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Comment by skyechurch | Hacker News Reader

>The allies did not care about the Nazi genocide until after the war had begun in earnest.

The Wannsee Conference was January 1942, all the allies were quite fully at war with the axis powers. I'm not aware of any further steps they could have taken aside from total war and industrial incineration of cities (which, as OP's article bemoans, they 110% committed to.)

>Stopping the Holocaust or the Japanese crimes against humanity was, for the most part, a consequence of accomplishing their other strategic goals, not a strategic goal unto itself.

Not true. Ending the Holocaust was a war aim and plans were considered for operations specifically to disrupt it, but nothing was ever proposed that would be as effective as simply winning the war.

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A lot of things we now recognize as actual genocide had happened prior to the Wannsee Conference. Kristalnacht, the Aryanization of businesses, the Babi Yar massacre, etc. You'd have to ignore a lot of out-and-out massacres of specifically Jews (in addition to a whole bunch of other war crimes) to think that the Nazis were not already fully committed to the concept of extermination prior to that conference. You should understand the Wannsee Conference as an effort to consolidate and scale up the extermination process, not as its birth place.

I don't have a hard time imagining the Wannsee Conference as stemming from a post-mortem (pardon the pun) of the Babi Yar massacre in particular, as the Nazis came to terms with the overall cost of doing a genocide manually.

The outcome of the Wannsee Conference was Auschwitz, an intensification by a factor of 1000 of what had gone before. The point is not that this represents the absolute beginning of German attacks on Jews, just that it represents the beginning of turning a death count in the 1000s to one in the millions, which is what we call "the Holocaust". All of this, and the serious strategic deliberations in real time of what to do about it, is a matter of historical record, which has been gone over quite thoroughly over 80 years.

Curious that Auschwitz was established fully 18 months prior to the Wannsee Conference[0].

There were a LOT of things the Allies chose not do (consider the Evians Conference, for instance) well before hostilities broke out.

I don't disagree that once fighting broke out, there was nothing to be done. But there was plenty to be done way back in 1933 when the first concentration camp was opened.

I'm also not denying that after the Wannsee conference, the efficiency of the Holocaust really picked up [1]. I'm saying that it's a mistake to believe that anybody in control was at all on the fence about what to do with all these undesirables, until they held a conference and said "why don't we just kill everybody?". They'd been trying for years, and it turns out that just shooting 17 million people is a lot harder than it sounds.

0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Holocaust

1. https://theconversation.com/quantifying-the-holocaust-measur...

>Curious that Auschwitz was established fully 18 months prior to the Wannsee Conference

No, it's not curious at all. It was established to exterminate Soviet and Polish POWs, only after Wannsee was it involved in mass extermination of Jews and other "undesirables", because that was the point of the conference. It didn't come out of thin air, there were certainly signs that something like this was going to happen, but it didn't actually happen until it actually did. This is all completely uncontroversial and a matter of historical record.

The point of the Holocaust is its exceptional nature, and the Nazi treatment of Jews prior to Wannsee was not "exceptional" by the standards of the time. The atrocities of the USSR and the late Ottoman empire had established the European benchmark. In 1937, in the Dominican Republic, tens of thousands of civilians were massacred by the government[0] and nobody did anything about it, despite the fact that it would have been orders of magnitude easier than winning WW2, because it was not considered exceptional. You can tell this is true because no one remembers it. What separates the Holocaust, what makes it exceptional, is the scale. And it is Wannsee where that begins.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsley_massacre?wprov=sfla1

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