What territories exactly were "Lebensraum"?

[Critical]

Hi.

I would like to be able to read about the concept of Lebensraum through the original documents of the National Socialists.

Specifically, I would like to know which territories were considered "German living space"

[borjastick]

What are you asking for precisely? Do you want links or further info on where to find such info and records or is this a general question on the matter of Lebensraum?

[Hektor]

Hi.

I would like to be able to read about the concept of Lebensraum through the original documents of the National Socialists.

Specifically, I would like to know which territories were considered "German living space"

It's more a foreign policy / ww2 debate and unrelated to "The Holocaust".

Lebenraum / living space actually mean the totally available land and sea mass in terms of economic use. This included territory under control, but also other countries one was friendly with and trading with. That's why the notion that 'lebensraum' means 'conquest' is highly misleading.

This 1943 German Atlas mentions Lebensraum:
https://archive.org/details/deutschersc ... 7/mode/2up

There was also a "Nationalpolitische Aufklaerungsschrift on this":
https://archive.org/details/Nationalpol ... 7/mode/2up

[Critical]

What are you asking for precisely? Do you want links or further info on where to find such info and records or is this a general question on the matter of Lebensraum?

Mainly documents that define the territories that are considered Lebensraum

[Hieldner]

Good question!

As Richard Evans, among others, fanasises, the Lebensraum concept would encompass the following:

According to the General Plan for the East, ethnic Germans were to be settled in Germanised towns and agricultural estates all across Eastern Europe, which, Hitler fantasised, would be linked to the Reich by high-speed railways and autobahns. Anywhere between 30 million and 45 million Slavs living in the region were to be left to die, deliberately deprived of food and medical care. The plan envisaged that some 85 per cent of Poles, 64 per cent of Ukrainians and 75 per cent of Belarussians would perish in this way.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n21/richard-j.-evans/who-remembers-the-poles

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum

In contrast, quoting Jürgen Förster’s article Entscheidung für den Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion, Stefan Scheil explains in Die Eskalation des Zweiten Weltkriegs von 1940 bis zum Unternehmen Barbarossa 1941, p. 21:

At no time during his reign did Hitler explicitly speak of wanting to conquer Lebensraum in Russia, either publicly or secretly, as Jürgen Förster conceded in the account of the Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt on the attack on Russia. The Lebensraum concept remained nebulous where it did not mean the goal actually proclaimed by Hitler of a Greater German unity including “Bohemia and Moravia,” supplemented by a sphere of influence in eastern Central Europe and cushioned by the intended alliance with Poland and Hungary if the original goal of an Anglo-German alliance could not be realised. The “Operation Barbarossa” as a campaign of conquest for Lebensraum does not appear in this world of thought; on the contrary, the fear of a Soviet attack increases there from 1935/36 onwards with the comprehensive armament that had been under construction since 1929.

On the alliance with Poland and Hungary Scheil writes in a footnote on the same page:

Hitler explained such a concept to the Hungarian Foreign Minister Count Czaky in January 1939, when he spoke of a few years of calm after the greatest problems had been solved with the annexation of Austria and the Munich Agreement: “One must strive for a political-territorial line and Poland and Hungary must participate . . . . He saw everything calmly and promisingly under the condition of absolute cooperation, however. Poland, Hungary and Germany must work together like a football team, as economically as possible, without crises and at lightning speed [blitzartig].”

In Logik der Mächte, p. 129, Scheil explains furthermore, quoting the Hoßbach protocol (where Hitler talks about attacking Austria and Czechoslovakia, if we assume this document isn’t forged):

However, the speech also reveals how limited Hitler's goals were, and this is usually overlooked. In fact, here he once again gives detailed reasons for his opinion that Germany's problem was the lack of living space. The economy could not become self-sufficient in the present space and food could not be guaranteed either:

“The German future is therefore exclusively conditioned by the solution of the lack of space, such a solution can naturally only be sought for a foreseeable period of about 1–3 generations.”

Where this space should lie, in what time frames Hitler reckoned and how he thought about his own role in this, he also gave precise answers to these questions on this day. Both the areas of food

“as well as the areas of raw material were to be sought more expediently in direct connection with the Reich in Europe and not overseas, whereby the solution must have an effect for one or two generations. What goes beyond that must be left to future generations. The development of large world entities proceeds slowly (!), and the German people, with its strong racial core, finds the most favourable conditions for this in the middle of the European continent.”

Germany's spatial problem was thus to be solved, at least in the next few decades, by expansion in the centre of Europe. Hitler immediately explained what he had in mind. The annexation of Austria and “Czechia” (not: Czechoslovakia) would make it possible to feed an additional 5–6 million people and bring in twelve divisions.

Ultimately, apart from Austria, only the Sudeten German parts of Czechia and larger areas of western Poland were incorporated into the Reich during the war, to be Germanised through resettlement, cultural and economic policies, while the entire area conquered by the Wehrmacht was designated as the Vorfeld (apron, front area).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_areas_annexed_by_Nazi_Germany

[Hektor]

.....Ultimately, apart from Austria, only the Sudeten German parts of Czechia and larger areas of western Poland were incorporated into the Reich during the war, to be Germanised through resettlement, cultural and economic policies, while the entire area conquered by the Wehrmacht was designated as the Vorfeld (apron, front area).
Generalgouvernement_with_2nd_Polish_Republic,_ Lebensraum_im_Osten ,_and_current_borders.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_areas_annexed_by_Nazi_Germany

Those area with some exceptions were previously parts of Germany. And actually in it largest extension this was even a rather modest territory, given that ethnic Germans from outside this area were to be resettled there.

'Lebensraum' was arguable bigger, but as I said this is the area of economic relevance which can include territories that are entirely independent of Germany.

The use of the term 'Lebensraum' is used in innuendo as 'proof that the Nazis were imperialists bent on world conquest', but that is simply a non-sequitur, a jump in logic that is not warranted by the content of the sources. The expansion of NS-Germany/Axis was done out of necessity and not based on a previous plan. If it wasn't for Allied declarations of war on Germany, that isn't something that was done, but the focus would have been on developing the territory and the people within NS-Germany's borders. They would have had a hegemony, influencing policy elsewhere to some extent and that was exactly that big finance wasn't interested in. Rather drive war to the utter limits, destroy NS-Germany and prevent policy changes with regards to economics and banking.

[Otium]

As Richard Evans, among others, fanasises, the Lebensraum concept would encompass the following:

According to the General Plan for the East, ethnic Germans were to be settled in Germanised towns and agricultural estates all across Eastern Europe, which, Hitler fantasised, would be linked to the Reich by high-speed railways and autobahns. Anywhere between 30 million and 45 million Slavs living in the region were to be left to die, deliberately deprived of food and medical care. The plan envisaged that some 85 per cent of Poles, 64 per cent of Ukrainians and 75 per cent of Belarussians would perish in this way.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n21/richard-j.-evans/who-remembers-the-poles
Greater_Germanic_Reich.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum

The actual document, handwritten notes by Hermann Krumey on a lecture by Justus Beyer on 1-2 February 1943 (printed in: Czeslaw Madajczyk, ed., Vom Generalplan Ost zum Generalsiedlungsplan, Munich 1994, Doc. 74, pp. 261-266), mentions a 30 year period in which he gives percentages of peoples 'to be resettled', not killed. The idea that they'd be killed is literally just made up, and not found in any of the documents.

The historian Christian Ingrao in dealing with this document in his book 'The Promise of the East: Nazi Hopes and Genocide, 1939–43' relies on a lecture given by SS-Standartenführer Hans Ehlich, entitled 'Die Behandlung des fremden Volkstums’, delivered on 11 December 1942, to help prove that the National Socialists planned to kill tens of millions of people. This is a lie, pure and simple. In Ehlich's lecture, the 7 page document of which I have obtained, he literally says the opposite; that mass murder isn't any kind of solution:

"Die Beziehungen zwischen den Völkern beruhen auf völkisch-rassischen Kräften. Die Beziehungen zwischen dem deutschen Volke und fremdvölkischen Gruppen in seinem Hoheitsbereich sind daher ein völkisches und rassenpolitisches Problem und erst in zweiter Linie ein staatsrechtliches oder machtpolitisches. 4 Möglichkeiten der Auseinandersetzung sind gegeben:

1.) ein Zusammenleben mit rassisch und völkisch gleichen Volksgruppen;
2.) eine Umvolkung fremden Volkstums in das deutsche Volkstum;
3.) eine räumliche Verdrängung fremden Volkstums und
4.) die physische Vernichtung des fremden, im Machtbereiche des Deutschen Reiches unerwünschten Volkstums.

Alle 4 Wege können beschritten werden, sie können auch nebeneinander gegangen werden. Entscheidend aber ist, dass einmal eingeschlagene Wege auch kompromisslos bis zum Ende durchmarschiert werden und dass man nicht gezwungen ist, auf halbem Wege umzukehren. Es ist klar, dass ein solches Ausweichen von dem fremden Volkstum immer als Schwäche ausgelegt werden muss. Ich komme auf diese Frage noch einmal in anderem Zusammenhange zurück.

Bevor also einer der 4 genannten Wege beschritten wird, ist zunächst eine klare Bestandaufnahme des jeweiligen Volkes in rassischer und völkischer Hinsicht erforderlich. Ein Zusammenleben oder aber die Umvolkung eines fremden Volkstums oder einzelner Angehöriger desselben ist nur möglich, wenn es sich hierbei um stammesgleiche Familien und Sippen im Sinne der Anordnung des Reichsführers SS, über die ich vorher schon sprach, handelt. Ist dies nicht der Fall, so kann nur die dritte und vierte Möglichkeit, nämlich eine Verdrängung oder eine physische Vernichtung infrage kommen. Wenn wir uns nun überlegen, dass es sich um 70 Millionen Menschen handelt, über deren Schicksal entschieden werden muss, dann bedarf es nicht vieler Worte darüber, dass weder eine restlose Verdrängung, noch eine totale physische Vernichtung infrage kommen kann. Dies ist allein schon deswegen unmöglich, weil wir niemals die Menschen hätten, um diese 70 Mill. auch nur annähernd zu ersetzen. Es muss hier vielmehr weitgehend die Frage gestellt werden, ob es möglich ist, aus diesen Völkern gewisse Teile auszulesen, die einer Umvolkung unterzogen werden können."

Bundesarchiv, Berlin-Lichterfelde, BArch R 4901/13160
Relevant page from the original document:

In contrast, quoting Jürgen Förster’s article Entscheidung für den Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion

I read this too. Scheil writes:

"If we first look at the known sources, the findings are already impressive. A closer look reveals without further ado that the phrases of a "phased plan" to conquer the USSR, a "program" to conquer the USSR or even a "world blitzkrieg" are based to a surprising extent on conjecture. This has occasionally been explicitly acknowledged in relevant standard works. There is no "source evidence" for Hitler's assumed "step-by-step plans" to achieve world domination, wrote, for example, Andreas Hillgruber in "Hitler's Strategy", which did not prevent him from making these unverifiable step-by-step plans the leitmotif of his habilitation thesis. At no time during his reign did Hitler explicitly speak of wanting to conquer Lebensraum in Russia, either publicly or secretly, Jürgen Förster also conceded in the account of the Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt on the attack on Russia."

Stefan Scheil, Die Eskalation des Zweiten Weltkriegs von 1940 bis zum Unternehmen Barbarossa 1941 (Berlin: Duncker & Humbolt, 2011), pp. 20-21.

But if you read the relevant pages from Förster cited by Scheil, there is no 'explicit acknowledgment' of this fact. What Förster actually does is make assertions without evidence, and what evidence he does provide is merely the harking back to Mein Kampf and the Zweites Buch from the 1920s, rather than provide any contemporary sources which prove the long-standing, and relevant, motivations for Hitler's decision to attack Russia in 1940/41. In one instance he quotes from Hitler's Table Talks for September 17-18, 1941 !

"The natural leadership role of the ‘Germanicnorthern race’ in the international struggle for survival and the unique ‘racial quality’ of the German people justified, in Hitler’s eyes, the conquest of the necessary ‘living-space’ at the expense of other, racially inferior, nations, in particular the Slavs, for the establishment of a Greater Reich of all Germans and the racial reshaping of Europe. ‘The struggle for world hegemony will be decided for Europe by the possession of Russia’s space: this will make Europe the most blockade-proof spot in the world.’"

Jürgen Förster, "Hitlers Entscheidung für den Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion", in: Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt (ed.), Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, Vol. 4: Der Angriff auf die Sowjetunion (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1983), p. 19. Cf. In English: Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, Germany and the Second World War, Vol. IV: The Attack on the Soviet Union (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1998), p. 31. [Hereafter: DRZW and GSWW respectivly]

Förster's evidence and argumentation is not only flimsy, but it's embarassing. For example, in one of the pages Scheil cites, Förster makes the following assertion:

"Before the increasing co-operation of the Anglo-American naval powers and a heavily armed Soviet Union were able to restrict Germany’s external freedom of movement, the conquest of the European regions of the Soviet Union was to enable Germany to gain a strategic and economic position that would convince Britain of the hopelessness of her struggle and make confrontation with the United States seem no great danger. His political interest in successfully coming through the overall war was linked in Hitler’s strategy with his programmatic goals vis-a-vis the Soviet Union. The global political justification for his decision of 31 July to attack the Soviet Union in the spring of 1941 should not lead us to overlook the links between calculation and dogma, between will to power and ideology, in Hitler’s war policy. The turn to the east was neither the final, as it were logical, step on the road towards the creation of an autarkic German colonial empire, nor ‘mere compulsion to act in order to escape the waiting-war of the summer of 1940 and to reach a decisive conclusion to it’. Hitler’s living-space programme must be seen as an equally substantive basis for his decision to hold on to the military and political initiative by smashing the Soviet Union as it was for his directives of March 1941 to conduct Operation Barbarossa as an uncompromising war of annihilation."

Förster, DRZW, 4, p. 16; GSWW, IV, p. 28.

The underlined in the above is when Förster just makes shit up.

When Förster writes that Hitler was following a "'mere compulsion to act in order to escape the waiting-war of the summer of 1940 and to reach a decisive conclusion to it'", he is disparagingly quoting Martin Broszat, who also criticized the irrational trend to view every action made by Hitler, proof or not, as intended to gain 'lebensraum'.

Broszat describes Hitler's concept of 'Lebensraum' as being more symbolic and undefined, rather than concrete. Yet he erroneously equates Hitler's desire for German independence with "aggression". Hitler's aim, as Broszat admits, was freedom to manoeuvre and for Germany to determine her own destiny, a not unreasonable demand by any means. Broszat's example of alleged "aggression" was Hitler's refusal to join a four power pact in March 1939 that would effectively acted to encircle his country. Brozsat also doesn't apply the same criticism to the Poles when they rebuked the minority conventions in 1934 as being "oppressive" because it meant Poland was unable to determine her own foreign policy, nor does he criticise the Soviet Union for not signing the standard military conventions which protect the rights of civilians and POWs. None of this is considered "aggression", it all goes unnoticed:

"Hitler's undeniable consistency in the pursuit of the Lebensraum goal in the East is not to be understood as a rational plan of action toward a concretely imagined limited object, but - similar to anti-Semitism - as a fanatical adherence to a dynamic movement that has been set in motion. In foreign policy, this meant for Hitler: gaining complete freedom of action in power politics, first by abolishing and breaking all international legal and multilateral ties and pacts, and finally by open aggression, territorial annexation, and the establishment of a large-scale power base and hegemony."

Martin Broszat, "Soziale Motivation und Führer-Bindung des Nationalsozialismus", Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, Vol. 18 (1970), No. 4, pp. 392-409, here p. 407. [Hereafter: VfZ, 18/4]

The method Broszat imbues onto Hitler is without foundation. Not playing by the rules of the status quo isn't the same as "aggression"; it may be seen as belligerent, but not aggression. Nor was territorial annexation via "aggression" necessary, as is proven by Hitler's peaceful annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland. Hitler initially attempted the same bloodless victory with Poland until he had no choice. At no point did Hitler ever limit his methods to force, as Broszat clearly wants the reader to think. Force was one tool among many (as Hitler had made very clear in his address of Febaury 10, 1939). The goal is what remained the same, and I agree with Broszat's characterization of Hitler's goal (the large scale power base in which Germany had freedom to live and act).

He goes on:

"The notion of large-scale colonial domination in the East was ultimately only a metaphor and utopian paraphrase of this continuous striving for ever more freedom of action in power politics, a striving that was by its very nature unlimited in time and space. [...] Until 1939/40, the goal of lebensraum reclamation in the East largely had the function of an ideological metaphor, a symbol to justify ever new foreign policy activity to achieve the "final state" of perfect national freedom (as a prerequisite also for the realization of the social utopia of the elitist master race conception). And it is significant that during this period, when Hitler spoke of the living space in the East in public speeches, in diplomatic talks or in the circle of Wehrmacht leaders, he did not focus on the radical master race utopia, but on much more rational and convincing sounding aspects (gaining space for surplus population, improving the domestic raw material and food base, etc.), i.e. apparently addressing concrete interests. Just as the "Jewish question" represented the primary symbol of the incessant struggle within, the "Lebensraum im Osten" was the symbolic justification of continued activity and expansion outward."

Broszat, VfZ, 18/4 (1970), pp. 407, 408.

The point being that Hitler had no conception of what "Lebensraum" actually was, nor how to obtain it. Only that Germany needed it. The way to get it was vague, and he could utilise circumstances in order to achieve it without intending to wage wars. No plan existed.

What Förster has a gripe with is the following:

"Hitler's decision in the fall of 1940 to attack the Soviet Union was not a calculated plan for the realization of the idea of the East [Lebensraum], but rather a forced move to get out of the war of waiting in the summer of 1940 and to reach a conclusion that would decide the war. Only when, for military reasons, the decision to fight the Soviet Union had been made, was the ideological motivation brought in and taken at its word, and then played a similarly self-destructive role for the nature of the occupation policy as the Final Solution of the Jewish Question and objectively meant the end of further movement and expansion."

Broszat, VfZ, 18/4 (1970), p. 408.

Broszat is perfectly correct in his judgement here; and, ironically, Förster's own evidence agrees with him; for when he cites Hitler's table talks of Setpember 1941, he does so well after the beginning of the Barbarossa campaign, meaning the 'evidence' he provides is irrelevant because it lacks a contemporanous link with Hitler's motivation for Barbarossa in the first place. But Förster clearly believes he can beguile the reader into believing that ex-post evidence can somehow be used to prove the view he wants Hitler to have prior to the campaign, at a time when he has no clue whether Hitler still believes it.

What Broszat writes is merely common sense on the basis of the evidence. If the evidence proved Förster's view, then he wouldn't need to make circumstantial and suppositional assertions about how "Hitler’s living-space programme must be seen as an equally substantive basis for his decision to hold on to the military and political initiative by smashing the Soviet Union", because he'd actually be able to prove it by quoting a document or speech in which Hitler makes this clear. But he can't do that because it doesn't exist, whereas evidence for Hitler's tactical motives for Barbarossa exist in abundance and don't contain a shred of proof that 'living-space' was a motivation at all (For a well-documented study on this, see the book by Hartmut Schusterelt, Vabanque: Hitlers Angriff auf die Sowjetunion 1941 als Versuch, durch den Sieg im Osten den Westen zu bezwingen, Herford/Bonn, 1988).

If you can find where in Förster's essay he explicitly says what Scheil claims, I'd be happy to read it. But to be clear, Scheil is actually correct in that Förster cites no evidence from Hitler's 'reign' that he intended to gain 'living-space' in Russia.

---

As an aside, when Scheil correctly writes that 'the phrases of a "phased plan" to conquer the USSR, a "program" to conquer the USSR or even a "world blitzkrieg" are based to a surprising extent on conjecture', a hilarious quotation from Klaus Hildebrand came to mind.

Hildebrand explicitly admits that Hitler's 'plans' for 'world domination' were not stated by him at any point, but merely 'hinted at' (how is it hinted at, who knows?). But his circumstantial 'proof' of this 'plan' is Hitler's opposition to the domination of world Jewry; to Hildebrand this means that Hitler had to have wanted world domination, because there'd be no other way to eliminate the Jewish world influence:

"The declared and precisely described goal is the establishment of a German "world power position", whose development and existence will determine Germany's continued existence or demise. This task is not to be achieved in a rushing Alexander procession tackling all goals simultaneously, but in separate stages. While Hitler speaks in detail about the first, decisive stage of his "programme", talking of the conquest of Russian space and the subsequent work of the German plough, the second stage, the reach overseas, is merely hinted at as a goal. For it will still have to support the continental strategy for decades as a tactical means: In Hitler's historical self-image, colonial renunciation is the basis of the alliance with England that is necessary for politics and warfare. The fact that England's alliance will turn into enmity when Germany reaches overseas is a logical consequence if one is familiar with Hitler's fatally simplified view of history, according to which England regards every nation with world power intentions as an enemy and, moreover, takes into account his statements about the transience of alliances when the interests of the partners change. But for the time being, Hitler recommends renouncing the overseas attribute of a "world power" for a century in order to be able to acquire it at last. The revisionist claim to the pre-1914 borders has finally given way to plans to build up a German "world power position". In his deliberations to build up a "world power position" appropriate for the Reich in Europe and overseas, Hitler takes into account quite precisely the various alliance possibilities that come into question for military conquest. In contrast, his ultimate goal of leading Germany to racially based world domination can only be inferred. Even his words about the borders of living space as lines of chance and his views of struggle and war as eternal values point to a never-ending policy of conquest whose ultimate goal can only be understood on a global scale. Hitler's inevitable claim to world domination, however, becomes clearer when one thinks through his statements about Judaism. The Jewish plan of world domination - so Hitler's conclusion - can only be thwarted by equal means and a corresponding goal, and therefore the Jewish striving to subjugate the earth will be opposed by "the victorious sword of a master race that will take the world into the service of a higher culture". The slogan of the German essence, on which the world will one day be healed, has for the time being found its final consequence as culturally dressed up racial rule! The Reich has been given the task of enclosing "as a state all Germans" and not only of collecting and preserving from the people the most valuable components of primordial racial elements, but also of slowly and surely leading them up to a dominant position in order to be able to fulfil the "mission of the German people on earth". Hitler's racial claim to totality and his global idea of mission are, in contrast to earlier doctrines of salvation, which were also very often spread in a bloody manner, no longer characterised by politically organised relations such as hegemony and subjugation, but by biologically determined principles such as domination and annihilation. In Hitler's consistently thought-out vision, the Aryan minority embodied in the German people will finally stand at the zenith of world history and determine its course! The "programme" and doctrine of the "Führer" reveal his goals and ideas for the coming years and decades and, moreover, point the way for the German people in foreign policy for a future in which history will lead into a racial apotheosis and find its biologically determined end: The domination of the continent will be followed by overseas expansion as a complement and completion of the planned "world power", until finally the racially pure minority of Aryans in the German people will achieve world domination in the victorious confrontation with Judaism."

Klaus Hildebrand, Vom Reich zum Weltreich: Hitler, NSDAP und koloniale Frage 1919-1945 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1969), pp. 81-84.

This is the kind of insanely irrational garbage which is passed off as historiography. It's really an embarassing joke that Hildebrand thinks he can derive foreign political, and territorial aims from mere anti-semitic rhetoric which was common all around the world. Yet this kind of 'logic' runs through all 950 or so pages of Hildebrand's book.

[Hektor]

As Richard Evans, among others, fanasises, the Lebensraum concept would encompass the following:

According to the General Plan for the East, ethnic Germans were to be settled in Germanised towns and agricultural estates all across Eastern Europe, which, Hitler fantasised, would be linked to the Reich by high-speed railways and autobahns. Anywhere between 30 million and 45 million Slavs living in the region were to be left to die, deliberately deprived of food and medical care. The plan envisaged that some 85 per cent of Poles, 64 per cent of Ukrainians and 75 per cent of Belarussians would perish in this way.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n21/richard-j.-evans/who-remembers-the-poles
Greater_Germanic_Reich.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum

The actual document, handwritten notes by Hermann Krumey on a lecture by Justus Beyer on 1-2 February 1943 (printed in: Czeslaw Madajczyk, ed., Vom Generalplan Ost zum Generalsiedlungsplan, Munich 1994, Doc. 74, pp. 261-266), mentions a 30 year period in which he gives percentages of peoples 'to be resettled', not killed. The idea that they'd be killed is literally just made up, and not found in any of the documents.

The historian Christian Ingrao in dealing with this document in his book 'The Promise of the East: Nazi Hopes and Genocide, 1939–43' relies on a lecture given by SS-Standartenführer Hans Ehlich, entitled 'Die Behandlung des fremden Volkstums’, delivered on 11 December 1942, to help prove that the National Socialists planned to kill tens of millions of people. This is a lie, pure and simple. In Ehlich's lecture, the 7 page document of which I have obtained, he literally says the opposite; that mass murder isn't any kind of solution:
.....

Excellent work.

It also demonstrates how the Exterminationist pushers work with documents. They pick 'considerations' from the document, that are rejected, and then insinuate that those would have to be the actual policy. It also demonstrates the falsehood of other extermination claims, since they aren't considered neither.

That there would have been a population policy related changes after ending WW2 successful is another matter. Probably yes, but rather as a consolidation of 'Volksraum', national areas within a 'new order' in Europe. Those exterminationist speculators make use of the fact that those things are counter-factual. And I think this is driven by a hunger for imaginary genocides, since the Holocaust Theory is busy fading, while still assumed into the equation.

[Hieldner]

The actual document, handwritten notes by Hermann Krumey on a lecture by Justus Beyer on 1-2 February 1943 (printed in: Czeslaw Madajczyk, ed., Vom Generalplan Ost zum Generalsiedlungsplan, Munich 1994, Doc. 74, pp. 261-266), mentions a 30 year period in which he gives percentages of peoples 'to be resettled', not killed. The idea that they'd be killed is literally just made up, and not found in any of the documents.

Coincidentally, the alleged plan described in these documents, concerning at least 30 million Slavs, provides a perfect excuse for the Soviet expulsion and murder of 15 million Germans from the Eastern territories.

The historian Christian Ingrao […] relies on a lecture given by SS-Standartenführer Hans Ehlich, entitled 'Die Behandlung des fremden Volkstums’, delivered on 11 December 1942

Does that document even have a signature?

die physische Vernichtung des fremden, im Machtbereiche des Deutschen Reiches unerwünschten Volkstums.

I can imagine that the "historians" would use this to imply that this option represented a viable alternative for the National Socialist authorities for undesirable populations far smaller than 70 million. Anyway, the Generalplan Ost is most commonly quoted in conjunction with the alleged Hunger Plan that would lead to the allegedly envisioned starvation.

But if you read the relevant pages from Förster cited by Scheil, there is no 'explicit acknowledgment' of this fact.

Well, this is embarrassing. I wouldn’t have thought that Scheil would simply invent quotes. This shows once again that you can’t trust a single one of these Holocaust affirmationists and “Second Book” quoters. Many thanks for your thorough checking. The corresponding footnote by Scheil states “p. 16 and p. 18 f.” where Förster, to describe the Lebensraum programme, quotes from Mein Kampf regarding new territories in Russia. I think that this implies for Scheil that there are no further corresponding quotations during Hitler’s reign.

The term Lebensraum was used at different times by various people for different things, so it is difficult to pinpoint it exactly because there is no official document describing it. Hans Frank used it for the Generalgouvernement, which included the designated Jewish reservation, and as far as I remember, in this case he meant increasing the proportion of the German population. Furthermore, Scheil quotes from an article by Shlomo Aronson in which the living space is also described as limited within Europe:

It would be very important to look at the geostrategic nature of this struggle for Eastern Europe. In the traditional sense, the East could mean parts of Poland and the Baltic States, probably also Ukraine. However, it seemed possible to Hitler that domination of only part of it – excluding the Ukraine and the Baltic States – would suffice as long as foreign countries, including the Soviet Union, remained passive, i.e. refrained from directly or indirectly threatening German hegemony there [47]. In this sense, in the second half of the 1930s, Hitler not only tried to blind, lie to or threaten foreign countries while consolidating his power within Germany; rather, in his own way, he remained true to his main desire, which was the appropriation of a living space in Central Europe and limited parts of Eastern Europe, without a two-front war, as well as the elimination of the Jews from this hegemonic area, not by physical extermination but mainly by forced emigration or displacement. If he could have had all this while the West supported him or remained neutral, he would have preferred that; as we know, he tried to neutralise the Soviet Union, and succeeded. But he expected Stalin to avoid threatening, even implicitly, the areas under German rule in Eastern Europe, the Balkans and Northern Europe, which had been incorporated into the German “Lebensraum” since September. As late as the winter of 1940, he was not interested in a campaign against the Soviet Union. He told Mussolini on 8 March that he could live with Stalin, since he had already conquered enough “Lebensraum” for the next 50 years [48].

Footnotes:

[47] Kulka, Vol. I, p. 208 ff. Cf. also Kulka, The Jewish Problem as a Factor in Hitler’s Policy towards the Soviet Union, Abriss B 74-75, Sixth World Congress of Jewish Studies, Jerusalem 1973. Cf. with Stegemann, pp. 95-97, who likewise convincingly demonstrates that Hitler did not intend to attack the Soviet Union after the Western campaign, but rather reacted later to Soviet measures concerning the Baltic States, Finland and Bessarabia. Stegemann quotes a statement by Hitler on 25 June 1940: “The war in the West is over. France is defeated, I will come to an understanding with England in the shortest possible time. Then only the confrontation with the East remains. But this is a task that raises worldwide problems such as relations with Japan and the distribution of power in the Pacific. Perhaps it can be tackled in ten years’ time, perhaps I will have to leave it to my successor. Now we have our hands full for years to come in digesting and consolidating what we have achieved in Europe.”
[48] Hitler's conversation with Mussolini on 8 March 1940, in: Documents on German Foreign Policy, Series D, Vol. 8, No. 663, pp. 871 ff.

Shlomo Aronson. Die dreifache Falle. In: VfZ, 32/1 (1984), pp. 42 f.

[Critical]

As Richard Evans, among others, fanasises, the Lebensraum concept would encompass the following:

According to the General Plan for the East, ethnic Germans were to be settled in Germanised towns and agricultural estates all across Eastern Europe, which, Hitler fantasised, would be linked to the Reich by high-speed railways and autobahns. Anywhere between 30 million and 45 million Slavs living in the region were to be left to die, deliberately deprived of food and medical care. The plan envisaged that some 85 per cent of Poles, 64 per cent of Ukrainians and 75 per cent of Belarussians would perish in this way.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n21/richard-j.-evans/who-remembers-the-poles
Greater_Germanic_Reich.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum

The actual document, handwritten notes by Hermann Krumey on a lecture by Justus Beyer on 1-2 February 1943 (printed in: Czeslaw Madajczyk, ed., Vom Generalplan Ost zum Generalsiedlungsplan, Munich 1994, Doc. 74, pp. 261-266), mentions a 30 year period in which he gives percentages of peoples 'to be resettled', not killed. The idea that they'd be killed is literally just made up, and not found in any of the documents.

The historian Christian Ingrao in dealing with this document in his book 'The Promise of the East: Nazi Hopes and Genocide, 1939–43' relies on a lecture given by SS-Standartenführer Hans Ehlich, entitled 'Die Behandlung des fremden Volkstums’, delivered on 11 December 1942, to help prove that the National Socialists planned to kill tens of millions of people. This is a lie, pure and simple. In Ehlich's lecture, the 7 page document of which I have obtained, he literally says the opposite; that mass murder isn't any kind of solution:

"Die Beziehungen zwischen den Völkern beruhen auf völkisch-rassischen Kräften. Die Beziehungen zwischen dem deutschen Volke und fremdvölkischen Gruppen in seinem Hoheitsbereich sind daher ein völkisches und rassenpolitisches Problem und erst in zweiter Linie ein staatsrechtliches oder machtpolitisches. 4 Möglichkeiten der Auseinandersetzung sind gegeben:

1.) ein Zusammenleben mit rassisch und völkisch gleichen Volksgruppen;
2.) eine Umvolkung fremden Volkstums in das deutsche Volkstum;
3.) eine räumliche Verdrängung fremden Volkstums und
4.) die physische Vernichtung des fremden, im Machtbereiche des Deutschen Reiches unerwünschten Volkstums.

Alle 4 Wege können beschritten werden, sie können auch nebeneinander gegangen werden. Entscheidend aber ist, dass einmal eingeschlagene Wege auch kompromisslos bis zum Ende durchmarschiert werden und dass man nicht gezwungen ist, auf halbem Wege umzukehren. Es ist klar, dass ein solches Ausweichen von dem fremden Volkstum immer als Schwäche ausgelegt werden muss. Ich komme auf diese Frage noch einmal in anderem Zusammenhange zurück.

Bevor also einer der 4 genannten Wege beschritten wird, ist zunächst eine klare Bestandaufnahme des jeweiligen Volkes in rassischer und völkischer Hinsicht erforderlich. Ein Zusammenleben oder aber die Umvolkung eines fremden Volkstums oder einzelner Angehöriger desselben ist nur möglich, wenn es sich hierbei um stammesgleiche Familien und Sippen im Sinne der Anordnung des Reichsführers SS, über die ich vorher schon sprach, handelt. Ist dies nicht der Fall, so kann nur die dritte und vierte Möglichkeit, nämlich eine Verdrängung oder eine physische Vernichtung infrage kommen. Wenn wir uns nun überlegen, dass es sich um 70 Millionen Menschen handelt, über deren Schicksal entschieden werden muss, dann bedarf es nicht vieler Worte darüber, dass weder eine restlose Verdrängung, noch eine totale physische Vernichtung infrage kommen kann. Dies ist allein schon deswegen unmöglich, weil wir niemals die Menschen hätten, um diese 70 Mill. auch nur annähernd zu ersetzen. Es muss hier vielmehr weitgehend die Frage gestellt werden, ob es möglich ist, aus diesen Völkern gewisse Teile auszulesen, die einer Umvolkung unterzogen werden können."

Bundesarchiv, Berlin-Lichterfelde, BArch R 4901/13160
Relevant page from the original document:

In contrast, quoting Jürgen Förster’s article Entscheidung für den Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion

I read this too. Scheil writes:

"If we first look at the known sources, the findings are already impressive. A closer look reveals without further ado that the phrases of a "phased plan" to conquer the USSR, a "program" to conquer the USSR or even a "world blitzkrieg" are based to a surprising extent on conjecture. This has occasionally been explicitly acknowledged in relevant standard works. There is no "source evidence" for Hitler's assumed "step-by-step plans" to achieve world domination, wrote, for example, Andreas Hillgruber in "Hitler's Strategy", which did not prevent him from making these unverifiable step-by-step plans the leitmotif of his habilitation thesis. At no time during his reign did Hitler explicitly speak of wanting to conquer Lebensraum in Russia, either publicly or secretly, Jürgen Förster also conceded in the account of the Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt on the attack on Russia."

Stefan Scheil, Die Eskalation des Zweiten Weltkriegs von 1940 bis zum Unternehmen Barbarossa 1941 (Berlin: Duncker & Humbolt, 2011), pp. 20-21.

But if you read the relevant pages from Förster cited by Scheil, there is no 'explicit acknowledgment' of this fact. What Förster actually does is make assertions without evidence, and what evidence he does provide is merely the harking back to Mein Kampf and the Zweites Buch from the 1920s, rather than provide any contemporary sources which prove the long-standing, and relevant, motivations for Hitler's decision to attack Russia in 1940/41. In one instance he quotes from Hitler's Table Talks for September 17-18, 1941 !

"The natural leadership role of the ‘Germanicnorthern race’ in the international struggle for survival and the unique ‘racial quality’ of the German people justified, in Hitler’s eyes, the conquest of the necessary ‘living-space’ at the expense of other, racially inferior, nations, in particular the Slavs, for the establishment of a Greater Reich of all Germans and the racial reshaping of Europe. ‘The struggle for world hegemony will be decided for Europe by the possession of Russia’s space: this will make Europe the most blockade-proof spot in the world.’"

Jürgen Förster, "Hitlers Entscheidung für den Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion", in: Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt (ed.), Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, Vol. 4: Der Angriff auf die Sowjetunion (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1983), p. 19. Cf. In English: Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, Germany and the Second World War, Vol. IV: The Attack on the Soviet Union (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1998), p. 31. [Hereafter: DRZW and GSWW respectivly]

Förster's evidence and argumentation is not only flimsy, but it's embarassing. For example, in one of the pages Scheil cites, Förster makes the following assertion:

"Before the increasing co-operation of the Anglo-American naval powers and a heavily armed Soviet Union were able to restrict Germany’s external freedom of movement, the conquest of the European regions of the Soviet Union was to enable Germany to gain a strategic and economic position that would convince Britain of the hopelessness of her struggle and make confrontation with the United States seem no great danger. His political interest in successfully coming through the overall war was linked in Hitler’s strategy with his programmatic goals vis-a-vis the Soviet Union. The global political justification for his decision of 31 July to attack the Soviet Union in the spring of 1941 should not lead us to overlook the links between calculation and dogma, between will to power and ideology, in Hitler’s war policy. The turn to the east was neither the final, as it were logical, step on the road towards the creation of an autarkic German colonial empire, nor ‘mere compulsion to act in order to escape the waiting-war of the summer of 1940 and to reach a decisive conclusion to it’. Hitler’s living-space programme must be seen as an equally substantive basis for his decision to hold on to the military and political initiative by smashing the Soviet Union as it was for his directives of March 1941 to conduct Operation Barbarossa as an uncompromising war of annihilation."

Förster, DRZW, 4, p. 16; GSWW, IV, p. 28.

The underlined in the above is when Förster just makes shit up.

When Förster writes that Hitler was following a "'mere compulsion to act in order to escape the waiting-war of the summer of 1940 and to reach a decisive conclusion to it'", he is disparagingly quoting Martin Broszat, who also criticized the irrational trend to view every action made by Hitler, proof or not, as intended to gain 'lebensraum'.

Broszat describes Hitler's concept of 'Lebensraum' as being more symbolic and undefined, rather than concrete. Yet he erroneously equates Hitler's desire for German independence with "aggression". Hitler's aim, as Broszat admits, was freedom to manoeuvre and for Germany to determine her own destiny, a not unreasonable demand by any means. Broszat's example of alleged "aggression" was Hitler's refusal to join a four power pact in March 1939 that would effectively acted to encircle his country. Brozsat also doesn't apply the same criticism to the Poles when they rebuked the minority conventions in 1934 as being "oppressive" because it meant Poland was unable to determine her own foreign policy, nor does he criticise the Soviet Union for not signing the standard military conventions which protect the rights of civilians and POWs. None of this is considered "aggression", it all goes unnoticed:

"Hitler's undeniable consistency in the pursuit of the Lebensraum goal in the East is not to be understood as a rational plan of action toward a concretely imagined limited object, but - similar to anti-Semitism - as a fanatical adherence to a dynamic movement that has been set in motion. In foreign policy, this meant for Hitler: gaining complete freedom of action in power politics, first by abolishing and breaking all international legal and multilateral ties and pacts, and finally by open aggression, territorial annexation, and the establishment of a large-scale power base and hegemony."

Martin Broszat, "Soziale Motivation und Führer-Bindung des Nationalsozialismus", Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, Vol. 18 (1970), No. 4, pp. 392-409, here p. 407. [Hereafter: VfZ, 18/4]

The method Broszat imbues onto Hitler is without foundation. Not playing by the rules of the status quo isn't the same as "aggression"; it may be seen as belligerent, but not aggression. Nor was territorial annexation via "aggression" necessary, as is proven by Hitler's peaceful annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland. Hitler initially attempted the same bloodless victory with Poland until he had no choice. At no point did Hitler ever limit his methods to force, as Broszat clearly wants the reader to think. Force was one tool among many (as Hitler had made very clear in his address of Febaury 10, 1939). The goal is what remained the same, and I agree with Broszat's characterization of Hitler's goal (the large scale power base in which Germany had freedom to live and act).

He goes on:

"The notion of large-scale colonial domination in the East was ultimately only a metaphor and utopian paraphrase of this continuous striving for ever more freedom of action in power politics, a striving that was by its very nature unlimited in time and space. [...] Until 1939/40, the goal of lebensraum reclamation in the East largely had the function of an ideological metaphor, a symbol to justify ever new foreign policy activity to achieve the "final state" of perfect national freedom (as a prerequisite also for the realization of the social utopia of the elitist master race conception). And it is significant that during this period, when Hitler spoke of the living space in the East in public speeches, in diplomatic talks or in the circle of Wehrmacht leaders, he did not focus on the radical master race utopia, but on much more rational and convincing sounding aspects (gaining space for surplus population, improving the domestic raw material and food base, etc.), i.e. apparently addressing concrete interests. Just as the "Jewish question" represented the primary symbol of the incessant struggle within, the "Lebensraum im Osten" was the symbolic justification of continued activity and expansion outward."

Broszat, VfZ, 18/4 (1970), pp. 407, 408.

The point being that Hitler had no conception of what "Lebensraum" actually was, nor how to obtain it. Only that Germany needed it. The way to get it was vague, and he could utilise circumstances in order to achieve it without intending to wage wars. No plan existed.

What Förster has a gripe with is the following:

"Hitler's decision in the fall of 1940 to attack the Soviet Union was not a calculated plan for the realization of the idea of the East [Lebensraum], but rather a forced move to get out of the war of waiting in the summer of 1940 and to reach a conclusion that would decide the war. Only when, for military reasons, the decision to fight the Soviet Union had been made, was the ideological motivation brought in and taken at its word, and then played a similarly self-destructive role for the nature of the occupation policy as the Final Solution of the Jewish Question and objectively meant the end of further movement and expansion."

Broszat, VfZ, 18/4 (1970), p. 408.

Broszat is perfectly correct in his judgement here; and, ironically, Förster's own evidence agrees with him; for when he cites Hitler's table talks of Setpember 1941, he does so well after the beginning of the Barbarossa campaign, meaning the 'evidence' he provides is irrelevant because it lacks a contemporanous link with Hitler's motivation for Barbarossa in the first place. But Förster clearly believes he can beguile the reader into believing that ex-post evidence can somehow be used to prove the view he wants Hitler to have prior to the campaign, at a time when he has no clue whether Hitler still believes it.

What Broszat writes is merely common sense on the basis of the evidence. If the evidence proved Förster's view, then he wouldn't need to make circumstantial and suppositional assertions about how "Hitler’s living-space programme must be seen as an equally substantive basis for his decision to hold on to the military and political initiative by smashing the Soviet Union", because he'd actually be able to prove it by quoting a document or speech in which Hitler makes this clear. But he can't do that because it doesn't exist, whereas evidence for Hitler's tactical motives for Barbarossa exist in abundance and don't contain a shred of proof that 'living-space' was a motivation at all (For a well-documented study on this, see the book by Hartmut Schusterelt, Vabanque: Hitlers Angriff auf die Sowjetunion 1941 als Versuch, durch den Sieg im Osten den Westen zu bezwingen, Herford/Bonn, 1988).

If you can find where in Förster's essay he explicitly says what Scheil claims, I'd be happy to read it. But to be clear, Scheil is actually correct in that Förster cites no evidence from Hitler's 'reign' that he intended to gain 'living-space' in Russia.

---

As an aside, when Scheil correctly writes that 'the phrases of a "phased plan" to conquer the USSR, a "program" to conquer the USSR or even a "world blitzkrieg" are based to a surprising extent on conjecture', a hilarious quotation from Klaus Hildebrand came to mind.

Hildebrand explicitly admits that Hitler's 'plans' for 'world domination' were not stated by him at any point, but merely 'hinted at' (how is it hinted at, who knows?). But his circumstantial 'proof' of this 'plan' is Hitler's opposition to the domination of world Jewry; to Hildebrand this means that Hitler had to have wanted world domination, because there'd be no other way to eliminate the Jewish world influence:

"The declared and precisely described goal is the establishment of a German "world power position", whose development and existence will determine Germany's continued existence or demise. This task is not to be achieved in a rushing Alexander procession tackling all goals simultaneously, but in separate stages. While Hitler speaks in detail about the first, decisive stage of his "programme", talking of the conquest of Russian space and the subsequent work of the German plough, the second stage, the reach overseas, is merely hinted at as a goal. For it will still have to support the continental strategy for decades as a tactical means: In Hitler's historical self-image, colonial renunciation is the basis of the alliance with England that is necessary for politics and warfare. The fact that England's alliance will turn into enmity when Germany reaches overseas is a logical consequence if one is familiar with Hitler's fatally simplified view of history, according to which England regards every nation with world power intentions as an enemy and, moreover, takes into account his statements about the transience of alliances when the interests of the partners change. But for the time being, Hitler recommends renouncing the overseas attribute of a "world power" for a century in order to be able to acquire it at last. The revisionist claim to the pre-1914 borders has finally given way to plans to build up a German "world power position". In his deliberations to build up a "world power position" appropriate for the Reich in Europe and overseas, Hitler takes into account quite precisely the various alliance possibilities that come into question for military conquest. In contrast, his ultimate goal of leading Germany to racially based world domination can only be inferred. Even his words about the borders of living space as lines of chance and his views of struggle and war as eternal values point to a never-ending policy of conquest whose ultimate goal can only be understood on a global scale. Hitler's inevitable claim to world domination, however, becomes clearer when one thinks through his statements about Judaism. The Jewish plan of world domination - so Hitler's conclusion - can only be thwarted by equal means and a corresponding goal, and therefore the Jewish striving to subjugate the earth will be opposed by "the victorious sword of a master race that will take the world into the service of a higher culture". The slogan of the German essence, on which the world will one day be healed, has for the time being found its final consequence as culturally dressed up racial rule! The Reich has been given the task of enclosing "as a state all Germans" and not only of collecting and preserving from the people the most valuable components of primordial racial elements, but also of slowly and surely leading them up to a dominant position in order to be able to fulfil the "mission of the German people on earth". Hitler's racial claim to totality and his global idea of mission are, in contrast to earlier doctrines of salvation, which were also very often spread in a bloody manner, no longer characterised by politically organised relations such as hegemony and subjugation, but by biologically determined principles such as domination and annihilation. In Hitler's consistently thought-out vision, the Aryan minority embodied in the German people will finally stand at the zenith of world history and determine its course! The "programme" and doctrine of the "Führer" reveal his goals and ideas for the coming years and decades and, moreover, point the way for the German people in foreign policy for a future in which history will lead into a racial apotheosis and find its biologically determined end: The domination of the continent will be followed by overseas expansion as a complement and completion of the planned "world power", until finally the racially pure minority of Aryans in the German people will achieve world domination in the victorious confrontation with Judaism."

Klaus Hildebrand, Vom Reich zum Weltreich: Hitler, NSDAP und koloniale Frage 1919-1945 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1969), pp. 81-84.

This is the kind of insanely irrational garbage which is passed off as historiography. It's really an embarassing joke that Hildebrand thinks he can derive foreign political, and territorial aims from mere anti-semitic rhetoric which was common all around the world. Yet this kind of 'logic' runs through all 950 or so pages of Hildebrand's book.

It seems clear that the Generalplan Ost existed, although it had no genocidal intent, it implied deporting 31 million Slavs from some areas to Western Siberia.

However, the key question here is whether the Generalplan Ost was the only plan for Eastern Europe or if it was part of a long cast of plans.

[Hektor]

.....
It seems clear that the Generalplan Ost existed, although it had no genocidal intent, it implied deporting 31 million Slavs from some areas to Western Siberia. However, the key question here is whether the Generalplan Ost was the only plan for Eastern Europe or if it was part of a long cast of plans.

It is reasonable to assume that there was some long term planning during WW2. Planning can start with lots of proposals being made and scenarios and options being investigated. Naturally there will be hard-line approaches to be discussed as well. Now if one is malicious one can cherry pick that kind of papers and proposals from archives and than spin narratives from that.

[hermod]

Generalplan Ost was as much a German governmental plan for postwar Eastern Europe as the Kaufman Plan was an American governmental plan for postwar Central Europe...

Note that the National Socialist authorities of the Third Reich kept evacuating very numerous ethnic Germans of Eastern Europe westwards (Heim ins Reich program) during the years when the German armies were allegedly conquering additional Lebensraum in Eastern Europe for the postwar expansion of the German people's living space (Soviet narrative of Operation Barbarossa).

[Hieldner]

Other threads dealing with the Generalplan Ost: Generalplan Ost in Revisionism, Myths about Generalplan Ost and Lebensraum, Is Generalplan OST real? Or is it an Allied hoax?.

The actual document, handwritten notes by Hermann Krumey on a lecture by Justus Beyer on 1-2 February, 1943 (printed in: Czeslaw Madajczyk, ed., Vom Generalplan Ost zum Generalsiedlungsplan, Munich 1994, Doc. 74, pp. 261-266)

This document is a short summary of the document most commonly cited as “the” Generalplan Ost which is Nuremberg document NG-2325, a 43-page memorandum by Erhard Wetzel, an official in Rosenberg’s Ostministerium, of 27 April, 1942, with respect to a document containing the actual plan from January of the same year by Hans Ehlich of the RSHA which has apparently been “lost.”

Nearly all the wartime documentation on Generalplan Ost was deliberately destroyed shortly before Germany's defeat in May 1945, and the full proposal has never been found, though several documents refer to it or supplement it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost

Both the summary and Wetzels memorandum contain the figures given by Richard Evans, except they say 65 per cent of the “Westukrainer” are to be resettled instead of “64 per cent of Ukrainians.” They also contain typical primitive propaganda phrases and crazy ideas like

Intelligentsia [unreadable] 2 possibilities: 1. repopulation [Umvolkung], 2. exterminate.

“Document no. 74: Handwritten notes by Hermann Krumey, 1–2 February 1943.” Vom Generalplan Ost zum Generalsiedlungsplan, edited by Czeslaw Madajczyk, Munich: K. G. Saur, 1994, p. 262.

In the Eastern Ministry, however, the question of where the racially undesirable Poles should remain is of particular interest. To place more or less 20 million Poles in Western Siberia would undoubtedly mean a constant, compact danger to the Siberian region, a focal point of constant revolt against the German ruling power (p. 62).

It should be obvious that the Polish question cannot be solved by liquidating the Poles in the same way as the Jews. Such a solution of the Polish question would burden the German people into the distant future ... (p. 63).

As the undersigned has also become aware, the Foreign Office is not uninterested in the idea of a possible partial solution of the Polish question in South America, especially Brazil. In my opinion, it would be necessary to achieve that later, after peace has been concluded, the more or less intellectual, but also in part other strata of the Polish people, who for racial and also political reasons cannot be considered for Germanisation, emigrate to South America, possibly also North or Central America (p. 63).

Abel saw only the following possible solutions under these circumstances: Either the extermination of the Russian people or the Germanisation of the Nordic-determined part of the Russian people. These remarks by Abel, which are to be taken very seriously, deserve the greatest attention (p. 69).

Rather, it is a question of the destruction of the strength of the Russian people and thus the destruction of the Russian nation itself, of its splitting up. Only if the problems here are seen consistently from the biological, especially the racial-biological point of view, and if German policy in the Eastern region is set up accordingly, is it possible to counter the danger threatening us from the Russian people (p. 69).

One can, for example, train midwives or feldsherds to be abortionists. The more properly the abortions are performed, the more the population will gain confidence in this (p. 74).

“Document no. 16: Statement and thoughts of Dr. Erhard Wetzel on the General Plan of the Reichsführer SS, 27 April, 1942.” Vom Generalplan Ost zum Generalsiedlungsplan, edited by Czeslaw Madajczyk, Munich: K. G. Saur, 1994, pp. 50–81. See also NG-2325.

and many more, all designed to agree with and confirm the Allied war time propaganda messages. NG-2325 can be viewed here https://catalog.archives.gov/id/284759417?objectPage=199. It is, as always, simple unsigned type written pages on microfilm which anyone could have authored.

The other document often cited as “the” Generalplan Ost is a 99-page memorandum by Konrad Meyer which states it was written in June 1942. Nevertheless it was allegedly sent to Heinrich Himmler already at the end of May 1942. This document was “found” only in 1957. Where, by whom and why only at that time it was “found” remains a mystery, however. Until then, only a 6-page summary (NO-2255) was available.

In May 1942, Himmler received a memorandum from Professor Konrad Meyer-Hetling, headed Generalplan Ost, Rechtliche, wirtschaftliche und räumliche Grundlagen des Ostaufbaues, which we shall print below. Only the six-page summary of this memorandum under the title Kurze Zusammenfassung der Denkschrift Generalplan Ost - rechtliche, wirtschaftliche und räumliche Grundlagen des Ostaufbaues, among the documents of the Nuremberg Trial (No 2225), was known until recently. It was thought, that the memorandum itself had been lost.

The first information of its content was given by Robert L. Koehl in RKFDV: German Resettlement and Population Policy 1939-1945, published by the Harvard University Press in 1957. Further references to it existence were made in 1960 in the West Germany quarterly "Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte". The memorandum and its summary were enclosures in the letter sent by SS-Oberführer Professor Meyer-Hetling on May 28th, 1942 to Himmler, Reichsführer SS and Commissary for Germanization.

Czeslaw Madajczyk. “General Plan East: Hitler’s Master Plan for Expansion.” Polish Western Affairs, vol. III, no. 2, 1962. https://web.archive.org/web/20190613021210/http://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/GPO/gpoarticle.HTM.

An article by Helmut Heiber in 1958 still states

This elaboration itself is not available, as it is missing from the bundle of documents compiled by the Americans as evidence against Meyer
Footnote: The defence therefore made a motion in its closing argument to exclude this document NO-2255 "as not being complete as evidence" (VIII Pläd. Meyer-Hetling [dt.] p. 147)

Helmut Heiber. “Der Generalplan Ost.” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, vol. 6, no. 3, 1958, p. 289.

Only later the IfZ took notice of this document.

Thankfully, we have been informed by a staff member of the American Historical Association's microfilm project (Mrs. E. A. Caroll) that the full text of the main document is in its original form in the "World War II Records Division" in Alexandria/Virginia (Record Group 1048, file number EAP 66-C-12-2/20). The memorandum is available on microfilm under T-84, Roll 73.

Hans Rothfels. “Nachtrag zu der Dokumentation ‘Generalplan Ost’.” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, vol. 8, no. 1, 1960, p. 119.

A facsimile of the document in question can be viewed here https://www.1000dokumente.de/index.html?c=dokument_de&dokument=0138_gpo&l=de. As source the site states “Original, BArch Berlin, R 49/157a.” So, the original document is apparently located in the Bundesarchiv, but for some reason we get to view only a facsimile copy with unsigned type written pages anyone could have authored. It includes a detailed financial plan which Heiber characterises as a naive fallacy.

There are many further documents describing the alleged Generalplan Ost, Czeslaw Madajczyk lists over 100 documents in his respective document collection. From these documents, Karsten Schulz determined six distinctive plans, summarised and evaluated them in his Master’s thesis, either called Generalplan or Gesamtplan Ost. Four of these six alleged plans are missing, their contents can only be reconstructed from relating documents. Schulz’s thesis, in turn, is summarised in this Axis history forum thread https://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=90383 (roughly the same content can be found on the German Wikipedia which doesn’t cite a source). It is discussed in this thread viewtopic.php?f=20&t=7943. Schulz makes clear that

[t]he general plans were post-war plans. At no point in the documents is there any indication that realisation had already begun. Nevertheless, in the secondary literature one repeatedly finds the interpretation that the general planning had already been realised in the early stages with the resettlement actions that had taken place. As in Wasser's book with the main chapter "Die Umvolkung in Südostpolen als erste Realisierungsphase des Generalplans Ost" #58 these resettlements are presented as if they would not have been possible without a GPO and are its consequence. However, no documents can be used as proof (which would then have to read: "In implementation of the GPO ... resettled."). The opposite of this interpretation is correct: resettlements that had already taken place, SS bases that had been planned or built, various decisions that had been taken, etc., etc., had to be taken into account by the planners and incorporated into the plans in order not to completely miss the reality. The GPO were therefore not a prerequisite for the measures that were taken, but rather those represented a part of the planning basis that had to be taken into account, as was expressed quite clearly in the first GPO of January 1940 with regard to the Jewish population (see 3.3.1.). In this regard, Aly/Heim apparently stoop to the thesis that general plans were important prerequisites for the Final Solution: "This included - within the framework of the General Plan East - the extermination of the entire East European Jewry - a total of about 5 million people." #59 Elsewhere: "In this timetable [of the Deutsche Reichsbahn], which is likely to be one of very many similar ones, central connections of the population-political exchange programmes of the General Plan East are reflected. The cycle of human resettlement and extermination closed in Auschwitz with the murder of the 'inferior', but also in Zamosc with the settlement of the ethnic Germans, ..." #60 Proof cannot be provided here either.

It must be noted that there was no final version accepted by Himmler which could have already legitimised realisation. Until the extremely unlikely proof of the contrary through a corresponding source finding, it must therefore be assumed that the GPO never went beyond the planning phase.

The discussion about feasibility or partial implementation continues to ignore the fact that Himmler wanted to "hand over this general plan to the Führer at some point", i.e. that he needed his approval or at least attached importance to it.

At present, the importance of the general plans is rather overestimated.

Karsten Schulz. Nationalsozialistische Nachkriegskonzeptionen für die eroberten Gebiete Osteuropas vom Januar 1940 bis zum Januar 1943. Master's thesis, Institute for Political Science at the Technical University of Berlin, 1996. https://web.archive.org/web/20040722015155/http://lausche.tripod.com/planung.html.

In contrast, Peter Longerich states in this respect:

The Soviet Union was not simply to be defeated; the intention was to eliminate its ruling class, decimate the nations living on its territory by the violent destruction of millions of people, and to exploit the survivors as slave labour for the construction of the new German ‘living-space’ (Lebensraum) (p. 515).

By the end of 1942 Himmler had made considerable progress with his resettlement strategy: according to the report he sent to Hitler dated 20 January 1943, a total of 629,000 ethnic Germans had been resettled. […] To create space for these people 365,000 Poles from the annexed Polish territories had been expelled into the General Government, 17,000 Slovenians had been deported to Serbia, and 37,000 as forced labour to Germany. In addition, 100,000 people from Alsace, Lorraine, and Luxembourg had been deported to unoccupied France, Germany, or to the occupied eastern territories. Himmler’s assumption was that he could also resettle a further 400,000 ethnic Germans, consisting of 143,000 South Tyroleans and 250,000 from the occupied eastern territories (pp. 579–80).

Peter Longerich. Heinrich Himmler. 2nd ed., Oxford University Press, 2012.

So, according to the peddlers of an alleged Polocaust, the greatest resettlement projects in this supposed grand scheme for racial annihilation were the resettlement of around 600,000 Germans from the East to the Warthegau followed by the expulsion of around 300,000 to 370,000 Poles to the Generalgouvernement and the deportation of 100,000 people from disputed French territories, which obviously had nothing at all to do with any “plans for the East.” All of this is peanuts in relation to what Stalin did during and after the war, or, for that matter, any of the Western European population replacers like Mrs. Merkel.

An article by Konrad Meyer from 1941 sheds some light on what the plans for the East were really about. I quote it in full because it contains many of the phrases which orthodox historians would quote out of context as proof of a racial annihilation plan, but all it really says is that the newly acquired territories incorporated into the Reich proper should be Germanised:

Settlement and reconstruction work in the German East

The unique task that has arisen for the German people in our days, above all in the East, has a profound effect on all areas of our lives, and is therefore impossible without the prerequisite of a total mobilisation of all the popular, moral, social and economic forces of the nation as a whole.

As much as it will be necessary to heed the lessons of German Eastern history in our political work on the East, we must also strive in every retrospective to penetrate beyond the external forms to the actual content of the events that have become history. The saying that a country belongs to the first person to bring it morality is refuted above all by the German Ostpolitik of the past centuries. If this proposition were true, then the whole of the East, from the Baltic to the Carpathians, would have to be German today; in reality, however, it was not those areas in this region that were entirely and unequivocally won over to Germanness, into which German morals and German labour were carried, but only those in which German peasant fists led the plough. Even the provinces in which Prussian state power had been established for more than a century were snatched away from German life again at the moment of the Reich's weakness after the awakening of the foreign nationality that had been overlaid there, because in all those earlier years no thought had been given to the fact that a country only really belongs to its own nationality for eternity when it is filled to the last corner with its own nationality.

This fact—corroborated and irrefutable by historical development—is the ironclad and immovable starting point of our work for the future in the new German East. Thus, the German peasant will have to be at the centre of the new German movement in the East, or else we will run the risk from the outset that one day foreign peoples - today subjugated and subservient - will once again destroy the German shaping of the German living space in the East. Let us remember Bismarck’s saying that historical logic is even more precise than the Prussian Chamber of Accounts!

Today, in the age of highly developed industry, the demand to shift the emphasis of the Germanisation policy to a conscious peasant policy can no longer be interpreted as a demand to form a purely agrarian eastern region. The cautionary example of “East Elbia,” which is poor in industry and far removed from markets and culture, must prevent us from making such a spatial and popular policy mistake again. The East Elbian part of Prussia always remained colonial soil with all the weaknesses and advantages inherent in such a space. For this reason it never grew—and still does not grow—into a truly organic unity with the West Elbe region. This danger must be countered from the very first moment in order to solve the tasks that have arisen in the new eastern territories of the Reich. We are all well aware that this re-acquired East will one day be a rich gift to our people; for its soil is inexhaustibly fertile, and the forces waiting to be tapped are unimaginably great. But we know just as well that this area will give us all the more, the more we sacrifice to it in terms of commitment and creative will, in terms of material things as well as in terms of the best German national identity.

We therefore consciously turn away from the half-solutions of earlier times and commit ourselves clearly and unequivocally to a total and national-socialistically unambiguous reorganisation. This will includes a purposeful settlement strategy based on the people, as well as a new and thus revolutionary population, economic, cultural and social policy. In the new territory of the Reich, our National Socialist will must for the first time find complete realisation in the National Socialist deed! The solution of the Eastern questions will mean—more than all other tasks—the decisive mastering of the National Socialist creative power, indeed of the National Socialist idea in general.

National Socialist spatial planning requires a balanced relationship between town and country, between agriculture, industry, trade and commerce. This demand automatically implies the necessity of bringing rural labour into line with the industrial and commercial sectors of the national economy in terms of wage and price policy, and not only by emphasising its importance in purely ideological terms. There can be no doubt that the pathogens of rural exodus must be eliminated in the bud as a prerequisite for a profound and lasting process of Germanisation. On the intellectual side, this means reducing the cultural gap between town and country to a minimum by creating the appropriate preconditions, and on the economic side, paying rural labour as highly as any other work.

The goal of a planned settlement strategy must be to completely Germanise the area down to the smallest detail. Those who are still toying today with the idea of being able to overlay the Polish people as a thin master class of large landowners and thus satisfy the Germanisation, have learned neither from the history of the East nor from the shattering experience of the ethnic German passion of the autumn of 1939. Today we must be aware that the East will only remain truly German for all time when all foreign blood that could somehow endanger the unity of the border German people has been completely removed from the closed German settlement area. Above all, from the very first moment of the Germanisation process, care must be taken to ensure that this unambiguous adjustment of the ethnic situation in the rural sector is carried out as quickly and completely as possible. The new national territory will not only be farmed by German owners and supported by German pensions, but will also have to be cultivated by German fists, even in the remotest corners. It is obvious that these popular preconditions for a real Germanisation would virtually force the implementation of a conscious peasant policy, if it were not clear from the outset that the agricultural policy of National Socialism can only be peasant policy in the best sense of the word.

This requirement of a complete Germanisation forbids any dispersal of the use of people, organisational forces and raw materials. Even from the soberest consideration that the necessary demand for skilled labour and materials in the building industry would not be sufficient to completely Germanise the entire territory of the new Reich, it proves to be absolutely necessary to direct and deploy the available forces in such a way that first of all the most important and most ethnic areas are completely Germanised and made German.

Through this territorial subdivision, the force of the Germanisation process can be increased just as much as the speed of this reconstruction work can be accelerated. However, the areas which are not covered by the full Germanisation will not be less valued or even neglected. Here, the tasks that must be postponed in the priority settlement areas will have to be taken care of first: Land culture and transport development in every respect.

In addition, landscaping, the shaping of this partly barren and monotonous area into a German homeland—with forests and gardens, rows of trees and hedges—will have to be started from the very first day of peace. We know that a lasting echo of the call to the East will only arise in all German tribes if the “ver sacrum” of the nation finds the opportunity in the new German territory to make this space its new homeland. We have already pointed out that the first prerequisite for this must be the truly National Socialist solution of social questions—above all in the creation of a new rural order. In addition, the new National Socialist building philosophy will find its most beautiful and generous realisation in the new Eastern Gaue, in the shaping of the towns into centres of national power, in the rebuilding of the villages into the home of core German peasant families, in the planning and implementation of industrial plants, as well as in the shaping of cultural and community-serving buildings. For example, moral centres will have to be formed for individual groups of villages, which in their spatial and technical possibilities will eliminate the difference between town and country to a minimum.

In the reconstruction of the East, there can be no question at all of bringing in embarrassing solutions, because either one does not believe one has the courage or the means to want the whole thing. Eastern policy and the future—viewed correctly—is nothing more and nothing less than the realisation of the National Socialist idea. Through this, above all, the obligation for the next generation of students is firmly defined. Through the student body's service in the country and its work in the East, the ground has been successfully prepared for the tasks of shaping the new territories and for the educational work on German people. The German youth is the guardian of the Eastern idea and the idea of blood and soil. They will therefore prove themselves worthy of the greatness of the tasks that have arisen. In the coming period, service in the East will be the most beautiful form of German probation.

If we really succeed in finding a total solution in the new German East, then this National Socialist work will one day radiate from the new area to the entire Reich and will prove to us, after centuries of failed Ostpolitik, how fatefully closely the German East is connected with the overall German destiny. The implementation and methods of German Ostpolitik may change according to technical and civilisational circumstances. But the goal must remain the same for all times, to organically and closely connect the new German living space with the old empire, so that the prerequisite for our highest goal is really given: to form the first truly Germanic empire of all Germans and to firmly establish its foundations.

Konrad Meyer. “Siedlungs- und Aufbauarbeit im deutschen Osten.” Die Bewegung, no. 8, 1941, p.7. https://web.archive.org/web/20041017103052/http://gplanost.x-berg.de/wprim.html#KMeyer

This agrees with my above interpretation of the term Lebensraum and, among others, Hitler’s statement to Mussolini on 8 March, 1940, that “he could live with Stalin, since he had already conquered enough Lebensraum for the next 50 years” which I have quoted in my post above from an article by Shlomo Aronson.

It seems clear that the Generalplan Ost existed, although it had no genocidal intent, it implied deporting 31 million Slavs from some areas to Western Siberia.

I think you need to be more “critical.” All there is are easily forged slips of paper from the hands of the Allies who made great efforts in defaming the Germans with this kind of rhetoric already during the war. Some of the documents moreover imply the existence of a Holocaust of the Jews which has been shown to rest on embarrassing assumptions. The allegations contained in the above documents not only contradict public statements but also the actions taken by Third Reich officials.

Generalplan Ost was as much a German governmental plan for postwar Eastern Europe as the Kaufman Plan was an American governmental plan for postwar Central Europe...

There are some striking parallels between the argumentation of Theodore Kaufman and Robert Vansittart, especially the figure used by both of them of 20 per cent of Germans permitted to remain, as Stefan Scheil shows (again Die Eskalation des Zweiten Weltkriegs von 1940 bis zum Unternehmen Barbarossa 1941, pp. 337–354). There is a big difference with respect to the alleged Generalplan Ost: While the Kaufman plan would have probably gone unnoticed if it wouldn’t have been discussed openly in the press during the war (such as in Time magazine or PM Daily) no such thing happened in the case of the alleged Generalplan Ost. It is another alleged top secret SS endeavor that originated really in the Allied propaganda press while no German official ever took notice of it publicly until the Allied government propagandists advertised it in the Nuremberg trials. But the Kaufman and Generalplan documents also have something in common: the insane figures and the equally insane hate filled language used.

[Otium]

Both the summary and Wetzels memorandum contain the figures given by Richard Evans, except they say 65 per cent of the “Westukrainer” are to be resettled instead of “64 per cent of Ukrainians.” They also contain typical primitive propaganda phrases and crazy ideas like

Intelligentsia [unreadable] 2 possibilities: 1. repopulation [Umvolkung], 2. exterminate.

“Document no. 74: Handwritten notes by Hermann Krumey, 1–2 February 1943.” Vom Generalplan Ost zum Generalsiedlungsplan, edited by Czeslaw Madajczyk, Munich: K. G. Saur, 1994, p. 262.

'Exterminating' the intelligenstia is clearly not the same as extermining tens of millions, the distinction would hardly need to be made if that was the plan. In-fact, such an idea is completely absent from the documents Madajczyk presents. Nonetheless, these notes are short and party illegible it seems, and may alter the possibility of correct interpretation.

[...]

and many more, all designed to agree with and confirm the Allied war time propaganda messages. NG-2325 can be viewed here https://catalog.archives.gov/id/284759417?objectPage=199. It is, as always, simple unsigned type written pages on microfilm which anyone could have authored.

In reality they don't. Certainly not in any meaningful sense. I quoted a large swarth of this document here, but will do so again here. What strikes me is that, if anything, the opposite is said:

"c. There are many ways that lead to the destruction of the biological strength of a people. In cultural countries, poor economic conditions often cause serious declines in birth rates. Let us recall the declining birth rates in the Reich before 1933. Sometimes, however, very great prosperity seems to lead to the same result (cf. Sweden, USA, the better-off strata of the Empire). In the primitive population of the Soviet Union, the years of hardship under the Bolshevik regime obviously did not bring about a reduction in the birth rate. At most, industrialization in the last years and the associated urbanization led to some reduction. Nevertheless, Russian birth rates were still far higher than German ones. The goal of a German population policy in the Russian area will have to be to bring the birth rates to a level below the German birth rate. Incidentally, the same should also apply to the extremely high-birth-rate Caucasus region, and to some extent later also to Ukraine. First of all, there is an interest in increasing the number of Ukrainians as a counterweight against the Russians. However, this must not lead to the Ukrainians later taking the place of the Russians. In order to [not] come to an increase of the population in the Eastern territories which is unbearable for us, it is urgently necessary to refrain from all the means in the East which we have used in the Reich to increase the birth rates. We must pursue a deliberately negative population policy in the areas concerned. Through propaganda measures, especially through the press, radio, cinema, handbills, short brochures, educational lectures, and the like, the population must be persuaded again and again how harmful it is to have many children. It must be pointed out once to the costs, which make children, then to what one could have acquired for it. The great dangers to women's health that can result from having children can be pointed out, and so on. Along with this propaganda, a generous propaganda for contraceptives must go into the country. An industry for such means must be specially created. Neither the promotion and distribution of contraceptives nor abortion should be punishable. The establishment of abortion institutes should be encouraged. For example, midwives or nurses can be trained as abortionists. The more properly abortions are performed, the more the population will gain confidence in them. The physician, too, must of course be authorized to perform these acts, without there being any question here of a violation of the medical code of ethics. Voluntary sterilization is also to be propagated. Infant mortality must not be combated. Education of the mother about infant care and childhood diseases must also not take place. Attempts must be made to minimize the training of Russian physicians in these areas. Children's homes and the like must not be supported. In addition to these negative measures in the field of health, divorce should not be made particularly difficult. No special measures should be taken for illegitimate children. Tax breaks for large families, child allowances, and all measures that favor large families must be avoided. If the new agricultural regulations stipulate that the number of family members or able-bodied family members may be taken into account in the division of land where business reasons require it, this is of course justified at the present time, when it is important to make agriculture in the East as intensive as possible. However, whether such provisions should be adhered to later seems doubtful in view of the fact that they encourage child wealth. It is obvious that the systematic application of the above-mentioned means will lead to considerable success in weakening the Russian body politic. At the same time, we are quite capable of intervening at any time in the event of too radical a decline in the birth rate, which would put the very existence of Russianness on the line, by cancelling this or that measure. In any case, we can have no interest in a complete biological annihilation of Russianness as long as we ourselves are not able to fill the space with our people. For otherwise other peoples would occupy this space, which would likewise not be in our interest. Our aim in carrying out these measures is only to weaken Russianness to such an extent that it can no longer overgrow us with the mass of its people. If we have converted the mass of the Russian people to the idea of the one-child or two-child system, we should have achieved the goal we set. How far we thereby weaken the White Race in view of the dangers from Asia is another question. Perhaps a positive population policy in the Siberian area, which is not dangerous for us here, is the right balance. For us Germans, the only thing that matters is to weaken Russianness to such an extent that it is no longer in a position to endanger Germany's claim to leadership in the European area. The paths outlined above bring us closer to this goal. However, it must also be remembered that a concentration of the masses in industrial cities is undoubtedly a more suitable means of limiting population increase than if the bulk of the population were to sit in the flat countryside. For the propaganda and enlightenment mentioned above can be carried out much more easily in cities than in the countryside, especially when one thinks of the vast spaces of the East."

Czeslaw Madajczyk (ed.), Vom Generalplan Ost zum Generalsiedlungsplan (München: K.G. Saur Verlag, 1994), Doc. 16, pp. 73-75.

The population control of 'Russianess' is certainly a harsh measure, but it's not on the scale of what's claimed by orthodox historians.

In-fact Wetzel explicitly states that intervention should take place to prevent the 'too radical a decline in the birth rate' of Russians which would, if allowed to happen, 'put the very existence of Russianness on the line'. This should be avoided not because of any sympathy for 'Russianness' per se - obviously - but nonetheless to avoid a speedy depopulation which would presumably take decades upon decades.

The aim and the method wasn't to kill people, despite how unpleasant the stated proposition is to a modern reader. The goal was, as Wetzel stated, to ensure the Russians have one or two children to 'weaken Russianness to such an extent that it can no longer overgrow us with the mass of its people'. Which is not even aimed at eliminating 'Russianness' entirely, just not letting it get out of hand 'to such an extent' to ensure 'that it is no longer in a position to endanger Germany's claim to leadership in the European area'. I guess in that way it's not too different from the policies enacted in China or gradually in the Western world today where the birthrate has been obliterated below replacement levels. This document is not suitable to support any claims of 'Slav genocide' (i.e. Mass Murder). It's anti-Russian, certainly, but the kinds of views expressed was not uncommon regardless of who it was coming from, whether it be Germans, Russians, Poles etc. You can find pretty much anyone, from any country, saying such things about another group of people and holding the same views.

As to the statement: "It should be obvious that the Polish question cannot be solved by liquidating the Poles in the same way as the Jews." If you read any German dictionary from around this time or prior, 'liquidiert' is defined very generally, and not necessarily used to denote killing. It could be figurative, just like the infamous entry of March 27, 1942 in Goebbels' diary. In this case, I would argue this is very much how the word was being used. Think of the evidence and the chronology. The Jews were to be pushed outside of Europe to places like Madagascar, as Goebbels wrote on March 7, 1942:

I read a detailed report from the SD and police regarding a final solution of the Jewish Question. This involves a tremendous number of new viewpoints. The Jewish Question must be solved within a pan-European frame. There are more than 11 million Jews in Europe. They will have to be concentrated first in the East; perhaps later after the war, an island can be assigned to them, such as Madagascar. In any case, there can be no peace in Europe until the last Jews are totally excluded from the European territory

Elke Fröhlich (ed.), Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, Part 2: Vol. 3 (Munich: K.G. Sauer Verlag, 1994), pp. 431-432. English translation in: Thomas Dalton (ed.), Goebbels on the Jews: The Complete Diary Entries 1923-1945 (Uckfield: Castle Hill Publishers, 2019), p. 147.

Wetzels document is from April 18, 1942, a mere 42 days later; and since the Holocaust narrative is itself supremely questionable, what is more likely, that Wetzel was referring to deportation or killing? Well, it seems to me it's the former because the Poles, according to Wetzel, were not to be moved to a place like South America or Brazil which is similar to the plan mentioned by Goebbels, for the Jews to be deported to a place like Madagascar. So by 'liquidated in the same way as the Jews' Wetzel must, I think, clearly be referring to deportation and not killing.

A facsimile of the document in question can be viewed here https://www.1000dokumente.de/index.html?c=dokument_de&dokument=0138_gpo&l=de. As source the site states “Original, BArch Berlin, R 49/157a.” So, the original document is apparently located in the Bundesarchiv, but for some reason we get to view only a facsimile copy with unsigned type written pages anyone could have authored. It includes a detailed financial plan which Heiber characterises as a naive fallacy.

The facsimile on the website is in-fact the same document as in the Federal Archives, which has been digitized and can be viewed/downloaded by searching the file 'R 49/157a' using the Invenio system (invenio.bundesarchiv.de).

[...] Karsten Schulz determined six distinctive plans, summarised and evaluated them in his Master’s thesis, either called Generalplan or Gesamtplan Ost. Four of these six alleged plans are missing, their contents can only be reconstructed from relating documents

[...]

[...]

The discussion about feasibility or partial implementation continues to ignore the fact that Himmler wanted to "hand over this general plan to the Führer at some point", i.e. that he needed his approval or at least attached importance to it.

At present, the importance of the general plans is rather overestimated.

Karsten Schulz. Nationalsozialistische Nachkriegskonzeptionen für die eroberten Gebiete Osteuropas vom Januar 1940 bis zum Januar 1943. Master's thesis, Institute for Political Science at the Technical University of Berlin, 1996. https://web.archive.org/web/20040722015155/http://lausche.tripod.com/planung.html.

Very interesting indeed!

Of course this is a very logical point to have been made.

All this blathering about unconfirmed, emotional wartime 'planning' for something which was never implemented is completely ahistorical, and actually a falsification of history. We have no idea what would've happened had the Germans won, we can speculate on these documents, but we might also have seen even more moderate plans enacted. That Hitler didn't know of these, which seems likely to me although I do not claim to know for sure (and seems likely based on Schulz's statement above), is an import piece of information because Hitler is assumed to have known everything. And what's more, he's assumed to have been party to planning and constructing everything, when in reality a lot of these debates are conducted by obscure German bureaucrats. Even the fact that these matters were debated is underrepresented in the literature; historians would have everyone think that 'the Nazis' were unanimous in their 'evil' decision making.

And of course these ex-post facto 'plans', ever chaning in scope, do not at all confirm claims of a predetermined plan for an 'Eastern Empire' as I've shown in other threads, particularly in reference to the April/May plan of 1940 which was exceedingly moderate.

So, according to the peddlers of an alleged Polocaust, the greatest resettlement projects in this supposed grand scheme for racial annihilation were the resettlement of around 600,000 Germans from the East to the Warthegau followed by the expulsion of around 300,000 to 370,000 Poles to the Generalgouvernement and the deportation of 100,000 people from disputed French territories, which obviously had nothing at all to do with any “plans for the East.” All of this is peanuts in relation to what Stalin did during and after the war, or, for that matter, any of the Western European population replacers like Mrs. Merkel.

Right, and the other thing about this is the resettlement of Germans in Western Poland (in former Prussian territory, with some amendements in late September and early October 1939 in light of Germany's new boundary with Russia) is one of the things Broszat points out against the expansive 'Lebensraum' concept of Hitler peddled by the programmatist historians, of which Broszat is perhaps, a moderate. He writes, for example:

The fact that the German-Soviet pact and the consequence of a National Socialist policy of eastern expansion, which was for the time being concentrated solely on Poland and "distracted" by it, initially represented a shift in Hitler's pursuit of his long-range foreign policy goal of eastern expansion is, in my view, obscured by the overly retrospective interpretation of an unbroken consistency and continuity in Hitler's foreign policy, as it is, for example, interpreted by Hitler's ideology and policy as being too strongly systematized. In my opinion, the retrospective interpretation of Hitler's world view and politics, which systematizes them too strongly, does not sufficiently elaborate the unbroken consistency and continuity of Hitler's foreign policy, as presented, for example, by Trevor Röper. The facts alone, for example, that Hitler arranged for the resettlement of ethnic Germans from the Soviet-controlled area in 1939/40 and that he planned a gigantic eastern wall along the German-Soviet demarcation line in the fall of 1939, show that Hitler was obviously counting for a long time on the territorial limitation of his own eastern expansion resulting from the pact with Moscow.

Martin Broszat, Nationalsozialistische Polenpolitik 1939-1945 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1961), p. 13, note 3.

And indeed, after the German-Polish war, all sources on planning indicate Hitler was satisfied by this new arrangement, completely abrogating any pre-September 1939 source on Hitler's alleged 'programmatic' foriegn policy objectives. As I wrote in another thread: Goebbels noted definitively in his diary on September 30th (1939), a new fortification line was to be built in order to "separate Germany from Russia once and for all" (An seiner Grenze bauen wir eine neue Befestigungslinie. Die trennt Deutschland endgültig von Rußland). He also remarked on the permanence of this plan to delineate the new German settlement zone in Western Poland (formerly Prussian), west of the new Polish territory of the Generalgouvernement; he stated: "Our settlement is proceeding according to plan and is calculated for the long term" (Unsere Siedlung geht planmäßig vor sich und ist auf lange Sicht berechnet). The fact that he could remark that this was "calculated for the long term" is important information, because it shows that this was not just a short-term plan before a "war for lebensraum," but that this was the end of the lebensraum concept at this point.

---

Very good post Hieldner.

[TLSMS93]

What is surprising is that almost all the powers became what they are thanks to the sword, genocide and exploitation of the native population. But a larger development in Germany has been treated in a special way by historians and politicians. Germany should restrict itself to the free market, with no resources other than the brains of its people, “either export or die” so to speak. What is a fact is that even at the gates of Moscow and Stalingrad Germany refused to annex those territories, was content with the northeast of the General Government, how in the long term the Reichskomissariat would develop, whether full autonomy of its peoples or transformed into colonies there is no way to know because the war was lost, there was a Reichskomissariat in Norway and the Netherlands, so there is no way to talk about future atrocities without clear sources in this regard but historians think they have the right to predict the future and ensure that all would be exterminated or enslaved, sent to the Ural Mountains and that Hitler would create a lake around Moscow.