What if Hitler (and the Nazi party) hadn't gone against the Jews?

So what if Hitler had risen to power, same dates and all, but hadn't had his Jew-killing-fetish? Would the war have ended diffrently? Would the amount of Jews fighting have any effect on the outcome of the war?

This question has been bugging me for a while...would love to hear your answers!

 

I really dont think the actual fact that he had a problem with Jews effect the war in the slightest. Many battles were lost due to poor judgment, inclimate weather, and the war being fought on multiple boarders with multiple countries.

 

I don't think it would be a war winning move that said it would have been a boost for productivity, Having a million healthy Jew's working the fields and factories rather then being killed off and having men stationed to do so that could have been better used else where.

 

I always have a tough time commenting on the atrocities the Schutzstaffel, along with others, commited during the war. That being said, In response to the above question, his radical and obsessive views and vindictive behavior kept the German people riveted with a sense of their own passion towards the "Fatherland." This, one would argue, was the major factor in the German notion that they were the chosen people, highly superior to other races. Hitler took a downtrodden people and gave them a false sense of pride that exploded into the catastrophe that ensued, beginning "officially" in '33. Of course, there are numerous details I am leaving out, but you get the idea. My point is, Hitler's view of the Jewish people was a direct result of his insanity. Without his insane sense of entitleship, the war would have never happened. The Nazis rise to power was fueled by hate and vengeance, that would have led to failure, regardless of his earlier military successes. Above,von-Noobie made an interesting point, but it may have only delayed the war another 6 months. Consider all of the man power and dollars he spent on constructing and maintaining his genocide.

 

1)These manpower and dollars spent on the Holocaust were quantité negligeable copared to the total war expenses

2)The persecution of the Jews had nothing to do with the outbreak of the war :the DOW from Britain and France was caused by the German attack on Poland .

 

Has gotten me wondering, If such a scenario occurred in which Hitler didn't go against the Jew's would he have been less inclined to violence against other people? Specifically the Russian civilians in German held territory of Russia and the captured Russian troops.

If for arguments sake he had no ill though against the Russian civilians as the Jewish population I'd imagine that that would be a much bigger part to play in the war then the Jewish pop. Lower need for occupation forces, Possible army to be made out of them (I do recall one German general wanting to raise a 1 million strong army from Russian volunteers).

 

If they hadn't 'gone against the Jews', they wouldn't be Hitlerian Nazis. Too big a what-if really.

Plenty of volunteers among the 'Soviet' population.Stalin hardly... universally popular...
The Galicians for a start, though they perhaps underline the point that it's all very well to recruit - training & true usefulness takes a little longer.

Anyway - 'Untermensch' still the key concept for this particular flight of fancy - without that moniker being applied to the Jews, it's rather hard to imagine Adolf gaining a political foothold in the first place for a variety of reasons.
Needs a concentrated hatred to motivate the weedy little veteran & painter to step up - anti-Bolshevism alone just not a strong enough spark for him to start building on (and Hitler's anti-Bolshevism was intrinsically bound up with anti-semitism. Seen by him as utterly hand-in-hand, often even interchangeable ).
A very specific long-established & visible local target for hatred/distrust/rumour was essential.

Adolf, having a bit of a ramble (otherwise known as Mein Kampf) :

I think he means it. The fruitloop.

 

1) Mainland Europe, from 1940 because of the embargo inflicted upon it by the Commonwealth, had an enormous shortage of food. Germans suffered the least, as the Reich saw to it that quantities of food stuffs were shipped to Germany proper. The Greeks suffered miserably, as did the Poles. But even in Germany in 1941, the average daily caloric intake was lower than recommended. It's no coincidence, that this is when the Holocaust stretched into its full machinery of incarceration and death (the Wannsee Conference was Jan 1942, IIRC).

2) It easy to forget in this day and age, just how prevalent many of the ideas that Hitler and the Nazis espoused were, even in mainstream science, philosophy, and literature. Yes, these currents existed in the Western Democracies, too.

Phrenology was an accepted branch of science, The use of Eugenics to keep out defects, (the enforced sterilisation of mentally ill), the Darwin's maxim "Survival of the Fittest", the age old fear of Judaism, and cultural barriers to understanding, as well as the general acceptance by the populace of deliberate lies and accusations against Jewry and Zionism ("The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" being just one such hoax, originating from Russia, but published in 500,000 copies distributed though out the USA, funded by Henry Ford...

The Use of non-voluntary Euthenasia was and has been advocated in many societies and still exists to some degree. The trouble is it becomes a slippery slope, and in a regime that accepts it as not just "morally acceptable" but a "moral obligation to the wider society", to perform surgeries where one fifth die of complications (the forced sterilisation of the clinically insane), then you end up with taking the next step: Assuming "Life unworthy of Life", and killing them instead. Then, as the standards start to slip, it becomes criminals, "criminally insane", other "incureable" sicknesses and diseases, By 1941, there was already a whole medical industry killing not just the insane, but the mildly queer, and slightly handicapped.

The International Eugenics Conferences of 1921, and 1932 were held in New York... (The first, in 1912 was in London).

The appearance of the Ûbermensch in Nietzsche's "Thus spake Zarathustra" : Zarathustra first announces the Übermensch as a goal humanity can set for itself. All human life would be given meaning by how it advanced a new generation of human beings.

Darwin's Theory of Evolution, with the "Survival of the Fittest", Gregory Mendel's discovery of Genetic Inheritance, it all feed into the storm.

Try to read some passages about "race" in any encyclopedia from the 1920's or 1930's. Read particularly what is said about Africans or Aborigines. This is mainstream thought at the time.

The Encylcopedia Britannica, 11th Edition (1911): the entry for "Negro" states, "Mentally the negro is inferior to the white... the arrest or even deterioration of mental development [after adolescence] is no doubt very largely due to the fact that after puberty sexual matters take the first place in the negro's life and thoughts." I've been unable to find a reference to the next significant edition, the 14th edition from 1929.

These were very mainstream thoughts of the time, widely published, and widely accepted.

If you've already bought into the Ideas of Racism, a superior race, eugenics, the need to keep a race pure from defects, a struggle for survival between Jewish-Marxism / Bolshevism and Aryan Capitalism (many had), and you're killing German babies with mild birth defects, why would you even consider Jews on equal terms, deserving of respect? It was a long, logical slide into utter madness, based on the misconception that Humans can be divided into distinct races, this mixed with a dangerous amount of nationalism, wounded pride, economic hardship inflicted by the victorious Western Allies (foremost France), with European's traditional ready scapegoat, and the emergence of dangerous ideas threatening Capital Ownership, a perceived "weak" government, and the threat of Communism, causing the business leaders to support a strong alternative they believed they could control.

The Nazi's could no more stand on a platform of non-Racism, than an American president candidate today could stand for election on a platform of Socialism or Anti-Capitalism.

 

In response to your first point, I was simply responding to Von_Noobie's comment on turning Jewish slave labor into productivity. In fact, after some research, it is believed by many historians that the SS, in the end, profited quite an amount from the slave labor. I never took that into consideration which in turn adds another horrific component of the Holocaust.

On your second point, I never claimed that Hitler's persecution of the Jewish people led to the war. I stated that his insanity and false sense of entitlement manifested itself. His hate for the Jewish people was just another side effect of his distaste for rational thought. The war began, yes, technically after the Allied (France and Britain) declaration, but was caused by Hitler's convoluted sense of national pride. In turn, he invades. My point was his mindset.

 

This was an illusion : there never would be an army of 1 million Russian volunteers

 

I think I've shown he was far from irrational.

Quite the opposite. He pursued his beliefs to their logical conclusion. That it was based on false premises was not really his fault, there were many other intelligent people who accepted the same premises. The premises which he accepted were quite mainstream in Europe and even America, at the beginning of the last century:

The superiority of certain races over others. (See Encyclopaedia Britannica Quote above)
The need for genetic purging (removing inferior genes from the gene pool; i.e. preventing undesirables from breeding): Eugenics.
That Communism was a Jewish Conspiracy (Karl Marx was ancestrally a Jew)
The "Stab in the Back" myth (became widely accepted in Germany in Interwar years)
That the Jews were in control of businesses, media and International finance and conspired ("The Protocols of the Elders of Zion")

 

I am sorry, I understand and agree with your specifics, but I cannot believe, personally, that anyone who exterminates millions of people, to have any sense of rational thought. No matter the research, which you clearly listed above. I happen to believe rational thought is intertwined with a moral compass. Maybe I am simply speaking on semantics. Your point is well taken, there was a widespead anti-semitic temperament in Europe at the time, through ages actually, and those people followed him willingly, but it also created the most despicable acts of evil imaginable. As philosophers, yeah I went there , such as Thomas Nagel and others suggest, rationality includes ethics and moralilty. If one is not thinking morally and ethically, than one is not rational.

 

With the German and Italian Jewish scientists working for him he may have gotten the A bomb first, look up how many key contributors to the Manhattan project, beginning with Einsten himself, fled axis countries because of racial laws.

 

Interesting point.

 

I basically agree with all of this, though there is one thing I don`t understand. I thought the Nazi party (i.e. Hitler) disliked the church, so the quote from MK about "I am fighting for the work of the Lord" seems a bit inconsistent and hypocritical on his part ! That said, hypocrisy wasn`t exactly alien to his personality was it ? ! ?

 

Last time I did it wasn't as many as I expected. Einstein himself did essentially no work on the Manhatten Project although his letter suggesting it carried some weight.

 

Adolf. Hypocritical. Imagine that.
The national church was an instrument as far as Nazism was concerned. A useful institution of the state, no matter how distasteful their ideologues may have found it, or a few brave individuals were amongst it.

On the original what-if here, the thought occurs that a better question might be:

What if the Nazis had postponed their programme of liquidation and resettlement until war aims had been achieved?

The aggressive pursuit of the racist ideals of Nazism can be said to have been counter-productive and disruptive to the primary temporal aim of winning the war in so many ways. Agriculture and production from enslaved prisoners could never equal that from a lighter occupation. Vast tracts of farmland and industrial capacity were destroyed in the scorched-earth ideological campaign. Years were lost in capacity that might well have been 'merely' disrupted rather than completely destroyed and then weakly rebuilt.
Successful empires historically do not behave quite as Nazi Germany did.

Why not save the calculated slaughter & 'final solution' for post-war?

The Himmler effect, maybe? The very nature of the hierarchy inciting that man (among others) to build his/their little empire/s and justify it with slaughter in the name of the 'higher' Nazi cause, regardless of the negative effect on overall capacity and ability to wage war.
desperation as time ran out, to kill as many untermensch as possible (I can see that after the tide turned, but the tide might well have turned later if they had been capable of some restraint...).

 

I've said it before: it was desperation fuelled by a lack of food, already in '41. The Nazis could not feed Europe entire, even if they wanted to. Europe has long needed imports of food stuffs, to sustain its population. Once the naval blockade of Occupied Europe came into being, and the trade with the Soviets ceased, there was no way in hell they could feed all the people in Europe. Add to that the poor harvest of that year, and it was a disaster. If someone was going to starve, it was going to be those deemed least desirable. Once this fact was realised, there was little point in postponing "the final solution."

 

That's a given, and what actually happened - they were on the whole ideologically incapable of restricting German food supplies before starving subject populations first.
But... it's the magic world of what-if, and that's where the question lies. Was that desperation somewhat of their own making...

Eastern agriculture, though hardly the most efficient following Soviet 'reforms', was ravaged by the racial policies and their application, on top of the inevitable damage done by passing warfare.
The point is, that if the Wehrmacht & SS had followed a more conventional imperial policy of carrot & stick, perhaps even with a more sensible approach to feeding Germany itself, the damage may well have been far less to infrastructure.
A village burnt, with all of it's 'untermensch' inhabitants killed or scattered produces nothing.
A village occupied, with a dollop of propaganda and maybe even some sense of liberation from the previous Soviet repression might well have served the Reich far better... until the war's end, when the mask can drop.
The Romans only sowed the ground with salt and carried out mass killings as a punishment. They knew a thing or two about Imperial infrastructure.

 

This is a very significant point, the most successful empires (the Roman and the British are the best examples) tended to work with the local population. I don`t know whether the word benign Empire is appropriate but in that direction. The Nazi empire was malign in the most ruthless and unpleasant way, and very short term it was likely to be, and in fact was.......