Is Generalplan OST real? Or is it an Allied hoax?

[clewder]

From the sounds of it, Generalplan OST, Hitler's 'plan' to ethnically cleanse Western Russia, is horrifically inhumane and cruel. However, is it actually real? Please provide sources!

[Lamprecht]

There are threads about this already. Search the forum for "generalplan ost" - for example:

Myths about Generalplan Ost and Lebensraum
viewtopic.php?t=12639

[hermod]

Would a notoriously-well-organized people such as the Germans have used scarce resources during the most titanic war ever fought in order to de-Germanize lands (Heim ins Reich program) they allegedly planned to Germanize after that war (Generalplan Ost fantasy)?

National Socialist poster promoting the Heim ins Reich program during WWII :

https://fr-academic.com/pictures/frwiki ... _Karte.jpg

https://web.archive.org/web/20220507102 ... 32890b.jpg

Heim ins Reich (meaning "back home to the Reich")
(1938-1944)

policy initiative which entailed the displacement and relocation of ethnically German communities (Volksdeutsche ) from Central and Eastern European countries in the Soviet "sphere of influence", whose ancestors had settled there during the Ostsiedlung of earlier centuries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heim_ins_ ... %80%931944

Generalplan Ost
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Nearly all the wartime documentation on Generalplan Ost was deliberately destroyed shortly before Germany's defeat in May 1945,[10][11] and the full proposal has never been found

[Hektor]

People must realize how scenario management works. You sit with a problem.... There are several possible constraints including what is and what you want to achieve. So you sketch several scenarios, lets say 5 of them. The 1 will be the most optimistic one, No.5 a very harsh one. "Generalplan Ost" seems to be such a No.5 one.

[hermod]

People must realize how scenario management works. You sit with a problem.... There are several possible constraints including what is and what you want to achieve. So you sketch several scenarios, lets say 5 of them. The 1 will be the most optimistic one, No.5 a very harsh one. "Generalplan Ost" seems to be such a No.5 one.

Not to mention the fact that various suggestions by some experts and civil servants don't amount to an approval and endorsement by their government. For instance, Operation Northwoods was never officially accepted by the U.S. Government and was even rejected by President JFK.

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

[gl0spana]

People must realize how scenario management works. You sit with a problem.... There are several possible constraints including what is and what you want to achieve. So you sketch several scenarios, lets say 5 of them. The 1 will be the most optimistic one, No.5 a very harsh one. "Generalplan Ost" seems to be such a No.5 one.

Yet the preferred outcome according to Hitler was general colonization, and Himmler (second most powerful figure) was specific


https://ghdi.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cf ... nt_id=1549

By way of introduction the Führer emphasized that he wished first of all to make some basic statements. Various measures were now necessary; this was confirmed, among other events, by an assertion made in an impudent Vichy newspaper that the war against the Soviet Union was Europe's war and that therefore it had to be conducted for Europe as a whole. Apparently the Vichy paper meant to say by these hints that it ought not to be the Germans alone who benefited from this war, but that all European states ought to benefit from it.

It was essential that we should not proclaim our aims before the whole world; also, this was not necessary, but the chief thing was that we ourselves should know what we wanted. In no case should our own way be made more difficult by superfluous declarations. Such declarations were superfluous because we could do everything wherever we had the power, and what was beyond our power we would not be able to do anyway.

What we told the world about the motives for our measures ought to be conditioned, therefore, by tactical reasons. We ought to proceed here in exactly the same way as we did in the cases of Norway, Denmark, Holland and Belgium. In these cases too we said nothing about our aims, and if we were clever we would continue in the same way.

We shall then emphasize again that we were forced to occupy, administer and secure a certain area; it was in the interest of the inhabitants that we should provide order, food, traffic, etc., hence our measures. It should not be recognizable that thereby a final settlement is being initiated! We can nevertheless take all necessary measures—shooting, resettling, etc.—and we shall take them.

But we do not want to make any people into enemies prematurely and unnecessarily. Therefore we shall act as though we wanted to exercise a mandate only. It must be clear to us, however, that we shall never withdraw from these areas.

Accordingly we should act:

1. To do nothing which may obstruct the final settlement, but to prepare for it only in secret;
2. To emphasize that we are liberators....

In principle we have now to face the task of cutting up the giant cake according to our needs, in order to be able: first, to dominate it; second, to administer it; and third, to exploit it.

And Himmler:


From the book GERMAN RULE IN RUSSIA 1941-1945 A Study of Occupation Policies BY ALEXANDER DALLIN:

Some of Rosenberg’s subordinates put their concern into cautious inquiries. Reporting on the Hegewald move, two officials wrote :

This can be interpreted as the beginning of the Germanization of the Ukraine. What shall be done with the Ukrainian population is not clear.(Germanization of racially desirable parts ? Shift of the Ukrainian ethnic area beyond the Volga ? Maintenance of the Ukrainians in their present area with less political freedom ?)3

Likewise, the economic- branches under Goring objected to this‘ child’s play’ : to their way of thinking, such measures were premature and of no help to the war effort.4 Others, such as the Army and the Foreign Office, eyeing the SS aggrandizement efforts with concern, privately dissented but preferred to remain silent. Himmler, on his part, was dissatisfied with the slow progress being made. According to Meyer-Hetling’s masterplan, at the end of the 25-year programme, half the residents of the Marken would be Germans, while about one-fourth of the strong-points’ residents would be Germans. This was not enough for the Reichsführer-SS.Himmler therefore wrote back that he had

evidently been misunderstood. This twenty-year [we] plan must include the Germanization of Estonia and Latvia [in their entirety]. . . . I personally am convinced that it can be done.

When Meyer-Hetling asked for more detailed guidance, Himmler, oblivious to the difficulties, added Lithuania and Belorussia (in addition to Ingria and the Crimea) to his list of ‘ must’s ’. L'appetit rient en mange ant. The Planning Staff returned to its work, and by February 1943 a revised Generalplan was ready.1

3 Firgau and Gallmeier, ‘ Bericht’, March 18, 1943, Document Occ E 4 -13 * ,Y IV O . As early as April 1942 Rosenberg’s ‘ racial expert*, Dr. Wetzel, submitteda careful criticism of the plan’s earliest version, deeming the projected eastward removal of some thirty million Slavs to be unrealistic. (Wetzel, ‘ Stellungnahmeund Gedanken zum Generalplan O st’ , April 27, 1942, Document N G -2 32 5*.)
4 See Documents 1539 -P S *, and 264-PS, T M W C , xxv, 317.
1 [Meyer-Hetling,] Generalplan Ost ; Himmler to Greifelt, June 2, 1942 ;Himmler to Meyer-Hetling, January 12, 1943 I Greifelt to Himmler, February 15,1943 ; all Document N O -2255*

Himmler continued:

In the next twenty years after signing the peace, we, the present generation, and especially we in the SS, must set ourselves the following objectives:
(1) We have as our first fundamental objective, in this territory, to do everything possible to attach the Germanic peoples to ourselves, both externally and internally. We must win the Germanic peoples not only externally but internally so that the 83 million conscious Germans can become 120 million.
(2) In the most important issue for a people, that is to say, in the issue of blood transmission, we must dare to make the decisive breakthrough, to give our own men a sense of morality, so that it becomes ‘natural[selbstverständlich]’ – I mean without discussion, without debate, without problem – that no family will be extinguished, that there will be children there.
(3) The problem: territory and land for men! In the next twenty years, we have to populate and colonize the present German provinces of the East, from East Prussia to Upper Silesia, and the General Government as a whole; we need to Germanize and colonize Belarus, Estonia, Lithuania, Ingermanland and Crimea. In the other territories, along the penetration routes on which lie our roads, railways and aerodromes, protected by our garrisons, there will be founded small towns of 15–20,000 inhabitants and, in a 10 km radius around, German villages so that they can always be integrated into the German life and the urban cultural centre. These colonies are like rows of pearls that we will extend to the Don and the Volga, and hopefully to the Urals; one day, with the passing years, they will create, in the course of a generation, thanks to the actions of our eternally young successors, new strata in Germanic blood.

This Germanic East stretching as far as the Urals must – and this is what, as SS, we are working on – be the nursery of German blood. It must be this in our thoughts, in our lives, in our education, following the example of our comrades fighting for it and suffering a premature death, so that in 400–500years, if the destiny of Europe leaves us this time until the moment for intercontinental confrontation comes, there will no longer be 120 million but 600 million Germans there.

AGKBZH, NTN, vol. 253, fos. 93–139; reproduced in Madajczyk, VomGeneralplan Ost, pp. 172 and 173.

[Hektor]

People must realize how scenario management works. You sit with a problem.... There are several possible constraints including what is and what you want to achieve. So you sketch several scenarios, lets say 5 of them. The 1 will be the most optimistic one, No.5 a very harsh one. "Generalplan Ost" seems to be such a No.5 one.

Not to mention the fact that various suggestions by some experts and civil servants don't amount to an approval and endorsement by their government. For instance, Operation Northwoods was never officially accepted by the U.S. Government and was even rejected by President JFK.

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

Indeed, one needs to think of it as "brainstorming" - people uttering ideas and visualizing on how the future would look like and what could be done. To collect snippets thereof and then puzzle a "Master Plan" from it declaring it definite is intellectually dishonest and a conspiracy theory in the worst sense.

Personally I am convinced that a victorious Axis would do some border adjustments and resettlements after the War. With the tendency of shifting people more to the East, if that would be feasible. There wouldn't be much need of compulsion though, if those resettled were reimbursed with opportunities to improve their lives, this won't have been necessary. But the more malicious historiographer craft the thing in a way trying to paint it as dark as possible following a paradigm of demonization of Hitler, NS, the Axis and the Germans. And this isn't just some harmless bending of history done there. The Hitler Myth created that way is a diablography to justify wars, violence, repression of dissidents and all kinds of mischief. One just needs to look at the Ukraine conflict:
- Putin justified is as "denazification" : https://web.archive.org/web/20220224191 ... news/67843
- His opponents call him "literally Hitler" : Not as a historic comparison (There are of course some analogies), but as to mobilize people against him and Russia, which makes war easier justifiable and executable in the end.

[Goethe]

Fact:
gl0spana's problem is that there are no authentic German documents to back up his fake English "quotes".
Otherwise he'd show them.

[Otium]

If I were fighting a deadly war with a power like that of the Soviet Union I would want to have a little something for my trouble, territory in this case colonized by the Germans is to be expected and isn't unreasonable. Such is the nature of these developments which have occurred all throughout history. The fact of the matter is that it was a gradual development in which settlements were planned only well after the war began, not a pre-determined plan that existed in any capacity beforehand, or even really into 1940 while the prospect of peace was desired.

Also worth noting is that, while the Germans invaded "Soviet territory" this was never territory which had existed as largely independent in any meaningful sense. The Germans weren't obligated to grant anyone independence if it wasn't in their interest to do so. It is a matter of perspective. There's no reason to apply loftier standards to the Germans than to the Russians.

In view of the dreadful suffering inflicted on the various national groups constituting the Soviet state and, in the case of Ukraine, the genocide carried out less than a decade earlier, Stalin’s claims that the Germans sought, among other things, “the destruction of the national culture and national statehood of Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Uzbeks, Tartars, Moldavians, Georgians, Armenians, Azerbaijanis and the other free peoples of the Soviet Union”—the same antinational policies pursued by the Soviet regime since 1918—must have induced a state of suppressed rage and disgust among some of these national groups. Stalin’s volte-face, no different in principle from Hitler’s tearing up of the Non-Aggression Pact, exemplified the essential and open hypocrisy of raw and unfettered power and the lawlessness on which the Soviet regime was founded and acted. Land, assets, installations, and, above all, people do not suddenly become “Soviet” merely because a totalitarian regime in Moscow invades and annexes territory. For their part, the Germans were simply the latest set of occupiers. For these reasons, Hartmann’s view that the Soviet side enjoyed some allegedly higher moral right to engage in a scorched-earth policy is erroneous and objectionable.

Frank Ellis, Barbarossa 1941: Reframing Hitler's Invasion of Stalin's Soviet Empire (University Press of Kansas, 2015), pp. 301-302.

Ellis makes a great point, which goes further in its implications to the extent that the German invasion of the USSR and the decision to occupy that territory is in itself not necessarily morally contemptable. This is because the historical value judgement which is routinely emphasised is that Hitler committed the crime of invading a sovereign state, when in reality he invaded another territory which had no moral justifications for its borders in the first place. (Even the United States refused for years to recognize the Soviet "state" as legitimate) Thus the political administration of the criminal Soviet system was itself unjustifiable and thus under no moral compulsion to be viewed with sympathy from the outside. Nor should there be any desire for the preservation of that political structure except by those already sympathetic to that system of government. In which case the difference of opinion isn't moral, but ideological.

This is to say that the "Soviet Union" cannot be viewed in traditional state terms with borders and sovereignty. Ironically this is very much in line with Communist thinking, in which states do not exist nor does private property. So one could even say that applying standards of state and sovereignty which the Communists don't ideologically agree with anyway makes them unworthy of being protected by those principles. And anyway, the Soviets aren't known for their respect of borders, so why should anyone respect theirs? (one could argue the same thing about all colonial powers too of course) If one should disagree, and believe that "Land, assets, installations, and, above all, people" somehow do become "Soviet" when annexed by a totalitarian state, then there's no reason to oppose the Nationalsocialists from doing the same and turning these assets "Nazi".

So Hitler eventually decided to colonise the territory of the USSR, big whoop.

[Hektor]

Fact:
gl0spana's problem is that there are no authentic German documents to back up his fake English "quotes".
Otherwise he'd show them.

Indeed, when the veracity of claims is being doubt, you can not refute reasonable doubts simply by repeating those claims and put some snippets on the table. To judge what a previous policy has been, it ain't enough to have some statements, snippets and use innuendo on them. You need to look at the affair in a holistic manner, meaning you need to have all the relevant documents for the matter in question, work through them and then form an opinion on those. Otherwise you could read into something, anything and that ultimately does tell you nothing. It can of course be good for propaganda and crafting of desired narratives. But I won't call it valid historiography, which by necessity would always have been revised.

[gl0spana]

"Such is the nature of these developments which have occurred all throughout history."

Perhaps you could argue that what the Germans planned to do was fully justified under a certain code of ethics. The Mongols are not viewed so villainously these days.

But make no bones about it, a mass resettlement of tens of millions of people is historically unprecedented. The Germans planned to resettle at least thirty million (the lowest number I could find in.a German document), which according to them was not a complete estimate.  

As early as November 1941, I was informed that the RSHA was working ona General Plan for the East. The competent expert for this work, Standartenführer Ehlich, mentioned the figure, contained in the plan, of 31million aliens to be expelled. In this business, of all the agencies of the SS  Reichsführer, the RSHA is the one that has the strongest position today. Here, the RSHA, according to the theories defended by the agencies of theRFSS (Reichsführer SS), also acts as a delegate of the RKFdV. […]

As regards colonization territories, it appears that the territories of Ingermanland and the Dnieper, Taurida and Crimea loop have been removed from the plan. This is obviously due to the fact that, in the meantime, new colonization projects have emerged which we will have to discuss in conclusion. Moreover, it seems that today, the eastern frontier of colonization is being described as a much more offset line to the East, from Lake Ladoga to the hills of Valdai and Brjansk. I cannot conclude that this is a change of plan on the part of the SS. In any case, this will probably result in an increase in the number of people involved in expulsions.

Erhard Wetzel, ‘Stellungnahme und Gedanken Erhard Wetzels’, NG 2325,published in Madajczyk (ed.), Vom Generalplan Ost zumGeneralsiedlungsplan (Munich: Saur Verlag, Einzelveröffentlichungen derHistorischen Kommission zu Berlin), vol. 80, 1994, reproduced inMadajczyk, Vom Generalplan Ost, pp. 50–81 (p. 66)  

 

Wetzel's document, which quotes a 31 million figure found in another plan, puts forward another figure of 50 million to be deported to Siberia. Included here is 80-85% of the Polish population, some 30 million people, so this at least is completely unrelated to USSR and Barbarossa, other than it provided the Nazis with a convenient place to put them. 

[Otium]

But make no bones about it, a mass resettlement of tens of millions of people is historically unprecedented. The Germans planned to resettle at least thirty million (the lowest number I could find in.a German document), which according to them was not a complete estimate.

The number is perhaps unprecedented, but not the principle - as the mass deportations of millions of Germans at the end of the war clearly shows. Not to mention the policies of Stalinism which saw millions of people, ethnic groups and all, removed and deported.

For any modern person who is otherwise at pains to stress their loathing of ethnonationalism to make bones (as you said) out of the displacement of peoples in WW2 when they approve of the mass replacement migration of something like a billion European peoples worldwide in perhaps one hundred years or so is hypocritical to say the least; warranting real scepticism as to their motives and whether anyone should take them seriously. Which to me is clear, they shouldn't. If these connections to land and folk are simply "old-fashioned", "racist" and "trite", then no bones can truly be picked with the Germans using principles those critical of them would otherwise loathe in any other context.

Wetzel's document, which quotes a 31 million figure found in another plan, puts forward another figure of 50 million to be deported to Siberia. Included here is 80-85% of the Polish population, some 30 million people, so this at least is completely unrelated to USSR and Barbarossa, other than it provided the Nazis with a convenient place to put them.

There are many of these documents which put forth a lot of things, many of them are the people involved arguing with each other over just these things. The fact is there was no consensus about which segments of the population could Germanized and which couldn't, and then who would need to be resettled. Much of the work, as they admit, hadn't even been done to make any such determinations of which segments were valuable enough to keep around, thus the large estimates were just estimates, and not definitive let alone resolute. The idea for deportations came much later as a result of Barbarossa, so despite what you claim about this being "unrelated", this couldn't be further from the truth.

In the documents too there are arguments over the use of force, what should be voluntary etc. It's not as simple as "deport 31 million people" and that's it. Even though you want to stress the historically unprecedented task of rearranging such a large body of people, perhaps it will suffice to quote from a source you just used in this thread:

In addition to Germans temporarily stationed in the East and residing at central ‘ strong-points’, permanent settlers were to be moved in to form a network of Marken, or frontier marches. During the period of settlement, these marches were to be separated from the civil administration and placed as enclaves under the jurisdiction of the SS. Ambitious though it was, the Generalplan was less drastic than some of Hitler’s and Himmler’s pronouncements would have led one to expect. Since during the first phase the bulk of settlers would migrate to areas directly annexed by the Reich, the ‘ settlement marches ’ would have a total of only 3.5 million Germans at the end of the first 25 years.

Those natives who ‘ could not be considered [eligible] for Germanization ’ were to be moved eastwards — if need be, by force. Some, it was ‘ realistically’ assumed, would have to be left behind, to perform menial tasks for the new German masters.

Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia 1941-1945: A Study of Occupation Policies (Colorado: Westview Press, second ed., 1981), p. 282.

The resettlement of Germans, and thus the native populations of the newly acquired territories was envisioned to take decades.

Similarly from another book:

The Generalplan Ost (1942) of the SS Chief Heinrich Himmler envisaged the deportation of almost 50 per cent of Estonians, all Latgalians, over 50 per cent of other Latvians and 85 per cent of Lithuanians. The remaining fraction was evaluated racially as Nordic (and thus worth Germanization) by a 1942 Anthropological Commission field study. Due to the limited number of Germans available, immigration was expected to be rather slow: 520,000 within 20-25 years after the end of the war.

The immediate goal of Nazi Germany, however, was to win the the war. Major deportation, immigration and denationalization were to start only after military victory.

Romuald J. Misiunas & Rein Taagepera, The Baltic States Years of Dependence 1940-1990 (University of California Press, 1993), p. 49.

And again, all of this was a development which took place after Barbarossa, whereas before it German expansion was envisaged to be extremely limited:

The Führer gives me an update on the situation: Warsaw invasion on Monday. In a very grandiose way. Then seven days of flag-raising and hours of bell-ringing every day. This will end the war in Poland.

In Moscow precise demarcation of German and Russian territories and interests. Peace offer to England and France. The East is settled only by Moscow and Berlin. If peace is refused, we will go together. We now gain a powerful territory. In return, Moscow's influence in the Baltic will be strengthened. Estonia must already agree to tolerate Moscow's troops on its territory and to allow the construction of airports and shipping ports. Russia must have ice-free ports. We could also expand in the Baltic, but the Führer does not want to attack another state, and for the rest we have enough to digest for the time being.

Goebbels Diary, 30 September, 1939; Elke Fröhlich (ed.), Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, Part I: Volume 7 (München: K.G. Saur Verlag, 1998), p. 130.

In line with this two days later Hitler told Ciano that it would take "60 to 100 years" to digest just that which Germany had gained from "Poland":

In principle, he [Hitler] wished to burden Germany as little as possible with the Polish residual state. On his visits to the front he had found Poland in so run-down and rotten a condition that he wanted to have as little to do with it as possible. He believed that the Western nations, if they could see it with their own eyes, would not fight another day for this totally bankrupt country. It would take from 60 to 100 years to colonize the areas that were to be annexed to Germany.

DGFP, D, VIII, Doc. 176, p. 188.

In both this conversation with Ciano, and in a private letter to Mussolini a little more than five months later in mid-march 1940, Hitler was saying the exact same things about Poland, and not least that he was as yet hoping to maintain a reasonable relationship with Russia.

Earlier than both these documents however, Hitler on September 26 in line with his consistent personality tells Dahlerus and Goring the same thing:

If the British desired peace in Europe they should make it clearly understood. Germany would in any case be prepared for it, for she needed peace in order to cultivate the newly acquired areas in the East that had formerly belonged to the German cultural sphere. This would require at least 50 years. The Fuhrer intended to reincorporate into the Reich the former German and former Austrian sections of Poland, as well as strategically important territories. Besides this there was to be a ‘‘reshuffling” not only by reuniting once more inside the Reich by large-scale resettlement the scattered Germany minority groups, but also by effecting an adjustment between the thickly populated west, with a population density of 140 persons per square kilometer—a condition that could not last— and the thinly populated east with a density of only 35 people per square kilometer. To carry out these great plans would required 50 to 100 years, particularly if one considered the tremendous backwardness and demoralization of Poland, in comparison with which Czechia looked like a veritable paradise.

DGFP, D, VIII, Doc. 138, pp. 141-142.

And indeed this reshuffling of German minority groups into the newly acquired territory in Poland (actually former Prussian 'Western Poland' and some strategic parts of the former Russian empire) was exactly what was being done before Barbarossa opened up new opportunities. As you might recall it was around this time that Hitler told Rosenberg that the "large task that awaited the German Volk" was the "creating of a German breadbasket, a community of sturdy farmers, and resettling of good Germans from all over the world" within the limited horizons of what Germany had gained from former Prussian territory that had belonged to Germany before being given to Poland, which the latter was colonising and ethnically cleansing. I say that without any moral implications. I actually don't begrudge the Poles for this, as it was in their interests and thus logical from their perspective, just as it was logical from the German perspective to do the same in kind. All this is to say that whatever the developments were in late 1941 and 1942 as the "plan" to relocate large numbers of people was discussed, it was not always the plan, a fact mostly overlooked.

We can see Hitler's comments to Rosenberg (and others) find some formation in the early plan devised by the Main Planning Department of the Reichsführer SS (Planungshauptabteilung des Reichsführer-SS) in April-May of 1940 devised as the "Planning Principles for the Reconstruction of the Eastern Territories" (Planungsgrundlagen für den Aufbau der Ostgebiete). This limited vision of German colonisation was initially for the border areas of the then occupied territory of Poland (no mention is made of anywhere beyond this until after Barbarossa), primarily West Prussia/Posen/Upper Silesia. The goal was outlined to restore Germany's 1914 frontier which had been lost:

The new eastern territory annexed to the Reich has a total area of 87,000 sq. km. The population was about 9 1/2 million. The share of the Polish population in this area in 1939 was on average 82%, the German share about 11%. . .

. . . In the former Prussian provinces of Poznan and West Prussia, the German population at the outbreak of the World War was about 50%, i.e. it balanced out proportionally with the Polish population.

The first goal, achievable in the next few years, must be to restore at least this 1914 status. Once this goal is achieved, further Germanization will proceed in a steadily increasing manner through the participation of the biological and economic forces arising from the settlers and the new territory itself. The restoration of the status of 1914 would mean that the number of 1.1 million Germans now living in the area would be increased by 3.4 million, to 4.5 million, and that 3.4 million Poles would be deported step by step. In the former provinces of Posen and West Prussia, it is mainly those Poles who have settled here from the eastern regions after 1918 who have to leave the country.

Czeslaw Madajczyk (ed.), Vom Generalplan Ost zum Generalsiedlungsplan (München: K.G. Saur Verlag, 1994), Doc. 1, p. 3.

The 'new territories' referenced were those strategically annexed in October 1939 (Ciechanow/Kattowitz/Lodz/Suwalki triangle/Kutno into the expanded Reichsgau Wartheland), on the basis of Hitler's Directive No. 5 of late September upon the signing on the 28th, of the new boundaries with Russia. These moves were improvised, and thus not premeditated before the war. Thus it's clear before quoting anything else that it would take years to restore the 1914 borders, and then the goal was to Germanize that territory sufficiently, while moving the extant Polish remnant from Versailles out of that area, presumably at this point, into their own territory, as Hitler told Mussolini on March 8, 1940:

In regard to Poland, Germany has only one outstanding interest, and that is absolute security for the eastern boundary of the Reich. At least during the war we cannot avoid also taking on the ballast of administering the General Government. [...] I need not assure you, Duce, that once this war is over we ourselves have only the greatest interest in ridding ourselves of this ballast of administration and responsibility—provided, however, that every further threat to the eastern boundary of the Reich is precluded.

DGFP, D, VIII, Doc. 663, pp. 877, 878-879.

In section C. of the Himmler document it's outlined what the zone of colonization will be, and it is quite modest, herein lies (perhaps) the beginning of the settlement belt previously referred to by Hitler to Rosenberg:

The following strategic aspects are decisive for the delimitation of areas to be settled with priority:

1. first, along the border of the Generalgouvernement, a rampart of German nationality in the form of a deeply staggered belt of Germanic farms must be erected. This border wall will definitively separate the Poles, who for the time being will remain in the territory of the Reich, from the hinterland.

2) The hinterland of the larger cities must be more densely populated with German peasants.

3) A wide German folk bridge must be built as an east-west axis connecting the border wall with the old Reich; in addition, another narrower bridge must be built through the former corridor across the districts of Zempelburg, Bromberg, Kulm and Graudenz. These folk bridges will then separate the remnants of the intervening Polish folk, creating Polish islands.

Madajczyk, op. cit., pp. 5-6.

Even as late as August 1940 Hitler was still undecided about what to do with the rest of Poland:

In order to create the conditions for an eastward march, the National Defense Department was to draw up an order from the Supreme Command of the Wehrmacht under the name "Aufbau Ost," for which General Jodl gave precise instructions at the meeting on July 29. A first draft was presented by General Warlimont) to Field Marshal Keitel on August 2. In the beginning it said, in order to conceal the actual purpose of the order [to prepare for the invasion of Russia]: The Fuehrer had decided to refrain from the formation of an independent remnant Poland and to incorporate the occupied eastern territories into the Greater German Reich. This would also make it necessary for the Wehrmacht to consolidate and expand the newly won eastern region in every respect. In addition, during the war, the growing air threat in the West would require the military exploitation of the secured eastern territories to a greater extent. . .

. . . The Quartermaster Group of the National Defense Department pointed out on August 7 that, according to the available news, there was still no clarity among the civilian authorities that the Generalgouvernement was to be incorporated into the Greater German Area.

Since Hitler, contrary to the assertion in the introduction to the decree, which served only as camouflage, was not at all clear at that time about what he was to do with the rest of Poland, he ordered, in response to this objection, that only the air war in the West should be cited as a justification for the measures planned in the East. In this modified form the - order was signed by the Chief of the Supreme Command of the Wehrmacht on August 9 and issued to the Wehrmacht units, the supreme Reich authorities, and the Governor General.

Helmuth Greiner, Die Oberste Wehrmachtführung, 1939-1943 (Wiesbaden: Limes Verlag, 1951), pp. 293, 294. Similarly before the war Nikolaus von Vormann, Hitler's Army Liaison Officer noted the same thing, see: Gerd Schultze-Rhonhof, 1939 Der Krieg, der viele Väter hatte: Der lange Anlauf zum Zweiten Weltkrieg (Lau-Verlag, 2018), p. 358.

Indeed the relevant diary entry (August 2, 1940) from the OKW-Diary (to which Greiner was the official diarist and thus well in the know of what was going on) quotes this camouflage order which proves that at late as August no decision had been made as to the extent of territory to be incorporated into the Reich.

The point of all this is to emphasise that these colonization efforts take a lot of time and planning which was considered by those who did the planning. In these cases there were no prior plans, and clearly no prior intentions which is important only because of the assumption made by many that anything being "planned" by "the Nazis" must've been apart of some master conspiracy from the start, despite the lack of any contemporaneous documentation to prove it.

[Hektor]

"Such is the nature of these developments which have occurred all throughout history."

Perhaps you could argue that what the Germans planned to do was fully justified under a certain code of ethics. The Mongols are not viewed so villainously these days.
....

Aren't you simply presuming something there... That wasn't proven in any meaningful way?

As indicated, there is a tendency among historiographers to paint anything the Germans (esp. under National Socialism and there especially during WW2) in the darkest light possible. This gains them big support by governments, NGO's, academia, media... Contrary opinions, regardless how reasonable and well founded (as opposed to well funded) are on the other hand met with hostile suspicion and disparaged. Wouldn't you agree that such a climate is conducive to distortions?

The evidence for the present narrative on Axis Policies in the East are rather thin. They start however looking "overwhelming" to the audience, when they are only fed stories of what fits the narrative and when they are completely ignorant of anything else that went off in the 1930s/40s in the geographic area in question.

[gl0spana]

Otium, I’m not following your logic here. You’re saying that since there were no concrete plans for mass deportations prior to Barbarossa (when peace with Britain was still on the table, something total ‘digestion’ of Poland would have compromised) that means their post invasion plans should not be taken seriously?

If you’re saying RSHA, the department that according to Wetzel was in the “strongest position” to handle colonization planning, was not entirely committed to this position, you should be able to find textual evidence of this. Instead it seems as time went on, even with the failure of Barbarossa, the plans got more ambitious.

“A few weeks earlier, on 11 December 1942, Hans Ehlich, the head of the RSHA Group III B and principal author of the Generalsiedlungsplan, had delivered a lecture to the leaders of the NSDStB on the ‘treatment of foreign peoples’.54 He envisaged four methods for dealing with the 70 (68.6 in fact) million people who, for him, peopled the territories that needed to be Germanized: ‘life in community with racially related peoples, dissimilation within the German nationhood, spatial repression and physical extermination […] of undesirables’. According to Ehlich, ‘life in common’ concerned only the mainly Nordic peoples, who did not exist in the East. The dissimilation was in his view conditioned by a selection within the peoples, a selection that would make it possible to tap northern blood and to expel those who were considered unfit. Less than a fortnight later, Ehlich, Ohlendorf, the head of the SD, and Justus Beyer produced, at the conference of the Referenten III B of local offices of the SD,55 percentages of expulsions broken down by peoples.56

By combining the numbers given by Ehlich in his lecture with the percentages of ‘persons to be displaced’ given by Beyer, we can finally gain a clear idea of the fate of these aliens. Ehlich mentions 22.5 million Poles, in Beyer’s view 85 per cent (19.125 million) of them expellable, 7 million Czechs with 50 per cent (3.5 million) expellable, 4.1 million Baltics also with 50 per cent (2.05 million) expellable, 5 million White Russians with 75 per cent (3.75 million) expellable, and 30 million Ukrainians – the rate only concerns the Ukrainians of Galicia, more ‘naturalised’ than the others in the eyes of racial experts, so that the figure represents a minimum – with 65 per cent (19.5 million) expellable. This results in a total of 47,925,000 undesirable people.

Excerpt From: Christian Ingrao;. “The Promise of the East.” Apple Books.

Beyer’s numbers are sourced here with document scans:

http://rcin.org.pl/Content/49915/WA303_ ... ajczyk.pdf

About 100 related documents can be found found in this book:
https://ereader.perlego.com/1/book/1154596/301. You can sign up for a free account but it is German text only and a pain to machine translate

Perhaps your German associate can look into this and find textual evidence supporting your position. I don’t believe any pushback came from within RSHA, even to method #4 “physical extermination”, and no counter proposals were made. A simple, “I don’t think these expulsions should be carried out because they would lead to massive uprisings against us’ would suffice.

A final point here is that even as the war was starting to turn and German logistics becoming overwhelmed, mass resettlements were undertaken in areas nowhere near West Prussia or the 1914 borders, and areas that were completely and historically Non German. So 'intentionality’ is supported by actual policies put into effect by RSHA, as well as written plans

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cl ... zi_Germany

[Otium]

Otium, I’m not following your logic here. You’re saying that since there were no concrete plans for mass deportations prior to Barbarossa (when peace with Britain was still on the table, something total ‘digestion’ of Poland would have compromised) that means their post invasion plans should not be taken seriously?

Nope, not what I said. I think they are serious. But I do think they're not concrete and we can still only speculate on what would've happened in actuality, over what period of time (20-25 years after the end of the war), and how many people would've been Germanized versus deported, as the questions of Germanization were not simple ones (i.e. the extent). I'm accepting that there's volatility in the numbers, but by how much at the end of the day we simply cannot know and will never know. Plans are indicators of intentions that are developing, but not set in stone hence the constant development of newer more ambitious plans (in times of increased tension and hostility) in contrast to more moderate plans in times where alternative prospects exist. By this I don't mean to imply they would've decided to do nothing, but to get hung-up over particular numbers when we simply don't know what the result would've been (whether more or less "unprecedented" in scope) is hard to say. These documents have a context to be considered, in that they were devised during a high-tension war, not peacetime, so the more outlandish propositions must be viewed with that in mind which many are adverse to doing.

The rest of your comment indicates that you haven't understood what I've said previously. You seem to think I was saying that after Barbarossa the Germans were sticking to their modest plans which were envisioned prior, when if you read what I wrote carefully I clearly stated that Barbarossa "opened up new opportunities" past the point of no-return, where peace as was initially desired and even a prime motivator for Barbarossa in the first place had come to pass as a solution. And in my post prior I didn't disagree that they had decided to incorporate former Soviet territory into the Reich as the price of victory. This was very much acknowledged by me.

Anyone alleging "extermination" and then conflating that with deportations is automatically to be viewed with scepticism. This is the implication brought up around 'Generalplan Ost' and it has no basis in fact. The "Generalplan" was a resettlement plan (of both Germans and unassimilable aliens), a Germanisation plan, a colonisation plan but not an extermination plan nor a predetermined one.

So 'intentionality’ is supported by actual policies put into effect by RSHA, as well as written plans

"Intentionality" insofar as it was a result of functionality determined by the new situations which arose, yes.