
Originally Posted by
ronburgundy
You might want to rethink the level of apology and excuse you are giving to the Nazis. It was no "accident". It was a byproduct of the culture and circumstances created the antisemitic hatred that the Nazis (and many Poles) had propagandized for years prior and the gradually increasing violence such propaganda inherently causes.
And dude, "Impossible to keep them alive"??? Murdering and starving the Jews to death was the only possibility only if one has the mindset that doing so is of so little concern that other options are not considered. First, every person involved with or who knew about the selling of prisoner food knew they were killing the prisoners. There was a culture and context that encouraged and allowed the knowing killing of innocent Jews to happen, and antisemitism was the foundation of that culture. Then after there was no food to feed them, there was a choice to kill them and let them die, make an effort to stop the selling of the food, deport them to allied areas, etc.? These were a group of people who are all innocent of any crime other than being a Jew and many children. Those other options are only "impossible" if one has an antisemitic view of Jews as subhuman and of no moral worth. So again, everyone (including the Poles) who promoted this antisemitic view was a causal contributor to the death of every Jew in the holocuast, whether murdered or died from starvation and disease.
Meh... we have surviving loads of documents where high Nazi officials wrote angry letters to camp commanders because it made them look bad when the prisoners kept dying. All the Nazi slave labour production camps produced much worse than both projected, but also facilities with free labour. This was a major problem for the Nazi government and hampered the war effort. The Nazi government had a major incentive to keep them alive... yet still failed. Many of the slave labour camps demanded specialised skilled labour. These barely produced anything at all, because skills couldn't be maintained among the workers long enough to make new workers proficient. Nearly all died while still being useless apprentices. This was a big problem because these plants had been built at great cost for the government. Overall the slave labour camps only ended up costing the Nazi government. The concentration camp system didn't even pay for itself.
And to drive home the point. When the Eastern front opened up the concentration camps were filled up with Russian war prisoners. These were also supposed to be kept alive and strongly worded letters from Himmler were sent to camps. Yet, these also died, even faster than the Jews that preceded them. This led to a purge of camp commanders and several ended up as prisoners in the same concentration camps they once ran. Because they let their prisoners die. The Nazi government took this very seriously.
It wasn't a bi-product of antisemitism. It was a bi-product of that totalitarianism and state run companies are inefficient. Because the incentives of the people running these places is to kiss ass of the people higher on the ranking ladder. Not to produce whatever is needed to be produced by their company. And since they all have monopolies it's impossible to compare and track their performance. Since everybody on all levels have an incentive NOT to be honest in their reporting. This was true on all levels in the Nazi government.
The same things happened in the Gulag, the Chinese re-education camps or the Cambodian. You can't claim these institutions were in practice death camps because of antisemitism?