@8thGuards:
Black Earth by Tim Snyder
The author argues that the removal of the jews was (at least in Hitler’s mind) a rational consequence of a certain world view. Hitler supposedly didn’t believe in the concept of countries as entities defined by borders, but only in “nation” as in a racial community, and all foreign elements had to be eliminated for such a nation to thrive.
Also that the great crimes of the 20th century, especially the holocaust required statelessness and de facto anarchy, it could not have been done anywhere in western Europe. This is why the countries of eastern Europe needed to be disbanded so the great project could be completed. In western Europe the governments were overthrown but the states more or less maintained, in the east not just governments were overthrown, but states were obliterated creating the very environment in which the deed could be done.
Less known is that after winning the war Hitler and friends also planned to do to the Poles what they did to the jews (after assimilating maybe 5-10% into the German nation) and then also vast population reductions across the Baltic States, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia itself to establish his dream of a German racial empire.
Another book of his that is really good is Bloodlands (eastern Europe between Hitler and Stalin).
Almost none of the factual claims in the above post are true. (The exception being Hitler’s view of race and nation. So for example Hitler would consider someone of German ethny to be a fellow German, regardless of whichever nation in which that person resided. On the other hand he would not consider a black or Asian person to be a German, even if that person had obtained German citizenship.)
During the 1930s, Hitler’s proposed solution to what he called the “Jewish problem” was Jewish relocation to Palestine. Large numbers of German Jews relocated during that period. So much immigration happened, in fact, that the Palestinians rebelled against British rule. Britain ruthlessly suppressed the rebellion, of course, but it also felt it had to give the Palestinians something to reassure them that little additional Jewish immigration would occur. The something that it gave them was the White Paper of 1939. That white paper restricted Jewish immigration into Palestine to 15,000 per year. A trivial sum in relation to Europe’s Jewish population.
The 1935 Nuremberg Laws stripped the 500,000 German Jews of their citizenship. Jewish migration was impeded by Nazi restrictions on the transfer of finances abroad (departing Jews had to abandon their property), but the Jewish Agency was able to negotiate an agreement allowing Jews resident in Germany to buy German goods for export to Palestine thus circumventing the restrictions.
Hitler didn’t go around tearing up Eastern European nation states in preparation for the Holocaust. Prior to the White Paper of 1939, Hitler’s plan for the Jews had involved resettlement, not extermination.
As for the Poles: during WWII, German officials had drawn up plans to relocate 30 - 50 million Poles eastward, to make room for German expansion. (This relocation was to be done during the postwar period.) If at that time there was still an Allied food blockade/famine conditions, the deaths of large numbers of these Poles would have been seen as an acceptable way to reduce pressure on Germany’s food supply, and to prevent the starvation of others living in German-held territory. On the other hand, there was no plan in place to starve any Poles if the blockade had been lifted, or if food conditions had fully or partially returned to normal. The idea that Hitler had planned to exterminate all Poles is a wild exaggeration, and is no more credible than any other Allied propaganda.
