Sorry, but this is a very naive point of view. The Nazi solution was to kill as many of everything as fast they can, the t4 programme and hands on killings were already daily business. The only thing holding the Nazis back was a functional USSR, as soon they anticipated the fall of Moscow, the termination camps have been built in no time. They also maintained many concentration camps long before the decisive conference at Wannsee. The systematic killings started in June 41. The construction and initial glassings via gas vans started before the Wannsee conference, they couldn't wait long enough to get started. Hitler stated as early as 1922 to a journalist that his first and foremost task will be the annihilation of Jews. He simply had to keep a bit of international reputation and was not sure if the army and other lackeys would be ready to commit mass genocide on civilians. After the cowardly operation Barbarossa, there were no doubts any more.

There are no ifs or whatever about this, the German population will forever be marked as the biggest suckers in mankind for allowing this man to power and have him and his rich buddies stay in power. There were heroic people who had seen the painting on the wall and died for the cause, then there were the complicit, active clogs in the machine and the most cowardly, the "neutral/passive" parts of the population who accepted the state of affairs and hoped it might either away without consequences for them. And then there's people like you, to this day believing the Jewish solution would have seriously been a peaceful relocation, which would have killed many as well.

Ask yourself in which of the 3 aforementioned groups you would most likely be.

I upvoted you, simply because you state facts. Frankly, while we know a majority either supported or at least accepted Nazi policy, condemning all Germans from back the day is a tad harsh. Simply, because people back then didn't have much of a choice after 1933.

And Nazi propaganda was quite effective. I have more of an issue with the fact, that denazification wasn't even half as thorough as it should have been. A combination of national denial / shame and Cold War realities had people like Fillbinger make distinguished careers after the war. Despite being a hard core Nazi judge he rose to prime minister of Baden-Württemberg. But I guess, that was the best possible outcome after all.

Thanks for the upvote, you do have a valid point, most of the opposition was shut down one way or another. My main issue with the German population was them not seeing on what the economy was based back then and the many saying "we did not know". This simply does not pass the sniffing test. I agree, as usual with conflict riddled nations, the state apparatus is never entirely changed, many got off without any consequences whatsoever, the ones who paid were soldiers and the whole of eastern Germany and all places which were invaded and plundered by the USSR. I share the exact same view as you , just worded differently.

I had both sides of "we did not know" in my family. On the one side of my grandparents you had my grandmother being warned of by SS to stop leaving food on her employers door step, on the other side you had "we didn't know, nobody did and was hard for us as well". My conclusion, and took really long to get there, is that it was easy to fall for Nazi propaganda. Even grandma one did like the Bund Deutscher Mädel a lot. I even get why you would end up fighting, because to a degree you did defend your home. I think that, if you bought to much into it, once the full gravity hit after the war, a loy of people just preferred to push it all away. Facing that you served and sacrificed that much for a regime that evil is hard to swallow. And I agree, the full scope of the Holocaust, and not the fate of jews and others, came as a nasty surprise to a lot of people.

All that was made easier by the cold war. All of a sudden the western allies agreed that the Communists were the real enemy. So in a way, you fought the right war. At least you could tell yourself that lie without too much push back.

I think that this is also the reason why people like Schindler and all the others were sidelined the way they were. They showed everyone the lies they were telling themselves.

This is a very insightful post. I had family which suffered from both the fascists and the communists and even royalists to a degree. Where I am sceptical about the German "did not know" is, all these soldiers who went on invasions, they had families and surely some reported about the matters. In the east European countries and the south, soldiers did report home and speak to families. This includes the operators of the death camps, which might have been told to keep quiet, but the boots on ground soldiers surely were more communicative. I could be wrong.

War is a horrible thing, not sure how to prevent it or what post war measurements other than education and relative wealth can prevent it. It is even more sad if one considers how Hitler came to be, all the way from what basically was family feuds leading to WW1 etc.

Germany simply had the manpower, engineering and resources to do it, it could have been some other country as well.

People often handwave away what doesn't fit in their world view. So if you lived in Germany during those times and heard whispers about the genocide your first thought would be: "But in the news papers it's nowhere to be found! How can it be true? That's probably an exaggeration or a single occurence" (or whatever else pops in your mind at first thought). And because you as a mere citizen don't have a lot of leverage you would probably leave it at that and simply try to live and survive. I think there's a lot about group psychology to be learnt by our horrible past (I'm German) and I think these lessons are helpful for every human being. Especially now with the rise of populists in the last years worldwide (and the atrocities against the Uighurs).

So was the Madagascar Plan really on the table or not. Please answer only that, is this complete misinformation because my internet filter bubble got distorted by some weird searches years ago? Or do the records genuinely exist and compete with our understanding of the outcome.

From my understanding: It existed, and the German apparatus acted as if it did. Turning Madagascar into a SS-run concentration camp as planned would have been genocide too, so it arguably doesn't matter all that much. Similar to some of the other "Jewish reservations" that had happened previously, e.g. Lublin-Nisko: It turns out if you cram many thousands people into an area without infrastructure, shoot everyone who tries to leave and add some forced labor, survival rates are not good. Who at what point considered mass deaths to be the point of the exercise vs just a (tolerable or welcomed) side-effect boils down to an aspect of the functionalism/intentionalism debate.

Well the Nazi government had a bit of a selective modus operandi when it came to procedures. They didn't widely announce t4, even the gassings were just delegated by Hitler and the implementation was left to the command chain. What they wanted known, they made known, the less popular projects were delegated verbally. There have been many, many more diplomatic lies, from other governments out of fear of Germany, it is pretty incredible. For example how the Romanians communicated the Germans are there to train their forces, the reality was protection of gas resources. Or the very sad story how Hungary was coerced to attack former Yugoslavia by means of acrobatics with the truth only days after signing a forever friendship and brotherhood treaty, it was so bad then prime minister Teleki commutes suicide over it. In his suicide note, Teleki wrote in part: We broke our word, – out of cowardice […] The nation feels it, and we have thrown away its honor. The Nazi Germany diplomatic communications were far from honest and this man called it by the name. I always remember how the British considered Hitler's appeasement as a big mistake, they had a hunch. Hitler also ordered every occupied nation to be free of Jews with little time given for the task and implementation of it up to the occupied puppet governments. It does not matter if the Madagascar plan existed, what matters is what really happened. The Madagascar plan was broadcast just like any other Nazi propaganda, which was riddled with lies.

> Sorry, but this is a very naive point of view. The Nazi solution was to kill as many of everything as fast they can, the t4 programme and hands on killings were already daily business. The only thing holding the Nazis back was a functional USSR, as soon they anticipated the fall of Moscow, the termination camps have been built in no time.

Sorry, but that's a very naive and quite wrong point of view.

The Wannsee conference, where it was actually decided to mass murder industrially the Jews was in January 1942, and happened then because they saw they won't have a quick victory against the USSR; otherwise it would have waited after that. Before the conference, there were small scale proofs of concept by local eager commanders, nothing more.

As was already established in the article, the USSR didn't care about Jews, why would they be holding back the Nazis? Nothing was stopping them from industrially murdering all Jews deported to the General Government in 1941, yet they didn't. The policy then was murder through torture, overwork and hunger.

It was rather that Germany thought they can do whatever they want once they believed Moscow is about to fall. I agree the Soviets did not care much more for Jews than Nazi Germany, hell, they even have been kinda allied or not entirely hostile to eachother at some time, like the Poland split.