Sunday, January 25, 2015

Wannsee Revisited

It is worth recalling this key line from the Protocol:
In the meantime the Reichsfuehrer-SS and Chief of the German Police had prohibited emigration of Jews due to the dangers of an emigration in wartime and due to the possibilities of the East.
It raises two questions. Firstly, why would it be safer "in wartime" to send Jews to the East, where the military conflict was at its most intense and insecure position, than to let them go to a country such as Morocco or Palestine, to which Germany had no objections to letting them go in 1939-40? Secondly, what are the "possibilities in the East"? Most western Jews were unsuitable for labor over there and would be a rapidly diminished labour force. The unfit Jews would gradually starve if not simply killed on arrival. Costs of maintaining camp security would be prohibitive, and there would be a constant risk of prisoners escaping to the partisans. Heydrich and Eichmann must logically therefore be referring here to the possibilities of killing these Jews, just as Soviet Jews had been killed in large numbers in the preceding months.

4 comments:

  1. C'mon man you must can do a better job than that.

    "Heydrich and Eichmann must logically therefore be" .. I mean really, lololol.

    Explain why the schism between the intentionalists and the functionalists please.

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  2. «C'mon man you must can do a better job than that.

    "Heydrich and Eichmann must logically therefore be" .. I mean really, lololol.»

    Is that supposed to be an argument?

    «Explain why the schism between the intentionalists and the functionalists please.»

    Why not? Different theories about how and when certain policies developed are part of historiography, whether it's the Nazi genocide of the Jews or another subject. How about explaining what your question has got to do with the subject matter of the article?

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  3. If the 'final solution' was decided at Wanssee why can't the Intentionalists and the Functionalists get along?

    Theories, the holocaust I'm continually told is the most documented event in history, why are you still coming up with theories?

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  4. «If the 'final solution' was decided at Wanssee»

    Who said the "final solution" was decided at Wannsee? It had been decided upon before, actually.

    «why can't the Intentionalists and the Functionalists get along?»

    Are you sure you know what the Intentionalist and the Functionlist theories are about, first of all? Let's see if you know. Please fire away.

    «Theories, the holocaust I'm continually told is the most documented event in history, why are you still coming up with theories?»

    Why should the fact that the Holocaust is among the most documented events in history, as concerns its occurrence, be in contradiction with there being different theories as to when the original intention to carry it out (as opposed to the decision to do so) came into being?

    ReplyDelete

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