>>2929838I think that's an even more confused definition. I know you said Generalplan Ost, T4 etc., were linked with the Holocaust, but which act of mass murder is which? Is something like the Babi Yar massacres part of the Holocaust because it targeted Jews or is it part of General Plan Ost because the Jews were Soviet Slavs? Was the liquidation of the Polish Jews in the extermination camps in the GG part of the Holocaust or was it part of German settler colonialism in Poland since part of the reason for the Ghettos being crammed with Jews was because of deportations to make room for German settlers in the Warthegau?
The KL-system was also established as an internment system for political opponents during the Machtergreifung rather than for the sake of mass killing, and its prison population was majority non-Jewish for the majority of its existence. It had even almost ceased to exist in the 30s with just a few thousand inmates. Despite that, even if you exclude the Jews that were simply murdered at Auschwitz without registration into the KL, the camps still account for almost a million deaths, with some of the first acts of outright systemic murder being against Soviet POWs and "commissars". The extermination camps were set up specifically for the mass murder of Polish Jews during Operation Reinhardt and the vast majority of victims (>95% except for Sobibor where it was about half) came exactly from those Polish ghettos, with the rest being Jews from elsewhere. Many of the T4 euthanasia personnel were also present at the extermination camps, so that is another link between two different victim groups. There were of course also genocidal acts that were not perpetrated by the Germans, but by their allies or by local nationalist groups and auxiliaries which complicates things even more. There was also not really a single experience for a victim group. For example, Jews in Romania proper fared much better than Jews in the areas it re-annexed from the Soviet Union.
Like yeah, obviously all this stuff is linked, but I feel like Nazi mass murder was
too interlinked to consider them apart like this at all. Nazi terror was extremely multi-causal (think food, loot, forced labour, anti-partisan activity, anti-communism, population transfers, you name it) and had a kaleidoscopic ideological base, so I think, maybe a bit paradoxically,
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