No Hitler, no Holocaust.
If Britain and France had not declared war on Germany in September of 1939, there likely would not have been a world war and therefore no Holocaust.
Chaim Amalek writes:
“Never been a holocaust?” OK. It is 1939, and Hitler has overrun Poland (or at least the western and central parts of it), along with some 3,000,000 or however many Jews lived there. His charge to his lieutenants was “Make this land German for me again!”. Now then, just what do you suppose would have been the fate of those 3,000,000 Polish Jews? Also, Hitler was obsessed with invading the USSR for “living space.” That war was going to happen sooner or later. What do you suppose Hitler would have done to the Jews of the Ukraine? And finally, had war not come in ’39, Hitler’s minions would have had more time in which to perfect jet aircraft, radar, and who knows, possibly even nuclear weapons (the Germans had Heisenberg and some other more than competent scientists working for them). No holocaust? Maybe not including France, but everywhere else his armies marched, that was a key goal of his.
A friend tells me:
One of the things that so many people forget about the onset of WWII was that the German demands that led to the war, return of Alsace Lorraine, reunification with Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia, protection of ethnic Germans in Poland, the Baltic States and even within the Soviet Union, even the Anschluss with Austria, were not unique to Hitler. People forget that up to WWI, the ethnic Germans in Poland were under German governmental control since there was no Poland, its territory divided between Imperial Germany and Tsarist Russia, that the ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia were under Hapsburg control out of Vienna, that Alsace Lorraine were part of Germany and that even the ethnic Germans within Russia were well treated.
There was tremendous pressure, both from within Germany and from the Germans outside of Germany to be protected and reunited with Germany. This nationalism was not limited to the Nazis. The Austrians were more than happy to join with Germany, especially since Germany’s leader was Austrian by birth, and the non German ethnic parts of the Hungarian Empire had been split off from its German speaking core after the war.
The question that your correspondent Amalek asks is whether Hitler would have stopped had he been granted the right to the Danzig corridor and the protection of Germans in Poland. Hitler clearly didn’t fear war. He believed it had many positive effects, but there certainly is a case to be made if he consolidated Germans if he had had his way with Poland (before the Soviet – Nazi pact) that he would have expanded his influence among the Aryan nations Belgium, Holland, and the Scandinavian contries. It is also to be remembered that although Germany was anti semitic, sanctioned German killings of Jews didn’t happen until after Operation Barbarossa (the first killings were pogroms by ethnic Latvians and Lithuanians) and the Wannsee conference, which most people use as the date the final solution was adopted for implementation took place at the beginning of 1942. So not only were the annexations of Alsace Lorraine, Austria and Czechoslavakia not accompanied by extermination, neither was the conquest of Poland, France, Holland, Belgium, Norway and Denmark. Jews in those places may not have been happy, but they were not sent to extermination camps until 1942 at the earliest.
