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Old November 14th, 2009 #3
Hadding
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The only important source of confusion that I find in this document -- one that certainly could be exploited by Holocaustians -- is the fact that "emigration" (Auswanderung) is used with several different meanings. Initially it means emigration from Germany to any other country; then, after the fall of France, it means emigration from Europe to Madagascar. At this point "emigration" becomes shorthand for emigration to Madagascar. (It seems likely that the connotation of Auswanderung was influenced by the history of German emigration in the preceding century, which generally involved boarding a ship and crossing an ocean.)

Deportation of the Jews to the East therefore is not called emigration. In a sense it really is not emigration if the Jews are relocated within Europe or within the German sphere of influence, which the General Government (the provisional holding area for Jewish deportees, pending resettlement farther east) certainly was. How far east the Jews would be sent after that (i.e. whether they would leave Europe instead of being confined to the fringe of Europe under the "territorial solution") is not specified in this 1942 memorandum, perhaps because it was unknown at the time what the options would be.

If some Holocaust believer says that it is documented that the Germans gave up on emigration and thereupon decided on killing all the Jews, one need only show Luther's explanation in the penultimate paragraph of what eine territoriale Endlösung, "a territorial final solution," really means, which is resettlement in the East.

Last edited by Hadding; November 14th, 2009 at 03:03 PM.