What if the Holocaust was delayed?

[Chris]

(before someone starts something, this is not a pro-Nazi thread.)

I cannot really conceive of a Nazi Regime that didn't hate the Jews (it was a fixed part of Hitler’s character) but their obsession with exterminating every last Jew was a colossal waste of time and resources, to say nothing of making the Nazi Regime look bad before the world – even before WW2 broke out. What if Hitler decides to put the pogroms and the holocaust off until the end of the war?

Chris

[Admiral Canaris]

Pogroms there'll be anyway if Nazism is at all like that IOTL. What you can remove is systematic extermination.

However, there are also resources issues - for example, three million Jews in Poland that will still require food, something Germany is desperately short of in the war years. (See Tooze, "The Wages of Destruction".) Will they feed these enough that they can live? When the foodstocks dwindle, the temptation will still be there to drastically lower their rations. In fact, some historians (working in the so called "functionalist" school) argue that depriving the Polish Jews of food in the "Hunger Winter" of 1940 was a key step on the road towards industrial genocide - it made the German officials more comfortable with mass death, so to speak.

So, even if there is no Judeocide as such with gas chambers and execution squads, hundreds of thousands will very likely still die from starvation and neglect. A bit like theSoviet POWs, most likely.

[Valdemar I]

I agree with Admiral Canaris here, the interesting are what happen after the war, both with Jews and Germany. The Nazis will lack their most unpleasant crime and as such only bee seen as the Italian fascist rather than the scum of OTL. 4-5 millions Jews will still be alive including hundred of thousands in Germany and 2-3 millions in Belarus and Poland. Israel are likely to receive the same or a little more than OTL thanks to the sad state of Europe. But we will see millions staying in Europe. Yiddish survives as a European language. Germany will evolve the same guilt complex as OTL, through it will be a smaller part of German culture without the very visible example of Holocaust.

[Straha]

If hitler won the war, why wouldn't he just force Vichy France to dump Europe's jews in madagascar?

Why would he even bother with a hypothetical holocaust?

[Hades]

I could see Hitler using Jews as slave labour though, which would lead to many deaths. :(

[Jim Coke]

I think the main issue for delaying the Holocaust might have been preventing the Nazi invasion of eastern Europe, and the main issue in this regard would have been the Polish government allowing Soviet troops to be stationed on Polish soil. This was unacceptable to the Polish government, understandably so because it would have amounted to the Soviet conquest of Poland without a single shot fired. Instead the Soviets cut a deal with the Nazis and got a big chunk of Polish land after the Nazis invaded, which Stalin hoped would be a buffer zone and would help buy time to build up Soviet forces.

The question therefore is how well the alternate history of Soviets being allowed to station their troops in Poland would have prevented eastern Europe from eventually being invaded. Certainly it would have been very chastening to the Nazi leadership in psychological terms. And it was a great sense of euphoric over-confidence after the initially easy invasion of the USSR that led to the Nazi plan to find a 'final solution' to the 'Jewish problem'. This euphoria might not have been in existence if it had been a long hard slog eastward starting from the eastern German border all the way to Moscow.

On the other hand, of course, when the going did get tough in the invasion of the USSR at the end of 1941, that is when the Nazis really committed themselves to genocide. So the Holocaust cannot be entirely attributed to euphoric hopes.

Still, if the going had been tough from the outset of the invasion of the USSR (indeed, if there had been an invasion, which is not assured) and if it was recognized early on that German resources would be very limited and that it would be a long struggle without certain success, the chastened German mindset might have led to a different policy toward the Jews in occupied territory -- basically, supervised neglect, or even pillage. That would still be devastating, but not organized mass murder.

from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wannsee_Conference

"The rapid German advances in the opening weeks of the invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa, induced a mood of euphoria among the Nazi leadership, which began to take an increasingly radical view of the "solution" of the "Jewish question"—a question that seemed to become more urgent with the growing likelihood that the four million Jews of the western Soviet Union would fall under German control.[1] On 16 July 1941, Hitler addressed a meeting of ministers, including Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, at which the administration of the occupied Soviet territories was discussed. He said that Soviet territories west of the Urals were to become a "German Garden of Eden", and that "naturally this vast area must be pacified as quickly as possible; this will happen best by shooting anyone who even looks sideways at us."[2]

"Hitler's chief lieutenants, Göring and the SS chief Heinrich Himmler, took this and other comments by Hitler at this time (most of which were not recorded, but were attested to at postwar trials) as authority to proceed with a more radical "final solution of the Jewish question" (Die Endlösung der Judenfrage), involving the complete removal of the Jews from the German-occupied territories. On 31 July 1941 Göring gave a written authorisation to SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, Chief of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) to "make all necessary preparations" for a "total solution of the Jewish question" in all the territories under German influence, to co-ordinate the participation of all government organisations whose co-operation was required, and to submit a "comprehensive draft" of a plan for the "final solution of the Jewish question".[3]

"Göring was at this time the second most powerful figure in the Nazi regime, having been given the special rank of Reichsmarschall and designated as Hitler's successor.[4] Therefore, Heydrich would have understood that any instruction coming from Göring carried the authority of Hitler. Heydrich also knew that his immediate superior, Himmler, was in favour of exterminating the Jews, and Heydrich was at that moment directing the Einsatzgruppen to do just that in the newly conquered Soviet territories. Rudolf Lange, commander of Einsatzkommando 2 in Latvia, wrote that his orders were "a radical solution of the Jewish problem through the execution of all Jews".[5] In October the deportation of the Jews of Germany, Austria and the Czech lands to the east began. When a train carrying about 1,000 German Jews arrived at Riga in Latvia on November 29, 1941, Lange simply had them shot. But this was clearly not a feasible method of dealing with millions of people: the cost of ammunition alone was unacceptable, and it was observed that even SS troops were uncomfortable about shooting assimilated German Jews as opposed to Ostjuden ("Eastern Jews").[6] The head of the German civil administration in Belarus, generalkommisar Wilhelm Kube, who among other crimes personally murdered Jewish children, objected to German Jews deported to the Minsk Ghetto, "who come from our own cultural circle", being casually killed by German soldiers.[7]

"During the second half of 1941, therefore, Heydrich and his staff worked on proposals to "evacuate" all Jews from Germany and the occupied countries to labour camps, either in occupied Poland or further east in the Soviet Union, which it was assumed would soon be completely conquered. Those who were unable to work would be killed, while the remainder would soon be worked to death. But the German defeat in front of Moscow in November–December led to a sharp change of emphasis. Euphoria was replaced by the prospect of a long war, and also by a realisation that food stocks were not sufficient to feed the entire population of German-occupied Europe.[8] It was at this time the decision to proceed from "evacuation" to extermination was made. Speaking with Himmler and Heydrich on 25 October, Hitler said: "Let no one say to me: we cannot send them into the swamp. Who then cares about our own people? It is good when terror precedes us that we are exterminating the Jews. We are writing history anew, from the racial standpoint."[9]

[Straha]

My guess is not much effort on the war. Israel has several million more people, and is de-arabized in 1948 with the arabs pushed east of the jordan. On the one hand, initial worse relations and larger numbers of expelled people, but on the other hand, there'd be no occupied territories or expansionist urges since it'd have Israel's historical areas.

My guess is Israel's post-1948 borders look like current israel plus the sinai with the nation's population being more Ashkenazim and less sephardim. It'd be a land of three major languages with Yiddish, Hebrew and English instead of OTL's Hebrew, Arabic and Englsih.

Honestly, by now the arabs have probably learned to live with Israel's existance. Israel TTL is more populous, less statist(less wars, less paranoia), is wealthier(freer economy) and we're less likely to see a middle eastern world war by 2030 than OTL.

[Fearless Leader]

Though I doubt the lack of a systematic genocide would truly affect the overall outcome of the war, I do think that with the added resources, especially logistically, the Nazi's are going to do somewhat better. Their troops are going to be better supplied and therefore be more able to hold off the Soviets and to a lesser extent the Western Allies. I'd say this leads to the war lasting at least a few more months than OTL. Without the constant diversion of trains and rolling stock to the deportations, more supplies can be sent to the front. Perhaps in TTL the Nazis get closer to their goals in Operation Barbarossa...

Furthermore in order to "justify" keeping the Jews alive, (just barely though, rations are still going to be below starvation level) the Nazis will probably engage in slave labour using those Jews in the Ghettos. Ghettos also will be organized in the occupied zones of Eastern Europe as well. This policy probably leads to a large number of deaths but nowhere near the numbers in OTL, roughly 1-2 million. This might lead to increased production and decreased partisan activity, and could also contribute to the Nazi war effort in that way.