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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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Jew-hunting was likely transitory and once the exigencies of war vanished would very likely have disappeared*

I think Jew-hunting would disappear because the Jews disappeared. Pre-war Nazi policy was to encourage Jews to emigrate, and it was mostly successful - per Wikipedia there were 523k Jews living within the 1933 borders of Germany, and only 163k were left to be Holocausted. If the policy had continued for another decade there would have been sufficiently few Jews left in Germany that Hitler could have had the last few murdered discretely, or paid the British to let them into Palestine. The industrial-scale genocide machinery of the Holocaust was "needed" because:

  • Hitler conquered territory with much higher Jewish populations than pre-war Germany.
  • The war made emigration impossible
  • Hitler started to worry about losing the war, which set a time limit on resolving the Jewish problem.

The Holocaust makes most sense as a last-ditch move by someone who thinks he can achieve some of his long-term geopolitical goals by killing Jews even as he goes down to an ignominious defeat on the battlefield. If you think that Hitler's basic view on the JQ was the same as modern right-wing anti-Semites (I don't, but the argument is too long for this post), then he was not wrong.