Comment by petsfed | Hacker News Reader

Comment by petsfed | Hacker News Reader

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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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