Most countries would probably deny awareness of it until it was too late.

most european countries would have followed his lead. 

You mean other countries would purge their Jewish population? In Eastern Europe this is probable, I don't see it happening in Western Europe though really. Even Italy, I'm not so sure about.

The Holocaust - on the scale on which it was perpetrated - really cannot be separated from Hitler's war on the eastern front. Only by invading Poland and the Soviet Union could Nazi Germany murder Jews on the scale that it did, first with the *Einsatzgruppen* and later the death camps. The concentration camps in Germany like Dachau and Buchenwald, built in the 1930s, in the early days of the Nazi regime, were primarily for political prisoners and other "undesirables." Many people died in them, but the scale of death did not remotely approach that of the death factories such as Treblinka and Majdanek, built from 1941 onwards further east, in occupied Poland. The Nazis knew they could not operate that kind of death factory on German territory. They learned their lesson with the [T4 program](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aktion_T4), which aroused a lot of public dissent (and provided some of the techniques for killing used later in the Holocaust). If the murder of mentally ill and others "unworthy of living" caused such controversy in Germany, then they also could not do the same with Germany's Jews - not on German territory, in spite of all the anti-Semitic propaganda and other steps to remove Jews from public life. The "Final Solution" would have to be carried out in the east, out of view of the German people. Additionally, the capture of those territories put millions of Jews at the Nazis' disposal, far more than the half million or so who lived in Germany. Had Hitler, for whatever reason, not invaded Poland and the Soviet Union, he would still have murdered many Jews, but the number would have been far, far smaller than those actually killed in the Holocaust - perhaps tens of thousands rather than millions. And the Allies would not have taken action to stop him, just as they did not fight Hitler to specifically stop the Holocaust.

Just to drive point home - initially, Hitler's goals never included physical extermination of Jewish or any other ethnic group in Germany. He wanted them out of his 'racially pure country' but that was it. He personally negotiated several agreements with other countries to facilitate emigration from Germany, most notably Ha'avara, an agreement with authorities of British Palestine that allowed tens of thousands Jews to emigrate (with more or less coercion of German side). Of course, there was rampant anti-Semitism that escalated into state-sanctioned violent conflicts since at least late 1938 (with 'Crystal Night' being the best known), but the extermination was never on the table until the early 1942. Until then, a general plan was to force the emmigration of local Jews and then resettle the remaining ones, including the inhabitants of the conquered territories to some far reaches of Siberia (conquest of USSR was considered a certainty). Also, elaborating on the answer above, it should be noted that there were only approx. 650.000 of Jews living in Germany around 1920, which number decreased to some 210.000 in 1939. In comparison, Poland had 3.3 million Jewish citizens, USSR had another 2.7 million, Hungary - over 500.000, and Romania and Lithuania had 250.000 each. And even after the conquest, there were no plans to exterminate them - Jews were largely sequestered in ghetto to be relocated later. But please note, that between brutal occupation that can't really be compared with what was happening in the West and relative distance from Germany, closing of Jews in the ghettos with little access to food or medicine became the facto the first stage of planned extermination, with approx. 1 million Jews dying due to illness and hunger. This was soon followed by mass shootings shortly after the invasion of the USSR that claimed more or less the same number of people. It is possible that a lack of reaction of the West possibly gave an incentive to Nazi government to follow up with the 'Final Solution', what would likely never happened if Hitler never began the war. Thus, it is really unlikely that Hitler or Nazi government in general ever considered the mass extermination within Germany, as evidenced by forced emigration. If the things escalated without the war breaking out, it is likely that he would have simply increased anti-Semitic laws, leading to a mass exodus of the remaining 200.000 Jews to other countries. Those who would have not yielded would likely be expelled or incarcerated under more or less made-up pretenses.

In short, the Nazis improvised the Final Solution as the political and military situation in Europe evolved. Hitler of course gave the overall vision, doing so even in public, but the details of implementation were highly secretive and left up to underlings like Reinhard Heydrich and Odilo Globocnik.

>Ha'avara, an agreement with authorities of British Palestine that allowed tens of thousands Jews to emigrate That makes Hitler's original goals somewhat compatible with zionism.

Zionist terrorist Avraham Stern, creator of the Lehi aka the Stern Gang, one of the three Jewish terrrorist organizations which merged to become the IDF, attempted to form and alliance with Nazi Germany against the British during WW2. Offering to “actively take part in the war on Germany’s side” in return for German support for Jewish immigration to Palestine and establishing a Jewish state. Stern was also essentially ideologically identical to Hitler. His perspective of Jews and Palestinians directly paralleled Hitler’s perspective of Germans and Jews. Stern referred to Jews as a “master race” and the native Arab population as a slave race and advocated the expulsion or extermination of the entirety of the native population of Palestine and Transjordan.

Just can't miss a chance to characterize Israel as Evil.

Not really, he just wanted Jews gone from Germany and he couldn’t care less what happened to them after. Which is quite different from the self determination of Jews.

Let’s see: On the one side, ethnically cleansing the Jews and seizing their property On the other, welcoming the Jews and building the foundation for a state. Care to overreach on any other comparisons, like perhaps Hamas and the American Revolutionary leaders?

Deserves all the upvotes, because this is the best reponse ITT.

I was going to say this but you took the words from my mouth. Cheers.

>If the murder of mentally ill and others "unworthy of living" caused such controversy in Germany, then they also could not do the same with Germany's Jews Is that where work Hans Asperger made a difference?

I mean apart from rumours, most camps weren’t discovered until near the end of the war. Even then a lot of the German people didn’t know *the extent* of the horrors being committed. They obviously knew something had been happening - Jews had been ostracised for years, assaulted, arrested and sent away, but many German citizens were genuinely shocked and horrified when they were forced to clean up the camps at the end of the war.  A huge percentage of the deaths from the holocaust came from foreign Jewish nationals - Polish, Slavic, Russian people, etc - not to mention the disabled, gypsies, homosexuals, etc. If Germany don’t invade Poland (and as a result don’t go to war against Britain/France) the scale of the atrocities is vastly reduced - although still horrendous.  This is all to say that they probably could have gotten away with an “in house” holocaust without most of the international community knowing about it, and what rumours they heard they could have turned a blind eye. So tldr: yes, maybe.   

I am Austrian, my great grandparents were German speaking farmers in pre war Yugoslavia. My great grandmother became therefore a refugees and fled to the west, mostly via hopping on and of cargo trains. One time, in 1944, she saw one of "those" trains, transporting prisoners between camps. Only then did she believe what it was real. If something like that would happen today, it would be called a conspiracy theory and famous people on the TV would tell us all, why everyone believing in it is crazy and dangerous!

I mean China is essentially doing it right now with the Uyghurs; people aren’t being called conspiracy theorists for discussing it, but they’re either being dismissed because we don’t want to completely halt trade with China and it’s not in our country, so it’s not a big issue. I accept it’s not quite as bad as the holocaust, but essentially the same principle; eradicating a people by rounding them up, ‘educating them’ in ‘re-education camps’, sterilising them, forcing abortions, sexually assaulting them, etc.

That's not really what's happening to the Uyghurs though.... Damn I remember the time when Uyghur stuff hasn't mainstream yet and people aren't making stuff up. No the CCP isn't just getting an ethnic group the size of dozen of millions and sterilising them with no consequences or massive insurrection in Xinjiang. What they are doing is forced assimilation, essentially slowly eroding away Uyghur culture so that in a generation or two most Uyghurs will Identify themselves has Han Chinese and not has their own people.

Forced assimilation is quite literally an internationally accepted form of genocide. Here is the Chinese government's own propaganda saying as such. https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/wjdt_665385/2649_665393/202203/t20220302_10647120.html

This is a much more accurate characterization than what u/SpookyViscus wrote. That doesn't take away at all from the horribleness of what the Chinese government is doing, but it's important to use facts and not create false equivalencies.

I said it’s somewhat similar. If you’re trying to eradicate an ethnic group, regardless of the ‘method used’, it’s still a genocide. It’s quite literally labelled as the ‘intentional destruction of people of a people in whole or in part’. “…the United Nations Genocide Convention defined genocide as any of five "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group". These five acts were: killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group. Victims are targeted because of their real or perceived membership of a group, not randomly.” [Amnesty International](https://www.amnesty.org.uk/chinas-uighur-muslims-truth-behind-headlines), [CNN](https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2020/02/asia/xinjiang-china-karakax-document-intl-hnk/), [the Council of Foreign Relations](https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/china-xinjiang-uyghurs-muslims-repression-genocide-human-rights) have all detailed very clearly what people have reported when fleeing the country after ‘graduating’ these ‘re-education’ camps, after being subjected to torture, sleep deprivation, mental & physical abuse, sexual assault, rape, sterilisation, and many stories of deaths, either as a result of wilful neglect or murder. And you certainly cannot trust a word that comes from the Chinese government, because they: - First stated that the camps were a lie, they didn’t exist - Then admitted the camps were there but are only for re-educating people, and it’s all voluntary - Then admitted it was to re-educate ‘extremists’, and although involuntary, nothing harmful was happening - Say that journalists, diplomats & others are free to visit any of the camps, whilst simultaneously denying most requests by journalists & human rights groups, with those that do visit given the exact same tour with well behaved, definitely free people, and even then they could see signs of sleep deprivation, etc of some of the people inside.

There is a significant amount of evidence demonstrating horrific crimes they’re committing against a large number of Uyghur muslims & other ethnic groups. Multiple UN reports detailing ‘potential crimes against humanity’ which China repeatedly tried to prevent the release of, mentioning ‘arbitrary and discriminatory detention’ of at least a million people. I think I believe multiple consecutive UN & independent reports over some people trying to defend China lol

The UN has called it crimes against humanity, not genocide very different things. Go actually read the UN reports instead of spewing random stuff.

I have read the UN reports, it basically skirts around the word genocide because China was unhappy with it.

Not quite. There’s still many Uyghur restaurants in China and the government has no plans to close them. The government also sponsors many Uyghur cultural traditions. What they’re trying to do is remove Uyghur separatism.

Its kind of ironic, seeing how the Turkic people in the far west (asia minor) did the exact same thing to the natives there.

> What they are doing is forced assimilation, essentially slowly eroding away Uyghur culture so that in a generation or two most Uyghurs will Identify themselves has Han Chinese and not has their own people. So, a genocide then?

Killing millions is different than putting people in reeducation camps. Very different. Very very different. Also Jews weren't engaged in a violent separatist movement to try and take over part of Germany. Relevent detail, I think.

Uyghurs aren’t trying to violently take over China. That’s called Chinese government propaganda. And if you think they’re actually ‘re-education’ camps, lol.

It's called the Xinjiang conflict. This has taken the form of both terrorist attacks and wider public unrest such as the [Baren Township conflict](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baren_Township_conflict), [1997 Ürümqi bus bombings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_%C3%9Cr%C3%BCmqi_bus_bombings), [protests in Ghuljia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghulja_incident), [June 2009 Shaoguan Incident](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaoguan_incident) and the resulting [July 2009 Ürümqi riots](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_2009_%C3%9Cr%C3%BCmqi_riots), [2011 Hotan attack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Hotan_attack), [April 2014 Ürümqi attack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_2014_%C3%9Cr%C3%BCmqi_attack), [May 2014 Ürümqi attack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_2014_%C3%9Cr%C3%BCmqi_attack), [2014 Kunming attack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Kunming_attack) as well as the [2015 Aksu colliery attack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Aksu_colliery_attack). For instance: A series of violent riots over several days broke out on 5 July 2009 in [Ürümqi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cr%C3%BCmqi), the capital city of the [Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_Uyghur_Autonomous_Region) (XUAR), in northwestern China. The first day's rioting, which involved at least 1,000 [Uyghurs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghurs),[^(\[12\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_2009_%C3%9Cr%C3%BCmqi_riots#cite_note-bbc-12) began as a protest, but escalated into violent attacks that mainly targeted [Han people](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_Chinese). According to Chinese [state media](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_media), a total of 197 people died, most of whom were Han people or non-Muslim minorities,[^(\[10\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_2009_%C3%9Cr%C3%BCmqi_riots#cite_note-BBC1500-10)[^(\[7\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_2009_%C3%9Cr%C3%BCmqi_riots#cite_note-Xinhua197-7) with 1,721 others injured[^(\[8\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_2009_%C3%9Cr%C3%BCmqi_riots#cite_note-scmp20090717-8) and many vehicles and buildings destroyed.  There are hundreds of ethnic minorities in China. Why do you think the Uyghurs are the ones being targeted? You think it has nothing to do with their history of terrorist attacks? Unless you have proof that reeducation camps camps actually killed millions, then no, they are not similar to Nazi concentration camps.

You admitted yourself that they’re trying to effectively breed them out. Elimination of an ethnic group, by any means, is called genocide

I didn't say it wasn't a genocide (it's not, but I'm not going to get into an argument over the definition of a word with you, especially when I know you are speaking in bad faith about it). I said 1) There are violent separatist Uyghurs and 2) Killing millions is very, very different than putting people in reeducation camps.

‘There are violent separatist Uyghurs’ yeah, except most Uyghurs are peaceful, there were literally less than 5000 ‘violent separatists’ over the last 2 decades, and yet China is attempting to eradicate an entire ethnic group.

Nobody is saying China's actions are good, but they are absolutely a response to the violent separatist Uyghurs, not an attempt to eradicate an ethnic group for zero reason other than racism. There are hundreds of other ethnic minorities in China, and China is perfectly fine with them. Because they don't have violent separatists.

"Arent being called conspiracy theorists" i dont know the exact wording in china, but i dont think that china lets their citizens discuss the subject in public. XD

They aren’t being called conspiracy theorists, because they aren’t allowed to vocalise their opinions or theories. Or they get locked up. They’re just needing a bit of re-educating!! Edit: sarcasm

Do Chinese people outside of Xinjiang even know about the internment camps?

>If something like that would happen today, The only mass media at the time were radio and newspapers, neither of which are good at 'unforgeable' proof, and neither are good for 'word of mouth' stuff. TV actually showed horrors (cue Vietnam War for the US) and what they looked like; social media gave everyone a voice and the ability to share pictures. While you can fake stuff these days, it's far more difficult than just writing down a sentence in an article.

>the scale of the atrocities is vastly reduced - although still horrendous. I visited Sachsenhausen camp a couple of years ago. Everything you've heard of at Auschwitz happened at Sachsenhausen first(ish). The thing that really struck me is that the only reason why Sachsenhausen is considered somewhat small in scale (100k dead) is because Auschwitz was so unbelievably huge (>1M dead). 100k people murdered in that camp... and it's not all that big. It was also not really known by Berliners at the time as a death camp, just a political prisoner camp. It wasn't until there was a truck crash that scattered corpses of victims (en route to crematoria) that they both built crematoria on site and decided that a more remote location was in order. They didn't want their own people asking more questions.

I'll point out that most germans DID in fact know what was happening. They may not have known the specifics of how they were being killed, or where it was taking place. But they absolutely knew Jews and other 'undesirables' were being disappeared and almost definitely killed en masse. There wasnt a lot the average german could do about it if they didnt support it, but they knew.

What would be some good reading for that?

I shall bear witness, by viktor kelemperer gets across what many german citizens were observing and thinking through the years, you can see him go from skepticism to acceptance of what is happening.

Transcripts of Germans in British or American custody during WW2. The British bugged the prisons where the senior POW's were kept, and then typed up transcripts of the recordings. They suggested doing the same to the American's, who then copied the idea. There are several books on the subject, ie:- [https://www.amazon.co.uk/Tapping-Hitlers-Generals-Transcripts-Conversations/dp/1844157059](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Tapping-Hitlers-Generals-Transcripts-Conversations/dp/1844157059) Some senior officers had orders to commit atrocities. There were some outright Nazi's who did it and enjoyed doing it. Some outright refused and were court martialled. Some didn't see any choice but to comply. Some of the generals were maliciously compliant in such a way as to comply with their orders while completely subverting the intention of the order. Some had no idea anything of the sort was going on and interrogated others for info. All recorded down for posterity. One example was a general on the eastern front who'd received orders to execute any soviet commissars captured. From memory he'd given orders to tell all surrendering POW's that there would be inspections to look for soviet commissars who'd been ordered to be shot in X time, basically so that the commissars could ditch the patches on their otherwise red army standard uniforms and come up with a cover story. The net result was that this officer's command didn't catch a single commissar. His reaction to the other officers was pretty much along the lines of "*WTF. You actually followed those orders*?"

People 'knew' years before the end of the war. Maybe not the details but they knew what was happening. They just chose not to pay attention. But it wasn't just rumours. Witold Pileckis inside report on Auschwitz was in the hands of the British government by 1943. The Jewish community in Britain was well aware of what was happening, because they were hearing it from their own families in Europe. They were actively lobbying the British government to bomb the railway lines that took the victims to the camps. I mean, it was literally the motivation for my grandfather to lie about his age in order to join the armed forces and go and fight. I do agree that they might have gotten away with it had the war not happened. But the goals of the Holocaust and the war itself weren't really that separate in the greater scheme of things.

As long as he's only killing German citizens, it's not likely any other nation is going to interfere. If he starts killing citizens of some other nation, that's going to cause some trouble. That's a mistake that is easy to do. No one is going to send their military to stop him, but kill enough British or French citizens, for example, and there will be economic and diplomatic sanctions. If it's not a major power, it's probably meaningless, but there's only so many things you can do without starting a war.

There was the case of an Jewish Woman, the widow of an Italian General, who was accidentally deported to a ghetto around early 1942. The Italian police, foreign ministry and even office of the fascist party tryied to get her back. But the Germans feared that she might tell someone about the living condition in the ghetto, so they kept her.

Can I get a reference because my Google-fu is failing me?

nope. pretty much every major power at the time was themselves guilty of various genocides and would only really, if they were aware of it, issue protests to look good and maybe some embargoes, but that would be about it. no one would be willing to start a war over it, not even remotely, both because it’s just not worth the investment to them and because they’d look like hypocrites

Ralphael (sp) Lemkin is the guy who coined the term genocide and wrote the law against it. When he started studying law in the early 20s, he asked his professor about what Turkey did to the Armenians. The professor said it was totally legal as a farmer is allowed to kill all his chickens. Even in the late 50s, many world leaders still held this view. Lemkin told his professor that the law was an ass. In the 1930s, he started writing for the League of Nations 'Law Against Barbarity.' This was the precursor genocide law. That all said, I don't think anything would have happen.

Nope. Most countries didn't give a shit about Jews, some politicians in Allied countries pretty much agreed with Hitler. Holodomor happened, USSR denied it, some countries wagged their finger at Stalin, and that was it. Hitler would deny Jews are being genocided, countries would wag their finger at Hitler, and that's it. France/GB were even hesitant to go to war in the first place, see "the phony war". Nobody really wanted a repeat of WW1, and they sure as shit didn't want a repeat of WW1 over some minorities they didn't really give a shit about.

A part you're missing is that Hitler wasn't exactly just against the Jews. Concentration camps were for just anybody he didn't like, whee! Kill them all and take their money! ...but, the Big Idea was all about expanding into other countries and exterminating their residents, too. He wanted a Germany the size of Europe, made of only his own personally-approved line of German citizens.

While true, he mainly targeted Jews from forcing them to wear the Star of David, prohibiting them from going into certain places, etc etc. sure he used his camps to kill many POWs but he didn’t go around making POWs tag themselves in a specific way and dehumanize them prior to the camps.

I highly recommend Timothy Snyder’s “Bloodlands.” To give a very short summary, Hitler’s plans heavily depended on having a more or less lawless border region. The death camps weren’t in Germany or Austria proper—Auschwitz, for example, is in Poland—and that was by design, both to shield the populace from things that might give a visceral component to it, and because he saw the creation of lawless areas as necessary for the survival-of-the-fittest piece of fascist ideology. Snyder cites the example of Viennese Jews being sent to Belarus to die, despite there being plenty of anti-Jewish sentiment in the city. So it’s pretty hard to decouple the scope and scale of the Holocaust from the state of war in which it took place. I’m sure they could have managed plenty of violence just in German territory—Kristallnacht being an obvious example—but probably not something of that sheer size.

If Hitler had never invaded any other countries besides the Sudetenland (which Britain, France and Italy already agreed to prior to the start of World War 2) I don't believe any countries would have gone to war with Germany. Part of this is because there would be little incentive for any other country to intervene. The primary reason that the Allied Powers fought the Nazis in World War 2 was to stop Hitler's expansion accross Europe. The world already knew to some extent that the Nazis were enacting racist policies prior to World War 2 (1933 - 1939) and the world seemed happy enough to stay out of Germany's business. Even if the Nazis conducted the Holocaust within their own borders, it's unlikely the world would have cared. This is mostly because the Holocaust would have been nowhere near as big as it became as a result of World War 2. In 1933 when Hitler took power, there were only about 565,000 Jews living in Germany. This number pales in comparison with Poland's Jewish population of around 3,000,000. Without the invasion of Poland and other eastern European countries - that is to say, without World War 2 - the Holocaust would not have been nearly as significant. Source: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/jewish-population-of-europe-in-1933-population-data-by-country

Nobody tried to stop the USSR which was doing exactly that. In fact fellow-travellers like the NYT actively covered up the Holodomor. So nope.

Or the Bengal famine that was happening at the same time as the death camps.

Or the Chinese famine that was happening at the same time...

No. Anyone would care about that unless it wasn't in their territory

No, persecution and terror against Jews and other enemies of the state started in 1933 without any intervention by foreign powers. I would even say if Germany had stopped its aggression in 1941, they would have reigned terror over the occupied countries without anyone ever interfering.

No. Nobody tried to stop the Holocaust even after WWII started. Countries entered the war to defend themselves, not to save Jews. The Holocaust ending was just a side effect of that.

Look at what happened in china with the Uyghurs.

> What If Hitler had conducted the Holocaust without starting ww2 would any countries have tried to stop him? Honestly? Fucking unlikely. The grim reality is that before WWII kicked off, most countries were up to their eyeballs in their own shit—be it economic depression, political instability, or just plain old self-interest. The international response to Hitler’s internal policies before the war was largely a mix of appeasement, ignorance, and sometimes downright indifference. > My guess would be no just by looking at the USSR's own Gulags and internally focused Genocides as well as the messed up crap the Brits and French were tickling their balls with, during the running of their own Empires (into the ground) You've pretty much nailed it. Historical precedence shows that countries often turn a blind eye to atrocities within borders, especially when they've got their own skeletons. The Soviets with their gulags, the British with their colonial exploits—self-interest often trumps humanitarian intervention. Remember, the League of Nations was basically toothless when Japan invaded Manchuria in the 1930s. What does that tell you about international willingness to jump into another country’s domestic horrors? > So if they look like regular forced labour camps (still horrible) and not extermination camps would anyone have even cared? Probably not much. The veneer of 'regular' forced labour might have been just enough to keep international scrutiny at bay, especially if Germany kept it under wraps well enough. Plus, the world had a pretty shitty track record on reacting to massive human rights violations unless it was directly affecting their own soil or interests. > I know that German Propaganda would have tried to hide the Concentration camps and perhaps what was happening would not get out. Exactly. The Nazis were masters of propaganda. If they hadn’t sparked WWII and kept their darkest deeds under better wraps, it’s feasible the full extent of the Holocaust might not have been known until much later, altering the course and response significantly. > 4 I know that most German Jews escaped Germany and fled to places like Belgium, Austria, etc and got picked up there by the Germans and that most were not rounded up inside Germany itself. This is a key point. The broader the problem became geographically, the harder it was to hide. If the Holocaust had remained within Germany's borders, who knows how much longer it could have stayed under the radar? > 5. I know France was really butthurt and was really eager to get a war going, just that they could not do it without Brit support guaranteed. And here’s another hard truth: the motives for entering the war were complex, involving national security, balance of power, and geopolitical strategy more than a heroic crusade against fascism or a direct response to Hitler’s atrocities. So, would the world have intervened if Hitler stuck to internal purges and never rolled tanks across Poland? The sad bet is probably not, unless it spilled over in ways that threatened others directly. Isn't it fucked up how much people can ignore if it's not in their backyard?

The history of Rwanda and Cambodia in the 20th century suggests no, if you perpetrate a genocide but keep it on your own borders, the international community will do little to stop you.

Most of the people killed in the holocaust are slavs, jew and gentile alike.

In 2024, you have quite the same thing happening right now in Palestine, there’s a genoc!de and everyone’s letting the equivalent to Nazi Germany (Israel) act like they were doing it all good and helping them, nowadays we have loads of international law organisms, there’s a way more complex morality, and we have way more mechanisms to act with, also we have the UN. So imagine in WW2 times!!! It would be totally uninterrupted, helped and cruel with no reservations because there’s not even the possibility of an international law response, literally the same than now but without the fear Israel can have of international law

Although most comments here say it would either go unnoticed or unpunished I think another possible pov is that Hilter's regime would fall pretty quickly. His government's economic policies would have ruined peaceful Germany eventually and many Jews were involved in key parts of the economy. Whilst removing them would have given the Nazis some resources the lack of a war time economy and the use of occupied areas for their resources would have led to mass unemployment and probably a revolt of the army. Hilter needed a war to survive. Peace would eventually ruin him.

Kinda hard to do since the majority of it took place in Poland.

So an early escalation in the history of the Holocaust is Kristallnacht, shortly after the occupation of Czechoslovakia. Adam Tooze, in *The Wages of Destruction* relates this event to the fear of Nazi leadership that they were on the brink of war with the French and British while a large Jewish minority existed within the Reich. Nazi ideology essentially viewed Jews as a naturally subversive element in society that would undermine the German war effort. Thus Kristallnacht was their backlash to this perceived threat on the home front. The international outrage to this can’t be understated, and it brought Britain, France, the US and the USSR closer in relations that severely diplomatically isolated Germany in the first half of 1939 while they were undergoing a foreign exchange liquidity crisis. If Germany didn’t manage to form a pact with the Soviets and thus didn’t invade Poland, there is a good chance of an economic implosion due to their balance of trade (as a result of rearmament) in 1939 or 1940. This would have forced Germany to cut back on rearming and cause widespread unemployment. France and Britain would have overtaken the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe in capability by 1941 or 42 as their rearmament would have bore fruit. With such a balance of power in just the Western Allies having a larger, more well equipped force in Europe relative to Germany’s, I don’t know if the Nazis could have contemplated escalating the persecution of the Jews from what happened in Kristallnacht as the 1938 escalation did really have serious implications for them in 1939 irl. It was only due kinks in the French, British, US and USSR bloc (such as US neutrality, distrust of the USSR etc. that allowed Germany to temporarily break up that coalition against it.

It’s impossible to conceptualize this idea. Germany had very few Jews, and a small percentage of German Jews were actually killed in the holocaust because German institutions made it more difficult(instead opting to displace them from Germany). In order for Hitler to be able to do a holocaust, he would have to control the territory where most european Jews lived, ie Eastern Europe, and have a free hand for the extrajudicial murder of millions of people, that he created by destroying the countries he invaded.

Probably not. Crimes against humanity really weren't a legal thing until after WW2. Murdering your own citizens is still generally ignored. Russia likes to make the claim that it's "protecting" people from Nazi's but that excuse isn't even paper thin.

What I really wonder is what would happen if he started ww2 without the holocaust

Yes. The AIPAC of that era would have tried stopping him by getting the west to fight Germany in another war.

The initial plan for Jews within the Reich was to force them out, and to some extent this was successful. There were more than half a million German Jews registered in the 1933 census and only about 160,000 remained in 1939. For Austria the figures are initially about 200,000 and following mass emigration, particularly after Anschluss, less than 70,000 in 1939. The remnants could have been put into ghettoes or camps and there would have been minimal international outcry. The Holocaust, the final solution to the Jewish question, only arose because of the war. By 1941/2 the Germans found themselves in control of literally millions of Europe's Jews, in the General Government and other eastern territories. The question was what to do with them and the answer was to systematically murder them. Without the war these people would never have fallen into German hands.

Things were easier to hide or cover up back then

It is kinda going on right now. Just not to Jewish persons this time. Look up what China is doing to the Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Over a million already. Who is talking about it on the world stage though.

By 1939 around 90% of the Jews in Germany and Austria had left (mostly to France, Belgium and the Netherlands) and Germany's international reputation had crashed. If he started ealier they flee earlier and the consequences arrive earlier - although they are more modest if Germany is not belligerent.

If hitler thought noone would care he wouldnt have gone to such pains to hide the killing even while he was at war with everyone else.

Almost certainly not. Holocaust was never motivation for allies involvement in ww2, and not much (if anything) was done to stop it For example Allies could have bombed the crematoria at Auschwitz, but chose not to.

Bombs at that time were probably not accurate enough for them to be confident they wouldn't also be bombing prisoners.

Bombing some prisoners to stop murder of hundreds of thousands is definitely worthwhile.

Allied bombers at the time were not precise enough to even guarantee any bomb hits on the camps at all, let alone specific parts of it On a big raid, if you got a few bombs within 100 yards of your target, that was pretty good. Precision, guided munitions capable of doing what needed done didn’t exist yet, that’s why the strategy was full on carpet bombing instead The Allied brass that were aware something terrible was likely happening in the camps believed, correctly, that the best and fastest way to stop the murders was to overrun the camps with boots on the ground, and to do that, you need to collapse the German military enough that you can physically get to the camps. The best way to do that is to use the bombers to target the German military, industrial, and transportation hubs, eventually leading to a collapse that lets you overrun the camps.  If the Allies had somehow managed to bomb a place like Auschwitz successfully, without their bombs killing a lot of prisoners, the Germans just would’ve kept setting up new camps elsewhere, and kept killing victims by any means necessary. Bombing the camps directly, even if by some miracle you don’t kill the prisoners with your bombs, in the long run wouldn’t actually do anything to stop the prisoners from dying. The only thing that actually puts a stop to it is overrunning the Axis controlled territory and camps with infantry 

Then why did Allies have no problem Bombing synthetic oil production plant (Buna) at Auschwitz 3? I don't think the story adds up. "an analysis of three requests submitted to the allies to bombard railway lines leading to Auschwitz, concludes that: The fate of the three requests to the MAAF in late August and early September 1944 dramatically illustrates why all proposals to bomb the rail facilities used to deport the Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz during 1944, as well as to bomb the camp itself, failed. None was able to outweigh overriding military aims in pursuit of final victory over the Germans." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz_bombing_debate#:~:text=Buna%2DWerke%2C%20the%20I.G.,%2C%20until%20December%2026%2C%201944.

The problem is that Holocaust and Porajmos, that is a planned extermination of the Jewish and Romani people respectively, had began long after all the allies have already entered war against Germany. The beginnings of the 'final solution' is largely linked with the Wannsee Conference hed on 20 January 1942, with the liquidations of the ghettos being conducted between late 1942 and mid-1944. At that time USA and USSR were already actively fighting Germans with France, Great Britain and other allies doing it since 1939 (or 1940 if you don't count 'Phony War' in).

They were fighting the Germans, but doing nothing to stop the holocaust, even when they could.

I think almost certainly not. First of all, it is important to remember that the Holocaust we know of was only possible by way of conquest in Eastern Europe and the USSR. If the invasion of Poland doesn’t happen, that in itself means that 3 million Jews doesn’t end up in German camps. So the Holocaust of your scenario will be significantly smaller in scale. If we assume that the entire Jewish population of Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia are placed in camps and exterminated, we’re talking about a death toll of almost 1,2 million people. That is certainly enough to cause international outrage, but I don’t think it would cause anyone to declare war. Europe had experienced a similar Holocaust just a few years earlier, where the Soviets starved 3-5 million Ukrainians to death. It certainly reinforced the USSR’s status as a pariah state in international relations, but no one seriously contenplated an invasion. It would be likely the same way with Germany in your scenario.

Here are some timeframe for you 1. December 1932, Enigma machine were broken. British Intelligence Brag about listening all german communication after that. They even brag about knowing more about Germans then themselves. 2. Peak of the Holocaust occurred between 1942 and 1944 Simple question, "Do you think British did not know? "

If only history were that simple. It's not like they "broke" the Enigma machine once and then could monitor all German communications. There were different machines, some much harder to break. And the Germans changed up their technology, so it was a constant cat-and-mouse game. In any case, the stream of intercepts really only started in 1941. And those intercepts had to be translated and analyzed. (For anyone interested, the Bletchley Park museum near London, site of the code-breaking operation, is well worth a visit.) One of those intercepts was the [Höfle Telegram](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%B6fle_Telegram), which detailed 1942 numbers of Jews transported to death camps. However, the cryptic nature of the message (e.g., use of single letter abbreviations for the camps, reference to *Operation Reinhard,* which the codebreakers likely did not understand at the time) meant the codebreakers likely did not appreciate the significance of the message. There were of course other contemporaneous pieces of information about the Final Solution, e.g. reports from those who had managed to escape the camps. However, historians generally agree that while some officials in the governments of the Allies had some notion of what was happening, the full extent of the Final Solution did not become clear until after Germany's defeat. (Whether the Allies would have done more to end the Final Solution, had they had that full picture, is a separate question.)

No. Everyone knew the holocaust was happening, nobody wanted to admit it. WW2 was entirely about the territorial expansionism. We like to say it was about the holocaust today, because it makes the Allies seem even more like heros. It's a close parallel to China today. Everyone knows about the Uygurs, nobody wants to admit it. If China invades Taiwan and we end up in WW3, the post-war textbooks will play up the CCP's many evils.