I am sorry to say I am a fellow countryman of hengist. His arguments are totally disproved by the Nazi's own archives of the establishment of the holocaust, namely the Wannsee conference ([
prorev.com]) where Rinehard Hydrich (head of the SD) instigated the 'final solution'. You only have to look at the arguments so callously put forward at this conference for the death camps to realise the full horror of the thinking behind this development.
Before this conference, the Nazi's used special police groups (totenkopfverbrande) to 'liquidate' Jews in the occupied territories (mainly in the east) this was done by
1. Digging a pit
2. Rounding up the local Jewish population.
3. Marching them to the pit
4. Executing them usually with a bullet to the back of the head.
The Nazi's had several problems with this.
1. It was labour intensive, using police/soldiers who could be better deployed fighting the enemy (the release of totenkopfverbrande from these duties enabled the creation of the 3rd SS panzer division totenkopf)
([
www.wssob.com]).
2. It wasn’t efficient; it would have taken many years to have liquidated the Jewish race in continental Europe using this method.
3. It was visible, the local population knew what was happening & there was plenty of proof left behind.
4. Finally, & this was Hydrich's major concern, it was too expensive. It was shown at the Wannsee conference that killing Jews this way cost the government nearly 3 Richemarks per Jew killed. At the death camps the cost was less than 1 Richemark per head.
This terrifying thought shows more than anything the Nazi's mentality. They saw the Jews as a burden to be destroyed, and why shouldn’t the Jews 'contribute' to the cost of their extermination in the death camps? Firstly by working before they where executed, and then by selling the waste products of that execution to cover the cost....glasses, gold teeth, even human hair.
This is the harrowing and awful truth of the holocaust, the death camps were real & the use of them was to industrialise the elimination of a race of people simply because of their religion, and for someone to deny this truth only invites comparison to the instigators of this terrible evil.