Dear KurtGodel,
You are repeating your self.
Like I said before, if you are not able to provide evidence of your claims then simply stop posting this nonsence!
You are sounding like someone who is trying to change history from his desk.
You arguments have no logic at all and I can not see that you are in anyway intellect.
Copy and paste has nothing to do with it.
If you are hundred procent convinced about what you say is the truth, then a intellect guy
would do everything possible to provide facts, lifetime witnesses, documents to prove his point.
You just come up with links of books we should read and take it as granit.
There is only one book in the world that is about the truth.
And belief it or not, even this books talks about the holocaust.
I suggest we go back to topic or we stop this topic.
Because I’m no fan of your theories and having relatives who survived camp and had relatives who served for Germany during this timeperiod makes me not even smile about your arguments that Germany was forced to pull up death camps.
If you say forcef to war, diffrent thing.
If we talk about overlord was also an inside job, diffrent thing.
But if you keep argumenting that germany was forced to kill jews, gays,gypsys,disabled, jehova witnesses, christians then I will report this topic to mod.
Im serious about it!
I have listening to long and debated to much with people who either denied the holocaust or blamed others for that it happened.
Nazi Germany did it, no way arround!!!
But if Group B steals food from Group C, knowing and guaranteeing that members of Group C will die in their place, then Group B is still responsible for murdering Group C. The fact that Group B is threatened with starvation doesn’t give them a free moral pass to starve others.
True, but the fact that Group B starved others instead of themselves doesn’t absolve Group A of causing the starvation in the first place.
@Imperious:
That is an opinion, not fact. And he wasn’t referring to killing 10 million people in camps, because the Allies didn’t do that.
OK people, first-hand witness accounts are now opinion.
Also since when is the Soviet Union not part of the Allies? They killed tens of millions of people in and out of camps.
@Imperious:
In order to get lend lease going for USSR, they needed Iran because it was somewhat hostile to those efforts, for the greater good to win the war. They also attacked Vichy and occupied Iceland, and half a dozen other things….for victory. But what they didn’t do is exterminate people, that was reserved for Hitler.
So the Allies are allowed to invade whomever they want and wage war however they want as long as they emerge victorious? Somehow I don’t think you would argue that the starvation of Soviet population to feed the German army was acceptable if Germany had won the war and gotten the Allies to surrender…
And the Allies didn’t exterminate people? Tell that to the Ukrainians the Soviet Union starved before the war, the Poles they indiscriminately killed during their invasion, the Bengalis who starved because the British thought their homeland citizens were more important…the list goes on.
@Imperious:
nobody denies the soviets did some things, but it the NAZIs were still worse … by far.
You have denied multiple times that the Soviets did “some things” when you say that the Allies never committed mass murder. The Soviets were part of the Allies.
I am curious what your metric for “badness” of crimes are, though. It can’t be numbers, because the Soviets killed more than Germany even if you attribute the food blockade deaths to Germany. If it’s the people they killed, what makes the Nazis’ victims more important to keep alive than the Soviets’?
@Imperious:
What makes it “cuckoo”?
It is coo coo. Otherwise History would be quite different.
Question dodging aside, this is terrible logic. It’s like saying anyone who votes for the loser in an election is “cuckoo” because their candidate lost.
@Imperious:
They will always be ridiculous to even try to explain that “Hitler had to kill the Jews and many other groups because Germans didn’t have food, and its Churchill’s fault”.
As far as I can tell, this is a straw man argument. Only Kurt can confirm/deny that this is/isn’t the argument he’s making, but if it’s not, any attempts to argue against this point of view are irrelevant, as no one is actually taking that side.
But if Group B steals food from Group C, knowing and guaranteeing that members of Group C will die in their place, then Group B is still responsible for murdering Group C. The fact that Group B is threatened with starvation doesn’t give them a free moral pass to starve others.
True, but the fact that Group B starved others instead of themselves doesn’t absolve Group A of causing the starvation in the first place.
I thought wheatbeer’s post made it clear that it did not absolve group A, in which case he, you and I are in vociferous agreement.
My mistake then, I read it as Group A only sharing guilt if Group B let their own people die.
Kurt,
None of your three scenarios matches my perspective.
- Once Group B steals from Group C, Group A is absolved of guilt. Under this scenario, Group A’s use of famine as a weapon was permissible, as long as Group B made sure that the resulting harm was borne by someone other than B. Group B is guilty of 20 million deaths, Group A is guilty of nothing.
Everyone is responsible for their own actions. If your numbers are correct, then Group A is guilty of 20 million counts of attempted murder.
- Group A and Group B are both held equally responsible. In this scenario, Group A is held responsible for 20 million deaths because of what it did to B. Group B is also held responsible for 20 million deaths; on the theory that it has the right to starve its own people to death, but does not have the right to starve C. Under this scenario, both A and B are being held responsible for 20 million deaths each–40 million deaths total–even though only 20 million people have died.
20 million cases of attempted murder on one side and 20 million cases of murder on the other side. There is no duplicate crime.
- Group A is held responsible. Its use of food as a weapon was intended to kill 20 million people; and 20 million people died. The fact that B transferred those deaths to C does not absolve A of its guilt, or make B either more guilty or less guilty than would have been the case, had it starved its own people instead. Under this theory, a government does not have the right to starve its own people, and does not have the right to starve some other group of people either. No additional guilt was created when the government of B transferred the starvation to C; because the starvation of either B or C is regarded as equally wrong.
Everyone is responsible for their own actions. Otherwise there is no such thing as responsibility at all because the cause of all things would stretch continually backwards through time.
Wheatbeer wrote,
If your numbers are correct, then Group A is guilty of 20 million counts of attempted murder.
You and I appear to be regarding this matter from somewhat different perspectives.
Let’s say that there are three ships crossing the ocean; each with 100 people on board. Ship A has enough food to feed 150 people; ships B and C have exactly enough food for 100 people each. The captain of ship A orders a nighttime raid on ship B. During the raid, some of Ship A’s sailors sneak on board Ship B, and throw overboard enough food to feed 30 people.
Ship A is very well-defended. Well-defended enough that the captain of Ship B cannot acquire any of the food he needs by raiding it. His two choices are to either allow 30 of his own people to starve; or to take the food he needs from Ship C. He chooses the latter option, on the theory that his first responsibility is to ensure the well-being of the men, women, and children who have given their loyalty to him.
As a result of Captain B’s decision, the people on Ship C begin to starve. At this point in the scenario, the Captain of A could choose to feed the people on board Ship C. But he chooses not to, even though he has more than enough food.
Under this scenario, Captain A has most of the power. If he chooses not to use food as a weapon, he leaves the door open to everyone on ships B and C surviving. But if he uses food as a weapon, he guarantees that some combination of the people from Ships B and C will die. If he continues using food as a weapon after it’s become clear that B is taking the food it needs from C, he is no longer attempting to murder B. He is actually murdering C. Every day that he refuses to provide famine relief to C–despite C’s starvation–constitutes a fresh decision on A’s part to murder C.
aequitas et veritas wrote:
Like I said before, if you are not able to provide evidence of your claims then simply stop posting this nonsence!
You choosing to ignore the evidence I’ve provided is not the same as me not having provided any. I’ve cited multiple sources: both online and in print. I’ve consistently cited mainstream sources, and have not once cited anyone sympathetic to the Nazis. If you don’t want to go out and buy a copy of The Wages of Destruction, fine. But at least read the Amazon book reviews before dismissing it.
Imperious Leader has also provided a number of links to this discussion. Several of those links provided support for the (correct) view that Germany had a grave food crisis during WWII. The most recent link he provided was to the Hunger Plan. From his link:
Germany itself was running low on food supplies, and the same problem faced the various territories occupied by Germany. The fundamental premise behind the Hunger Plan was that Germany was not self-sufficient in food supplies during the war, and to sustain the war it needed to obtain the food from conquered lands at any cost.
There is only one book in the world that is about the truth.
At the risk of going off-topic, 1 John 3:13 states, “Marvel not, my brethren, if the world hate you.” Just because a propaganda effort is widespread–just because it’s believed by a large portion of the world–does not make it correct. Just because the world hates some political, religious, or ideological minority; does not mean that minority deserves to be hated.
But if you keep argumenting that germany was forced to kill jews, gays,gypsys,disabled, jehova witnesses,
christians then I will report this topic to mod.
Part of having good character is to do the right thing even in the face of threats. (Such as the threat you made in the above text.) The permissibility of questioning the Allied propaganda effort has already been discussed by the list owner and a number of list moderators. They have not (so far as I’m aware) expressed the wish to revisit that discussion.
I have not argued that Germany was forced to kill Christians. The reason I haven’t made that argument is because Germany did not (so far as I’m aware) kill anyone for being a Christian. If someone was a Christian and also a member of the anti-Nazi political opposition, that person stood in danger of being killed. Non-Christian members of the anti-Nazi political opposition were about equally likely to be killed.
If the Nazis didn’t kill people merely for being Christian, why are they being accused of it? Lenin said to accuse your enemies of that which you yourself are guilty. From Wikipedia:
The total number of Christian victims of Soviet state atheist policies, has been estimated to range between 12-20 million.[6][7][8] . . .
Some actions against Orthodox priests and believers along with execution included torture, being sent to prison camps, labour camps or mental hospitals.[24][25][26][27] Many Orthodox (along with peoples of other faiths) were also subjected to psychological punishment or torture and mind control experimentation in order to force them give up their religious convictions (see Punitive psychiatry in the Soviet Union).[25][26][28] During the first five years of Soviet power, the Bolsheviks executed 28 Russian Orthodox bishops and over 1,200 Russian Orthodox priests. Many others were imprisoned or exiled.[1] . . .
Protestant Christians in the USSR . . . in the period after the Second world war were compulsively sent to mental hospitals, or endured trials and imprisonment (often for refusal to enter military service). Some were even compulsively deprived of parental rights.[29] . . .
None of the documented acts of brutalities against members of the clergy by the Reds involved anyone who actually took up arms with the Whites, and only a few of them were cases of clergy who gave vocal support.[39] . . . The slicing up of unarmed prisoners, scalping and torturing believers, shooting priests’ wives and children, and many other such acts recorded in the documented acts of brutality by the Reds against the Orthodox church during the civil war have nothing to do with acting in ‘self-defense’.[39] . . .
When [in the 1920s] church leaders demanded freedom of religion under the constitution, the Communists responded with terror. They murdered the metropolitan of Kiev and executed twenty-eight bishops and 6,775 priests. Despite mass demonstrations in support of the church, repression cowed most ecclesiastical leaders into submission.[45] . . .
The Orthodox church suffered terribly in the 1930s, and many of its members were killed or sent to labor camps. Between 1927 and 1940, the number of Orthodox churches in the Russian Republic fell from 29,584 to fewer than 500. . . .
After 1929 and through the 1930s, the closing of churches, mass arrests of the clergy and religiously active laity, and persecution of people for attending church reached unprecedented proportions.[2][63] The LMG employed terror tactics against believers in order to further the campaign. . . .
During the purges of 1937 and 1938, church documents record that 168,300 Russian Orthodox clergy were arrested. Of these, over 100,000 were shot.[72]
While these events were happening, FDR was courting a warm diplomatic relationship with Joseph Stalin; and convincing the American people to regard him as a benign “Uncle Joe.” Over in Europe, Chamberlain and Daladier had chosen to guarantee Poland against a German invasion, but not against a Soviet invasion. France signed a defensive alliance with the U.S.S.R. in 1935. Corrupt Western politicians’ pro-Soviet foreign policies are an important reason why I regard them as narcissists, lacking compassion, mercy, or a moral compass.
Funny thing is Kurt goes on about Allied blockade, when the reality is Germans used the reduced food supply to SYSTEMATICALLY EXTERMINATE HITLERS ENEMIES. The allies just spread the food around and rationed it so few died if any. That excuse can never be overcome by any of that flat earth society logic he uses.
And i wonder why he doesn’t mention the Great War Allied blockade which did actually starve Germans. Hes got the wrong war!! LOL
Quote from: Imperious Leader
That is an opinion, not fact. And he wasn’t referring to killing 10 million people in camps, because the Allies didn’t do that.
OK people, first-hand witness accounts are now opinion.
Also since when is the Soviet Union not part of the Allies? They killed tens of millions of people in and out of camps.
The Soviets were obviously guilty of doing things, but after all they were subject to a war of extermination and some in their armed forces sought retribution when they entered Germany. But we are talking about how a sane person could rank Genocide as an excuse for a system that directs the food supply to kill millions, when it could be rationed like everybody besides Germany did.
Quote from: Imperious Leader
In order to get lend lease going for USSR, they needed Iran because it was somewhat hostile to those efforts, for the greater good to win the war. They also attacked Vichy and occupied Iceland, and half a dozen other things….for victory. But what they didn’t do is exterminate people, that was reserved for Hitler.
So the Allies are allowed to invade whomever they want and wage war however they want as long as they emerge victorious? Somehow I don’t think you would argue that the starvation of Soviet population to feed the German army was acceptable if Germany had won the war and gotten the Allies to surrender…
And the Allies didn’t exterminate people? Tell that to the Ukrainians the Soviet Union starved before the war, the Poles they indiscriminately killed during their invasion, the Bengalis who starved because the British thought their homeland citizens were more important…the list goes on.
They are allowed to invade to save the world from enslavement, yes The Soviets did kill some Poles, but not to the extent or anywhere near Hitler. The actual list goes on for what the NAZI’s did BTW.
Quote from: Imperious Leader
nobody denies the soviets did some things, but it the NAZIs were still worse … by far.
You have denied multiple times that the Soviets did “some things” when you say that the Allies never committed mass murder. The Soviets were part of the Allies.
I am curious what your metric for “badness” of crimes are, though. It can’t be numbers, because the Soviets killed more than Germany even if you attribute the food blockade deaths to Germany. If it’s the people they killed, what makes the Nazis’ victims more important to keep alive than the Soviets’?
Read up on what the NAZI’s did and stop making excuses…All sides did some things, but Germany was the problem starter and committed the worst crimes.
Quote from: Imperious Leader
Quote from: ColonelCarter
What makes it “cuckoo”?
It is coo coo. Otherwise History would be quite different.
Question dodging aside, this is terrible logic. It’s like saying anyone who votes for the loser in an election is “cuckoo” because their candidate lost.
It’s coo coo because in face of obviously established facts, some people refuse to acknowledge who was fighting and for what reasons. For keeping Europe free or enslaving it.
Quote from: Imperious Leader
They will always be ridiculous to even try to explain that “Hitler had to kill the Jews and many other groups because Germans didn’t have food, and its Churchill’s fault”.
As far as I can tell, this is a straw man argument. Only Kurt can confirm/deny that this is/isn’t the argument he’s making, but if it’s not, any attempts to argue against this point of view are irrelevant, as no one is actually taking that side.
As far as i can tell this is Kurt’s argument and the fact that his invented “food blockade” which is really an economic war and that Hitler manipulated that into his Hunger Plan for exterminating entire groups of people and hunting them down. He redirected the supply of food to put millions into camps to be gassed/cremated. That act had NOTHING TO DO WITH FOOD. That nonsense he runs on about " i got food and only Germans will use it" is total BS. He used the perceived lack of food to persecute his enemies. To even argue that the Allies are remotely equal to the evil acts committed by the Nazi’s is completely faulty reasoning.
He chooses the latter option, on the theory that his first responsibility is to ensure the well-being of the men, women, and children who have given their loyalty to him.
Even if you need to make innocent outsiders suffer in your place? Good luck with that theory if it turns out that God exists or if you end up in court.
You choosing to ignore the evidence I’ve provided is not the same as me not having provided any. I’ve cited multiple sources: both online and in print. I’ve consistently cited mainstream sources, and have not once cited anyone sympathetic to the Nazis. If you don’t want to go out and buy a copy of The Wages of Destruction, fine. But at least read the Amazon book reviews before dismissing it.
You don’t have any sources, you just regurgitate one book and ignore the other millions that say otherwise. How bout discussion for the Hunger Plan? It totally trashes your argument because it shows that Germany directed it to have an excuse for killing Jews, Slavs, Gays, gypsies, deformed, and countless others. The lack of food of 15% ( to use a figure brought up earlier) could be easily distributed. Additionally, Hitler could have just stopped the war realizing Herman would starve and save his people. Who in their right mind knowing his people are starving just continues the war and attacks new countries like the Soviets who were providing grain shipments to the Reich? Secondly, Germany attacks so many countries that any viable trading partners are either : Invaded, plundered, or at war with the Axis.
He is left with the Swiss, Sweden, Turkey to feed 525 million? yea sure. And don’t tell me Argentina can save the day, they can’t.
If they are at war with him, where is any food coming from?
It’s so ridiculous to make so many excuses when its so basic.
[�]The policy of annihilation by hunger approved by Hitler was directed against two population groups: on the one hand against the people in the “forest zone” of central and northern Russia and Belorussia, on the other against the urban population of the Soviet Union in general. It is true that this plan, which in June 1941 was even checked and in principle approved by the Macroeconomic Department of the German Reichsbank, contained some basic flaws overlooked by its authors. For instance the surplus and deficit regions in the Soviet Union were by no means clearly separated, and especially Ukraine was not the most important surplus region, for it promised only relatively little “surpluses” even if the population�s food consumption was forcibly reduced. Thus the Macroeconomic Department of IG Farben had to conclude on 26 November 1941 that, “under the assumption of normal nourishment”, the territories conquered so far were “all together deficit regions in regard to bread grain”, which theoretically would have required supplies from the Volga-Urals region. The main flaw, however, was that no one seems to have thought how the starvation was to occur in an area which at least partially contained German troops.
Nevertheless the intention of letting millions of people in the occupied Soviet territories starve or otherwise perish became the guideline for many decision-makers. In this respect the ominous number of 30 million, by which [State Secretary at the Ministry of Food and Agriculture] Backe considered that the population would have to be reduced, played a part. The fact that many corresponding statements were made by acting figurers from the areas of Belorussia and “Central Russia” is no coincidence, but likely to be related to the fact that these regions were part of the “forest zone”.
Thus the Reichsf�hrer-SS and Head of the German Police, Heinrich Himmler, “at the beginning of 1941, before the start of the campaign against Russia, held [a speech] on the Wewelsburg, in which he stated that the purpose of the Russian campaign was the decimation of the Slav population by thirty million”, as the former Head of SS and Police von dem Bach-Zelewski testified in 1946 at Nuremberg. Written orders for this annihilation of Slavs had not existed. At the speech twelve Gruppenf�hrer (higher SS officers) were said to have been present. In fact the mentioned conference of the SS-Gruppenf�hrer on the Wewelsburg with Himmler took place only between 12 and 15 June. According to a later deposition of the Head of the Personal Staff Reichsf�hrer-SS, Karl Wolff, what Himmler had said on the Wewelsburg was that the death of these millions of people was not the goal, but would be the consequence of the war against the USSR. To this Bach-Zelewski, at the criminal trial against Wolff, added that Himmler had back then predicted that military actions and crises of food supply would lead to this high number of victims. Himmler�s announcement, however, came very late and was very vague, just like the food planners� project left many things open. Coincidence or not, two days before the meeting on the Wewelsburg Himmler had talked with Backe about the agriculture of the Soviet regions to be occupied.
All by themselves Bach-Zelewski�s utterances might be explained as a mere attempt to exonerate himself, as he was invoking a higher order. They are supported, however, by a deposition that the former Head of SS and Police for the Eastern Territories, Friedrich Jeckeln, made shortly before in January 1946 at Riga:
“Herf [Eberhard Herf, commander of the Order Police Minsk from about January to March 1942 and August 1943 to January 1944, Head of the Staff of the Anti-partisan Units Reichsf�hrer SS (Bach-Zelewski) for one month in July/August 1943] told me that von dem Bach-Zelewski had told him that he (von dem Bach) had been given by Himmler the order to destroy 20 million Soviet citizens on the territory of Belorussia and other regions east of Belorussia, immediately upon the heels of the advancing German Army.”In this respect it must be taken into account that Bach-Zelewski�s territorial area of action was to be “Central Russia” with head-office in Moscow. He himself even wrote once that it was to lie principally to the east of Moscow up to the Urals. A great part of the so-called forest zone would thus have fallen under his jurisdiction, which could explain why he was given the task to destroy so large a part of those 30 million people, a fact that he “forgot” at Nuremberg. The inferno foreseen for Central Russia was to be so terrible that even Erich Koch, one of the most brutal NS politicians, rejected the place of Reich Commissar in Moscow with the justification that this was “a wholly negative activity”.
In his memoirs the former counterespionage officer of Army Group Center, Rudolf-Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff, wrote about a visit by the head of the Advance Detachment Moscow of Einsatzgruppe B, Professor Franz Six, who shortly after the moving of the staff quarters to Borissow, i.e. presumably in July 1941, told him about the plan:
"He reported that Hitler had the intention to push the eastern border of the Reich up to the line Baku-Stalingrad-Moscow. To the east of this line there would be created a fire strip in the area of which all life was to be wiped out. It was intended to decimate the about thirty million Russians living in this area by hunger through the removal or all food from this gigantic area. All taking part in this action would be forbidden under punishment of death to even give a piece of bread to a Russian. The big cities from Leningrad to Moscow were to be leveled to the ground; Head of SS von dem Bach-Zelewski would be responsible for the execution of these measures.[…]A slightly different version of the same event is given by Wilfried Strik-Strikfeldt. According hereto “a special envoy of Rosenberg�s Eastern Ministry, in the company of a high-ranking party officials, visited the Army Group at Borissow.” As recalled by the Supreme Commander of Army Group Center, General Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, they had spoken with Bock at the meal about the colonization of Russia until possibly east of Moscow. A quintessence in this respect had been the following: “Forty million Russians too many! They must perish!” This meant starving to death. Asked about this by him, Strik, Rosenberg had answered that these were “fantasies” of the SS and some others without significance. Von Bock is supposed to have refused to believe what he heard. Yet the General Field Marshal had met Himmler already on 5 June 1941 and been informed by him that the “goal of the campaign in the East was the splitting of Russia into small single states and the extension of the German sphere of interest far beyond the Urals.” On 6 July he noted the following: “The region is a hunger region. Its products will hardly be sufficient […], so that I don�t know how one is to solve the problem of feeding the population.” Thus von Bock was by no means that much a stranger to these thoughts. When Himmler visited him on 24 October in Smolensk, he at least according to Bach-Zelewski�s testimony thanked him for the murder of the Jews, this “dirty work” which he thus would not have to do himself.
Back to Six. The considerations exposed by him are obviously based on the Backe Plan and also show notable coincidence with Jeckeln�s deposition. In what concerns the execution his vision remained nave and unclear, like in the “Guidelines of Economic Policy”. Fortunately the project could not be put into practice that easily.
The Hunger Plan also appeared on other occasions. For G�ring it was a favorite subject. In November 1941 he told the Italian foreign minister Count Ciano that within a year 20 to 30 million people would starve to death in Russia. Maybe this was a good thing, for certain peoples needed to be reduced. Hitler spoke of a “population catastrophe” of the “Muscovites” and declared that due to lack or destruction of food “millions would have to die”. According to Goebbels, the German leadership declared “publicly that Russia has nothing to expect from us and that we will let it starve to death.” The General Plenipotentiary for Labor Employment, Fritz Sauckel, stated on 4 August 1942, during a visit in the occupied Soviet territories, that when he had been there in the autumn of 1941 “all German authorities had persisted in the conviction that in the following, i.e. in the past winter, at least ten to twenty million of these people would simply starve to death.” At least some occupation authorities on site thus stuck to the guidelines as they were repeatedly stated similar to this: “We cannot feed the whole land. The intelligence has been killed, the commissars are gone. Huge areas will be left to themselves (starve to death).” Also the Eastern Minister Rosenberg repeatedly stated that the starvation death of millions was “a harsh necessity that stands outside any sentiment.” Hans Tesmer, head of the Department War Administration at the Commander of the rear area of Army Group Center (1941-1942) and of Army Group Center (1942-1944), disapprovingly remembered the following: “Slogans came up that in Russia several million might well starve to death, that the Russians were to be kept dumb and other similar views of this sort.”[…]
As military reports from 1942 indicate, the German insistence on the �annihilation of superfluous eaters� helped to foster famine conditions which afflicted large numbers of the Soviet population. �A rear army group reported in May 1942: �the population is afflicted by hunger and is therefore under pressure to wander around the countryside to barter for foodstuffs. The fact that the German Wehrmacht has done nothing to guarantee the nourishment of the civilian population has influenced opinion and made the population distrustful towards the victorious German forces.�
The 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war who fell into the hands of the Wehrmacht during 1941 were even more disastrously affected than civilians by the deliberate hunger strategy of the Germans. Christian Streit has estimated that approximately two million of these Soviet POWs died or were executed. �Streit�s pioneering research into the treatment of Soviet POWs by the German forces demonstrated that in the run-up to the invasion of the Soviet Union the German military leadership made virtually no preparations for dealing with the massive number of prisoners of war expected to come under German control during Operation Barbarossa. �In full knowledge of the consequences, the provision of food for the prisoners was totally subordinated to the goal of exploiting the food resources of the East in order to raise the rations of the German population.� �Predictably, the results were catastrophic. Major General Wagner, the army�s Quartermaster General in charge of the POWs, declared at a conference on 13 November 1941, �Those non-working prisoners of war in the prison camps are to starve. Working prisoners of war can in individual cases be fed from army provisions. But unfortunately this cannot be ordered on a general basis, given the overall food situation.� �This policy guaranteed that the death toll among the prisoners would be extraordinarily high. Major General Leykauf, in his notorious December 1941 report on the fate of �superfluous eaters� cited above, commented directly on the plight of the Soviet POWs: �Billeting, food, clothing and health of the prisoners of war is bad, mortality very high. The loss of tens of thousands even hundreds of thousands during this winter is to be expected.� �Only in the aftermath of the failure of Operation Barbarossa and in the knowledge that a lengthy conflict with the Soviet Union would require the utilization of all possible productive forces did the German military authorities alter their hunger policy toward the Soviet POWs with the intention of preserving and exploiting their labor power.
Rolf-Dieter M�ller has delivered an appropriate overall verdict on the hunger strategy adopted by the Nazi regime in 1941-42:
The victims of this plan were not unavoidable casualties of war but martyrs of a deliberate policy on the part of the occupational authorities, who set about implementing the first phase of their plan to colonize and germanize the lands of the Soviet Union. It was the beginning of a premeditated genocide on a colossal scale. The population was divided into racial categories, with �undesirable� elements or �superfluous mouths� being left to starve or simply murdered.
III. Famine in the Jewish Ghettos 1940-42
The final example of Nazi use of famine is provided by the ghettoization policies adopted in the period 1940-42. As Christopher Browning has pointed out, ghettoization policy emerged from the initiatives of local authorities and within the context of debates between two groups of officials whom he labels as �productionists� (those who favored allowing Jews to work in order to feed themselves) and �attritionists� (those who endorsed a harsh policy of allowing Jews to starve to death as a means of extracting all the assets which the ghettoized Jews allegedly were hoarding). �In late 1940 and early 1941 the attritionists held the upper hand among the German authorities in Warsaw and as a result they succeeded in deliberately imposing a starvation policy on the ghetto there with disastrous consequences for the Jewish inhabitants. As the commissar of the Warsaw ghetto, Heinz Auerswald, noted, �A quantum leap in deaths for May of this year [1941] showed that the food shortage had already grown into a famine.�
In spring 1941�at the same time that the hunger strategy toward the Soviet Union was being formulated�German authorities in the General Government adopted a fundamental change in German policy toward the Jews in the Lodz and Warsaw ghettos, endorsing the position of the �productionists� who insisted that the ghetto inhabitants were not to be allowed to starve to death but should be provided with enough food to transform the ghetto into a productive entity. �This change in German policy slowed down but did not halt the hunger and attrition in the ghettos. �In 1941 and 1942,� Israel Gutman has written, �112,463 persons died in the two ghettos [Lodz and Warsaw] of starvation and disease, which means that 20 percent of the population perished in the space of two years.� �Despite the temporary ascendancy of the productionists, starvation still remained one of the chief weapons in the Nazis� anti-Jewish armoury. In August 1942, Hans Frank, Governor-General of Poland, declared: �Clearly we are sentencing 1.2 million Jews [i.e., the Jewish population of the General Government] to death by starvation; and if they do not die from hunger, we will have to adopt other anti-Jewish measures.�
At the same time in 1941 that local German authorities were debating how to deal with the Jews confined to ghettos, Reinhard Heydrich, Head of the Reich Main Security Office, was busy formulating more far-reaching and deadly plans concerning European Jewry, plans which also incorporated famine as a deliberate tool of extermination. G�tz Aly has argued that in March 1941 Heydrich developed a plan which called for Jews to be deported first to the eastern periphery of the General Government and then, following the anticipated quick military victory over the Soviet Union, to the swamp areas of the Pripyat region. �Those Jews who survived these ordeals would then be deported further into Siberia. In Aly�s words, �the [Jewish] deportees would die a �natural� death, in part starving and freezing to death in ghettos and camps, in part working themselves to death under a barbaric police regimen.� �Famine thus played an integral part in the initial plans which eventually culminated in the �Final Solution�.
IV. Conclusion
The three examples which have been briefly outlined above provide clear evidence that famine was a central component of Nazi plans for occupied Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Although the ambitious and lethal demographic reorganization envisaged in the General Plan for the East never advanced far beyond the initial planning stages, the actual hunger strategy implemented in conjunction with Operation Barbarossa, as well as the inhumane conditions created in the ghettos of Eastern Europe, had catastrophic consequences for the Slavic and Jewish populations of the region. Raul Hilberg has estimated that over half a million Polish Jews died in the ghettos. �Approximately 7.5 million non-Jewish Ukrainian, White Russian and Polish civilians died as result of German occupation. �In addition, some 3.3 million Soviet POWs perished through hunger, disease or shooting at the hands of the Germans on the Eastern front over the course of the war. �These horrific figures underscore the magnitude of the death and suffering produced by the calculated starvation strategies applied by the Nazi regime. Along with numerous other methods of death and destruction, the deliberate use of famine must be rated as one of the favored Nazi means of exterminating the regime�s racial and ideological enemies.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jun/21/stalin-hitler-mass-murder-starvation/
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/oct/21/secondworldwar-russia
The Annihilation of Superfluous Eaters: Nazi Plans for and Uses of Famine in Eastern Europe
by Steven R. Welch
The deliberate use of famine was an integral part of Nazi plans and policies regarding Eastern Europe during World War II. The following essay will examine three key examples: first, the so-called General Plan for the East (Generalplan Ost; hereafter GPO); second, the hunger strategy carried out by the Germans in the occupied regions of the Soviet Union following the invasion of June 1941, which included the starvation of Soviet POWs and Soviet civilians; and third, the Nazi ghettoization policies from 1940 to 1942 which created famine conditions in which hundreds of thousands of Jews died of hunger and hunger-related diseases.
I. The General Plan for the East
The General Plan for the East, the first draft of which was presented to Heinrich Himmler in July 1941, embodied the Nazi vision for a complete and ruthless demographic revolution in Eastern Europe. The GPO was premised on the belief that the Wehrmacht would quickly and decisively vanquish the Soviet Union and thus bring a vast new territorial empire under Nazi control. Hitler and other leading Nazis conceived of the newly conquered areas as a German �India� over which they would wield absolute power and within whose boundaries they could realize their plans for a sweeping racially-based reorganization of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. �The GPO was to provide the blueprint for this new colonial empire. �It called for all of Poland, Czechoslovakia and large parts of the Soviet Union to be transformed into gigantic German settlement areas. �This would entail �resettling� or killing between 30 to 50 million of the present inhabitants of those areas: 80-85 per cent of the Polish, 75 per cent of the Belorussian and 65 per cent of the Ukrainian populations would be affected. The GPO implicitly factored into its grisly calculations that many millions of the victims would die as a result of famine and disease brought on by malnutrition and overwork. After the massive liquidation of much of the Slavic population of Eastern Europe the remaining fourteen million people were to be reduced to the status of slave laborers for the ruling Germans who would control all property and monopolize positions of skilled labor. The territory vacated by the millions of deported or liquidated Slavs was to be settled by some 4.5 million Germans drawn from the Reich, from overseas Germans and other Germanic groups (such as Norwegians and Danes) in Europe. The entire process was originally scheduled to be completed within thirty years. Himmler later insisted that the pace be accelerated so that the program of Germanization would be accomplished within no more than twenty years.
The first draft of the GPO included a provision for the forced resettlement of five to six million Jews as part of the Germanization project. By the time a revised version was prepared the following year this provision had disappeared. By then the mass murder of European Jewry in specially designed extermination camps was already well underway. As an official from Alfred Rosenberg�s Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories noted in April 1942, the Eastern Jews did not need to be included in the revised version of the GPO since they �would already be eliminated before evacuation [to the East].�
Thanks to the defeat of the German army by Soviet forces the provisions of the GPO remained for the most part unfulfilled. Himmler did attempt one large-scale resettlement project in November 1942 in the area of Zamosc in the General Government. Thousands of Polish farmers were forced out of their homes to make room for 27,000 ethnic Germans. From the German perspective the action ended as a dismal failure: throughout the region security worsened, produce deliveries declined and Polish resistance escalated. The deteriorating war situation from 1943 on prevented any further experiments in mass resettlement. After the disastrous defeat at Stalingrad Hitler ordered that further work on the GPO be suspended. Had Hitler�s forces been successful in the East, however, there can be no doubt that under the auspices of the GPO tens of millions of Slavs would have been subjected to a program of mass killing in which deliberately imposed famine would have been a major component.
II. The �Hunger Strategy� of 1941-42
In spring 1941 the Reich Food Ministry and the Armed Forces High Command (OKW) developed what Rolf-Dieter M�ller has termed a �hunger strategy� devised to deprive millions of Soviet citizens of food in order to provide surpluses which would feed the German army in Russia as well as allow foodstuffs to be sent back to the Reich from the occupied territories in the East. � This hunger strategy, as M�ller has convincingly demonstrated, was not an unintended or unavoidable outcome of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union but was deliberately planned in advance and must be regarded as a �consciously implemented policy of extermination.�
Plans for the economic exploitation of the occupied territories had been considered in some detail by German civilian and military experts in advance of the invasion. A statement of goals for the upcoming campaign from early May 1941 succinctly noted: �1. The war can only be continued if all armed forces are fed by Russia in the third year of war. 2. There is no doubt that as a result many millions of people will be starved to death if we take out of the country the things necessary for us.� �A much more detailed document prepared by the �Economic Staff East, Agricultural Group� on 23 May 1941, painted an even grimmer picture of the mass starvation and deindustrialization planned for some Soviet regions. The planners commented dispassionately that �the population of these areas, in particular the urban population, will have to face most serious distress from famine.� �The document went on to state with brutal frankness that the policy being enunciated would result in mass death for the population of the occupied regions:
It follows from all that has been said that the German administration in these territories may well attempt to mitigate the consequences of the famine which undoubtedly will take place, and to accelerate the return to primitive agricultural conditions. An attempt might be made to intensify cultivation in these areas by expanding the acreage under potatoes or other important food crops giving a high yield. However, these measures will not avert famine. Many tens of millions of people in this area will become redundant and will either die or have to emigrate to Siberia. Any attempt to save the population there from death by starvation by importing surpluses from the black soil zone would be at the expense of supplies to Europe. It would reduce Germany�s and Europe�s power to resist the blockade. This must be clearly and absolutely understood.
Within the context of the racial ideology of Nazism, which posited the supremacy of the Ayran master race over the inferior Slavs and Jews, the murder of �many tens of millions of people� by means of deliberate starvation was accepted as perfectly legitimate and indeed desirable. The utter disregard of humane values by the German planners provides very striking evidence of what Hans Mommsen has referred to as the �deformation of public and private morality� during the Third Reich. �The hunger strategy which the economic experts in the Wehrmacht and the state ministries formulated was a clear violation of international law which required that occupying forces insure an adequate food supply for the indigenous population. The economic planners cynically choose to ignore their obligations under international law and endorsed a policy guaranteed to condemn millions to starvation. In comments made on the eve of the invasion of the Soviet Union, Alfred Rosenberg explicitly rejected the notion that Germany had any obligation toward the peoples it was about to subjugate; German interests alone were paramount: �the job of feeding the German people stands, this year, without a doubt, at the top of the list of Germany�s claims on the East�We see absolutely no reason for any obligation on our part to feed also the Russian people with the products of that surplus-territory. We know that this is a harsh necessity, bare of any feelings.�
Rosenberg was articulating a view which was shared by all members of the top Nazi leadership. Three weeks into Operation Barbarossa Hermann Goering spelled out German priorities when it came to the distribution of food supplies: �It is clear that a graduated scale of food allocations is needed. First in line are the combat troops, then the remainder of the troops in enemy territory, and then those troops stationed at home. The rates are adjusted accordingly. The supply of the German non-military population follows and only then comes the population of the occupied territories.� �He went on to note, �In the occupied territories on principle only those people are to be supplied with an adequate amount of food who work for us. Even if one wanted to feed all the other inhabitants, one could not do it in the newly-occupied Eastern areas. It is, therefore, wrong to funnel off food supplies for this purpose, if it is done at the expense of the army and necessitates increased supplies from home.The economic welfare and indeed the survival of the subject populations was to be callously and criminally disregarded; all that mattered was what benefit Germany could derive from the occupied territories. Hitler of course was in full agreement with a policy of maximum exploitation and minimum concern for the population of the occupied territories: �Our guiding principle must be that these people have but one justification for existence�to be of use to us economically. We must concentrate on extracting from these territories everything that it is possible to extract.� �It can come as no surprise that the hunger strategy could count on Hitler�s complete support. On 8 July 1941 General Franz Halder, Chief of the Army General Staff, noted that the F�hrer had indicated that it was his �firm decision to level Moscow and Leningrad, and make them uninhabitable, so as to relieve us of the necessity of having to feed the populations through the winter.� �All the evidence amply justifies Theo J. Schulte�s judgement that �the economic and military leadership of the Third Reich�advocated a radical policy of exploitation that did not merely allow for but, rather, was based on the need for the extermination of millions of people.�
The hunger strategy had a devastating impact on the Soviet population in the occupied regions. One of the most remarkable and brutally frank assessments of the consequences of the strategy was provided in a report from the Armaments Inspector for the Ukraine, Major General Hans Leykauf, dated 2 December 1941. Leykauf�s report is noteworthy for its matter-of-fact acknowledgment of the scale and scope of mass killing being carried out by German forces in the East:
When we shoot the Jews to death, allow the POWs to die, expose considerable portions of the urban population to starvation and in the upcoming year also lose a part of the rural population to hunger, the question remains to be answered: who is actually supposed to produce economic values?
Leykaufs attention, of course, was focused not on the lethal human consequences of the hunger strategy and the other atrocities committed against the Soviet population but solely on the effects such a strategy might have on the productivity of the occupied regions. As he made clear, his own views were based not on humane �sentiment� but on �sober economic calculations.� �These calculations undoubtedly informed his suggestions for a continuation of the hunger strategy:
Scooping off the agricultural surplus in the Ukraine for the purpose of feeding the Reich is therefore only feasible if traffic in the interior of the Ukraine is diminished to a minimum. The attempt will be made to achieve this
1. by annihilation of superfluous eaters (Jews, population of the Ukrainian big cities, which like Kiev do not receive any supplies at all);
2. by extreme reduction of the rations allocated to the Ukrainians in the remaining cities;
3. by decrease of the food of the farming population.
I recently came across an article which states the following:
Opposition to racism used to be a political stance. Now it has every marking of a religion, with both good and deleterious effects on American society. . . .
The call for people to soberly “acknowledge” their White Privilege as a self-standing, totemic act is based on the same justification as acknowledging one’s fundamental sinfulness is as a Christian. One is born marked by original sin; to be white is to be born with the stain of unearned privilege. . . .
Real people are having real problems, and educated white America has been taught that what we need from them is willfully incurious, self-flagellating piety, of a kind that has helped no group in human history.
I also learned of a Princeton study; which examined over 20 years of data. That study showed no correlation between what the economic bottom 90% want, and what the U.S. government actually does. If every member of that bottom 90% opposes a bill, it has about a 30% chance of becoming law. If every member of that bottom 90% supports a bill, it also has a 30% chance of becoming law.
More bluntly: America is a plutocracy, and power flows from the top down. If the religion of Antiracism is supported by a large mass of the populace today, that is strong evidence that the religion had been promulgated by America’s economic and social elites for a number of decades prior. If the beliefs of FDR and many of his chief advisers are examined, that strong suspicion becomes absolute certainty.
Like most major religions, Antiracism has a central founding myth. That myth is rooted in WWII. WWII is presented as a good-versus-evil story between those who opposed Antiracism (the evil Nazis) and those who supported Antiracism (the good Allies).
In order to convert people to the Antiracist religion, it is useful to link the tenets of that religion to things people already believe. Those coming from a traditional moral background–i.e., those who had accepted neither the Nazi nor the Antiracist religion–often believe that compassion and kindness are good, and murder is wrong. In order to link those existing moral beliefs to the tenets of Antiracism, it was necessary to downplay or conceal Soviet mass murder, to conceal the Western democratic economic elites’ utter contempt for the victims of that mass murder, those same economic elites’ willingness to use a food blockade to starve the people of German-occupied Europe, and the Allies’ mass murder which occurred after the war. It was also necessary to highlight the Holocaust, without mentioning the little fact that the Germans simply could not feed everyone within their own borders. In this way, the Antiracist economic and social elite created the illusion that they cared about compassion and kindness; when in fact the only thing they cared about was the fanatical promulgation of their Antiracist religion and the physical destruction of those who had rejected it. During the Middle Ages, those seen as religious heretics were burned at the stake. The Dresden and Hamburg firestorms were the same thing–except with a new religion, and on a much larger scale.
Well i guess you can no longer argue against basic facts and now need to come up with god knows what.
Germany directed the starvation of millions and well could have feed everyone by rationing food like everybody else did in the war.
I’m currently reading a book written by Herbert Hoover, entitled Freedom Betrayed. I hadn’t realized this earlier, but apparently Hoover was a prolific author. He’s made a number of very good points, including the following:
He was involved in famine relief efforts for Poland, until Churchill blockaded food imports into Germany. Apparently, while Chamberlain and Daladier were the ones who created the blockade itself, it was Churchill who decided to treat food as a contraband item. No different than ammunition or bombs or tanks.
He stated that in 1939, the Western democracies sought an alliance with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany. Stalin said that his price for such an alliance would be the annexation of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, part of Romania, and some other territory. Chamberlain refused. But in a speech in the House of Commons, Churchill said that Stalin’s demands should be met.
He noted that very shortly after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, the United States placed an embargo on Japan. Other anti-Japanese measures were also taken. During the summer of 1941, Japan had a moderate prime minister. That prime minister waged his entire political career on his ability to resolve Japan’s diplomatic differences with the United States. He indicated that he was willing to make very considerable concessions to get the embargo lifted–as long as the American president agreed to a meeting. But instead of the agreed-upon meeting, he was given excuses, delays, or in some cases the thought that Japan had to agree to very considerable concessions before a meeting could even take place. (With nothing in return except the hope that maybe the American president would agree to meet.) Due to the failure of this prime minister’s efforts, he was removed from office and replaced with hard line militarists. The militarists also attempted to resolve Japan’s diplomatic differences with the United States, and didn’t make any more progress than the prime minister had made. At that point they decided to attack Pearl Harbor.
In April of 1945, Japan’s government had once again become moderate and peace-seeking. Their main precondition for peace was that the emperor be allowed to remain in office, even if only in a ceremonial or religious role. Japan’s peace feelers were ignored, and the United States was unwilling to grant any reassurances about the future role of the emperor. As a result, the war lasted several more months, culminating in incalculable destruction of Japanese cities through the use of conventional and nuclear weapons.
In 1939, Chamberlain and Daladier took a hard line against Germany in large part because of FDR’s promise to enter the war eventually. They were told that while the United States would not start the war, it would finish it. Similar reassurances were given to the government of Poland. This was a relatively rare case in which FDR actually intended to keep a promise he had made.
In 1941, on the eve of Germany’s Operation Barbarossa, a pro-Soviet faction within Yugoslavia was contemplating overthrowing the government. FDR promised them that if they did so, the United States would provide immediate and significant aid. That promise was of course broken. After the pro-Soviet putsch, neither the United States nor any other major nation helped the new, pro-Soviet government of Yugoslavia resist the resultant German onslaught.
After the war, the Truman administration exerted enormous diplomatic pressure on Chiang Kai-shek to make peace with Mao and the Chinese communists. This was consistent with deals made between the Big Three during the war–deals in which Chiang Kai-shek was basically thrown under the bus.
Kurt, can you please start a new thread with this?
Putting aside for a moment the annoyance-factor of resurrecting this thread yet again … creating a new thread would have the added benefit of your post matching the thread topic.
Well at least Hoover didn’t argue that the starvation of millions was not a directed NAZI program of genocide, or that Churchill was complicit in evil doings that required genocide by Germany.
Hes not that stupid. Finally we all know Germany directed the starvation of 10’s of millions as part of her “Hunger Program”.
He noted that very shortly after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, the United States placed an embargo on Japan. Other anti-Japanese measures were also taken. During the summer of 1941, Japan had a moderate prime minister. That prime minister waged his entire political career on his ability to resolve Japan’s diplomatic differences with the United States. He indicated that he was willing to make very considerable concessions to get the embargo lifted–as long as the American president agreed to a meeting. But instead of the agreed-upon meeting, he was given excuses, delays, or in some cases the thought that Japan had to agree to very considerable concessions before a meeting could even take place. (With nothing in return except the hope that maybe the American president would agree to meet.) Due to the failure of this prime minister’s efforts, he was removed from office and replaced with hard line militarists. The militarists also attempted to resolve Japan’s diplomatic differences with the United States, and didn’t make any more progress than the prime minister had made. At that point they decided to attack Pearl Harbor.
- In April of 1945, Japan’s government had once again become moderate and peace-seeking. Their main precondition for peace was that the emperor be allowed to remain in office, even if only in a ceremonial or religious role. Japan’s peace feelers were ignored, and the United States was unwilling to grant any reassurances about the future role of the emperor. As a result, the war lasted several more months, culminating in incalculable destruction of Japanese cities through the use of conventional and nuclear weapons.
