Did the Holocaust have any benefits for the Third Reich
>>673938
Fulfillment of ideological imperatives.
It would have gotten rid of the Jews if it had worked, which probably would have been good for Germany
>>673943
In what way?
They would have lost their intellectual elite, which seems like a pretty big disadvantage to me
Would Nazi leaders be charged with war crimes if the Holocaust never happens?
>>673984
yes, for the crime of losing the war
>>673972
Who needs Jewish intellectuals, anyway? The Nazis would have finished the bomb without Einstein if the war had gone on longer.
>>673996
Well, it seems to me that it is still better having them than not having them.
Also, Holocaust tied up many ressources that could have been used in war effort elsewhere
>>673996
but they didn't, and lost
not that most of them would have willingly worked for them anyways
jews were good to have on your team
>>673996
In the 1950s, maybe. Heisenberg's calculations for the critical mass were literally orders of magnitude off and demonstrated a misunderstanding of how fast neutron propagation works.
If the war had gone on longer, the Americans would have been dropping bombs on Berlin, well, well before the Germans finished their own bomb. Historically, they never got to the point where Fermi was in 1942.
>>674004
>Also, Holocaust tied up many ressources that could have been used in war effort elsewhere
Not as much as you might think. Most of the operatives were guys who weren't fit for frontline service, policemen and the like; and coal was one of the few things that the Germans had too much of to use effectively. I mean, sure, the resources could have been used elsewhere, but it would hardly have slowed down the Soviet tide.
>>673984
Yeah, the Holocaust was never a war crime after all
>>673938
no, that was the point
>>673938
A lot, actually. The Holocaust effectively ran at a profit, although if the Germans hadn't kept killing their workers it would have been far more efficient. The confiscated gold, money and other valuables helped pay for the war, and many other
items were used for industrial purposes, such as the hair from prisoners. They also benefited from cheap slave labor, and reduced demand for food. Towards the end of the war, however, things began to change. The Nazis continued to waste
some of their most loyal and fanatical troops guarding the prisoners, and wasted tons of ammunition and fuel trying to cover up the crimes that had been committed.
>>674049
I would think most of the Jews were way overqualified for the manual labour in concentration camps, and could have been used in far more demanding tasks
>>674029
>Not as much as you might think.
But you must also consider than instead of beeing murdered, the many abilities of Jews could have been put to good use in fighting Soviets
>>673938
Depends what you consider a "benefit." The driving idea behind the wanton genocide had its roots in WW1. Back in WW1, Germany found that they were strategically unsustainable in a total war. They tried to fix this by colonizing baltic territories (Ober Ost), but found that even by resorting to forced labor and pretty much doing everything they could to drain resources from the land, they were still taking a net loss by occupying the region.
The Nazis' solution to this was brutally simple - just don't worry about the locals. Kill off all those locals and then you've got far fewer mouths to feed while still getting all the land and resources they lived on. Better, you can confiscate their property and even rely on forced labor.
It's absolutely abhorrent regardless, but there very much was a logic to it.
>>673996
>The Nazis would have finished the bomb without Einstein if the war had gone on longer.
Doubtful. They politicized science by associating Einstein's theory of relativity and other important pieces of physics with the Jews. It didn't necessarily prevent them outright from using the concepts, but it reduced their importance in academics and made it harder to get support for anything based around it.
>>674072
But why focusing on killing Jews, especially, in Germany?
>>674065
>But you must also consider than instead of beeing murdered, the many abilities of Jews could have been put to good use in fighting Soviets
Roughly 3/4 of the Jews killed in the holocaust were from either Poland or the USSR's various constituent states. Very few, if any of them are going to be friendly towards you, even if your regime has 0 elements of anti-semitism, what with the whole "invaded our country" thing.
You're not going to squeeze that much out of them. The Jewish community in Germany before the Nazis took power was what? 5-600,000? It's just not that big of a deal when it comes to utilizing Jewish manpower.
>>673984
even with the broadest possible definition of the holocaust, absolutely
>>674060
The atomic bomb is basically this in a nutshell.
>>674065
I'd argue that, while the Holocaust was pants-on-head retarded for short-term strategic thinking, it was a solid long term strategy (as long as you're ignoring the fact that it required the deaths of millions of people) because it intended to free up a ton of resources for Germany.
From a purely strategic standpoint, it would have been a better idea to wait until the war over to really start on the genocide, as you had a lot of counterproductive persecutions, particularly on the Eastern Front.
>>674090
They made great scapegoats for all of Germany's problems. Remember that antisemitism was a pretty big thing all over Europe up until the end of WW2, and they were one of the few populations within Germany that could really be targeted as "others." It also helped that there was a lot of popular support for the idea that it was the Jews' fault for Germany losing WW1.
It's not like they were the only targets, however. Remember that anti-slav sentiment was really high as well, and up until the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact Goebbels was working hard to make Germans hate Russia just as much as they hated the Jews.
The general idea was to make all the hate target the most strategically "useful" populations.
>>674060
given the situation, why would you ever trust them with the responsibility of more demanding tasks? there was already a certain degree of sabotage on the simplest things.
>went to Auschwitz last year
>pretty nice looking place
Looked pretty comfy.
>>674114
But why focus on killing Polish and Russian Jews over Poles or Russians? All ot those population groups are probably gonna be equally hostile towards a German occupation force
>>674149
I dunno, maybe if nazi didn't treat them like vermins and send them into death camps, jews might be more willing to cooperate
>>674174
exactly what i'm saying
but doing that was one of the main ways they got power, so IMO it's not really separable
>>674167
well, let's just say it wasn't done for conventional logic
>>674167
Well, like I said upthread, fulfillment of ideological imperatives. Nazis thought Jews were responsible for Bolshevism and most of the world's ills. Removing them was a goal in and of itself, not a step towards other goals.
>>674136
>because it intended to free up a ton of resources for Germany.
How? The only possible benefit I see is a more homogeneous society
>anti-slav sentiment
This is something else I dont understand.
The pic related is a poster from a movie in 1939, which plays in moscow high society.
I just dont understand how germans went from admirering Russian upper class to seeing Russians as vermin in just a few years
>>674191
So you think Hitlers rise to power would have been impossible without his anti jew sentiments?
>>674209
"a more homogeneous society"
The percentage of Jews, Roma etc. in Germany was tiny
>>674199
right, enemies of the world hegemon always turn out to be illogical and insane, funny how that works out
>>674215
it would have been significantly different in approach and less likely to succeed. i don't know what he would have done without it. the combination of post war ills and deep rooted european antisemitism was the foundation.
>>674209
>How? The only possible benefit I see is a more homogeneous society
Because you're taking land that can and is supporting millions of people and then going and purging all of those people. All those resources that supported those people are now available for the much smaller population. Most important is food - food supplies and arable land that was originally (unsustainably) supporting well over 100 million people are now being given to just ~80 million.
>I just dont understand how germans went from admirering Russian upper class to seeing Russians as vermin in just a few years
Propaganda was a hell of a drug, especially with the unprecedented methods Goebbels had. Radio and movies were being used for propaganda like never before, and there was always extensive efforts to rewrite history every time the official stance changed. They made it impossible to really uncover the truth and kept repeating and glorifying the official stance until you either agreed or were too afraid to disagree for fear of being ostracized by the community.
>>674250
Well, look how America became great in the 19th and 20th centry through all the immigrantion that significantly boosted its population.
Now, if you take nazi approach, with killing people instead of assimilation, not only is your population gonna remain small in comparison, other countries will also hate you for all the evil shit you do, so you can only lose in the long term
>>674262
Not him, but America had huge amounts of land and virtually nobody on it. Continental Europe was hardly in the same demographic situation.
The Germans switched from shooting Jews into mass graves to using poison gas and starvation/death by labor, because executing 10,000 Jews a week was costing the Germans a lot of ammo (that was needed elsewhere on the Eastern Front). Nevermind that shooting scarred the men mentally, and even fucking Himmler got spooked and decided gas was the better way.
The Nazis were focused on engineering an industrialized death system in 1942 while the Allies were mobilizing their massive war economies and the Soviets built 20,000 fucking T-34s. Retards who think Hitler or Naziism saved Germany's economy completely fail to see how poorly it was utilized and deliberately held back by a clusterfuck of a bureaucracy.
Killing jews did absolutely nothing to help Nazi Germany; the only practical benefit was the pilfering of Jewish wealth and property - most of which was already seized before the killing started (the "economic miracle" was literally jew gold and public works projects). Yeah, they didn't need exactly A grade soldiers to do the job, but considering how things were going on the front lines, it is reasonable to assume Germans used camp duty as a reprieve from being sent to die in the East.
Only later on did the camp system provide any benefit to the war industry and this was through massive and widespread use of slave labor - while not actually improving output by much.
All the brilliant Jewish engineers and craftsmen were slaughtered or scared off, leaving unskilled, illiterate slavic fodder to work in production lines until they died or stopped being productive. German factories could have increased productivity much more by using what foreign talent they had and increasing the number of shifts for regular workers
That the Germans put so much effort into removing the Jews is precisely why Holocaust denial is a thing. People can see Nazi Germany as this industrial superpower and as this ideology wholly opposed to Jews, but not believe they put the two together.
>>674224
This, and German Jews were not the same as the backwoods, segregated Polish and Russian Jews.The German Jews were very much assimilated, very cultured and WANTED to be German. Hell, thousands of Jews fought in WW1 so they might be accepted as Germans, only to be told that they were traitors and cowards in 1918.
>>674262
This guy
>>674264
Has the idea right - Europe was already full, while Manifest Destiny America was very much the opposite. Germany's most pressing strategic need wasn't manpower so much as resources. They had a considerably larger population than both Britain and France (~80 million to about ~45-50 million each), whereas the Germans had critical shortages of major supplies.
Remember - in WW1, even with the Entente drawing heavily on their colonies and Russia providing a major manpower advantage, the Central Powers didn't really have a manpower shortage until the very end of the war. Rather, their most pressing concern was food shortages. Germany (and really Central Europe as a whole) was not self-sustaining, and with the British in control of the seas and not above underhanded tactics to prevent the importation of food and strategic materials, keeping the country fed and supplied was a bigger concern.
Using your analogy, the holocaust aimed to create the very situation that 19th Century America seized on by creating a massive underpopulated area in which the population could settle and exploit.
this board needs ID's and fucking flags so much shilling
>>674264
Lebensraum is a classic imperialist excuse for letting your supposedly superior nation get off with being lazy shits.
>We're gonna build a highly industrialized, well planned and homogenous society because we're Germans and we wuz romans and sheet!
>Germany is strong and has all the resources we need to accomplish this!
>Just in case we can't, lets invade all of Europe because we need all their shit in order to literally survive
>Germany is a self sufficient industrialized nation amirite?
When Britain colonized the world, it was to exploit resources and for strategic purposes and they set up intricate and efficient systems to do this all over the world. When Germany tried to do the same all they did was chimp out on the locals, not utilize all manpower assets and essentially squandered all the potential their territories had. Germany had France, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Ukraine, a quarter of Russia, Norway, the Low Countries - all first rate industrialized nations - let them go to waste while fat fuck lazy Nazi bureaucrats fellated each other. Germany had the potential all on their own to acheive autarky through production and trade, but was so horribly mismanaged they deserved their fate.
>>674378
I know, /pol/ and /int/ and /sp/ must be soooo bored shitposting on their own boards, lets bring them here!
