L. Hoffman wrote:
If the number of people who would starve is the same as those that would be killed, then
why not simply restrict their food such that they starve?
I’d like to thank you for taking the time to write a good post, and to express your points of disagreement in detail. I come here for good discussion, including discussion with those whose perspectives differ from mine. :)
In answer to your question–in some cases the Nazis tried to do exactly what you described. The Hunger Plan was intended to starve captured Soviet cities, in order to free up food for use elsewhere. However, the successful implementation of the Hunger Plan would have required the Nazis to physically blockade the captured Soviet cities in question. For that, the Nazis lacked the required manpower. As a result of that lack, food continued to flow from captured Soviet farms to captured Soviet cities. Also adding to the Hunger Plan’s failure was local Nazi officials’ grasp of the negative political consequences of starving the local Soviet population to death at a time when Germany and the Soviet Union were at war.
The failure of the Hunger Plan did not mean less overall starvation. It meant that different people starved than those the Nazis had wanted to starve. In particular, millions of Soviet POWs, conscripted to work in German weapons factories, died of hunger as a direct result of Germany’s failure to starve people living in captured Soviet cities.
If truly deprived of their food and facing persecution in Germany, I am sure many
Jews (et al) would have (and did) voluntarily emigrate if given the chance or free passage to do so.
Below is a description of The White Paper of 1939
The White Paper of 1939 was a policy paper issued by the British government under Neville Chamberlain. . . . a limit of 75,000 Jewish immigrants was set for the five-year period 1940-1944 (consisting of a regular yearly quota of 10,000 and a flexible supplementary quota of 25,000); after 1944 the further immigration of Jews to Palestine would depend on permission of the Arab majority (section II); and restrictions were placed on the rights of Jews to buy land from Arabs (section III).
The White Paper was published as Cmd 6019. It was approved by the House of Commons on 23 May 1939 by 268 votes to 179.[1] . . .
Following Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, a growing number of European Jews were prepared to spend the money necessary to enter Palestine. The 1935 Nuremberg Laws stripped the 500,000 German Jews of their citizenship. Jewish migration was impeded by Nazi restrictions on the transfer of finances abroad (departing Jews had to abandon their property), but the Jewish Agency was able to negotiate an agreement allowing Jews resident in Germany to buy German goods for export to Palestine thus circumventing the restrictions.
The large numbers of Jews entering Palestine . . . led to the 1936–39 Arab revolt in Palestine. . . .
In the wake of World War II, the British believed that Jewish support was guaranteed or unimportant. However they feared that the Arab world might turn against them. This geopolitical consideration was, in Raul Hilberg’s word, “decisive”[6] to British policies.
The White Paper of 1939 restricted Jewish immigration into Palestine to 10,000 Jews per year–a purely token number when weighed against the millions of Jews who perished in the Holocaust. I know what you’re thinking–that Hitler didn’t have to export his Jewish population to Palestine in particular. He could have chosen any nation outside the Allied food blockade. During the early 1940s the Nazi government tried something along those lines. They loaded a ship up with Jews, and had the ship sail to many nations around the world. Each and every nation–including the United States–at which the ship arrived turned away the Jews. Eventually, the ship returned to Germany, still filled with Jews! Granted, this was something of a publicity stunt, in that the Nazis knew in advance that no nation was willing to take in large numbers of Jews. Prior to the passage of the White Paper of 1939, Palestine had been the only viable destination for Jewish refugees. One of the reasons Israel was created in the first place was so that there would never again be a situation in which some random White Paper would prevent Jewish refugees from having any place to go.
After the outbreak of war in September 1939, the head of the Jewish Agency for Palestine David Ben-Gurion declared: ‘We will fight the White Paper as if there is no war, and fight the war as if there is no White Paper.’[21] . . .
After the war, the determination of Holocaust survivors to reach Palestine led to large scale illegal Jewish migration to Palestine. . . . Illegal immigrants detained by the British Government were interned in camps on Cyprus. The immigrants had no citizenship and could not be returned to any country.
There were other, non-genocidal ways of removing undesirable people.
Suppose, for example, that the Nazis had said, “we cannot feed all the people in the lands we’ve conquered. To solve the problem, we will force most of the populace in conquered Soviet lands eastward–to the portion of the Soviet Union not yet conquered by Germany.” Doing something like that would not necessarily have saved those people from starvation. Bear in mind that the Soviet Union had its own severe food problems, caused by the fact that Stalin diverted a large portion of his workforce away from agriculture and to military manufacturing. Such a measure might have lessened the death toll caused by the Allied food blockade; but not necessarily by very much. Moreover, such an action would have represented a very significant military sacrifice on Germany’s part. The tens of millions of people Hitler would have sent east would undoubtedly have been put to work in Soviet weapons factories, or conscripted for the Red Army. Given that Germany was badly outnumbered and greatly outproduced, in a war in which its very existence was on the line, to require that kind of military sacrifice was asking an awful lot. It’s also worth pointing out that there was not a single major instance during WWII in which the Allies sacrificed military advantage for humanitarian concerns. If the side with all the advantages wasn’t willing to make military sacrifices to save innocent lives, why should the nation in (by far) the weaker position have been expected to do so?
That being the case, I will grant that in Germany during WWII, military considerations were considered much more important than humanitarian concerns. Actions were justified or rejected based on whether they helped or harmed the war effort. Was there a certain level of brutality in their determination to do everything possible to win the war? Yes–but the same could also be said about the Allied war effort. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden come to mind. The brutality of the measures the Nazis were willing to employ in their efforts to win the war must be weighed against the brutality they were attempting to avoid: the brutality of an Allied victory.
Following the Winter Offensive of 1945, mass rape by Soviet males occurred in all major cities taken by the Red Army. Women were gang raped by as many as several dozen soldiers during the liberation [sic] of Poland. In some cases victims who did not hide in the basements all day were raped up to 15 times.[64][90] According to Antony Beevor, following the Red Army’s capture of Berlin in 1945, Soviet troops raped German women and girls as young as eight years old.[91]
Soviet postwar brutality was not limited to rape only. In the celebratory atmosphere of the Allied victory, it was considered acceptable to rape or murder anyone associated with opposing the Allied war effort. Millions of people were murdered in the aftermath of the Allied victory.
