I don’t even think that’s as much of a distinction as you think.
In 1930s Germany, the Nazi platform was “We’re going to relocate these Jews. We’ll make some kind of settlement for them, or shift them to other nations, who knows.”
Maybe at the end of the war the Holocaust - their “final solution” for the relocation problem was made clear, but even then anyone could have raised questions about where there were going.
Political excuses like “Relocation” are extremely common for Genocide.
No, The Nazi Platform in the 1930s was not “let’s relocate these Jews”. It was very clearly set out that they wanted to eliminate all Jews from the face of the earth, and have a pure race untainted by Jewish blood. That’s why they killed anyone that even had a Jewish grandparent. They systematically swept Europe’s Jewish population, children, women, elderly and murdered them in concentration camps. 6 million. All documented. The Nazis would tell Jews in deportation camps that they were sending them to work camps, while forcing them on trains that took them directly to Auschwitz and 40 other death camps.
You must get your facts correct before you apologise for the Nazis. It’s not “maybe at the end of the war”…It was always the agenda of the Nazis to kill every single Jew and they were incredibly efficient and successful. Killing 6 million people is an unfathomable task, and sadly much of Europe was complicit, unaware, frightened.
The tail end of that sentence was “…was made clear.” Up until then, the narrative seen to the world and the German public was different.
I’m not even claiming that Germany had a perfect veil of secrecy over it; just that they would use propaganda to push just enough plausible excuses over the “missing people”, the smokestacks, that the world wasn’t convinced until the end of the war that systematic execution was really going on.
And yes, deportation was an early public part of Germany’s plans, in part because that’s more publically digestible. They canceled plans to move many Jews to France after colonizing it - referred to as the Madagascar Plan - because of a blockade.
Of course, one major aspect of deportation is that people become sight-unseen at many destinations. The gestapo can easily execute people with gunfire en masse once they’re in a place no one can access them. So, saying “They only wanted to deport them” is not a compliment to the “decency” of old Nazis. It’s a word of caution about the new ones.
The ‘relocation’ wasn’t based on anything the Jews had that the Nazis wanted though, not in terms of physical land anyway. Wealth, sure, but the Nazis weren’t going after Jews because they had money. The Slavs were gone after for land, definitely, because the Nazis wanted all the land to the east and were happy to just murder anyone and everyone living on it, but even that was based on genetics because the Nazis believed the Slavs to be an inferior species.
Again, what Israel is doing is definitely genocide, there’s no arguments there, but it’s not the same as the Holocaust. There’s a reason the Holocaust is seen as more evil than the Holodomor, and it’s because of the sheer industrial evil of it all. A systematic extermination of a people based purely on genetics has some extra weight to it.
Wealth, sure, but the Nazis weren’t going after Jews because they had money.
That’s not entirely matching what I learned from history books. The German Nazis absolutely commit robber/murders. They just extended their murder spree to those of the same ethnicity and other “out-groups” who didn’t own anything to steal.
Again, what Israel is doing is definitely genocide, there’s no arguments there, but it’s not the same as the Holocaust.
No argument there, note my original wording “it no longer pales in comparison”. The Gaza genocide already has millions of victims and tens of thousands of murdered palestinians.
That’s unfortunately starting to become visible even on a scale that takes the Holocaust as reference.
That’s not entirely matching what I learned from history books. The German Nazis absolutely commit robber/murders. They just extended their murder spree to those of the same ethnicity and other “out-groups” who didn’t own anything to steal.
It wasn’t “Those people have money, therefore we shall rob them” though. It was “Those people are Jews, therefore they deserve to get robbed”. They were an acceptable target because they were Jewish, not because they had any money.
Well. Partially it was exactly that though. One of the roots of European antisemitism is that christians were not allowed to take interest on money loans, and jews were not allowed to do many jobs, but by faith could take interest from non-jews.
It’s kind of convenient to find an excuse why people you owe money to are “sub-human” and should be murdered. And that was also a factor in Nazi-Germany.
I don’t even think that’s as much of a distinction as you think.
In 1930s Germany, the Nazi platform was “We’re going to relocate these Jews. We’ll make some kind of settlement for them, or shift them to other nations, who knows.”
Maybe at the end of the war the Holocaust - their “final solution” for the relocation problem was made clear, but even then anyone could have raised questions about where there were going.
Political excuses like “Relocation” are extremely common for Genocide.
No, The Nazi Platform in the 1930s was not “let’s relocate these Jews”. It was very clearly set out that they wanted to eliminate all Jews from the face of the earth, and have a pure race untainted by Jewish blood. That’s why they killed anyone that even had a Jewish grandparent. They systematically swept Europe’s Jewish population, children, women, elderly and murdered them in concentration camps. 6 million. All documented. The Nazis would tell Jews in deportation camps that they were sending them to work camps, while forcing them on trains that took them directly to Auschwitz and 40 other death camps.
You must get your facts correct before you apologise for the Nazis. It’s not “maybe at the end of the war”…It was always the agenda of the Nazis to kill every single Jew and they were incredibly efficient and successful. Killing 6 million people is an unfathomable task, and sadly much of Europe was complicit, unaware, frightened.
The tail end of that sentence was “…was made clear.” Up until then, the narrative seen to the world and the German public was different.
I’m not even claiming that Germany had a perfect veil of secrecy over it; just that they would use propaganda to push just enough plausible excuses over the “missing people”, the smokestacks, that the world wasn’t convinced until the end of the war that systematic execution was really going on.
And yes, deportation was an early public part of Germany’s plans, in part because that’s more publically digestible. They canceled plans to move many Jews to France after colonizing it - referred to as the Madagascar Plan - because of a blockade.
Of course, one major aspect of deportation is that people become sight-unseen at many destinations. The gestapo can easily execute people with gunfire en masse once they’re in a place no one can access them. So, saying “They only wanted to deport them” is not a compliment to the “decency” of old Nazis. It’s a word of caution about the new ones.
The ‘relocation’ wasn’t based on anything the Jews had that the Nazis wanted though, not in terms of physical land anyway. Wealth, sure, but the Nazis weren’t going after Jews because they had money. The Slavs were gone after for land, definitely, because the Nazis wanted all the land to the east and were happy to just murder anyone and everyone living on it, but even that was based on genetics because the Nazis believed the Slavs to be an inferior species.
Again, what Israel is doing is definitely genocide, there’s no arguments there, but it’s not the same as the Holocaust. There’s a reason the Holocaust is seen as more evil than the Holodomor, and it’s because of the sheer industrial evil of it all. A systematic extermination of a people based purely on genetics has some extra weight to it.
That’s not entirely matching what I learned from history books. The German Nazis absolutely commit robber/murders. They just extended their murder spree to those of the same ethnicity and other “out-groups” who didn’t own anything to steal.
No argument there, note my original wording “it no longer pales in comparison”. The Gaza genocide already has millions of victims and tens of thousands of murdered palestinians. That’s unfortunately starting to become visible even on a scale that takes the Holocaust as reference.
It wasn’t “Those people have money, therefore we shall rob them” though. It was “Those people are Jews, therefore they deserve to get robbed”. They were an acceptable target because they were Jewish, not because they had any money.
Well. Partially it was exactly that though. One of the roots of European antisemitism is that christians were not allowed to take interest on money loans, and jews were not allowed to do many jobs, but by faith could take interest from non-jews. It’s kind of convenient to find an excuse why people you owe money to are “sub-human” and should be murdered. And that was also a factor in Nazi-Germany.
The Nazis found all sorts of excuses.