ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
Ah, ok. You've answered my edit to my last post. Thanks.
Nothing is ever a given before it actually happens. I hate that kind of reading of history.
As we used to say when sent on another mind-numbing exercise in Germany's frozen arsehole: "planning and strategy go by the by once the shit starts flying".
But your reading of it is very persuasive, VP.
That is kind of what I was trying to get at – genocide was a logical conclusion of Nazi ideology, which enabled it psychologically, but it was also of course a response to the material conditions of the time. I don't see a contradiction between the two – the seeds are certainly in Mein Kampf, but it wasn't decided upon then.
More importantly, it couldn't have been decided then, in the form it eventually took, because so much depended on people and events over whom Hitler and the Nazis had little or no control. A few examples:
Hjalmar Schact's work on the German economy prior to Nazism's rise.
USA and French "intransigence" and stonewalling of Schact's pleas for revision of the reparation payments schedule.
The relative "success" of Aktion T4 with so little internal dissent.
Stalin's relatively benign (for Stalin) approach to Soviet-German relations post-treaty. Stalin usually took treaties as permission to start squeezing.
As you say though, no-one (except speculative historians!) like getting into counterfactuals.