German interrogation files

3,789 Views | 36 Replies | Last: 6 yr ago by Smokedraw01
RPag
How long do you want to ignore this user?
By most I mean only that more than 50% of Western Jews survived. I'm pretty sure that's true although now that I think about it that might include Britain and Ireland which would obviously skew the percentages. And the percentages of course do not tell the whole story. France, which had the largest population of jews in Western Europe, had 75% of its jews survive. However, a majority of those who died were Polish jews who had immigrated, a common scene throughout Europe. States were generally unwilling to kill there own citizens.

Your point about the theft of jewish property is a good one. Ghettos would be forced to ransom their own jews to save them from deportation only to deported at a later date. Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka, believed that they were gassing the jews in order to steal their property.
RGV AG
How long do you want to ignore this user?
AG
Rpag:

You are right Jews in Western Europe fared better than Eastern European Jewry, but pockets and different countries had differing levels of murder. Greece, The Netherlands, and Belgium had very large percentages, per capita, of the Jews, either longer term residents or recent relocations, living there exterminated. Surprisingly on a percentage basis, and this illustrates some of your points, Austrian Jews fared better by percentage, but still had more than double the amount of Belgian Jews killed.

Some of the macabre actions that took place in terms of just outright greed and lust for blood money was German squads, and then later local citizens, going prospecting for abandon and hidden Jewish wealth after deportations and murders in Jewish homes and hideouts. This went on well into the 1950's and 1960's. The money and loot grab dimmed many consciences of locals helping to exterminate the Jews, in both the east and the west. I can't help but view the Nazi's as just outright thieves and crooks that made murder justifiable to plunder.
Smokedraw01
How long do you want to ignore this user?
RPag said:

There was never any real, ultimate plan to murder the Jews of Europe and there is an ungoing debate about how it arose and how it was implemented. Concentration camps were an aspect of one version of a final solution; that the jews would be worked to death but even this was a deviation from their original purpose which was to imprison political prisoners. Dachua opened in the 1930s and even in 1940, prisoners were being realized from Auchwitz. The solution to the jewish problem was first emigration (to Madagascar for instance), then to Siberia or the Lublin District to be worked to death, and finally by murder on an industrial scale; first with bullets then with gas.

This is were our intuitions fail us. When we (citizens of Western countries) think about the Holocaust we imagine an all powerful, fascist government taking away the rights of citizens, throwing them in camps and eventually killing them with the help of the bureaucracy but this is a distorted history. Most people who entered concentration camps survived and many wrote memoirs. The Holocaust took place over massive killing pits in Babi Yar, Rumubala, and the Ponary Forest and in the gas chambers of Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec. Almost no one survived the mass shootings or Reinhard camps. Virtually all of these jews were Soviet (meaning Ukranain, Baltic, Russian, etc) and Polish who were killed because they inhabited the land of a future German colony. Even Auschwitz, the great western symbol of Holocaust, gives us an incomplete view. By the time Auschwitz was a major extermination center, most Jews, including almost all of Polish Jews, were already dead. As terrible as the concentration camps were, they were not the center of the Final Solution


Germany didn't have a Jewish problem until they invaded Poland.
Refresh
Page 2 of 2
 
×
subscribe Verify your student status
See Subscription Benefits
Trial only available to users who have never subscribed or participated in a previous trial.