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The concentration camps and labor camps were part of the war effort, for sure. But the "Final Solution" as such was the resettlement of the Jews out of the European sphere into what would have become a Jewish territory partly occupied/administered by Germany, at least in the short term. That is comparable to Israeli ambitions to expel the Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank, including proposals to resettle them into a territory on the Sinai peninsula. 2rafa is trying to say these things are not comparable, but that's only the case if you accept certain premises such as mass gas chamber extermination inside shower rooms. If you take the documents at face value, they are comparable policies.
The use of "slavery" to describe wartime conscription is a bit dubious, but I don't feel like splitting hairs. If you give someone a rifle, force them to the front, and shoot them if they try to desert, I don't think you would call that enslavement (or maybe you would!).
The Nazis conducted slave raids across Europe, ultimately kidnapping millions for forced labor. Himmler being characteristically blunt:
The Nazis conducted slave raids across Europe insofar as the Soviets conducted slave raids across Europe, but nobody says the latter because the only real purpose of the former is to draw distinctions that don't actually exist. It's pretty typical of the mainstream historical method, too: ignore the thousands of WVHA documents dealing with the administration of the prisoner labor force, which did not regard them as slaves (and they were paid for their labor), but pick out a sentence from a (poorly sourced? can't tell) "secret speech" by Himmler.
If you want to call the forced labor during the war slavery that's your prerogative. I think it would be dishonest to call wartime forced labor as salvery but not conscription for front-line combat. But it's just splitting hairs. My point was that just because the Israelis have no plans to use Palestinians for forced labor does not mean their proposals to expel the Palestinians to the Sinai peninsula cannot be compared to German plans for the resettlement of Jews.
Nazis burned down Polish/Ukrainian villages and marched people onto trains at gunpoint to be sent to the Reich to work but at least they got paid in worthless money.
Yes the Soviets also made extensive use of slave labor and Stalin was also a bad guy.
Israeli treatment of the Palestinians is quite horrible and still isn’t half as horrible Nazi treatment of the European Jews.
It's not as much a question of "horribleness."
For our entire lifetimes, the idea of anybody supporting a mass expulsion/deportation/resettlement, whatever you want to call it, so close to home has not even entered into anybody's minds. It is significant that now we are faced with two plausible programs of mass resettlement within the "Western" sphere of influence: the resettlement of Palestinians out of Palestine, i.e. to the Sinai desert, and the mass deportation of non-European migrants.
Of course people like 2rafa who support these initiatives are going to try to explain why these programs cannot be compared to the Nazi policies regarding the Jews. But the uncomfortable reality is that they are definitely comparable. It's a grave situation, it's going to be violent if these policies are carried out. The gas chamber legend elevates the Nazi policies to another plane of existence, and allows people like 2rafa to not confront the similarities which are definitely there.
Look, I am willing to believe- I don’t believe it, I think the evidence is stacked against it, but I’m willing to believe it in the existence of a good argument- that Hitler did not intend to exterminate the Jews and German gas chambers were not tools of mass murder. I’m willing to believe the death total from the Holocaust was dramatically lower than generally believed. And I’ll even concede that Nazi Germany had the moral high ground on the eastern front compared to the USSR(but still in the sense of, like, the edge of the Mariana Trench instead of the bottom).
But it seems suspicious that of people making this argument- and I say this to Holocaust deniers in my ingroup- the argument makers(as opposed to fellow travelers and argument repeaters) can’t tell you if 200k-300k Jews dying from a combination of localized massacres and poor conditions in the camps is a tragedy that reflects a black mark on Hitler’s regime. Because Germany was quite clearly capable of running large scale prison camps with a normal-at-the-time death rate in conditions of wartime. They did it in WWI, after all. But even if the Jews in the concentration camps all died of typhus or famine or whatever(and I will concede that plenty of them did in fact die from this), that represents at least a lot of neglect from the German government and Nazi party for which they are morally culpable. Not to mention the massacres ‘in the field’ by einsatzgruppen. I’ve never seen a Holocaust denier even attempt to address the einsatzgruppen by the way; if it was all localized massacres that also seems like something Nazi germany is morally culpable for because they 1) had a policy to concentrate these people 2) per official state ideology considered them racial undesirables and 3) per official state ideology considered murder an acceptable way to deal with other undesirables, such as the disabled, and overzealous SS or Wehrmacht captains ordering massacres is what happens when that combination comes about.
Look, the eastern front was evil vs evil in a way that breaks most peoples’ brains. I don’t blame you for trying to resolve that ambiguity in your head by absolving the Nazis of guilt. And I especially don’t blame you for it when whites are under attack and anyone who defends them gets called a Nazi. But acknowledge what actually happened here especially when polite, intelligent people refute your arguments and provide high-quality, detailed, evidence-filled explanations of Nazi Germany being more evil to Jews than Israel is towards Palestinians a couple of times a month.
This is a funny way to put it, because the whole gas chamber story is really what aims to resolve the ambiguity not just on the Eastern front, but on the entire war. Imagine how ambiguous the entire war effort and war consequences become if you take the gas chamber story away. Certainly I accept greater ambiguity on the Eastern Front than the person who believes all the claims about mass gas chamber extermination of millions of people inside shower rooms...
Look at 2rafa's argument: What Israel is doing can't be compared to the Nazis. Yes, it can be compared because it is very similar in very concrete ways. It's only the gas chamber story that puts it in a different realm of reality, where it does not belong.
The death rates were "normal-at-the-time" throughout the war. Conditions became brutal in the final months of the war when the entire country was being destroyed and bombed on all sides, which did not happen in WWI. The gruesome footage captured by the Western allies at the liberation of camps like Belsen were not even filmed at the alleged extermination centers, and there is no footage or anything of those alleged massacres. Just eyewitnesses. The collapse of Germany was not planned, using the carnage from that to allege a planned extermination is not logical even if we accept custodial guilt for the conditions at the end of the war.
Address how? Revisionists accept the documents which do point to anti-partisan activities and reprisals. Revisionists point to the fact that no order has ever been found for the extermination of all Jews, just evidence of anti-partisan activity and reprisals. Partisan warfare was enormously detrimental to the German war effort, and reprisals were even legal according to international law at the time. German civilians were intentionally targeted by the Allies as well. What Israel is doing in Gaza right now is a reprisal against Gazan civilians. The reprisals were real, the gassing of millions of people inside gas chambers disguised as shower rooms was not real.
"Great Patriotic War" is considered sacred only in Russia, much more so in recent post-Soviet times than during USSR.
In the West, modern academic consensus is now that WW2 (at least the 90% of it that happened in the East) was fight between 100% evil and 99,9% evil.
Ernst Nolte was cancelled in his time, but his thesis won, to the dismay of remaining old time leftists.
And this trend will accelerate, both due to WW2 receding in historical memory and current events in Eastern Europe and Middle East.
No one is going to build any memorials to Nazi Germans any time soon, but Soviet monuments are going down everywhere outside Putin country.
Looks like mission accomplished, and without any questioning of "gas chamber story."
I am amazed that you don't think WWII is considered sacred and an unambiguous moral conflict in America. There is -zero- ambiguity in the mind of the public regarding that war, and the role of the United States in it, as anything short of a heroic salvation of the entire world, not just Europe. And that is foremost due to the gas chamber story everyone has been inundated with their entire lives in school, movie theaters, etc.
Even in this thread you have many people who refuse to accept that if Great Britain had remained neutral in Poland or Soviet war, there would have been no war in Western Europe. Even they cannot come to terms with the ambiguity of the decisions of the Western Allies to wage the war. They view it as inevitable when it was not.
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