True Left

...fortunately for posterity and the truth, the mountainous secret German military files leave no doubt that Hitler’s plan to invade Britain in the  early fall of 1940 was deadly  serious  and that, though given to many hesitations,  the Nazi dictator seriously intended to carry it out if there were any  reasonable chance of success.  Its ultimate fate was settled not by any lack of determination or effort but by the fortunes of war, which now, for the first time, began to turn against him.

...the Naval War Staff had estimated that to fulfill the demands of the Army for landing 100,000 men with equipment and supplies in the first wave, along a 200-mile front from  amsgate to Lyme Bay, would necessitate rounding up 1,722 barges, 1,161 motorboats, 471 tugs and 155 transports. Even if it were possible to assemble such a vast amount of shipping, Raeder told Hitler on July 25, it would wreck the German economy, since taking away so many barges and tugs would destroy the whole inland-waterway transportation system, on which the  economic life of the country largely depended.16  At any rate, Raeder made it clear, the protection of such an armada trying to supply such a broad front  against the  certain attacks of the British Navy and Air Force was beyond the powers of the German naval forces.

British light naval forces bombarded the chief Channel invasion ports, Ostend,Calais, Boulogne and Cherbourg, while the R.A.F. sank eighty barges in Ostend Harbor. In  Berlin that  day  Hitler  conferred with his service chiefs at lunch. He thought the air  war  was going very well and declared that he had no intention of running the risk of invasion.24 In fact, Jodl got the impression from the Fuehrer’s remarks that he had  “apparently decided to abandon Sea Lion completely,” an impression which was accurate for  that day, as Hitler confirmed the following day — when,  however, he again changed his  mind.

...two  hundred  German  bombers,  escorted  by  three  times  as  many fighters,  appeared over the Channel about midday, headed for London. Fighter Command had watched the assembling of the attackers on its radar screens and was ready. The Germans  were  intercepted  before  they approached  the  capital,  and  though  some planes got through, many were dispersed and others shot down before they  could deliver their bomb load. Two hours later an even stronger German formation returned and was routed. Though the British claimed to have shot down 185 Luftwaffeplanes, the actual figure, as learned after the war from the Berlin archives, was much lower — fifty-six, but thirty-four of these were bombers. The R.A.F. lost only twenty-six aircraft.

...

The German Navy,  crippled by the losses off Norway in the early spring, was unable, as its chiefs admitted all along, to provide the sea power for an invasion of Britain. Without this, and without air supremacy, the German Army  was helpless to move across the narrow Channel waters. For the first time  in the war Hitler had been stopped, his plans of further conquest frustrated, and just at the moment, as we have seen, when he was certain that final victory had been achieved He had never conceived — nor had anyone else up to  that time — that a decisive battle could be decided in the air. Nor perhaps  did he yet realize as the dark winter settled over Europe that a handful of  British fighter pilots, by thwarting his invasion, had preserved England as a great base for the possible reconquest of the Continent from the west at a later date. His thoughts were perforce turning elsewhere; in fact, as we shall see,had already turned

The  Nazi  German  occupation  of  Britain  would  not  have  been  a gentle affair.  The  captured  German  papers  leave  no  doubt  of  that.  On  September 9 Brauchitsch,  the  Commander  in  Chief  of  the  Army,  signed  a directive providing  that  “the  able-bodied  male  population  between  the  ages  of seventeen  and  forty-five  [in  Britain]  will,  unless  the  local  situation  calls for  an  exceptional  ruling,  be  interned  and  dispatched  to  the  Continent.” Orders  to  this  effect  were  sent  out  a few  days  later  by  the  Quartermaster General,  in  OKH,  to  the  Ninth  and  Sixteenth  armies,  which  were  assembled for  the  invasion.  In  no  other  conquered  country,  not  even  in  Poland, had  the  Germans  begun  with  such  a drastic  step.  Brauchitsch’s instructions  were  headed  “Orders  Concerning  the  Organization  and  Function of  Military  Government  in  England”  and  went  into  considerable  detail. They  seem  designed  to  ensure  the  systematic  plunder  of  the  island and  the  terrorization  of  its  inhabitants.  A special  “Military  Economic Staff  England”  was  set  up  on  July  27  to  achieve  the  first  aim.  Everything but  normal  household  stocks  was  to  be  confiscated  at  once.  Hostages would  be  taken.  Anybody  posting  a placard  the  Germans  didn’t  like would  be  liable  to  immediate  execution,  and  a similar  penalty  was  provided for  those  who  failed  to  turn  in  firearms  or  radio  sets  within  twenty four  hours.

Actually,  already  in  August  Heydrich  had  organized  six  Einsatzkommando  for  Britain  which  were  to  operate  from  headquarters  in  London, Bristol,  Birmingham,  Liverpool,  Manchester  and  Edinburgh — or  in  Glasgow, if  the  Forth  Bridge  was  found  blown  up.  They  were  to  carry  out  Nazi terror;  to  begin  with,  they  were  to  arrest  all  those  on  the  “Special  Search List,  G.B.  [Great  Britain],”  which  in  May  had  been  hurriedly  and  care- lessly compiled  by  Walter  Schellenberg,  another  one  of  Himmler’s  bright young  university  graduates,  who  was  then  chief  of  Amt  (Bureau)  IV  E— Counterespionage — of  R.S.H.A.  Or  so  Schellenberg  later  claimed,  though at  this  time  he  was  mainly  occupied  in  Lisbon,  Portugal,  on  a bizarre mission  to  kidnap  the  Duke  of  Windsor.

This  Nazi  Black  Book  actually  formed  a supplement  to  a supposedly highly  secret  handbook  called  Informationsheft,  which  Schellenberg  also claims  to  have  written,  and  whose  purpose  seems  to  have  been  to  aid  the conquerors  in  looting  Britain  and  stamping  out  anti-German  institutions there.  It  is  even  more  amusing  than  the  Search  List.  Among  the  dangerous institutions,  besides  the  Masonic  lodges  and  Jewish  organizations, which  deserved  “special  attention”  by  R.S.H.A.,  were  the  “public  schools” (in  England,  the  private  schools),  the  Church  of  England,  which  was  described as  “a  powerful  tool  of  British  imperial  politics,”  and  the  Boy Scouts,  which  was  put  down  as  “an  excellent  source  of  information  for  the British  Intelligence  Service.”  Its  revered  leader  and  founder,  Lord  Baden Powell,  was  to  be  immediately  arrested.

The Nazis also had plans for the deportation and enslavement of 50% of Britain's adult male population in the event of a successful invasion.[26]

After taking control of Mandate Palestine, Great Britain saw itself confronted with mounting Arab and Jewish tensions. Zionist settlers had been moving to the region since the 1890s and after the Balfour Declaration in 1917, the Zionist movement accelerated.

The current market cost of a leaded 5.56 mm round is 21 cents compared to 32 cents for a lead-free tungsten composite round.

Not all the Jews killed by the Nazis (and Jews made up "only" about 5-6 million of the 11 million they killed) were gassed - a lot of them were shot, starved or otherwise left to waste away in concentration camps. In any case, Zyklon B was the gas used in concentration camps to kill them en masse, with other gassings taking place in euthanasia centers and gas vans. The latter two were done with carbon monoxide and exhaust fumes, which are essentially costless, so we'll leave them out.

960,000 Jews were murdered with Zyklon B, whose main component was hydrogen cyanide gas (HCN). According to this page it takes a concentration of 3500ppm of HCN to kill a person in a minute, and about ten times less to kill a person in the span of 10-60 minutes. The page on Zyklon B states that victims took about 20 minutes to die, so we can (very) roughly estimate the average concentration of HCN in the gas chambers to be about 700ppm.

That's 700cm3 of HCN per 1m3 of air, or 0.7dm3 of HCN - which works out to be 0.7/24 = 0.029mol of HCN per cubic meter of gas chamber. A Google search for the sizes of Nazi gas chambers yields mostly Holocaust denial sites, one of which cites the size as 250 square meters with an unusually low ceiling. I can't be arsed to look for more reputable sources, but the website sourced it from the book of a Holocaust survivor, so I'll leave it at that and give an approximate gas chamber volume of 250 x 2 = 500m3 . Total amount of HCN gas then equals 0.029 x 500 = 14.5 mol of HCN per room, which contained about 1000 people (estimating from a line in the Zyklon B article that said 600 + 250 people were killed in the first Auschwitz gassing). That makes 14.5 x 960 = 14,000 mol of HCN used in total. Total mass of HCN x Molar mass of HCN = 14,000 x 27 = 378,000g = 380kg of HCN.

I can't find info on the makeup of Zyklon B, so I'll assume 1kg of the stuff contains roughly 95% HCN, to fudge the total mass of Zyklon B up to 400kg. Since HCN at that time was a pesticide, we can (very roughly) look towards today's pesticide prices as an estimate for how much gassing the Jews cost Hitler. This paper lists the USA's pesticide expenditure as 20 billion USD per 2.5 million tons - 8000 USD per 1000kg. This finally gives Hitler's gas bill as 0.378 x 8000 ≈ $3000, which is either a weekend trip for two to Hawaii, or one pack of cigarettes a day for a year (according to the Dictionary of Numbers Chrome app). This figure is definitely wildly inaccurate, and print sources would probably have the actual figure listed somewhere, but here ya go.

tl;dr: About $3000 - Hitler could've just gone to Hawaii twice.
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WeaponsGradeHumanity
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8 yr. ago

Doesn't it take less gas to kill someone who's been starved to skin and bones?

In his later years, Stalin was in poor health.[638] He took increasingly long holidays; in 1950 and again in 1951 he spent almost five months vacationing at his Abkhazian dacha.[639] Stalin nevertheless mistrusted his doctors; in January 1952 he had one imprisoned after they suggested that he should retire to improve his health.[638] In September 1952, several Kremlin doctors were arrested for allegedly plotting to kill senior politicians in what came to be known as the Doctors' Plot; the majority of the accused were Jewish.[640] He instructed the arrested doctors to be tortured to ensure confession.[641] In November, the Slánský trial took place in Czechoslovakia as 13 senior Communist Party figures, 11 of them Jewish, were accused and convicted of being part of a vast Zionist-American conspiracy to subvert Eastern Bloc governments.[642] That same month, a much publicised trial of accused Jewish industrial wreckers took place in Ukraine.[643]

The "doctors' plot" affair (Russian: дело врачей, romanized: delo vrachey, lit. 'doctors' case'), also known as the case of saboteur doctors (Russian: врачи-вредители, romanized: vrachi-vrediteli, lit. 'vermin doctors') or killer doctors (Russian: врачи-убийцы, romanized: vrachi-ubiytsy), was an alleged conspiracy of prominent Soviet medical specialists to murder leading government and party officials.[1] In 1951–1953, a group of predominantly Jewish doctors from Moscow were accused of a conspiracy to assassinate Soviet leaders.[2] This was later accompanied by publications of antisemitic character in the media, which talked about the threats of Zionism and condemned people with Jewish surnames. Following this, many doctors, both Jews and non-Jews, were dismissed from their jobs, arrested, and tortured to produce admissions.
[...]
Initially, 37 were arrested. Under torture, prisoners seized in the investigation of the alleged plot were compelled to produce evidence against themselves and their associates.[22][23]

Stalin harangued Ignatyev and accused the MGB of incompetence. He demanded that the interrogations of doctors already under arrest be accelerated.[24] Stalin complained that there was no clear picture of the Zionist conspiracy and no solid evidence that specifically the Jewish doctors were guilty.[23]
[...]
Khrushchev also claimed that Stalin hinted to him to incite antisemitism in Ukraine, saying, "The good workers at the factory should be given clubs so they can beat the hell out of those Jews."[41][42]

According to Khrushchev, Stalin told Politburo members, "You are blind like young kittens. What will happen without me? The country will perish because you do not know how to recognize enemies."[40]
[...]
There is a view, based on various memoirs and secondary evidence but without any solid proof, that the doctors' plot case was intended to trigger the mass repression and deportation of the Jews to the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, similar to the deportations of many other ethnic minorities in the Soviet Union, but the plan was not accomplished because of the sudden death of Stalin.[43]

According to Louis Rapoport, the presumed deportation would have been planned to start with the public execution of the imprisoned doctors, and then the "following incidents would follow": "attacks on Jews orchestrated by the secret police, the publication of the statement by the prominent Jews, and a flood of other letters demanding that action be taken. A three-stage program of deportations would be followed. First, almost all Soviet Jews ... would be shipped to camps east of the Urals ... Second, the authorities would set Jewish leaders at all levels against one another ... Also the MGB [Secret Police] would start killing the elites in the camps, just as they had killed the Yiddish writers ... the previous year. The ... final stage would be to 'get rid of the rest.'"[44]

Four large camps were built in southern and western Siberia shortly before Stalin's death in 1953, and there were unproven rumors that they were for Jews.[45]
[...]
Pure blooded" Jews were to be deported first, followed by "half-breeds" (polukrovki).[46] Before his death in March 1953, Stalin allegedly had planned the execution of doctors' plot defendants already on trial in Red Square in March 1953, and then he would cast himself as the savior of Soviet Jews by sending them to camps away from the purportedly enraged Russian populace.[46][49][50] There are further statements that describe some aspects of such a planned deportation.[48]
[...]
Yakov Etinger described how former CPSU Politburo member Nikolai Bulganin said that Stalin asked him in the end of February 1953 to prepare railroad cars for the mass deportation of Jews to the Jewish Autonomous Oblast.[51] According to a book by another Soviet Politburo member Alexander Yakovlev,[52][51] Stalin would have started preparations for the deportation of Jews in February 1953 and ordered preparation of a letter from a group of notable Soviet Jews with a request to the Soviet government to carry out the mass deportation of Jews in order to save them from "the just wrath of Soviet people.

The Night of the Murdered Poets (Russian: Дело Еврейского антифашистского комитета, romanized: Dela Yevreyskovo antifashistskovo komiteta, lit. 'Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee affair') was the execution of thirteen Soviet Jews in the Lubyanka Prison in Moscow on 12 August 1952.[1] The arrests were first made in September 1948 and June 1949. All defendants were falsely accused of espionage and treason as well as many other crimes. After their arrests, they were tortured, beaten, and isolated for three years before being formally charged. There were five Yiddish writers among these defendants, all of whom were part of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee.
[...]
Once the German invasion began and Russian Jewish culture was destroyed by the invading Nazi forces' genocidal operations, the JAC felt it had a duty to change priorities, and focus on the rebuilding of Jewish communities, farms, culture, and identity. Not everyone agreed with the direction in which things were headed and many[who?] thought the JAC was "intervening in matters in which it should not interfere."[3]
[...]
The charges filed against the accused included mentions of "counterrevolutionary crimes" and organized action meant to "topple, undermine, or weaken the Soviet Union."[4] Additionally, the inculpation revealed that the investigation uncovered evidence that the accused had used the JAC as a means for spying and promoting anti-government sentiment.
[...]
Overemphasis on exchanges of relatively innocuous information between the JAC leadership and Jews in other countries, particularly American journalists, augmented accusations of espionage.[4] Another piece of evidence supporting the indictment was a letter that the leadership of the JAC wrote as a formal request for Crimea to become the new Jewish homeland.[5]

All of the defendants endured incessant interrogations which, for everyone except Itzik Fefer, were coupled with beatings and torture. Eventually, these tactics led to forced, false confessions.

The Waffen-SS and War Crimes

If issues such as the service of Germanics in the Waffen-SS are complex matters that are easily misunderstood (See pages 84-180), this is no less true when studying the war crimes and atrocities associated with that body. Both are subjects on which much is sometimes presumed, often in the absence of solid facts. Wartime and post-war propaganda has also clouded the issue, and with this has come the desire of many, including many Germans, to identify the Waffen-SS with the commission of war crimes, to the exclusion, or near-exclusion, of other branches of the German armed forces. There is a widespread assumption that the men of the Waffen-SS were indoctrinated political soldiers of one sort or another, with the precise meaning of this term varying with the outlook of the user. This outlook, in turn, is assumed to account for the greater proportion of war crimes attributed to the Waffen-SS. Surviving records, however, support Waffen-SS veterans' claims that political indoctrination was at most a minor part of their training. Instead, indoctrination on political, ethnic, and historical matters was handled by National Socialist youth groups such as the German Youth and the Hitler Youth. Membership in the Hitler Youth and its various subgroups became mandatory in 1936, and was accompanied by state efforts to shape the curriculum of schools and universities according to National Socialist teachings. These processes combined to influence a generation of German young people, including the age groups born through 1928 who were called upon to perform military service in the Second World War. The youth influenced in this way primarily served in the Wehrmacht, which during the course of the war increasingly meant the German Army (das Heer) in particular. Throughout the Third Reich, the German Army consisted overwhelmingly of German men, with ethnic Germans and foreigners contributing only a small percentage of its manpower. By comparison, between 33 and 50 percent of the Waffen-SS consisted of ethnic Germans raised outside of Germany and Germanic or nonGermanic foreigners. These were young men who had not been raised in the atmosphere of National Socialist indoctrination, and had not been subjected to the racial and other poisonous theories of National Socialism. While some had been subjected to fascist or other chauvinistic indoctrination, few had been exposed to, much less professed, the course of propaganda delivered by the Nazi organizations in Germany. Thus, as an organization, the Waffen-SS possessed a smaller percentage of young men who had grown up under the teachings of National Socialism than did the Wehrmacht, especially the German Army. Countering this, it may also be theorized that those German citizens who did serve with the Waffen-SS tended to be volunteers, and that these volunteers were likely to hold a greater belief in the validity of National Socialist teachings. Of course, there was a high percentage of young volunteers in the German Army, Navy, and Luftwaffe, too. Thus, the Waffen-SS cannot fairly be characterized as being comprised mainly of Nazi fanatics, or of having soldiers who had been exposed to more (or, on the average, even as much!) Nazi hatemongering than the soldiers of the German Army. To explain the bad reputation of the Waffen-SS, it is more useful to consider the impact of political opportunism and the nature of anti-partisan warfare. The elite SS armored divisions in particular were a compact, easily recognized target even during the war, when they were singled out for blame by the Western Allies and Soviets if military reverses ensued. Sometimes, they were even blamed by German Army commanders if operations did not produce the desired results. Afterward, these units and others in the Waffen-SS were identified as being culpable for war crimes, with few corresponding accusations being made against German Army units, even when such accusations may have been justified. Interestingly, separate crimes were found for each of the first eight Waffen-SS divisions, and for the sister divisions of three of these. These incidents have sometimes received little study, but are taken at face value and their few particulars are repeated in countless works that rehash one another's content. Specifically, the 1st SS-Panzer Division is associated with the Malmedy Massacre; the 2nd SS-Panzer Division with Tulle-Oradour; the 3rd SS-Panzer Division with Le Paradis; the 4th SS-Polizei-Panzergrenadier Division with Larissa; the 5th SS-Panzer Division with the murder of 600 Galician Jews just after Barbarossa; the 6th SS-Mountain Division with the destruction of Rovaniemi, Finland; the 7th SSVolunteer-Mountain Division and 8th SS-Cavalry Division with massacres in their respective areas of operations; the 12th SS-Panzer Division with the murder of Canadian prisoners of war in Normandy; the 13th Waffen-Mountain Division of the SS with, again, massacres in its area of operations; and the 16th SS-Panzergrenadier Division with the massacre at Marzabotto, Italy. It is not the purpose of this piece to examine each case. It is essential, however, to realize that most cases result from some previous atrocity committed in violation of the laws and customs of war and were often of an exceptionally heinous nature. In other words, they were often a part of the pernicious cycle of cruelty that stem from other, similar acts. Each must be examined individually and closely before any opinion on the general nature of the Waffen-SS can be considered to be well informed. Detailed study reveals many interesting subplots to the various storylines. For example, Fritz Knöchlein became a martyr in certain circles following his execution for the commission of murders at Le Paradis, because evidence exists that he had simply reacted to earlier British war crimes. When Knöchlein is then given heroic stature, however, the matter has been carried too far, as the testimony of veterans and records in his file indicate that by late 1944 he was considered a poor regimental commander and an officer of unsavory character. In another case demonstrating the value of continuing research—the burning of the town of Rovaniemi, Finland—a late war memoir by a Finnish commando has revealed that the town burned down not as a result of a deliberate "scorched earth" tactic, but as a consequence of the actions by his leader who blew up a German ammunition train parked at the railway station. The killing in and around Marzabotto in the autumn of 1944 is normally labelled an "SS crime," yet the anti-partisan operation in that area was not the sort of police action that was typically organized by German police and/or security forces. It was actually a military operation directed by the headquarters of the Luftwaffe I Parachute Corps, which sought to remove threats to its rear area supply lines. The extent and character of the killing in and around this mountain village remains unclear to this day. Somewhere between 700 and 1,000 civilians died there, depending on the account one reads. However, which deaths were the result of combat (plain-clothed partisans and collateral civilian casualties), which were the targets of organized reprisals, and which may have been simply murdered outright remain clouded in controversy. Further, the situation is complicated by the fact that the Emilia-Romagna region in which Marzabotto lies was controlled by Communists at the time and for over 50 years afterward. Clearly, no more venomous political enmity existed than that between National Socialists and Communists, and as in so many similar situations, truth is often one of the first casualties. Investigations of allegations against eight members of the Reichsführer-SS Division allegedly involved in the killing at Marzabotto are actually still going on in Germany as of the time this book was written! "Anti-partisan" becomes the key term in so many of these cases, such as the incidents involving the "Das Reich," "Prinz Eugen," "Florian Geyer," and "Reichsführer-SS" divisions. Before casting judgment, it is worth remembering that before and during WWII, reprisals involving the civilian population in occupied lands were tolerated as a last resort by the Customary Law of Nations, including the principles of the socalled Martens' Clause in the preamble to the Convention, that is, "the usages established among the civilized peoples," "the laws of humanity," and "the dictates of the public conscience." The right to take reprisals against civilian hostages at that time was explicitly acknowledged by the court of the seventh follow-up trial of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg (1948). It was only in 1949 that the Hague Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War of 12 August that collective penalties, measures of intimidation or terrorism against civilians, as well as reprisals against persons and taking of hostages were prohibited (Article 33). According to the Customs of War on Land at that time, then, not every killing of a civilian by men of the Waffen-SS was a crime, even before the question is raised about the killing of unarmed civilians compared with those who had taken up weapons. In short, true massacres, such as the executions at and the razing of Lidice in the wake of Reinhard Heydrich's assassination (an incident perpetrated not by the Waffen-SS but by Gestapo, SD, and German and Czech police units), were never allowed under international law, but some reprisals against civilians were. Since the post-war Allied revision of the international conventions governing this distasteful aspect of warfare, modern people generally find such actions inconceivably reprehensible, but such was not the law or the outlook during World War II. Even the wartime (1940) US Army's Field Manual 27-10, The Rules of Land Warfare, allowed hostage taking and reprisals against civilians under some circumstances to "induce the enemy to desist from illegitimate practices" (pp. 89-90). To get to the bottom on those incidents, the nature of partisan warfare must be considered. Such activity took place long before the Second World War, and it has continued up to the time of writing, not least in places like Vietnam, Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. When Axis forces operated in Yugoslavia between 1941 and 1945, they became involved in a style of warfare that had existed there for centuries, and which resumed five decades later in the same regions. "Ethnic cleansing" had been practiced in the Balkans at intervals for centuries before the Germans' arrival, and has been continuing until very recently. The Waffen-SS, with its associations to the German police and security forces, had a substantial proportion of its units involved in anti-partisan warfare, not only in southeastern Europe, but in the Soviet Union, Italy, and elsewhere. These formations became caught up in an unusually cruel and merciless cycle of warfare characteristic of partisan activities as have some elements of the armies of the wartime Allies in the years since. The results are often disturbing and sometimes inexcusable, but not entirely unique to the Waffen-SS. It is within the realm of anti-partisan operations that the bulk of Waffen-SS atrocities can be found. With this understood, it is important to form judgments based on contemporary, not modern, requirements of the rules of land warfare, and on the study of policies which involved German military forces, and elements of the Waffen-SS in particular, in counterinsurgency roles.