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Functionalist Shoah Origins, With Unmentioned Implications for GENERALPLAN OST (the "Resettlement"-Genocide of Slavs), August 20, 2010
This scholarly work makes it obvious, from many cited German documents that, not only was there no intentionalist Nazi strategy for exterminating Europe's Jews, but actual Nazi WWII-era ideas for "solving the Jewish problem" were a mass of contradictions. The Nazis variously proposed the relocation of Jews to the Krakow area, Lublin area, Madagascar, the Pripet marshes, and northern Russia. When systematic killings of Jews were mentioned at all, they were for the liquidation of nonproductive Jews, not all Jews. (e. g., p. 215).
The Einsatzgruppen shootings of Jews, in the wake of Operation Barbarossa, were, with some exceptions, limited to Jewish military-age men for a full eight weeks, claiming 50,000 Jewish victims. After the August 15-16, 1941, visit by Himmler, the killings were vastly expanded in scope and scale, to encompass all Jews, and to claim 500,000 victims within the next four months. (p. 217). [Owing to the long duration of the selectivity of the killings (8 weeks), and huge difference in their scale before and after the 8-week initial period, it is difficult to accept the intentionalists' conjecture that the selectivity of the killings had simply been a trick to fool the Jews.]
Looking at the whole picture, the reader can see that the plans for the actual mass extermination of Jews developed gradually: "...as my results show, one can discern clear leaps in development in March, July, and October 1941...the extermination program was at first experimental, until sometime in May 1942." (pp. 258-259).
It is fallacious to think of the massive gas chambers as ones developed specifically for Jews. In fact, as tabulated by Aly (pp. 70-71), nearly 11,000 mentally ill Germans, Poles, and Jews were gassed in 1939-1940 alone.
Ironic to the recurrent media mendacious remarks about "Polish death camps" (for camps, built and staffed by Germans, in German-occupied Poland), the original idea was for the extermination camps to be built in the German-occupied USSR. Plans, in Fall 1941, called for one such camp to be built in Mogilev (Mogilov), 200 km. east of Minsk, and for it to have the then-unheard-of capability of cremating 2,000 corpses per day. Mass access to the camp owed not primarily to railroads but to the easily-navigable Dnieper River. (pp. 223-225).
According to many cited German officials, the strength of the Red Army had been underestimated. (p. 201). The failure of the USSR to collapse as expected in 1941 put a screeching halt to all of the plans to "settle the Jewish problem" deep in the USSR. Instead, the mass killings of Jews would have to be conducted on German-occupied territories well west of the German-Soviet front. Hence the continued non-selective Einsatzgruppen shootings of Jews and the eventual mass gassings of Jews on Polish soil.
During many Nazi actions, Poles were not treated as severely as Jews owing to fears of inflaming Polish resistance, as noted in a German document. (p. 271). Or, Jews were to be killed directly, and Poles allowed to die a [faked] natural death, as in the case of the Zamosc deportees to Auschwitz. (p. 249).
Now consider the Slavs. There were the mass expulsions of Poles and Jews from Wartheland (Reich-annexed northwest Poland)(e. g., p. 5, 8-9, 146; which the Poles notably resisted: p. 143, 145, 178), the genocidal extermination of the Polish intelligentsia (p. 23), use of mass deportations for forced labor as a tool to weaken the Poles biologically (p. 40), plans for the removal of all Poles (e. g., p. 161) and tentatively all Slavs (p. 4), the planned intentional starvation of 20-30 million Soviet citizens (p. 186, 192), etc.
Gotz Aly doesn't elaborate on GENERALPLAN OST, the eventual German plan to resettle around 100 million Slavs to Siberia. The resettlement would've been a genocidal act, comparable, if not deadlier, to the proposed mass resettlement of Jews to Siberia. Aly writes: "Heydrich's March [1941] plan provided for extermination of the Jews through the `natural' means of hunger, cold, and slave labor--in the northeastern regions to be conquered in the Soviet Union...Heydrich's plan in the spring 1941 was inextricably linked to a successful blitzkrieg against the Soviet Union." (pp. 255--256). Also, Aly cites Zamecnik, who comments: "`Deportation to the northern territories of the USSR would have been the simplest form of genocide. Under the murderous working and climatic conditions, the Jews would have died en masse, just like the millions who were deported under Bolshevik rule. None of the deportees were supposed to survive.'" (p. 184).
Finally, note Aly's own conclusion: "Nazi ideology gained its effectiveness not from isolated, government-controlled hatred of Jews or the mentally ill, Gypsies or Slavs, but from the totalitarian unity of so-called negative and positive population policies." (p. 245).
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