No, an armed Jewish populace probably would not have stopped the Holocaust from happening on some scale.
But armed Jews absolutely would have resulted in more dead Nazis.
And that is a good thing.
Right?
Or, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said regarding a different murderous atrocity in a different socialist country:
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!
The Bielski and Parczew partisan groups kind of underscore your point.
But they also undermine it a bit, since those armed groups were never successfully eradicated, despite massive efforts to do so.
If every Jewish community had retained some arms and fought from the beginning… Oh how they must have burned. Dammit, they literally did.
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Yeah, fighting back offers no guarantee of survival. Hell, it does not even offer a guarantee of taking one – or more – of the bastards with you. But it offers you a chance at both, and even looking past the vengeance/retribution aspect, one less Nazi is a strictly good thing, and it will make the next one think more seriously about what he is doing.
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