the Reich.

Also, it helped him considerably that his closest advisers were criminally insane and took great pleasure in carrying out his orders... It don't happen without Hitler.

KQ800 said:

Yes. I made my remark with that in mind. The upper echelon of nazis with the troika of H:s were not rational about their racism.

However. Even with that taken into account the general support for the idea of ethnic cleansing was strong and widespread so, as I said; EVEN IF you removed the three most driven murderers, the camps would have been put into effect and used, killing people slowly through slave labor rather than outright executions.

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I don't think so. I think the dynamic of a paranoid ruler is necessary to really get death camps or purges going. You can have genocide and ethnic cleansing without paranoid rulers, but to reach Stalin-Hitler-Pol Pot levels of mass murder you need a Stalin or a Hitler or a Pol Pot.
Italy would be the counter-example: a Fascist regime with plenty of murder, but no death camps. As Paxton argues in Anatomy of Fascism,
the Nazi regime was not classically Fascist, but a weird thing engineered by Hitler.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/02/books/the-original-axis-of-evil.html

If L. Ron Hubbard didn't exist, would there be Scientology?

Hitler didn't completely make up something. He catalyzed pre-existing sentiments of anti-semitism and nationalism. So obviously the issue isn't as black and white as it is with Scientology. But still, I disagree with Tolstoy: extraordinary men / events can hugely influence history. The Nürnberger racial laws might probably have happened without Hitler. The second world war would probably have happened too (it wasn't just Germany anyway). Some deportations and even killings maybe too. But a large-scale holocaust, the systematic extermination of an ethnicity? I highly doubt it.

I think the important thing here is that killing Hitler doesn't suddenly make everything a wonderful world. Hitler wasn't some allpowerful antichrist and things would have been pretty bad without him. On the other hand, saying Hitler had no influence whatsoever is beyond absurd too. The right answer is somewhere in between, and in order to estimate the exact outcome, extensive historical study needs to be done.

Drachen Jager said:

Hitler was just the front man. If it hadn't been him it would have been someone else, worse or better, but comparable. The holocaust and WWII were caused by long standing historical grievances and the excessive reparation payments Germany had to pay after WWI.

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Hitler's main ability was in being charismatic, initially in convincing wealthy baronesses to finance his political aims and later in swaying the nation to his goals. That said, what would have happened if Hitler's assassination lead to the SA's taking over before the SS could wipe them out?

What would have happened if the time traveller had assassinated Winston Churchill before he could sink the Lusitania and blame it on the Germans during WWI? What if the time traveller had arranged for a German fishing fleet to be standing by to save the rich Americans who died during the sinking of the Lusitania?

This might answer a few questions.

KQ800 said:

E. G. would you consider Sir Francis Galton, Sir Winston Churchill, John Keynes, Charles Davenport, Alexander Graham Bell, Andrew Carnegie or Calvin Coolidge to be "left wing"?

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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. If that's the same Keynes who invented Keynesian economics then yes. I can't really comment on the others since I don't know much about them.

The truth of the matter is that eugenics, like racism, patriotism or other forms of elitism, offers something for all.

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Everyone who believes in authoritarianism, probably. However, the Fabians and their fellow travellers seem to have been particularly devoted to the idea; I do vaguely remember Churchill talking about eugenics, but I don't remember him advocating mass gassing as Shaw did.

Max Vaehling said:

MAD TV already did that. In a Terminator parody.

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Oooh, I remember that... The Greatest Action Story Ever Told, lol!

But it was Judas Ahnold was killing before he could betray Jesus, who wanted him to betray Him.

That could be an interesting take: rather than offing Hitler before he got all important, how about someone who affected him? Have him find out about his (alleged) Jewish father? And twist it by ending with someone else getting twisted like Hitler because of the change in Hitler.

PeterL said:

Mao was responsible for more deaths than any other human, but I don't think that he was paranoid in the way that Hitler was.

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Well, you could probably kill Mao and you would still get a revolutionary overthrow of the Chang-Kai-Shek regime and probably just as much demographic loss (the deaths attributed to Mao and Stalin are calculated
from what the size of the population would have been if it had grown
at a normal rate versus what actually happened during the period 1920 to 1980 -- China and Russia both come up many 10s of millions short of what would have happened in a perfect world).

On the other hand, the mass killings of the Nazi regime can be much more clearly delineated in terms of timing and numbers.

re: Eugenics.

Hitler didn't invent it. The Holocaust was the worship of eugenics, imo, and it would have happened whether Hitler died in WWI or not.

It was very popular in the US and around the world pre-WWII. If you have ever read the explosive opinions of Margaret Sanger, among many others, you get a hint of where it could have gone here. If the Nazis had not shown the logical end-point of eugenics, would the US have disavowed its implementation? If not, what would have happened her? Blacks were first on the 'list', Jews, Mormons, the poor, Native Americans, etc. And the 'feeble-minded' and mentally ill were tops on the list of everyone (google Hadamar trials for that little-known horror)

There was so much more than one little evil man to work with in that era. Hitler did not create the evil, he just facilitated its implementation. So many actively involved...jmho.

MeretSeger said:

re: Eugenics.
If the Nazis had not shown the logical end-point of eugenics, would the US have disavowed its implementation?

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While I agree with you on your other points,if you think the US eugenics ended after -45. It did not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States

If you mean that without the nazis as a bad example the us would have kept its apartheid laws longer than it did, then I agree.

KQ800 said:

While I agree with you on your other points,if you think the US eugenics ended after -45. It did not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States

If you mean that without the nazis as a bad example the us would have kept its apartheid laws longer than it did, then I agree.

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It seems to have petered out as a mass movement, but generally, we are in agreement.

Personally, I think the returning African American war veterans were the core of the end of the racist laws. It just took time.

Edit: I've just noticed that this has been said before. I hope the way I said it can shed a bit more understanding on the specific viewpoint.

From what I can say, is that undoubtedly yes.

It might have not been germany, it might not have been jews, but somewhere at some point were were going to have a mass genocide.

The "Sciences" such as eugenics were unfortunately in practice in the US, Great Brittian, Canada, Australia and others. In some places smaller camps for "Undesirables" were created, but nothing on the scale of Hitlers Nazi Germany.

But it wouldn't have been long if he hadn't shown up. Civil unrest in the US, Cultural in the far east, and economic in Europe. It was only a matter of time before some nutjob who followed that "science" like a zealot got in power somewhere. And for all we know, that nutjob might have been more careful than Hitler.

This might sound pro Nazi, but trust me its not.

For all the evil Hitler committed, it brought a lot of stability back into the world, and he took most of the rest of us off the path because he ran ahead of us.

The old cliche is that if you put a frog in cold water, and heat it up, it'll stay in till it dies. If you put it in hot, it'll get out immediately. Hitler and the Nazi's were the human race's splash of hot water.

Without him, we probably wouldn't blink twice at sending undesirables to a camp to be "Taken care of."

Nivarion said:

For all the evil Hitler committed, it brought a lot of stability back into the world, and he took most of the rest of us off the path because he ran ahead of us.

The old cliche is that if you put a frog in cold water, and heat it up, it'll stay in till it dies. If you put it in hot, it'll get out immediately. Hitler and the Nazi's were the human race's splash of hot water.

Without him, we probably wouldn't blink twice at sending undesirables to a camp to be "Taken care of."

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The Nazis killed six million Jews and four million Gypsies, homosexuals, political prisoners, and other "undesirables" (counting only non-combatants). Let us know when the number of people potentially saved by this splash of hot water reaches 10 million - and don't forget to deduct the victims of genocide in the Balkans, Cambodia, Rwanda, and Darfur, all slaughtered post-1945.

If Hitler didn't exist, would the Holocaust have happened?

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The vast majority of Jews killed in the Holocaust lived outside Germany, coming from countries occupied by the Wehrmacht during WW2. So reckless German military expansionism was a prerequisite. If an alternative German leader, even one fanatically anti-Jewish, had taken the route of consolidating his own internal power without risking it on external campaigns, the Holocaust on our scale could not have happened.

Other fascist leaders such as Mussolini and Franco were nowhere near as anti-semitic as Hitler, so our alternative leader would have had to be violently anti-semitic as well as fascist, and to have had an equal interest in eugenics, to have been as charismatic as Hitler, and as content to commit genocide. Our alternative German leader would need to share so many of Hitler's characteristics that it's difficult to believe he would have emerged.

World War Two probably would have happened, though. I've read several interwar novels where the characters regarded it as a certainty.

Smiling Ted said:

The Nazis killed six million Jews and four million Gypsies, homosexuals, political prisoners, and other "undesirables" (counting only non-combatants). Let us know when the number of people potentially saved by this splash of hot water reaches 10 million - and don't forget to deduct the victims of genocide in the Balkans, Cambodia, Rwanda, and Darfur, all slaughtered post-1945.

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Remember, we're talking about something that altered the course of history. Trying to predict how many might have died had the whole world continued on eugenics is like trying to predict how many would have died had a driver not applied his breaks.

It might have been no one, it could have been a high fatality 20 car pile up.

Smiling Ted said:

The Nazis killed six million Jews and four million Gypsies, homosexuals, political prisoners, and other "undesirables" (counting only non-combatants). .

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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.

Smiling Ted said:

- and don't forget to deduct the victims of genocide in the Balkans, Cambodia, Rwanda, and Darfur, all slaughtered post-1945.

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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.

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.

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I know that non-Jewish collaborators were killed by the Nazis, but you really need to document these figures. 14 million? More Catholics than Jews? More Lutherans than Jews? I don't think so.

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.

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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."

Hold on, gang, while we take a little ride.

The discussion can continue in the P&CE forum.