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Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories

ian-leslie.com

211–220 of 256 posts

Re: Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 su…

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,…

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/

Re: Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories

#212
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was Marx anything like Ceausescu?

I guess the OP is referring to how communist countries are/were big in personality cult and general brainwashing. Marx and his ideology when they were happy with the soviets, Ceausescu later when the political winds changed. Generally though, people have a tendency to seek flags to rally behind, be it personalities, ideologies or religions. There is nothing surprising on that, given that the success of our species re…

> Marx and his ideology when they were happy with the soviets

Marx died 30 years before "soviets" had been invented. The ideology followed by the bolsheviks was marxist in name only.

Re: Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 su…

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,…

> 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.

Re: Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://jewishchronicle.timesofisrael.com/remember-the-11-mi... > Yehuda Bauer, an Israeli Holocaust scholar who chairs the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, said he warned his friend Wiesenthal, who died in 2005, about spreading the false notion that the Holocaust claimed 11 million victims — 6 million Jews and 5 million non-Jews. > “I said to him, ‘Simon, you are telling a lie,’” Bauer recalled in a Jan…

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'…

> 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.

Re: Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

> 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 u…

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

Re: Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

> 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 du…

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.

Re: Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories

#217
post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

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.

Re: Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories

#218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

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 ca…

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.

Re: Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories

#219
post #172
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how could the reviewers have found the errors in this article? The article can tell "Cort was informed about the new techniques from a family member back from Jamaica". How do you verify that? The only way is to redo the all work from scratch, refound all the historical references and cross-validate each of them. It's a huge work. This article was later debunked by experts who have taken time and effort to do tha…

> This article was later debunked by experts who have taken time and effort to do that It was debunked by a single non-academic with no publishing track record, who is currently completing a master's thesis. In other words it could have been debunked by anyone. > the article passes the peer-reviewing process because the peer-reviewing process does what it is supposed to do Indeed, it passed the process because the pr…

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Re: Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 u…

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.
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