Talk:Theresienstadt

The OTL section is about the concentration camp, but the article bears the name of the town. We should either retitle to "Theresienstadt Concentration Camp", or we should rewrite the OTL section for the town (which is called Terezín, BTW), and include info about the the OTL camp. Personally, I vote for a retitle to Terezin, but then rewrite the OTL section to include info about the town generally.

Now for the real issue with this page, the literary comment:

"There are no further references to Theresienstadt in later parts of the series."

That's reasonable to point out. That's our literary comment, full stop. We don't know.

"Assuming that conditions in this Theresienstadt were comparable to those in OTL"

Since we are now assuming something we have no direct information about, this comment has officially gone off the rails.

"it can assumed that about a quarter of the Czech Jews would have perished because of the conditions of imprisonment -"

Assumption on top of assumption. We know that the persecution of the Jews never reached Holocaust levels as in OTL. Pontificating about the death tolls is of no value here.

"but there would have been no deportations to Auschwitz or other camps for the outright extermination of Jews, which were not established on this timeline."

Hereby demonstrating why this speculative LC is of no value. That's a HUGE difference from OTL.

"Therefore, about three quarters of the Czech Jews would have survived until the fall of Hitler."

Or more. Or less. HT doesn't say.

"It can be further assumed that the Committee for the Salvation of the German Nation - which abolished the anti-Jewish laws in Germany itself and which managed to retain German rule in the former Czechoslovakia - would have allowed these surviving Czech Jews to leave Theresienstadt and return to their homes."

Or more. Or less. HT doesn't say. Here's what we do know: 1) we know that the Nazis were unable to inflict the horror on the Jews that they did in OTL; 2) we know that the Committee went out of its way to point out how terrible the Nazis after it took power, and that the Committee itself was appreciably less terrible than the Nazis; 3) we know that there were Germans who found Jews much more sympathetic as the war went on; 4) we know that Germany kept Bohemia and Moravia.

I think there is a cogent argument to be made that if the Nazis had begun anything like the OTL camp and inflicted that number of deaths, Guderian and the Committee might have made shared that with the German people in order to secure their own political advantage and legitimatcy. Conversely, a darker scenario is that the Committee, trying to keep a lid on the Protectorate, wound up doing awful things to the Jews in Theresienstadt in a broader terror campaign, while keeping the whole mess hushed up.

We can create more than one scenario to fit the facts HT has given us. Dedicating a paragraph to several assumptions is pointless. It is worth pointing out that HT never returns to the issue after volume 3. Therefore, I vote that the LC be deleted after the first sentence. TR (talk) 23:02, February 6, 2016 (UTC)