Comment by hef19898 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hef19898 | Hacker News Reader

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6 million murdered jews is about right and well proven by facts. Then we have another 3 million soviet POWs, half a million Sinti and Roma and euthanasie victims plus 3 odd million other civilian victims of the Nazis. Depending or your exact definition of the holocaust, 11 millions victims is pretty accurate.

Edit: General question, what is it with new accounts created, seemimgly, only for comments like yours? I don't see anything controversial in it that migjt justify a throwaway... Unless of course you are new to HN, in which cade, welcome!

Edit 2: It seems I have day checking links... well, you article quotes Bauer:

>>

“All Jews of the world had to be annihilated,” Bauer said. “That was the intent. There was never an idea in Nazi minds to murder all the Russians.”

With all due respect to Bauer, the Nazis deliberately killed Soviet POWs. And they considered them sub-human of sorts. Also tue, the Nazis basically started WW2 to murder all the jews. As I said, depends if where draw the line of the Holocaust, and whether or not you want to include non-jewish victims caught in the same industrial genocide complex seperately or not. It seems the question is not the number of victims, but rather under which column they are counted. >>

> Also tue, the Nazis basically started WW2 to murder all the jews.

Hitler was driven by his desire to reunify the German peoples and his wanting to enable Germans to become economically self-sufficient and militarily secure. Within Germany, these goals were supported because the Treaty of Versailles, which had ended WWI, put terms on Germany such as paying financial reparations, disarm, give up territory, and give up all its oversears colonies.

After annexing Austria and Czechosloviakia, Germany invaded Poland in 1939. The French and British had guaranteed support should this happen, so they declared war on Germany, which started WWII.

A weird way to say Germany started WW2. Glad we can agree they did so.

Nobody disputed who started WWII, but you claimed a motivation which was incorrect, so I wanted to help you get that right.

And the motivation was, in the Fuhrer own words none the less (!), Lebensraum in the east (and enslaving the slavs there while doing it) and gwtting rid of the made up jewish-bolshevik conspirancy by killing both groups. Hard to accept, I know, but none the less true.

Actually the only mistake the Allies might have made, might have because it is hindsight, is not invading Germany in the West while the Wehrmacht was busy in Poland. History is history so. Seeing the causes of WW2 so, and the motivation of the Nazis, as anything else than what they are ia something I will leave unadressed so.

We actually can't. Russia and in particular Stalin was also there. Russia absorbed more Polish acreage than the Germans. I'm happy to agree with the phrase, "Germany and Russia, acting together, started WWII."

The Russian war with Finland did escalate into a world war so. That was the Germans and the Japanese. Stalin, for once, had actually nothing to with that particular shitty thing.

> the Nazis basically started WW2 to murder all the jews

Tim Snyder's explanation in Bloodlands is at odds with that story. There were very few Jews in Germany at the start of WWII. Initially, the goal was to deport them - somewhere (Madagascar!). The systematic killing of Jews came later, after Germany had invaded Poland (which contained a lot of Jews). The irony is that the Jewish population of Germany increased during the initial part of the war, with Polish Jews being interned in Germany.

Well, the holocaust of bullets started very early. In a sense, the final solution was, as cynical as it is, by the logostocal challenges of killing all jews by bullets (after there was shooting war going on at the same time) and the practical, and ideological, impossible solution of deporting them. Hence mass extermination camps as the only logical solution. Cynical bastards, all of them.

To get some better feeling, and insihjt, I can only recommend the original film, German, about the Wannsee Conference based on the actual meeting minutes.

> Also tue, the Nazis basically started WW2 to murder all the jews.

I don't think that's true. It's a stupid point to start a war. Where's the profit for Germany in that?

While it's also true that Nazi Germany explicitly set to murder all Russians. There're numerous official Nazi documents confirming that. Most of the population was determined to be killed directly or by causing hunger (by capturing the only lands suitable for agriculture in the South-West of USSR).

But since the West in general always considered and continue to consider Russians as subhumans, there's no mention of this fact in western books, movies and articles.

The Nazis goal of the war was to eradicate all the jews. It was since, at least, Hitler wrote Mein Kampf. It shows in their actions, in how they organized, who got which resources. It was their goal, murdering all jews, and went about it with murderous and frighting efficiency. They only stopped outright murder in has chamber to enslave a portion of people ending up concentrations camps, the vast majority being jews, when Nazi Germany ran into work force issues. It was Speer who convinced Himmler that was necessary, so the Nazis settled for murder through work.

No idea what you mean that the Nazis behaviour regarding slaws, not just Russians, isn't talked about in the West. I am in the West, and I defenitely didn't learn about from Russian books. Also, claiming the West sees Russians as sub-human is a strong claim, to put it mildly...

One issue : Wansee takes place in 1942, that is in the middle of the war. Until now, most camps are "just" concentration (death by labour) camps, and Jews are mostly in the ghettos. Only after Wansee you have start of mass transports to death camps - most people who died in Auschwitz were never inmates there - they were brought from other countries, sorted on ramp and send to death. Not to mention - at that moment camps were already full of people (Auschwitz was started for Poles and Soviet POV). So no, they didn't "stop" with gas chambers - they have inmates in camps and Jews in ghettos (all having to work in one way or the other), and the idea of Final Solution wasn't complete until 1942 (and took place until 1944).

And the holocaust by bullets pre dates operation Barbarossa. Turned murdering millions of people requires more sophisticated logistics than your average, run of the mill genocide as all tjose done before. Hence Wannsee, the final solution, the extermination camps (of which Auschwitz wasn't one initially). The goal was clear from before the war started so, the means were somewhat less well defined.

Edit: As a supply chain and logistics guy myself, the logistics of the holocaust seem to be the only historical occurance the Germans got wartime logistics right. Eichmann was a really good supply chain guy, running a tremendously efficient operation from, and beware the following will be incredible cynical now, sourcing (getting jews concentrated in ghettos) with close collaboration of local suppliers (the SS, Gestapo and local authorities ranging from French police to the various collaborators in the east) over transportation (including Eichmann himself working on details like damaged passanger rail cars to keep his prime carrier, the Reichsbahn, happy) to the classification of people arriving in incredibly well run extermination factories in the occupied East. It is that efficiency, applied at murdering innocent people for a deprived ideology, that makes the holocaust stand out from all other genocides in history. And that was the main, if not even the only goal, of the Nazis behind WW2.

There's a massive scholarly debate about when exactly the Final Solution took shape, with one school of thought being that it wasn't until after the invasion of the USSR that extermination became the goal. Christopher Browning's _The Origins of the Final Solution_ [0] provides a good overview of this position.

[0] https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/bison-books/9780803259799/

The Wannsee conference would be my choice for the date the final solution (gas chambers and exterminatiom camps and sich, the holocaust of bullets started right away) became official policy. Obviouspy all the back room decision have already been met by then, the Wannsee Conference being more of a working level implementation meeting.

> No idea what you mean that the Nazis behaviour regarding slaws, not just Russians, isn't talked about in the West. I am in the West, and I defenitely didn't learn about from Russian books. Also, claiming the West sees Russians as sub-human is a strong claim, to put it mildly...

The comment you replied to is somehow assuming that all slavs are / were Russians and that the Germans didn't somehow also murder a ton of Ukrainians and Poles, among others.

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