“But he’s not a holocaust denier”
Cooper said something along the lines that the massive camp deaths were the result of “a lack of planning” rather than by intent.
But that’s just not so. We have notes that one participant took at the Wannsee Conference where the “Final Solution” was decided upon. It was intentional mass murder.
Wannsee took place in January 1942 shortly after Germany declared war on America.
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/wannsee-conference-1942
But what about the killings during Operation Barbarossa which began six months earlier? Were they due to lack of planning?
No. They weren’t due to lack of planning. Barbarossa included mobile SS death squads, the Einsatzgruppen, which followed behind the front line expressly to kill the various “subhumans” unlucky enough to find themselves within reach of the SS. Some of these SS units were composed of non Germans who willingly joined.
Ok, but Barbarossa was 1941; the war began with the attack on Poland in September 1939, so maybe Cooper is right that this murder of civilians wouldn’t have happened if Churchill hadn’t decided on war with Germany.
Right? No. He’s wrong again. The Einsatzgruppen mobile killing squads already existed in 1939 and they tagged along behind the German army in that invasion too.
Cooper is either astoundingly ignorant of the history that he’s discussing or he’s offering easily disproven excuses for a gangster regime controlled psychopaths. The SS looked for recruits who could prove that they had committed an act of cruelty against the German people. Not just against German Jews, against any German.
I go with ignorant. And Tucker still has all rights to air his opinion. But opinions have consequences.
Cooper was talking about Russian POW’s (and Russian civilians) in the interview, pointing out the neglect in planning.
I did NOT hear him say that the Jewish Holocaust was “unintentional”, so if he did and I missed it (which is possible) if you can provide a timestamp I would appreciate it.
Thing is, I don’t believe that point of view from Cooper is in outer space or incompatible with known facts. (I am not a fan of his in any way. But that doesn’t make me right and him wrong). It may not be completely correct in every aspect.
It is the feeding of the POW’s, I believe that may have put the Germans in that state where they had to choose between Germans eating and “sub-human” Russians eating.
Feeding 5.7 million people every day is no small matter.
I maintain it is believable, because of the scale-It wasn’t that the Germans captured 200,000 Russian soldiers...They captured 5.7 million Russian soldiers, and 3.5 million of those Russians died in captivity.
On the condition of the Russian POW’s-something that is not, and never has been in question, only a very small portion of those 3.5 million dead prisoners were shot outright, I would guess. The vast number of them were viewed as unimportant and expendable, if not worthy of extermination.
But I am unaware of a codified plan, laid down on paper in advance to shoot, starve, or work to death Soviet POWs. Not like the plan the Nazis put into action at the Wannsee Conference in 1942. That is why I believe Cooper termed it “unintentional”. If they HAD codified it in the same way they did with Jews, then it would indeed be intentional.
And it is not beyond the imagining that in their already racist view of Slavs, they may not have, in their hatred, differentiated much between Russians and Jews in any case. I believe the Nazi term to lump them all together was “Untermenschen”. Subhumans to them,
So the treatment is not far different in the camps...to the point I have read an account (can’t remember which) where there were Jews in one of the concentration camps took pity on seeing the Russian POWs on the other side of the wire. (The Nazis kept the camps segregated, and the work parties too.)
3.3 million dead speaks for itself, but the sight of Jewish concentration camp inmates feeling sorry for them because their situation was so pathetically horrible really brings that home.
That said, if they had 5 million prisoners, they had to feed them. In a country being bombed, resources going to the military, and farming manpower on the battlefield, there was going to be less food to start with, fewer people to harvest crops and create food, and food destroyed on the way to people who needed it in population centers. Anything that moved on the ground was attacked by Allied aircraft.
In the face of all that, how much food were they going to take away to feed Russian POW’s? Those same POW’s who were responsible of the death of their loved ones? (Not saying that was right-just describing how the situation could have been framed.
It is at that point where the choice is shoot them all, or work them to death. And they worked 3.5 million Russians to death. My point is, I agree that it could have reached that point because they did not forsee it.
That’s all. And that is what I got from watching it.