(DC thread) If the Nazis hadn't 'gone Holocaust', what would the legacy have been?

[mikeymikec]

The recent P&N thread regarding the confederate statue removal and people talking about honouring people who defended white supremacy made me ponder this question.

Admittedly trying to pick apart Nazi history to the point that one maybe needs to re-write some of the key characters involved may be a completely pointless exercise. However, history has repeatedly shown (all the way to the present) that the tactic of "see this group of people? They're the reason why your way of life is under threat in some way", is effective against significant amounts of people, so I don't think it's possible to hypothesize a plausible alternate scenario that doesn't involve significant amounts of Jew-hating (and other 'undesirables'), but let's say that the 'undesirables' were rounded up into camps but without the mass slaughter, and the war ended in a similar time frame and conclusion. Admittedly I don't know how much the slave labour added to the German war machine, but for the sake of argument I'll assume that its main purpose was to grind such people into dust rather than productivity.

In my experience, the vast majority of German people feel great shame over the whole event, probably because of (mostly) their ancestors' complicity in such atrocity, but if it hypothetically hadn't gone that far in the way that I've described, would Germany have statues celebrating elements of that war (ie. the focus of the statues being positive ones, e.g. "the bravery of our soldiers", "fighting to make our country great") rather than just memorials to those who died? If the Holocaust hadn't happened, how would other 'civilised' countries have behaved afterwards without such an obvious line drawn (and not to be approached) that constitutes going way too far as well as the associated ideologies of the Nazi regime?

 

[Genx87]

I don't think the legacy would be much different. This is assuming the Germans still carried out their war of aggression against Europe. Given the National Socialist ideology. It is hard to disconnect the war of conquest from the holocaust. They are interlinked. One of the Eastern Fronts goal was to kill off the native populations to make room for Germans. This was done via direct killings on site or camps. But also through starvation policy. If Germany had won in the east and some resolution to the war achieved between the western allies leaving Germany in control of their conquered territories. Eastern Europe would had been a genocide running into the hundreds of millions.

But lets take your premise at face value. Germany would had still lost. So I doubt the state replacing them would want to erect statues and memorials glorifying a brutal defeat.

 

[sm625]

It wouldnt have made any difference. The Nazis slaughtered eastern europe. For every jew that was killed in a camp, 10 eastern europeans and two dozen russians were slaughtered on the field or in beseiged cities. The people in the camps would have starved to death anyway even if they werent systematically disposed of. And history would have unfolded in much the same way. I still have trouble figuring out why the Nazis were so brutal. I mean they wrecked eastern europe so badly that they couldnt even get half the agricultural products out of it that they could have if they approached it the same way they did France. But for whatever reason, when they went east, they just destroyed everything. I dont know if its because the French are better at being subjugated, or if that's simply what the Germans thought.

 

[Craig234]

I think the Nazis would be viewed for their horribly costly aggression and many killed by the war. Also their hyper-nationalism.

An interesting question would be,what if they had not launched WWII?

 

[Crumpet]

If it wasn't for the holocaust it would just be seen as a horrific massive scale war.

If it wasn't for Hitler's inane desire to create bigger and less efficient weapons we'd probably be a part of the German Empire.

The main shame though, if a lone British soldier hadn't taken pity on an injured Nazi soldier in 1918, we may never have had a second World War.

BUT we also wouldn't have superglue, 95% of the medical and technological advancements, and quite probably votes for women, female workers and (slightly more) fair treatment to non-Caucasian ethnicities.

 

[Craig234]

If it wasn't for the holocaust it would just be seen as a horrific massive scale war.

If it wasn't for Hitler's inane desire to create bigger and less efficient weapons we'd probably be a part of the German Empire.

The main shame though, if a lone British soldier hadn't taken pity on an injured Nazi soldier in 1918, we may never have had a second World War.

BUT we also wouldn't have superglue, 95% of the medical and technological advancements, and quite probably votes for women, female workers and (slightly more) fair treatment to non-Caucasian ethnicities.

I disagree those advancements were dependent on the Nazis.

 

[Crumpet]

They weren't dependent on the Nazi's, they were dependent on war.

War breeds innovation, that's a fact.

 

[Craig234]

War breeds some innovation, it's true, at great cost. And the war helped advance some social progress, but it was hardly dependent on war.

For example, why wouldn't women have had the vote? Where does 95% of medical and technical advances come from?

 

[Yakk]

The victors write history, so who's to say.

 

[Crumpet]

War breeds some innovation, it's true, at great cost. And the war helped advance some social progress, but it was hardly dependent on war.

For example, why wouldn't women have had the vote? Where does 95% of medical and technical advances come from?

Jet engines, computers, aerosols, nylon, radar, space travel (high powered rockets), photocopying, nuclear power, synthetic fuels, guided weapons, helicopters, night vision, ballpoint pens.

For medicine, superglue, penicillin, effective sulphonamides, skin grafts, biogenic agents, successful blood transfusion, mepacrine and atebrin (malaria treatments), tetanus immunisation, activated carbon, plasma..

You know, small things.

 

[Craig234]

Jet engines, computers, aerosols, nylon, radar, space travel (high powered rockets), photocopying, nuclear power, synthetic fuels, guided weapons, helicopters, night vision, ballpoint pens.

For medicine, superglue, penicillin, effective sulphonamides, skin grafts, biogenic agents, successful blood transfusion, mepacrine and atebrin (malaria treatments), tetanus immunisation, activated carbon, plasma..

You know, small things.

What's with the jerky tone? Not gonna bother to respond because of the tone.

 

[Craig234]

The victors write history, so who's to say.

If the Nazis won the war, of course the story would be hugely different.

 

[Crumpet]

What's with the jerky tone? Not gonna bother to respond because of the tone.

My tone wasn't jerky, and the lack of response is because WW2 changed the world and you can't disagree.

 

[agent00f]

The recent P&N thread regarding the confederate statue removal and people talking about honouring people who defended white supremacy made me ponder this question.

Admittedly trying to pick apart Nazi history to the point that one maybe needs to re-write some of the key characters involved may be a completely pointless exercise. However, history has repeatedly shown (all the way to the present) that the tactic of "see this group of people? They're the reason why your way of life is under threat in some way", is effective against significant amounts of people, so I don't think it's possible to hypothesize a plausible alternate scenario that doesn't involve significant amounts of Jew-hating (and other 'undesirables'), but let's say that the 'undesirables' were rounded up into camps but without the mass slaughter, and the war ended in a similar time frame and conclusion. Admittedly I don't know how much the slave labour added to the German war machine, but for the sake of argument I'll assume that its main purpose was to grind such people into dust rather than productivity.

In my experience, the vast majority of German people feel great shame over the whole event, probably because of (mostly) their ancestors' complicity in such atrocity, but if it hypothetically hadn't gone that far in the way that I've described, would Germany have statues celebrating elements of that war (ie. the focus of the statues being positive ones, e.g. "the bravery of our soldiers", "fighting to make our country great") rather than just memorials to those who died? If the Holocaust hadn't happened, how would other 'civilised' countries have behaved afterwards without such an obvious line drawn (and not to be approached) that constitutes going way too far as well as the associated ideologies of the Nazi regime?

I don't think anyone really understood your question, in part because it's asked in an unclear way. The actual question in brief is whether the nazis losing made any difference. That situation is similar to our Manifest Destiny against the american natives (or enslaving blacks or so on), and here we are a few hundred years later with some who see it as egregious enough to justify recompense and others not so much. That timeline would be shortened in more recent times, but generally speaking I don't think german sensibilities are all that different from our own.

If it wasn't for the holocaust it would just be seen as a horrific massive scale war.

If it wasn't for Hitler's inane desire to create bigger and less efficient weapons we'd probably be a part of the German Empire.

The main shame though, if a lone British soldier hadn't taken pity on an injured Nazi soldier in 1918, we may never have had a second World War.

BUT we also wouldn't have superglue, 95% of the medical and technological advancements, and quite probably votes for women, female workers and (slightly more) fair treatment to non-Caucasian ethnicities.

The fact you believe 95% of technological advancements come from war says more about you than anything about factual reality.

 

[Crumpet]

The fact you believe 95% of technological advancements come from war says more about you than anything about factual reality.

The fact that i'm practically a pacifist who has a large interest in the study of history and archaeology, and spends a large amount of time gathering information and learning?

 

[agent00f]

The fact that i'm practically a pacifist who has a large interest in the study of history and archaeology, and spends a large amount of time gathering information and learning?

Not a great move to brag about how much effort it took you to learn the trivially false, as if scientists/engineers are sitting around doing nothing until it's killing time.

 

[Crumpet]

of course they aren't, but in times of war they get increased manpower, increased funding, increased assistance and are under what could be considered a reasonable amount of pressure to succeed.

 

[agent00f]

of course they aren't, but in times of war they get increased manpower, increased funding, increased assistance and are under what could be considered a reasonable amount of pressure to succeed.

Would you say about 20x (95/5) more times whatever the ratio of war to peacetime. I assume you've also studied basic math in your time of learning.

 

[Craig234]

Would you say about 20x (95/5) more times whatever the ratio of war to peacetime. I assume you've also studied basic math in your time of learning.

There's also the fallacy that because war sped an invention, it wouldn't have happened without war. For example, we'd have jet aircraft today with or without war.

 

[potzocalli]

I can´t say war speeds up scientific research in accurate numbers but we cant deny this is a fact.During war or around specially politically unstable times, government funding increases. Sometimes it is to find better weapons but other times it is to find alternatives to goods and products which will not be available during enemy blockades. If you research everyday things like synthetic rubber you will find a lot of the discoveries were done in en 1930 to 1940 by England, Germany, Russia and USA. Other discoveries such as Teflon were a result of non-military research.

Regarding the original topic. History is written by the victors and these also re-educate the defeated population. Whether or not the atrocities were commited, there would be no statues conmemorating the German army or their character traits. Had Germany won the war, statues and monuments would praise their efforts, regardless of what they did. Their work camps became public knowledge almost at war´s end to discredit them to their own people and the rest of the world. Remember that two different armies invaded Poland and both sistematically killed of the population but the Russians were on the victors side so that information remained unknown for several years.

 

[Craig234]

I can´t say war speeds up scientific research in accurate numbers but we cant deny this is a fact.During war or around specially politically unstable times, government funding increases. Sometimes it is to find better weapons but other times it is to find alternatives to goods and products which will not be available during enemy blockades. If you research everyday things like synthetic rubber you will find a lot of the discoveries were done in en 1930 to 1940 by England, Germany, Russia and USA. Other discoveries such as Teflon were a result of non-military research.

Regarding the original topic. History is written by the victors and these also re-educate the defeated population. Whether or not the atrocities were commited, there would be no statues conmemorating the German army or their character traits. Had Germany won the war, statues and monuments would praise their efforts, regardless of what they did. Their work camps became public knowledge almost at war´s end to discredit them to their own people and the rest of the world. Remember that two different armies invaded Poland and both sistematically killed of the population but the Russians were on the victors side so that information remained unknown for several years.

War also SLOWS scientific progress in other areas, IF we used the resources for them - but since the alternative to war isn't to spend on useful scientific research but just to give people with $100 billion a few billion more to buy more corporations and islands and jets, it doesn't happen.

What an incredibly inefficient and even evil way to progress science to say 'let's spend for killing many people and destroying infrastructure, but have a tiny bit of that go towards science.'

 

[sandorski]

They wouldn't be viewed quite as harshly. Hitler would be seen kinda like Napoleon. Someone with grand plans who killed a bunch of people, but was eventually defeated. Real Life Hitler bumped that up a few notches though.

 

[rommelrommel]

It wouldnt have made any difference. The Nazis slaughtered eastern europe. For every jew that was killed in a camp, 10 eastern europeans and two dozen russians were slaughtered on the field or in beseiged cities. The people in the camps would have starved to death anyway even if they werent systematically disposed of. And history would have unfolded in much the same way. I still have trouble figuring out why the Nazis were so brutal. I mean they wrecked eastern europe so badly that they couldnt even get half the agricultural products out of it that they could have if they approached it the same way they did France. But for whatever reason, when they went east, they just destroyed everything. I dont know if its because the French are better at being subjugated, or if that's simply what the Germans thought.

You have to remember that their racial theories were an inherent part of nazism. The French were not a significantly inferior race, just an enemy to be defeated (and absorbed.) The slavs, jews, etc were considered sub-human and not really worth the food to keep them alive.

There is some evidence that had the nazis treated the slavic people as well as the French, Belgians, Danes, etc that they would have won the war. The slavs generally hated the USSR and Stalin, and likely would have supported a semi-benevolent German rule. When it became clear that the nazis planned on exterminating them the partisan movements took off and Russian resistance was galvanized.

 

[Craig234]

There's an obvious answer to this question: the way we view the militaristic government of Japan from WWII.

 

[agent00f]

I can´t say war speeds up scientific research in accurate numbers but we cant deny this is a fact.During war or around specially politically unstable times, government funding increases. Sometimes it is to find better weapons but other times it is to find alternatives to goods and products which will not be available during enemy blockades. If you research everyday things like synthetic rubber you will find a lot of the discoveries were done in en 1930 to 1940 by England, Germany, Russia and USA. Other discoveries such as Teflon were a result of non-military research.

Regarding the original topic. History is written by the victors and these also re-educate the defeated population. Whether or not the atrocities were commited, there would be no statues conmemorating the German army or their character traits. Had Germany won the war, statues and monuments would praise their efforts, regardless of what they did. Their work camps became public knowledge almost at war´s end to discredit them to their own people and the rest of the world. Remember that two different armies invaded Poland and both sistematically killed of the population but the Russians were on the victors side so that information remained unknown for several years.

People who benefit from war tend to play up its benefits, like governments with large militaries looking for funding argue that some small fraction of it goes to r&d.