dafydd
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Is that why Hitler killed twenty million Russians during WWII?
General Holocaust Denial Discussion Part II
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Is that why Hitler killed twenty million Russians during WWII?
Nick Terry
Illuminator
Including a detailed commentary by Wetzel of the Ostministerium. Discussed here:
http://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/GPO/gpoarticle.htm
The Wiki statement is somewhat inaccurate since we have a 100 page plan very clearly labelled 'Generalplan Ost' surviving from May 1942 written by Konrad Meyer, who was the chief drafter of all the plans we know about from other sources.
http://gplanost.x-berg.de/gplanost.html
This one is much more focused on the positive aspects of settling Germans in the east than the negative aspects of what to do with the natives, which were evidently foregrounded in the earlier version commented upon by Wetzel.
Nick Terry
Illuminator
One of the great things about Wiki is that it often points you in parallel directions via links, whether in the text or under 'see also'.
The Hunger Plan was one of the main starting points for the wider race-and-resettlement planning drafted for the Generalplan Ost, devised in 1941 before Barbarossa for logistical and food-balance reasons, but applied to the east for racist reasons rather than to anyone else.
The Hunger Plan failed to reach its target of tens of millions of dead, because the Blitzkrieg failed and thus the Nazis could not continue to starve absolutely everyone in the medium term, and because the intention was rather vague to begin with, i.e. little concrete discussion had taken place about how to go about starving millions to death.
In 1941 the Nazis were very keen on things like preventing any exodus from the cities, undersupplying cities, undersupplying POW camps and murdering the urban Jewish population to 'solve' food crises in the occupied territories, and besieging Leningrad where 100s of 1000s starved to death. 1942-44 in the occupied territories remained decidedly unpleasant, but relief tended to come only when the 'surplus' population (in Nazi eyes) had perished, and repeated evacuations and displacements caused further famines throughout the later years of the occupation, especially in 1943-44.
The Hunger Plan was one of the main starting points for the wider race-and-resettlement planning drafted for the Generalplan Ost, devised in 1941 before Barbarossa for logistical and food-balance reasons, but applied to the east for racist reasons rather than to anyone else.
The Hunger Plan failed to reach its target of tens of millions of dead, because the Blitzkrieg failed and thus the Nazis could not continue to starve absolutely everyone in the medium term, and because the intention was rather vague to begin with, i.e. little concrete discussion had taken place about how to go about starving millions to death.
In 1941 the Nazis were very keen on things like preventing any exodus from the cities, undersupplying cities, undersupplying POW camps and murdering the urban Jewish population to 'solve' food crises in the occupied territories, and besieging Leningrad where 100s of 1000s starved to death. 1942-44 in the occupied territories remained decidedly unpleasant, but relief tended to come only when the 'surplus' population (in Nazi eyes) had perished, and repeated evacuations and displacements caused further famines throughout the later years of the occupation, especially in 1943-44.
Nick Terry
Illuminator
I do hope the Hitler lovers have enough reading comprehension to work out the differences between short, medium and long term goals involved here. I'm just waiting for the first 100% immediate extermination strawman to be wheeled out....
I'm trying to find a copy of "Stellungnahme und Gedanken zum Generalplan Ost des Reichsführers SS", which also seems known as NG-2325, without much luck at avalon.law.yale.edu and at http://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/library/WhatWeHave/SpecialCollections/Donovan/DonovanSearch.cfm
Nick Terry
Illuminator
If you look up the various web pages already given you'll see this was reprinted in the Viertelsjahreshefte fuer Zeitgeschichte:
Heiber, Helmut (ed), ‘Der Generalplan Ost’, VfZ 6, 1958, pp.281-325
these are all online here.
None of the various Nuremberg trial websites have yet uploaded 100% of the documentation. The Harvard site is the most comprehensive and has uploaded about one and a half trials out of twelve so far. This document was discussed in the RuSHA trial, and you can find the English summary version in the 'Green Series' on the Library of Congress Military Legal Resources website.
Correct me if I'm wrong but I read a lot of "resettlement" and no killing. Another code word? The author doesn't seem to think so:
On the other hand, one may accept the hypothesis that the remaining 14 million people were to be annihilated, or considered suitable for Germanization and left where they were, or else used as manpower to work in the Reich or in the annexed territories.
The non resettled people are hypothesized to be marked for annihilation. Since the moon landings were fake, in other news I put forward the hypothesis the moon is made out of cheese. Cheddar to be specific.A long and boring read but I have trouble reading between the lines where there is a plan for mass murder. Maybe you could help me with the code words? Apparently in the real Generalplan Ost the treatment of Russians was barely even mentioned?
Damit muß kurz auf die zukünftige Behandlung der Russen, die in
dem Generalplan so gut wie gar nicht erwähnt werden, eingegangen werden.
I think "not mentioned" is code word for vivisected and their eyes gouged out in search for a cure for the deadly and common disease of heterochromia. Your thoughts?dem Generalplan so gut wie gar nicht erwähnt werden, eingegangen werden.
Nick Terry
Illuminator
Wetzel's commentary is quite explicit in places. He states that the evacuation of Jews earlier planned “is no longer necessary due to the solution of the Jewish question" (Heiber p.305) and that “one cannot solve the Polish question by liquidating the Poles like the Jews.” (Heiber p.308)
This was after all a commentary on a document we haven't seen (a not unusual state of affairs in recorded history). Wetzel objects to many of the premises some on more humanitarian grounds otherwise he wouldn't object to the solution of the Polish question on potentially the same lines as the liquidation of the Jews. He also objects to the numbers since he thinks they don't add up to bring about the planned reduction by 31 million in the area to be colonised by the Germans.
The core plan envisaged the expulsion of the stated numbers of surplus Slavs to Siberia. This was fundamentally about ethnic cleansing. No such expulsion could take place without losses; this does not mean that the Nazis planned to kill all the surplus Slavs. The Nazis discussed other population reduction measures such as restricting births and encouraging abortion on many other occasions from 1940 onwards.
Extermination in the casual/colloquial sense is certainly not the right word for what was intended. Genocide is the right word, because the plan foresaw dramatic population reductions that would undoubtedly have caused immense human losses, thereby qualifying for the UN Genocide Convention definition ('in whole or in part'). Forced Germanisation and baby-stealing also counts as genocide in international law, by the way; just read the convention; and the Nazis certainly engaged in both during the war.
The Nazis carried out a pilot project in the Zamosc region of the Lublin district, which was one of the settlement strongpoints foreseen under the GPO, in late 1942. This resulted in substantial numbers being deported to Auschwitz and Majdanek (some were then liquidated outright at Auschwitz), and inflamed partisan resistance which led to the deaths of thousands during Nazi antipartisan operations harnessed to the goal of clearing villages.
The Poles became fairly convinced that they were next, since this operation came hot on the heels of the mass murders of Jews in Poland. Further east similar fears were expressed that after the Jews the Poles were next. Then Ukrainian nationalists launched their own campaign of ethnic cleansing in Volhynia and Galicia, which killed between 60 and 100,000 Poles. Of course, many Poles consider this to be genocide; it would certainly qualify as a genocidal massacre (term used to describe a more localised ethnic based killing action or wave of killings).
After the war, Poland and Ukraine conducted fairly orderly population exchanges while Poland and other East European states expelled 14 million ethnic Germans. There were at least 600,000 casualties and German folk memory has the number down at 2 million. Some consider those expulsions to meet the convention definition of genocide, too.
The notion that Siberia could really support 31 or however many million extra people is of course also contradicted by what happened when Stalin carried out dekulakisation in 1930. A significant proportion died en route or shortly after arrival due to the chaotic organisation of the population transfer.
The Nazis abandoned the Generalplan Ost in 1943 because of the way the war was going. This coincided with a much more positive political warfare strategy designed to increase pro-Nazi and anti-Bolshevik collaboration among Poles and Russians. Obviously that was too little too late after what had transpired since 1939 in Poland and since 1941 in the occupied Soviet Union.
Pretty much every Russian who is historically literate will tell you that the Nazis DID commit genocide against the Russian people because they succeeded in bumping off even more Soviet civilians and POWs than Jews who died in the Holocaust. Poles are pretty much the same way, they point to the targeted liquidation of intelligentsia and leadership elites in 1939-40 and the heavy losses suffered through the war, and say they suffered genocide at the hands of the Nazis.
And they will all point to the Generalplan Ost as an indicator of the ultimate Nazi intentions towards Slavs in Eastern Europe. Given that the occupation regimes were explicitly colonial in character and given the Hunger Plan of 1941, then they certainly have a point.
'Extermination' in the 100%-killed-straight-away sense, no. Mass violence, mass starvation, ethnic cleansing and planned population reductions of unbelievable magnitude, yes.
Nick Terry
Illuminator
Nope. Your problem is that you're arguing with a strawman, based on misunderstanding the documents and how they are conventionally interpreted, due to someone bandying around the word 'extermination' and then applying your own strawman of what that word might actually mean.
You'll notice that I didn't use the word 'extermination' earlier to describe Nazi policy towards the Slavs.
Until the Holocaust, that word would actually have referred to expulsions as well since the Latin root word, exterminare, refers to expulsion. This is one reason why extermination was used (by among others Turkish officers aghast at what they were witnessing) in the context of the Armenian genocide which involved mainly deportations, forced marches, decimatory shootings and then neglect.
Because of the Holocaust, we now have a new standard for outright extermination. Historically, most outbreaks of mass violence and population expulsion have not reached the same percentage of dead. When the Ustasha engaged in ethnic cleansing of Serbs from independent Croatia in 1941-2, they massacred many Serbs and drove many more out, while also using concentration camps. When the Bosnian Serbs engaged in ethnic cleansing of Muslims and Croats, they did the same kind of thing: some massacres, some expulsions, and some in camps.
Nazi plans went from projecting the deaths of 10s of millions of Soviet citizens from starvation and expulsion to trying to plan the transfer of 31 million. Fortunately this was never fully carried out. The track record of the Nazis does not leave us with much hope that they would have been able to implement this without massive violence and suffering.
We're discussing the extermination of the slavic people here Nick. This isn't the Holocaust thread. Polish are further not slavic people in case you didn't know.
I read in Wetzel's commentary alright that most Polish were racially quite close to/the same as the Germans. So any reconstruction of Generalplan Ost using Wetzel's commentary would indeed not be favorable to a premise for the extermination of the Poles on the same line as the jews.
The thread title is about "extermination" Nick. NOT genocide. Do I take it you concede MaGZ's point?
The OP asked for evidence for the planned extermination of slavic people, in specific by Hitler, not Wetzel's thoughts and opinions. I don't give a rat's ass about the Polish. Generalplan Ost was mentioned as proof/evidence. Now is Wetzel's comment correct that the treatment of russians was barely even mentioned in Generalplan Ost, yes or no?
Small reminder:
Damit muß kurz auf die zukünftige Behandlung der Russen, die in dem Generalplan so gut wie gar nicht erwähnt werden, eingegangen werden.
What a load of crap. Russians are among the Slavic people the biggest group of all and Generalplan Ost barely mentions their fate.
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Crossbow
Seeking Honesty and Sanity
Well, you are quite welcome to hold that opinion if it pleases you to do so.
In the meantime however, I (and I expect that most others who take this subject seriously) will try to keep my opinion more in line with the facts of the case.
Can you justify these odd remarks? Except perhaps the last one, which has the merit of being evidently true.
Nick Terry
Illuminator
Wetzel's commentary helps establish what was being meant. If he contrasts the fate of the Jews, which everyone sane accepts was liquidation by the spring of 1942, with the fate of Poles, then this is very useful, especially to explaining things to the slower-witted who might be reading the thread. The GPO wasn't a Final Solution-type plan.
Indeed, plenty of Poles were "Germanised" by the Nazis.
Wetzel however proceeds on then-contemporary assumptions suggesting that 20 million Poles would be moved bodily to Siberia, where a population of this size would probably remain as an intact ethnicity and thus continue to be a danger. He is evidently torn between different logics here, logics which arose directly from the nature of the Nazi colonisation plan. The same thoughts are then expressed vis-a-vis Ukrainians (who were to be reduced by 65%) and Belorussians.
Show me where I have ever discussed the GPO as a matter of 100% instantaneous extermination. I can't concede a strawman. I also don't care what the OP said, someone mentioned the GPO and I'm sharing the benefits of my understanding of this.
If you're incapable of going beyond black-and-white thinking, I can't honestly help you.
Maybe you should bother to look at the regions proposed to be Germanised under the GPO. Hardly any of them were in Russia proper. 'Ingermanland' around Leningrad (whose inhabitants were drastically reduced by the siege under the auspices of the Hunger Plan) was one area, and the Crimea was another area. That's about it. The territory to be affected by the GPO = overwhelmingly, Poland, Ukraine, Baltic States, Belarus.
Wetzel's commentary cites a Nazi racial scientist proposing to 'liquidate' Russiandom (Heiber p.314 bottom of page), and Wetzel's thoughts go on to elaborate the issues involved in administering the territories further to the east of the proposed settlement region to the west.
On the whole, Russians were ranked lowest of all the titular nationalities on Nazi-occupied Soviet territory. The hierarchy went roughly: Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Ukrainians. Tatars and Caucasians were tactically OK but easily confused with 'Mongols' who tended to be exterminated (as in killed outright).
Nazi racial policy was not very well founded in rational distinctions because the Russians were seen as 'Asiatic' (and thus to be excluded or destroyed) but also had 'Nordic' elements. The Nazi attitude to Slavs was not therefore the same as their attitude towards the Jewish 'race', since Slavs could contain admixtures of Germanic or Nordic elements, which should be recovered, as well as Asiatic and other subhuman elements, which deserved to be destroyed.
Crossbow
Seeking Honesty and Sanity
MaGZ
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No
Are you suggesting the NS attitude toward the Slavic races was the same as the Jews?
BTW thanks for the comments form all sides.
uke2se
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No, I'm saying that Nazi genocide denial belongs in the Holocaust denial thread. That way we can keep our Nazis nice and hemmed in.
NWO Sentryman
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I think Germany would be a nuclear wasteland by the time they get round to implementing generalplan ost.
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