Chris

“Brack’s note is more than a bizarre sidelight at this point in the history, because it demonstrates how the Nazis were considering a whole variety of ideas as potential ‘solutions’ to their ‘Jewish question’. It is crucial to recognize that all of them – from the Madagascar plan to ghettoization, to mass sterilization – were ultimately genocidal. Jews would not be destroyed en masse via sterilization, that’s true, but over a generation they would all disappear. In Madagascar they would have vanished over time because the territory could not support large numbers of people, and because the Jewish ‘reservation’ would have been overseen by SS fanatics. In the ghetto they would have perished eventually because the Nazis had created an environment where the death rate was higher than the birth rate and children were treated as ‘useless eaters’. Just suppose for a moment that circumstances had been such that the Nazis had adopted one of these methods, instead of going on as they did to create the death camps. Would the world have been so appalled? Would one of these methods of extermination still have been called a ‘Holocaust’? Perhaps not, because the factories of death the Nazis created in the east represented a particular horror – the cold, mechanistic destruction of human life in an instant, a crime that was symbolic of the worst extremes of the industrial age, somehow an even more haunting means of extermination than the mass shootings the Nazi killing squads would carry out elsewhere in the east at the same time. But we should still remember that the death camps were just one means to the same end that all of these other potential ‘solutions’ offered – the elimination of the Jews.”
― Laurence Rees, The Holocaust: A New History