Posted on 01/26/2020 7:03:52 AM PST by Olympiad Fisherman
While this may surprise many, there is actually an old dispute between historians over the intentionality of the Holocaust. In academic circles, it is called the Intentionalism vs. Functionalism debate. Intentionalists simply argue the Nazis intended to annihilate the Jews all along consistent with their oft-repeated statements, and finally took seriously their plans to do so from 1938 onwards. Functionalists, on the other hand, strongly argue that in spite of the earlier violent shrills of Nazis rhetoric against the Jews, the Holocaust itself occurred in a rather ad hoc manner based largely on differing and evolving circumstances that became increasingly radicalized into a gigantic snowball of sorts that could not be stopped once it started rolling down the mountainside, creating wider and wider swaths of destruction the farther it went downslope ....
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Anyone claiming the deaths were not on purpose doesn’t know the entire history of the Nazi.
Their own statements of purpose and plans and actions are not vague. They fully intended to eliminate, by killing, the Jews.
Claiming otherwise is tantamount to claiming someone saying they are going to punch you and then does so might of only tripped and lost their balance and it was an accident.
One group read Mein Kampf, the other didn’t...
Something so quickly organized and so horribly efficient and massive didn’t “just happen.”
Step 1 to both sides.
Ban guns.
A furniture store in a town where I lived was owned by an Auschwitz survivor - he was very successful and when each of his three sons hit 21, he set them up with their own business.
Was it attended by Bernie and Pocahontas and the Demoniacrats?
Wow.
The Functionalist view of the Holocaust is largely a German point of view, but is mixed in with others unwittingly helped to foster it without thinking it through seriously enough.
It is amazing what happens to historians when they are influenced by Marxian materialism and postmodern madness.
Die Wannseekonferenz (1984)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URSNN5mnI2g
(Much better than “Conspiracy”)
It hardly seems pertinent to wonder what degree of deliberation went into the camps - the Operation Reinhard facilities were meticulously planned, monstrously operated, and after autumn of 1943 carefully cleaned up to minimize or eliminate the evidence. So well, in fact, that archaeological evidence of the gas chambers and crematoria at Sobibor wasn't found until 2014. At what point the building execution of the Jews morphed into the Holocaust is a subject of debate - it is usually set at the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 but plenty of murder went on before that, notably at Chelmno, where, under Aktion T4, the original target of "social undesirables" included but was not restricted to the Jewish population. SOURCE
But as the author states, the Holocaust included more than the extermination facilities - Nikolaus Wachsmann does not use the term "camps" for these - and most of the labor camps were, in their own brutal way, death camps due to exposure, disease, and starvation. The conditions in those camps were not accidental, and if they worsened due to overcrowding as the war went on, that was itself entirely predictable and deliberately neglected.
The game-changer at Wannsee was the fact that the policy changed, where half-Jews were now considered as full-Jews, which was contrary to the policies established in the Nuremberg Laws.
Whereas before Wannsee, the process was more arbitrary, Wannsee made it precise.
A casual survey of what the Nazis did will reveal that there was nothing ad hoc in their goals, their plans, and the execution of their policy. Take a look at what happened in Hungary.
Hungary was an ally of Germany, so the Germans did nothing to deal with the “Jewish problem” in Hungary until Hungary withrew from the Axis and sued for peace with the Allies. At that point, the Germans had refined their policies, programs, and methods and launched their extermination system with a vengance using the lessons that they had learned elsewhere. What the Germans did in Hungary was deliberate, ruthless, and effective. The facts from Hungary destroys the ad hoc argument.
Most likely.
Distortions :
“1/6” of all murders for 1 million killed at ...
Thats for jews killed. Its Not mentioning the 5+ other million people the nazis similarly murdered - including several million Russian POWs.
.
Not usually mentioned : the long term intent of the Nazi to exterminate ALL the Slavs in the lands they were attempting to conquered (well over 100 million).
Nor is mentioned the numbers (far more millions beyond the ‘holocaust’) murdered by the Soviets decades previous -— a chapter of history leftist academics chronically ignore.
Sometime in the recent years there was a declaration in the media that the ‘camps’ were much more numerous than previously thought ... “10000” !!!. But that wasnt really news, as farming inmates out to ‘work’ camps close to the industries they served was already understood - and these were now being counted.
It was more a case of the journalists thinking they had some new revelation when they didnt.
Yes, very few ‘workers’ survived as it was a slower way to death, and yes, Chelmo was already in operation before Operation Reinhard got going, but perhaps the point was to point out the almost 2 million deaths associated with Reinhard and Chelmo.
Yes, their goals were not ad-hoc, but the implementation of the Final Solution was much more difficult to accomplish, and this is where the ad hoc functionalists take over the discussion. Contrary to popular opinion, the road to Auschwitz was very twisted and full of chaos at the very beginning, but once they got there, it was a well oiled through a brutal process of trial and error. By 1944, Operation Reinhard was already over, and then the Hungarian Jews were rounded up and sent to Auschwitz - some half million of them died there.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.