hermod wrote:Some Dude wrote:Also, consider that less than three weeks after Goebbels writes the entry you quote, he writes this: "Es wird hier ein ziemlich barbarisches und nicht näher zu beschreibendes Verfahren angewandt , und von den Juden selbst bleibt nicht mehr viel übrig. Im großen kann man wohl feststellen, daß 60 % davon liquidiert werden müssen , während nur noch 40 % in die Arbeit eingesetzt werden können."
Pretty clear people are being killed, no?
No. Goebbels said "
will have to be liquidated," not "
are being liquidated." Goebbels was notoriously a radical anti-Semite. He was expressing a personal wish, not a German policy in force at that time, when he wrote those words. That's just the kind of things radical anti-Semites say. No big deal.
Here's more context -- from Dalton's translation:
https://dagobertobellucci.wordpress.com ... as-dalton/Beginning with Lublin, the Jews in the General Government are now being evacuated (abgeschoben) eastward. The procedure is a pretty barbaric one and not to be described here more definitely. Not much will remain of the Jews. On the whole it can be said that about 60 percent of them will have to be liquidated (liquidiert) whereas only about 40 percent can be used for forced labor.
The former Gauleiter of Vienna, who is to carry this measure through, is doing it with considerable circumspection and according to a method that does not attract too much attention. A judgment is being visited upon the Jews that, while barbaric, is fully deserved by them
Is the part in bold the only segment you'd say is a hypothetical desire? I think you're drawing arbitrary lines here. In every other section of the quote he's talking about something that is happening or will happen in the future. I think you could still say it's his opinion -- this is what he thought was going to happen based on the information he was receiving -- but your interpretation of wishful thinking only works if we assume Goebbels is a bad writer.
fireofice wrote:Jäger wrote:It doesn't really make sense for the Nazis to send the Polish Jews en masse to the Russian front. The primary motivation (as explained by Himmler in the Sonthofen speeches, for example) for the liquidation of the Polish ghettoes was that they posed an immediate threat to the security of the rear (e.g, Himmler says he doesn't believe they could have held the Lemberg front if the Warsaw ghetto had remained). The nazis Nazis would not have solved this problem by sending the Jews to the front.
According to Franz Rademacher:
In August 1940 I gave you for your files the plan for the final solution of the Jewish Problem, drafted by my office, for which purpose the Madagascar Island was to be demanded from France in the Peace Treaty, while the Reich Security Main Office was to be charged with the actual execution of the task. In accordance with the plan, Gruppenführer Heydrich has been ordered by the Führer to carry out the solution of the Jewish Problem in Europe.
In the meantime the war against the Soviet Union has offered the possibility of putting other territories at our disposal for the final solution. The Führer accordingly has decided that the Jews shall not be deported to Madagascar but to the East. Therefore it is no longer necessary that Madagascar be taken into consideration for the final solution.
https://codoh.com/library/document/depo ... e-east/en/There's your answer. Their reasoning was that there was more space in the east than anywhere else. You can not like their reasoning all you want or think they were stupid, but that's not an argument for saying that's not what they were doing. Clearly, they thought this was a viable temporary solution, regardless of your opinions.
He doesn't provide any such reasoning. In fact there's no documents around this time that do, or that specify on any level of detail what is going to happen to the resettled Jews, or what did happen to them. There's more documents that have Nazis asking for clarity regarding resettlement plans.
Browning, page 6
http://web.archive.org/web/201208160456 ... /paper.pdfBut for those charged with actual planning, what did Hitler’s notion that the Jews
would be worked over in the harsh climate in the east actually mean? A state of frustration and
uncertainty can be seen in a memorandum of Rolf-Heinz Höppner, the chief ethnic-cleanser in
the Warthegau, following a discussion with Adolf Eichmann. On September 2, 1941, Höppner
complained that plans for deportation to “reception territories” had to remain “patchwork”
“because I do not know the intentions of the Führer,” Himmler, and Heydrich. “I could well
imagine that large areas of the present Soviet Russia are being prepared to receive the undesired
elements of the greater German settlement area….To go into further details about the
organization of this reception area would be fantasy, because first of all the basic decisions
must be made. It is essential in this regard, by the way, that total clarity prevails about what
finally shall happen to those undesirable ethnic elements deported….Is it the goal to ensure
them a certain level of life in the long run, or shall they be totally eradicated.”
Holocaust documents often provide rationale. I quoted from Hoppner earlier, who takes a humanitarian angle. "This winter there is a danger that not all of the Jews can be fed anymore. One should weigh honestly, if the most humane solution might not be to finish off those of the Jews who are not employable by means of some quickworking device. At any rate, that would be more pleasant than to let them starve to death."
Wetzel, in his letter on gassing devices, provides another reason. Killing this way would be more discrete
https://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-his ... index.htmlAs things now are, there are no objections if the Jews who are not capable of work, are eliminated with the Brackian remedy. In this way, events such as those that, according to a report in front of me, took place on the occasion of the shootings of the Jews in Vilna, and which, considering that the shootings were carried out in public, can hardly be excused, will no longer be possible.
It's also true, that policy documents describing occupied USSR are not only mum about resettled Jews, but explicitly say the Jews are not going to be there.
Wetzel again (when planning mass deportation of Soviet citizens following victory, Jews were not included in the figures):
Thus for the territories to be taken into consideration here there results a total population of 51 million. The number of those to be in principle evacuated according to the plan should thus be actually higher than foreseen in the plan. Only if one assumes that the about 5 to 6 million Jews who live in this area are already removed prior to the evacuation one reaches the number of 45 million alien peoples mentioned in the plan. The plan’s considerations, however, show that the Jews are still included in the mentioned 45 million.
From the 27 April, 1942 memorandum (keep in mind around this time mass deportations have been ongoing for months through Belzec and Chelmno)