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by pluma 3645 days ago
The Allied involvement in WW2 never was about the holocaust. In fact, the full extent of the holocaust only became apparent after WW2 as Allied soldiers had liberated the concentration camps and discovered the paperwork.

Also don't think that anybody in WW2 cared about the Jews. There are enough stories about Jewish refugees being rejected at borders and sent back to face certain death because nobody believed them or cared about them. Hating Jews was socially acceptable everywhere until the Nazis showed what that kind of thinking can lead to in a modern society (with the technical and political means to actually round up and murder people at scale).

The US only got directly involved in WW2 when it had no other choice (technically, Germany declared war on them after the US declared war on Japan). Britain only declared war on Germany because it had a pact with Poland which Germany invaded -- Germany had already annexed Austria and occupied Czechoslovakia at that point.

Heck, Italy and Hungary were allied with Germany for a significant part of the war. Not to mention various countries like Spain and Finland that fought alongside or at least supported Nazi Germany.

WW2 was a world war. It's called that because it involved so many countries that were at war with each other throughout the entire world at once over an extended amount of time. There were many reasons for each individual conflict and WW2 itself is just the aggregate of all of these (with the two major ones of course being the attempted domination of Europe by Nazi Germany and the attempted domination of East Asia by Japan).

It wasn't about ideals or principles. It was about power and territory. And for the Allies it was mostly about survival: a German victory would have meant vassalage for Western Europe and annihilation for most of Eastern Europe (because the Nazis wanted that territory as "lebensraum", i.e. living space, meaning the existing population had to go).

TL;DR: While halting the genocides was a nice side-effect of defeating Germany, the Allies weren't in it to save the Jews.

1 comments

My grandmother didn't give a damn about that when the Canadians showed up. And Hitler's plans for Poland were comparable to the Shoah: 1/3 dead, 1/3 slaves, 1/3 peasants.
Isn't that basically what I said?

> annihilation for most of Eastern Europe (because the Nazis wanted that territory as "lebensraum", i.e. living space, meaning the existing population had to go)