The far too well known form of the Holocaust (insert here stock images of Hungarian Jews being selected for the gas chamber at Auschwitz in late 1944) need never of happened and yet most of Europe's Jews would still have died.
The time to stop the second (open air public mass shootings late 1941, early 1942) and third Jewish Holocausts (secretive mass gassings 1942-1945) from ever occurring was in late 1939 and early 1940.
That is, before the successful conquest of France changed the war dynamics totally and at the moment when the mechanics of the initial Jewish Holocaust were first made public by the Nazis.
As soon as the occupation of Poland began in the Fall of 1939 and the urban daily ration for each of its ethnic groups was publicly announced to the world, it was clear that all of Poland's three million Jews would fairly quickly die from the diseases caused by prolonged totally inadequate daily calorie intake.
Without a single Jew having to be directly shot, hung or gassed.
Call it a slow but steady 'Holocaust by Starvation'.
I am quoting, second hand, from official public documents of the League of Nations released around the world.
A League of Nations, which yes, in 1940, was still around and still active.
So no cant please from all the old people, claiming 'we didn't know' - you knew - and you still did nothing.
This is when Britain and France should have said they would immediately begin the aerial gassing of small German towns, unless the Nazis immediately stopped this mass murder by slow starvation.
In the beginning, the Nazis allotted the Jews a ration one fifth the size of the 2500 calories a day given to the country's Germans.
To set a baseline, 2500 calories is the minimum needed for hard working adults to survive long term in cool climates like Poland ---- if you also suffer inadequate domestic heating and very little cool weather clothing - which , as it happens, the Poles et al did but the Germans did not.
(For we must never forget that the Germans also took most of the fuel and warm clothing of the Jews, Poles and Ukrainian populations in Poland, which together with the reduced calories allotted to these groups, ensured millions (Jews and non-Jews alike) died of starvation diseases over the six years of war.)
In point of fact, for the entire war about half of the Germans in Greater Germany actually lived better, not worse, than they had during the dark days of the Depression.
In 1940-1941, Jews in Poland were reduced to a tenth and then a twelfth of the minimum calories needed for long term survival.
Locked inside tiny, crowded, walled and guarded ghettos, the Polish Jews also couldn't get much of the black market food and informal charity food that helped keep most people outside the ghettos eating a little above the official ration level.
Jewish death rates soared and kept on soaring.
But Holocausting the Jews by slow starvation (while requiring no scarce resources or manpower and while {regrettably} less morally offensive to outsiders than death by guns, rope and gas) wasn't dramatic enough for a regime starved of any more quick military successes after the Greek Campaign.
Successful quasi-military campaigns of mass shootings and mass gassings against defenceless civilians just felt so dynamic and so decisive.
And so these two efforts (later) became the public face of the Nazi form of Holocaust.
But we mustn't forget, that if the Nazis had been more militarily successful in Russia, the preferred method of an expanded Holocaust would have been slow starvation of not just ten million Jews but ten million Poles and thirty million or more Russians and Ukrainians.
If intentions, as opposed to actual actions, is what really measures a sin rather than a war crime, it seems clear that the Nazis proposed carrying out an unbelievably huge mass murder -- and then laid it out in Plain Sight before an indifferent world.....
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