Anyone claiming the deaths were not on purpose doesn’t know the entire history of the Nazi.
Their own statements of purpose and plans and actions are not vague. They fully intended to eliminate, by killing, the Jews.
Claiming otherwise is tantamount to claiming someone saying they are going to punch you and then does so might of only tripped and lost their balance and it was an accident.
One group read Mein Kampf, the other didn’t...
Step 1 to both sides.
Ban guns.
A furniture store in a town where I lived was owned by an Auschwitz survivor - he was very successful and when each of his three sons hit 21, he set them up with their own business.
It hardly seems pertinent to wonder what degree of deliberation went into the camps - the Operation Reinhard facilities were meticulously planned, monstrously operated, and after autumn of 1943 carefully cleaned up to minimize or eliminate the evidence. So well, in fact, that archaeological evidence of the gas chambers and crematoria at Sobibor wasn't found until 2014. At what point the building execution of the Jews morphed into the Holocaust is a subject of debate - it is usually set at the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 but plenty of murder went on before that, notably at Chelmno, where, under Aktion T4, the original target of "social undesirables" included but was not restricted to the Jewish population. SOURCE
But as the author states, the Holocaust included more than the extermination facilities - Nikolaus Wachsmann does not use the term "camps" for these - and most of the labor camps were, in their own brutal way, death camps due to exposure, disease, and starvation. The conditions in those camps were not accidental, and if they worsened due to overcrowding as the war went on, that was itself entirely predictable and deliberately neglected.
A casual survey of what the Nazis did will reveal that there was nothing ad hoc in their goals, their plans, and the execution of their policy. Take a look at what happened in Hungary.
Hungary was an ally of Germany, so the Germans did nothing to deal with the “Jewish problem” in Hungary until Hungary withrew from the Axis and sued for peace with the Allies. At that point, the Germans had refined their policies, programs, and methods and launched their extermination system with a vengance using the lessons that they had learned elsewhere. What the Germans did in Hungary was deliberate, ruthless, and effective. The facts from Hungary destroys the ad hoc argument.
Distortions :
“1/6” of all murders for 1 million killed at ...
Thats for jews killed. Its Not mentioning the 5+ other million people the nazis similarly murdered - including several million Russian POWs.
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Not usually mentioned : the long term intent of the Nazi to exterminate ALL the Slavs in the lands they were attempting to conquered (well over 100 million).
Nor is mentioned the numbers (far more millions beyond the ‘holocaust’) murdered by the Soviets decades previous -— a chapter of history leftist academics chronically ignore.