National Socialism vs. Communism.

Imperious Leader

Hitler’s desire to occupy Poland doesn’t nullify Poland’s desire to occupy parts of Germany. Neither does Poland’s desire to occupy parts of Germany nullify Hitler’s desire to occupy Poland. They both wanted to fight, and Germany beat Poland.

Germany is the only party that did something. Act. Invade and kill. Every nation would love to conquer the earth or have designs on getting more land. Germany systematically not merely invaded but immediately began killing 3 million Jews living in Poland. Hitler created that situation and it was not war but much worse. It has nothing to do with “desire to be larger and making territorial claims” Its a continental plan to exterminate people, to reduce their education to counting no higher than 50 and perpetual enslavement of anyone not German. Their was no “Allied food blockade” what is was is the same tactic any nation at war with Germany would do on a basic level to fight her using the geography and sea power of England and not to allow imports of war material from nations not at war. Germany is doing that same thing to England with her U-boat campaign and much more successfully. At least Germany can plunder her conquered nations riches. All nations in time of war ration their food, its a basic thing you due to cope with the effects of war. Compared to deaths as a result of war by the effect of military hardware, German deaths by starvation ranks very low, just like English deaths from starvation.

The problem was not that Britain and France were trying to stop Hitler, the problem is that they were trying to stop Hitler because they didn’t want Germany to challenge them power-wise in Europe, while they claimed they had other motives.
If Britain and France declared war on Germany because it was invading Czechoslovakia, Austria, Poland, they would have declared war on the Soviet Union for invading Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Finland. They didn’t.
If Britain and France declared war on Germany because it was ostracizing, putting in concentration camps, and killing parts of minority groups of people in their country and countries they invaded, they would have declared war on the Soviet Union for doing the same thing. They didn’t.

No. the problem was the Allies wanted to stop another world war that Hitler caused. What basic facts are you remiss from? The Allies had no treaty with any Baltic States, and with Poland they didn’t have the means to stop Hitler in Poland, but they did help Poland and fund and raise divisions to contribute. And Stalin kept his actions well hidden.Again the Allies didn’t want another war, nobody does except Hitler.

Please explain how civilian bombing raids and food blockades are direct attempts at fighting the enemy. The way I see it is that acts targeting civilians are not direct attempts at fighting the enemy. Civilian bombing raids are clearly aimed at civilians; and as you say later in your post, all nations rationed food so that the soldiers are the first to eat, so any food blockades are also going to hit civilians first. Keep in mind that if you do come up with valid reasons, then while the Allies hold no guilt for their civilian terror raids and food blockade, Germany also holds no guilt for its civilian terror raids on England or its Unrestricted Submarine Warfare.

You need to be explained this? You fight and sap the enemy’s will to fight. Same thing Germany did in the Great War by bombing and terrorizing England with giant Zeppelins dropping bombs, Like the V-weapons, like the German bombing of London, like Germany bombing Rotterdam to ruins…to terrorize people into not having resistance to fight.

So you do agree that the starvation tactics applied against Germany were bad!

Its not starvation tactics, rather the vary basic tactic of denying the enemy of anything of value that he can persecute the war with. Germany could easily surrender and get pancakes back on the tables. But what no allied nation did was start systematically murdering entire groups of people and having some guy on AA.org blame it on the allied “food blockage” in air quotes BTW 75 years latter.

Why do the pictures taken of captured concentration camps at the end of the war show them filled with extremely emaciated people then? And if those that were straight-up killed had just been left to starve, would that absolve Hitler of their deaths in your mind? Why or why not?

You need to be explained this? They were worked to death and fell to death. They were the lucky ones. Most of the others were taken to the “shower” (again air quotes) and killed straight off. Hitler created that situation of course he was responsible- what are you talking about?

Hitler is justifying extermination-
Britain and France gave him this justification with their food blockade. (Whether or not it is a valid justification is a discussion I will abstain from) Had that not happened, there would be no reason for a significant part of certain ethnic and other groups to die under Germany’s control during the war, and if they did the WAllies would have gotten truthful propaganda to justify war against Germany instead of artificially engineered propaganda, but at the risk that Hitler would not engage in these mass murders and leave them without any propaganda.

Hit and run then? This really sinks you. Justification to exterminate due to “food blockade” you got to be ashamed of yourself. Hitler could just surrender the war he directly caused and pancakes would be in supply and Herman could eat his fill. Why not do that? Also, Hitler was killing people since the day he came in power long before any war. You really need to read or have a basic understanding of what happened. Present your ideas to any Historian and he will tell you the facts.

The Nazis destroyed far more food meant for England than anything that could possibly sail to a German port-
If this is the case, it’s because Britain and France could only prevent 100% of the food that Germany would import from going to them, while Britain could attempt to bring in 5x, 10x, whatever the number was; as much food as they could afford to send in in hopes that 100% of what was needed to feed their citizens would make it past the German raids.

Germany still got food and war making material in from Soviet Union, Finland, Sweden, Conquered countries, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, etc The only thing the allies cut off was food from South America. Ok so Hitler couldn’t taste Burritos or Tacos for 6 years big deal! If Hitler spent half the time capturing merchant ships as sinking them he would have had Tacos aplenty.

Also, the tactic of repeating “allied food blockade” as defending point to authorize Genocide and to make extermination of entire groups, when these groups were targeted since 1932+ is really weak, especially considering since Hitler controlled most of Europe by conquest and plunder, that simply he could GROW FOOD BY FARMING…HELLO? Germany could end the war and devote her people to farming so again its Hitlers fault, and Goerings for eating up everything in sight to maintain his belly. Allied food blockage is a myth and a talking point that fails.

Narvik

@Imperious:

Germany is the only party that did something.

Italy did nothing ?

WraithZer0

They attacked Ethiopia!

Imperious Leader

Well the debate had Italy entirely out of the conversation, though we all know they had plenty of food like Germany. If Hitler didn’t close down all the Jewish deli’s since like 1934 they would even have a food surplus.

KurtGodel7

IL wrote: Germany is the only party that did something.

False. After WWI, the Western democracies placed significant portions of Germany under hostile foreign occupation. The Sudentenland was placed under Czech occupation; the Rhineland under French occupation, and Western Prussia under Polish occupation. This achieved France’s “weak Germany” strategy in two ways. First, it meant that the German state was far smaller and less populous than would have been the case had Woodrow Wilson kept his promise of self-determination. Second, this arrangement created a permanent bone of contention between Germany and its neighbors; thereby ensuring that Germany would be encircled by enemies. During the Polish-Soviet War, for example, the Weimar government adopted an anti-Polish position due to the West Prussia issue. Admittedly, France’s intention was to harm Germany, not Poland, by creating enmity between Germany and its neighbors. But there are at least two sides to any dispute; and often both sides end up getting hurt.

Not content with having surrounded Germany with hostile neighbors, France and its allies also demanded that Germany be restricted to a merely token military. Then–having done everything possible to prevent Germany from resisting Soviet expansionism–neither France nor any other Allied nation did anything to prevent the Soviet Union from gobbling up Poland during the Polish-Soviet War (1919 - ‘21). If I deprive a man of weapons, and tie him to a tree, in a forest filled with man-eating coyotes, I become partially responsible for anything bad the coyotes do to him. By the same token, France and the other Allies were partially responsible for Soviet expansionism; because they did nothing at all to prevent such expansionism, and consistently sought to prevent Germany from having the means to do anything about it either. The Western democracies’ bad behavior cannot be blamed on Hitler, because the pattern of seeking a weak Germany + complete inaction in response to Soviet aggression began over a decade before the first year of Hitler’s administration.

Germany systematically not merely invaded but immediately began killing 3 million Jews living in Poland.

To assert that Germany “immediately began” the extermination of Polish Jewry is false. That extermination did not begin until 1942–several years after the war began, at a time when it had become clear that Germany needed to take very serious measures to address the famine conditions it faced.

Their was no “Allied food blockade” . . . We all know [Italy] had plenty of food like Germany.

You are simply ignoring truths you don’t like. In 1940, Herbert Hoover wrote,

The food situation in the present war is already more desperate than at the same stage in the [First] World War. … If this war is long continued, there is but one implacable end… the greatest famine in history.

In 1941, the following happened.

In January Herbert Hoover’s National Committee on Food for the Small Democracies presented the exiled Belgian Government in London with a plan he had agreed with the German authorities to set up soup kitchens in Belgium to feed several million destitute people. . . . The Germans agreed to supply . . . bread grains each month, and the committee was to provide 20,000 tons of fats, soup stock and children’s food. However, Britain refused to allow this aid through their blockade. . . . Hoover said that his information indicated that the Belgian ration was already down to 960 calories – less than half the amount necessary to sustain life – and that many children were already so weak they could no longer attend school.

If Belgian children were starving to death–and if Britain was refusing to allow food for them through its blockade–then in what way, shape, or form is that not a food blockade? If a nation is at war, it is acceptable for it to blockade iron, oil, ammunition, and other such items. But for British politicians to add food to their list of contraband items indicates their desire to kill civilians. The same lack of morality which led corrupt Western politicians to accept Soviet mass murder also hardened them to the idea of murdering civilians with their own food blockade. They were okay with such killing, as long as their propaganda machine could successfully blame the resultant deaths on the Nazis. If a nation’s populace supports its own politicians’ lies and their acts of mass murder, the politicians in question will have every reason to go right on lying and murdering. It is vital to expose politicians’ lies whenever they occur.

Narvik

@WraithZer0:

They attacked Ethiopia!

Imperious Leader

False. After WWI, the Western democracies placed significant portions of Germany under hostile foreign occupation. The Sudentenland was placed under Czech occupation; the Rhineland under French occupation, and Western Prussia under Polish occupation. This achieved France’s “weak Germany” strategy in two ways. First, it meant that the German state was far smaller and less populous than would have been the case had Woodrow Wilson kept his promise of self-determination. Second, this arrangement created a permanent bone of contention between Germany and its neighbors; thereby ensuring that Germany would be encircled by enemies. During the Polish-Soviet War, for example, the Weimar government adopted an anti-Polish position due to the West Prussia issue. Admittedly, France’s intention was to harm Germany, not Poland, by creating enmity between Germany and its neighbors. But there are at least two sides to any dispute; and often both sides end up getting hurt.

At least you flip floped, Poland didn’t start the war. What an achievement!

Not content with having surrounded Germany with hostile neighbors, France and its allies also demanded that Germany be restricted to a merely token military. Then–having done everything possible to prevent Germany from resisting Soviet expansionism–neither France nor any other Allied nation did anything to prevent the Soviet Union from gobbling up Poland during the Polish-Soviet War (1919 - ‘21). If I deprive a man of weapons, and tie him to a tree, in a forest filled with man-eating coyotes, I become partially responsible for anything bad the coyotes do to him. By the same token, France and the other Allies were partially responsible for Soviet expansionism; because they did nothing at all to prevent such expansionism, and consistently sought to prevent Germany from having the means to do anything about it either. The Western democracies’ bad behavior cannot be blamed on Hitler, because the pattern of seeking a weak Germany + complete inaction in response to Soviet aggression began over a decade before the first year of Hitler’s administration.

Why didn’t Hitler capture merchant ships full of food, rather than sink them?

Germany systematically not merely invaded but immediately began killing 3 million Jews living in Poland.

To assert that Germany “immediately began” the extermination of Polish Jewry is false. That extermination did not begin until 1942–several years after the war began, at a time when it had become clear that Germany needed to take very serious measures to address the famine conditions it faced.

False, they were shot, latter put in trucks and gassed with redirected exhaust, then finally camps up and running. Don’t tell lies. Polish Jews were killed in various numbers right after the 39 campaign ended, and not just Jews.

Their was no “Allied food blockade” . . . We all know [Italy] had plenty of food like Germany.

You are simply ignoring truths you don’t like. In 1940, Herbert Hoover wrote,

The food situation in the present war is already more desperate than at the same stage in the [First] World War. … If this war is long continued, there is but one implacable end… the greatest famine in history.

Herbert Hoover was a loser- “A Chicken for every pot” hoover was a busted man in his judgement and Histories judgement of him. Don’t quote politicians, rather Historians. And i bet that quote was about Americans during the depression, not Germans. Germany could just surrender and eat, or grow food and farm.

In 1941, the following happened.

In January Herbert Hoover’s National Committee on Food for the Small Democracies presented the exiled Belgian Government in London with a plan he had agreed with the German authorities to set up soup kitchens in Belgium to feed several million destitute people. . . . The Germans agreed to supply . . . bread grains each month, and the committee was to provide 20,000 tons of fats, soup stock and children’s food. However, Britain refused to allow this aid through their blockade. . . . Hoover said that his information indicated that the Belgian ration was already down to 960 calories – less than half the amount necessary to sustain life – and that many children were already so weak they could no longer attend school.

Well then they could get all the grain they want from Stalin, till they screwed up that deal and …invaded them too. Hitlers fault

If Belgian children were starving to death–and if Britain was refusing to allow food for them through its blockade–then in what way, shape, or form is that not a food blockade? If a nation is at war, it is acceptable for it to blockade iron, oil, ammunition, and other such items. But for British politicians to add food to their list of contraband items indicates their desire to kill civilians. The same lack of morality which led corrupt Western politicians to accept Soviet mass murder also hardened them to the idea of murdering civilians with their own food blockade. They were okay with such killing, as long as their propaganda machine could successfully blame the resultant deaths on the Nazis. If a nation’s populace supports its own politicians’ lies and their acts of mass murder, the politicians in question will have every reason to go right on lying and murdering. It is vital to expose politicians’ lies whenever they occur.

They should have left Belgium as they were not starving before they were plundered. Do you even put any events together to create any causal understanding of how events fit together, or do you just bring up Hoover of all people and sidestep Hitlers decisions that created the problem in the first place?

Imperious Leader

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/12/laurence-m-vance/wwii-starvation-of-useless-eaters/

some points-

The deliberate extermination by starvation of targeted groups became a defining feature of the National Socialist food system.

[Herbert Backe] argued that the Wehrmacht could be fed by diverting Ukrainian grain from Soviet cities. This would solve the problem of feeding a vast army while conveniently eliminating the Soviet urban population, who would starve to death.

Altogether the regime�s agrarian vision for the east generated plans to murder up to 100 million people.

During the Second World War the National Socialists would argue that the need to secure a minimum food ration of 2,300 calories per day for ordinary Germans justified the extermination of 30 million urban Soviets, over 1 million Soviet prisoners of war, and at least as many Polish Jews.

The majority of the 100,000 Jews who died in the Warsaw ghetto succumbed to starvation.

A proportion of the 200,000 mentally ill victims of Germany�s euthanasia programme and 2.35 million Soviet prisoners of war were all given so little food that they were slowly but systematically starved to death.

Although the National Socialists were at their most ruthless in exporting hunger to the Soviet Union and Poland, the plunder of foodstuffs from other occupied countries resulted in a famine which killed 500,000 in Greece, increased death and infant mortality rates and spread malnutrition, particularly among children, in Czechoslovakia, Poland, France, Belgium and Holland. During the Hunger Winter of 1944-45, 22,000 Dutch succumbed to starvation when the Germans cut off supplies to those parts of Holland which the Allies had failed to liberate.

The relentless extraction of food from China in order to feed the Japanese homeland caused chronic hunger and malnutrition among the Chinese population.

Despite the fact that so much has been written about the siege of Leningrad, it is less well known that the Germans regarded the death by starvation of its inhabitants as only one element in a far larger plan to eliminate as many Soviet consumers�or, rather, �useless eaters��as possible.

Why don’t you talk of starvation for Leningrad and what Germany did to cause it… ridiculous. Germany not Allies were primarily the agent that created the problem. Wake up.

KurtGodel7

Imperious Leader wrote,

Why didn’t Hitler capture merchant ships full of food, rather than sink them?

For that matter, why did Hitler sink (rather than capture) the many, many ships filled with tanks, planes, and other weapons that the U.S. sent to Britain and the U.S.S.R.? Maybe Hitler didn’t want anyone (himself included) to have weapons, which is why he sent them to the bottom of the ocean. Then again, it’s also possible that his u-boat force was better suited to sinking enemy vessels than it was to capturing them, in the face of overwhelming British naval superiority.

Don’t tell lies. Polish Jews were killed in various numbers right after the 39 campaign ended, and not just Jews.

From pp. 466 - 468 of Adam Tooze’s book The Wages of Destruction

A general statement on the outline of the Final Solution, to embrace not only the millions of Jews living in Poland and the Soviet Union but also the far smaller communities of Western Europe, was ready by December 1941. The meeting had to be postponed until January. . . .

The genocidal implications of the Generalplan Ost were clearly revealed by a ‘trial run’ organized in the summer of 1942. On 18 - 19 July 1942, at the same time as Himmler communicated the definitive order for the killing of the Jews in the General Government [of German-occupied Poland], he also issued instructions to Odilo Globocnic to carry out an experimental ‘evacuation’ of the entire Polish population of the Zamosc region.

Herbert Hoover was a loser

He was a failure as president, granted. But that does not detract from the value of his other life accomplishments. The United States entered WWI thinking we were doing so for idealistic reasons. After the war ended, Allied “idealism” was revealed to be a sham. First, the anti-German atrocity propaganda was revealed to have been a pack of lies. Second, the way the Allies actually acted at Versailles bore no relationship at all to the idealism, justice, and fair play that Woodrow Wilson’s public pronouncements had led everyone to expect. The American people lost faith in Woodrow Wilson; and he exited office a discredited president. On the other hand, Herbert Hoover’s efforts to feed Europeans during and after WWI displayed the kind of idealism that Woodrow Wilson had pretended to have. Hoover’s famine relief efforts were so well received by the American people that they eventually propelled him to the presidency. The office of president was not one for which Hoover was well-suited. During WWII, he went back to doing what he did best: famine relief. However, his efforts in that direction were hampered by Allied political leaders’ absolute determination to use famine as a weapon, both during and after the war.

But Hoover was far from alone in pointing to the existence of European food shortages. Below is a quote from pp. 418 - 419 of Wages of Destruction.

Grain imports in the late 1930s had run at the rate of more than 7 million tons per annum mostly from Argentina and Canada. These sources of supply were closed off by the British blockade. In addition Western Europe had imported more than 700,000 tons of oil seed. . . . By the summer of 1940 Germany was facing a Europe-wide agricultural crisis. . . . Most dramatic of all was the situation in France, where the grain harvest of 1940 was less than half of what it had been in 1938. In Germany itself 1940 brought a noticeable fall in grain yields . . .

Below is another quote, from page 477

Nor can the so-called ‘Hunger Plan’ be described as secret. . . . And, perhaps most importantly, no effort was made to hide the wider rationale of the individual acts of brutality that the programme required. . . . This genocidal plan [to starve large numbers of people living in captured Soviet cities] commanded such wide-ranging support because it concerned a practical issue, the importance of which, following Germany’s experience in World War I, was obvious to all: the need to secure the food supply of the German population, if necessary at the expense of the population of the Soviet Union. . . .

By December 1940 the entire military and political leadership of the Third Reich was convinced that this was the last year in which they could approach the food question with any confidence. Nor was this simply a German problem. All of the Western European territories which had fallen under German domination in 1940 had substantial grain deficits.

Germany could just surrender and eat

Erich Hartmann was the highest scoring ace in history. He said the following:

In fact I would say that in our group there were the majority who found all the National Socialist idiocy a little sickening. Hrabak made it a point to explain to the new young pilots that if they thought they were fighting for National Socialism and the Fuhrer they needed to transfer to the Waffen SS or something.

Hartmann described the conditions he saw once the Red Army took over the eastern half of Germany.

The Russians then separated the women and girls from the men, and the most horrible things happened. . . . We saw this; the Americans saw this, and we could do nothing to stop it. Men who fought like lions cried like babies at the sight of complete strangers being raped repeatedly. A couple of girls managed to run to a truck and the Americans pulled them in, but the Russians, most were drunk pointed their guns at the allies and fired a few shots. Then the truck drivers decided to drive away quickly. Some women were shot after the rapes. Others were not so lucky. I remember a twelve year old girl . . . being raped by several soldiers. She died from these acts soon afterward. Then more Russians came, and it began all over again and lasted through the night. During the night, entire families committed suicide with men killing their wives and daughters, then themselves.

But at least a German surrender would allow the Germans to eat, right? Wrong!

On March 20, 1945, President Roosevelt was warned that the JCS 1067 was not workable: it would let the Germans “stew in their own juice”. Roosevelt’s response was “Let them have soup kitchens! Let their economy sink!” Asked if he wanted the German people to starve, he replied, “Why not?”[32]

Toward the end of the war, a description of the Morgenthau Plan (JCS 1067) was leaked. A Swiss newspaper responded with the following words:

So far, the Allies have not offered the opposition any serious encouragement. On the contrary, they have again and again welded together the people and the Nazis by statements published, either out of indifference or with a purpose. To take a recent example, the Morgenthau plan gave Dr. Goebbels the best possible chance. He was able to prove to his countrymen, in black and white, that the enemy planned the enslavement of Germany. The conviction that Germany had nothing to expect from defeat but oppression and exploitation still prevails, and that accounts for the fact that the Germans continue to fight. It is not a question of a regime, but of the homeland itself, and to save that, every German is bound to obey the call, whether he be Nazi or member of the opposition.

Imperious Leader

Why didn’t Hitler capture merchant ships full of food, rather than sink them?

For that matter, why did Hitler sink (rather than capture) the many, many ships filled with tanks, planes, and other weapons that the U.S. sent to Britain and the U.S.S.R.? Maybe Hitler didn’t want anyone (himself included) to have weapons, which is why he sent them to the bottom of the ocean. Then again, it’s also possible that his u-boat force was better suited to sinking enemy vessels than it was to capturing them, in the face of overwhelming British naval superiority.

The answer is the food shortage was not acute enough to warrant these actions. Many sinkings instead could have been boarded and sailed to France as prizes. Its been done before but the need was not warranted.

Don’t tell lies. Polish Jews were killed in various numbers right after the 39 campaign ended, and not just Jews.

From pp. 466 - 468 of Adam Tooze’s book The Wages of Destruction

wrong as usual. go look it up. Go look up Operation Tannenburg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_crimes_against_the_Polish_nation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Sunday_(1939)

Grain imports in the late 1930s had run at the rate of more than 7 million tons per annum mostly from Argentina and Canada. These sources of supply were closed off by the British blockade. In addition Western Europe had imported more than 700,000 tons of oil seed. . . . By the summer of 1940 Germany was facing a Europe-wide agricultural crisis. . . . Most dramatic of all was the situation in France, where the grain harvest of 1940 was less than half of what it had been in 1938. In Germany itself 1940 brought a noticeable fall in grain yields . . .

The grain could have been raised in Ukraine, so this is bogus.

Grain imports in the late 1930s had run at the rate of more than 7 million tons per annum mostly from Argentina and Canada. These sources of supply were closed off by the British blockade. In addition Western Europe had imported more than 700,000 tons of oil seed. . . . By the summer of 1940 Germany was facing a Europe-wide agricultural crisis. . . . Most dramatic of all was the situation in France, where the grain harvest of 1940 was less than half of what it had been in 1938. In Germany itself 1940 brought a noticeable fall in grain yields . . .

Below is another quote, from page 477

Nor can the so-called ‘Hunger Plan’ be described as secret. . . . And, perhaps most importantly, no effort was made to hide the wider rationale of the individual acts of brutality that the programme required. . . . This genocidal plan [to starve large numbers of people living in captured Soviet cities] commanded such wide-ranging support because it concerned a practical issue, the importance of which, following Germany’s experience in World War I, was obvious to all: the need to secure the food supply of the German population, if necessary at the expense of the population of the Soviet Union. . . .

By December 1940 the entire military and political leadership of the Third Reich was convinced that this was the last year in which they could approach the food question with any confidence. Nor was this simply a German problem. All of the Western European territories which had fallen under German domination in 1940 had substantial grain deficits.

Germany could just surrender and eat

Erich Hartmann was the highest scoring ace in history. He said the following:

In fact I would say that in our group there were the majority who found all the National Socialist idiocy a little sickening. Hrabak made it a point to explain to the new young pilots that if they thought they were fighting for National Socialism and the Fuhrer they needed to transfer to the Waffen SS or something.

Hartmann described the conditions he saw once the Red Army took over the eastern half of Germany.

The Russians then separated the women and girls from the men, and the most horrible things happened. . . . We saw this; the Americans saw this, and we could do nothing to stop it. Men who fought like lions cried like babies at the sight of complete strangers being raped repeatedly. A couple of girls managed to run to a truck and the Americans pulled them in, but the Russians, most were drunk pointed their guns at the allies and fired a few shots. Then the truck drivers decided to drive away quickly. Some women were shot after the rapes. Others were not so lucky. I remember a twelve year old girl . . . being raped by several soldiers. She died from these acts soon afterward. Then more Russians came, and it began all over again and lasted through the night. During the night, entire families committed suicide with men killing their wives and daughters, then themselves.

But at least a German surrender would allow the Germans to eat, right? Wrong!

On March 20, 1945, President Roosevelt was warned that the JCS 1067 was not workable: it would let the Germans “stew in their own juice”. Roosevelt’s response was “Let them have soup kitchens! Let their economy sink!” Asked if he wanted the German people to starve, he replied, “Why not?”[32]

Toward the end of the war, a description of the Morgenthau Plan (JCS 1067) was leaked. A Swiss newspaper responded with the following words:

So far, the Allies have not offered the opposition any serious encouragement. On the contrary, they have again and again welded together the people and the Nazis by statements published, either out of indifference or with a purpose. To take a recent example, the Morgenthau plan gave Dr. Goebbels the best possible chance. He was able to prove to his countrymen, in black and white, that the enemy planned the enslavement of Germany. The conviction that Germany had nothing to expect from defeat but oppression and exploitation still prevails, and that accounts for the fact that the Germans continue to fight. It is not a question of a regime, but of the homeland itself, and to save that, every German is bound to obey the call, whether he be Nazi or member of the opposition.

The deliberate extermination by starvation of targeted groups became a defining feature of the National Socialist food system.

[Herbert Backe] argued that the Wehrmacht could be fed by diverting Ukrainian grain from Soviet cities. This would solve the problem of feeding a vast army while conveniently eliminating the Soviet urban population, who would starve to death.

Altogether the regime�s agrarian vision for the east generated plans to murder up to 100 million people.

During the Second World War the National Socialists would argue that the need to secure a minimum food ration of 2,300 calories per day for ordinary Germans justified the extermination of 30 million urban Soviets, over 1 million Soviet prisoners of war, and at least as many Polish Jews.

The majority of the 100,000 Jews who died in the Warsaw ghetto succumbed to starvation.

A proportion of the 200,000 mentally ill victims of Germanys euthanasia programme and 2.35 million Soviet prisoners of war were all given so little food that they were slowly but systematically starved to death.

Although the National Socialists were at their most ruthless in exporting hunger to the Soviet Union and Poland, the plunder of foodstuffs from other occupied countries resulted in a famine which killed 500,000 in Greece, increased death and infant mortality rates and spread malnutrition, particularly among children, in Czechoslovakia, Poland, France, Belgium and Holland. During the Hunger Winter of 1944-45, 22,000 Dutch succumbed to starvation when the Germans cut off supplies to those parts of Holland which the Allies had failed to liberate.

The relentless extraction of food from China in order to feed the Japanese homeland caused chronic hunger and malnutrition among the Chinese population.

Despite the fact that so much has been written about the siege of Leningrad, it is less well known that the Germans regarded the death by starvation of its inhabitants as only one element in a far larger plan to eliminate as many Soviet consumers or, rather, “useless eaters” as possible.

WraithZer0

Side story:

I was discussing this thread with a friend, in a bar, several days ago. My wife recently informed me that, while I was heavily engaged in this conversation, there was someone mean-mugging me pretty hard. Like they were intently listening and judging our conversation. My wife thought that maybe this person thought I was some sort of NAZI sympathizer. That made me laugh. Though, I could see where someone jumping into this kind of conversation would have strange regards to it. I had to explain both sides of the arguments and field their relevance accordingly, without prejudice. That way the story is better understood and may contain less bias.

I hope that this entertained you as much as it did me when she told me about it. Carry on. 8-)

KurtGodel7

Imperious Leader wrote:

The answer is the food shortage was not acute enough to warrant these actions.

And maybe Germany’s military situation was not acute enough to warrant commandeering merchant vessels laden with weapons. Either that, or you simply can’t commandeer very many enemy vessels when the enemy completely controls the surface of the water, and has radar, and has increasingly long-ranged aircraft, and has started using convoys.

The grain could have been raised in Ukraine, so this is bogus.

From pp. 477 - 480 of Wages of Destruction

As we have discussed, the ‘bread basket of the Ukraine’ played a key role in all the various military-economic assessments of the Barbarossa campaign prepared over the winter of 1940-41. For Hitler, it was the key priority, to be achieved prior to any military consideration, the importance of which was only reinforced by the alarming decline in German grain stocks. . . .

As Backe well understood, however, the Ukraine was not the limitless granary of imperialist cliche. The Ukraine, in fact, produced only a small net surplus of grain for export outside the Soviet Union. This was due, on the one hand, to the backwardness of Russian agronomy and on the other hand to the extraordinarily rapid growth in the Soviet urban population. Since 1928 Stalin had stamped an urban civilization of 30 million inhabitants out of the ground. The food for this vast new urban proletariat came from the Ukraine. To conventional economic analysis in Berlin this implied that even if the Ukraine was successfully conquered, Germany could expect little immediate benefit. It would, after all, take years before productivity could be substantially increased. Herman Backe, however, drew radically different conclusions. To enable the grain surplus of the Ukraine to be directed immediately towards German needs, it was necessary simply to cut the Soviet cities out of the food chain. After ten years of Stalinist urbanization, the urban population of the western Soviet Union was now to be starved to death.

That such a scheme should come from the pen of Herman Backe can come as no surprise. . . . What is perhaps more surprising is the alacrity with which Backe’s suggestion was taken up by the rest of the Ministerial bureaucracy in Berlin, above all by the chief economic expert of the Oberkommando Wehrmacht (OKW), General Thomas. At times, as we have seen, Thomas had toyed with opposition to Hitler’s war. But at heart, the General was a ruthless pragmatist. Germany’s future as a great power was Thomas’s only real concern. The raison d’etre of his office in the OKW was to prevent the kind of domestic crisis that had crippled the German war effort in World War I. Thomas was fully apprised of the precariousness of Germany’s food situation and saw no need to quibble with Backe’s calculations. . . .

According to General Thomas’s secretariat the meeting concluded as follows:

1.) The war can only be continued, if the entire Wehrmacht is fed from Russia in the third year of the war.
2.) If we take what we need out of the country, there can be no doubt that many millions of people will die of starvation.
3.) The most important issues are the recovery and removal of oil seeds, oil cake and only then the removal of grain.

The minute did not specify the number of millions that the Germans intended to starve. . . . Backe himself put the figure for the ‘surplus population’ of the Soviet Union at between 20 and 30 million, and over the coming months these numbers established themselves as a common reference point. . . .

Efforts to save the population from death by starvation by drawing on the surplus of the black earth regions can only be at the expense of the food supply to Europe. They diminish the staying power of Germany in the war and the resistance of Germany and Europe to the blockade. There must be absolute clarity about this . . . A claim by the [local] population on the German administration . . . is rejected right from the start.

One of the links you provided consisted of a book review. In that book review there was the claim that the Germans intended to starve 100 million people to death. That 100 million smelled like a made-up number. Germany’s government had concluded that there were 20 - 30 million people it would be unable to feed due to the Allied food blockade. While I’m highly dubious of that 100 million number, I nevertheless found a great deal of good content in your own link.

What is surprising, however, is the starvation that resulted from Allied policies.

India, which, as part of the British Empire, supplied “a large proportion of the soldiers who fought against the Japanese.” Yet, in Bengal, the “Allied powers made their own substantial contribution to wartime hunger, malnutrition and starvation” when 3 million Indians “died of a preventable man-made famine.” . . .

When Churchill declared the blockade in August of 1940*, he was “adamant that there was to be no question of food aid.” It might “relieve the Germans of the need to feed the people, and help their war effort.” Former American president Herbert Hoover was infuriated, and described Churchill as “a militarist of the extreme school who held that incidental starvation of women and children was justified.” . . .

The blockade of Germany in World War I contributed to the rise of Hitler. Writes Collingham: “The winter of 1918-1919 was the hungriest and most miserable for the German population. . . . Hitler (and many others who would later take up positions of power under the National Socialists) developed an acute awareness of the dangers of civilian hunger. . . . Indeed, Hitler developed an obsession with the need to secure the German food supply, especially at a time of war.” . . .

Chamberlain and Daladier initiated the food blockade of Germany back in September 1939. The author is either unaware of this fact, or is referencing a public affirmation of the blockade Churchill had made, long after it had been put into place.

Imperious Leader

What is surprising, however, is the starvation that resulted from Allied policies.

What is surprising, however, is the starvation resulted directly from NAZI policies.

The deliberate extermination by starvation of targeted groups became a defining feature of the National Socialist food system.

[Herbert Backe] argued that the Wehrmacht could be fed by diverting Ukrainian grain from Soviet cities. This would solve the problem of feeding a vast army while conveniently eliminating the Soviet urban population, who would starve to death.

Altogether the regime�s agrarian vision for the east generated plans to murder up to 100 million people.

During the Second World War the National Socialists would argue that the need to secure a minimum food ration of 2,300 calories per day for ordinary Germans justified the extermination of 30 million urban Soviets, over 1 million Soviet prisoners of war, and at least as many Polish Jews.

The majority of the 100,000 Jews who died in the Warsaw ghetto succumbed to starvation.

A proportion of the 200,000 mentally ill victims of Germanys euthanasia programme and 2.35 million Soviet prisoners of war were all given so little food that they were slowly but systematically starved to death.

Although the National Socialists were at their most ruthless in exporting hunger to the Soviet Union and Poland, the plunder of foodstuffs from other occupied countries resulted in a famine which killed 500,000 in Greece, increased death and infant mortality rates and spread malnutrition, particularly among children, in Czechoslovakia, Poland, France, Belgium and Holland. During the Hunger Winter of 1944-45, 22,000 Dutch succumbed to starvation when the Germans cut off supplies to those parts of Holland which the Allies had failed to liberate.

The relentless extraction of food from China in order to feed the Japanese homeland caused chronic hunger and malnutrition among the Chinese population.

Despite the fact that so much has been written about the siege of Leningrad, it is less well known that the Germans regarded the death by starvation of its inhabitants as only one element in a far larger plan to eliminate as many Soviet consumers or, rather, “useless eaters” as possible.

Funny how the Germans near the end of the war didn’t use the bogus “allied food blockage” garbage as an excuse for all the murdered people. They weren’t stupid enough to get laughed out to the ropes directly for even mentioning it. Rather they tried to cover up their crimes and accelerate the murders. Their only mention at Nuremberg was “they were following orders”, which were to systematically murder entire groups of people during the entire war and years before it.

Kurt you need to be ashamed of yourself for believing in your nonsense. It was almost like arguing with flat earth society people… a big waste. Sorry but you read all the coo coo literature and started hating Churchill. I’m quite sure you don’t have a university degree in History, and all that self taught reading led you to the wrong conclusions. Sorry man.

Imperious Leader

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade_of_Germany_(1939–45)

ColonelCarter

@Imperious:

What is surprising, however, is the starvation resulted directly from NAZI policies.

The widespread starvation in Europe during the years of WWII was not a result of Nazi policies; it was a result of the prevention of food imports from neutral nations by the British. The forcing of the Poles, Jews, Slavs, Soviets, etc. to burden this starvation is what was the result of Nazi policies. Any extra deaths throughout the war (a more significant number at the end since they didn’t have to feed as much conquered territory) are also at the fault of the Nazis.

@Imperious:

Sorry but you read all the coo coo literature

What makes it “cuckoo”? The fact that it highlights Allied shortcomings? Denying that the Allies had shortcomings is as wrong and ahistorical as denying that the Axis had shortcomings. If it acts like the Germans did nothing wrong? There’s plenty of literature that acts like the Allies did nothing wrong that you seem to have no qualms with, even though it’s also not truthful.

Private-Panic

@ColonelCarter:

The widespread starvation in Europe during the years of WWII was not a result of Nazi policies; it was a result of the prevention of food imports from neutral nations by the British. The forcing of the Poles, Jews, Slavs, Soviets, etc. to burden this starvation is what was the result of Nazi policies. Any extra deaths throughout the war (a more significant number at the end since they didn’t have to feed as much conquered territory) are also at the fault of the Nazis.

Colonel Carter - I agree with you and said the same thing ad nauseam in my posts earlier in this thread. Ultimately I failed to persuade Kurt to accept this balance of responsibility. It will be interesting to see whether you can achieve that with IL.

Accepting that balance of responsibility is not the same thing as ascribing equal moral guilt. Both can be responsible while the actions of one party may be worthy of greater approbation. Clearly the Nazis’ genocidal policies were evil. I myself am as yet undecided wrt the allies’ blockade, which merits debate. Until there is agreement (amongst those that contribute most) as to the responsibility of both the allies and the Nazis it seems that no such debate can happen.

Good luck.

Narvik

@Imperious:

Sorry but you read all the coo coo literature

KurtGodel7

Imperious Leader wrote,

Sorry but you read all the coo coo literature

The fact that someone who drank the Allied Kool Aid labels something “coo coo literature” does not make it so. Adam Tooze’s Wages of Destruction has been praised by The Times (London), The Boston Globe, The New York Sun, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, History Today, The Seattle Times, Sunday Telegraph (London). You’re going to find it extraordinarily difficult to persuade your audience that all those people are coo coos who don’t understand real history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade_of_Germany_(1939–45)

From your own link:

As 1940 drew to a close, the situation for many of Europe’s 525 million people was dire. With the food supply reduced by 15% by the blockade and another 15% by poor harvests, starvation and diseases such as influenza, pneumonia, tuberculosis, typhus and cholera were a threat.

Their only mention at Nuremberg was “they were following orders”, which were to systematically
murder entire groups of people during the entire war and years before it.

From the Wikipedia article about the Nuremberg Trials:

Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court Harlan Fiske Stone called the Nuremberg trials a fraud. “(Chief U.S. prosecutor) Jackson is away conducting his high-grade lynching party in Nuremberg,” he wrote. “I don’t mind what he does to the Nazis, but I hate to see the pretense that he is running a court and proceeding according to common law. This is a little too sanctimonious a fraud to meet my old-fashioned ideas.”[71] . . .

Jackson, in a letter discussing the weaknesses of the trial, in October 1945 told U.S. President Harry S. Truman that the Allies themselves “have done or are doing some of the very things we are prosecuting the Germans for.” . . .

Associate Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas charged that the Allies were guilty of “substituting power for principle” at Nuremberg. . . .

One of the charges, brought against Keitel, Jodl, and Ribbentrop included conspiracy to commit aggression against Poland in 1939. The Secret Protocols of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 23 August 1939, proposed the partition of Poland between the Germans and the Soviets (which was subsequently executed in September 1939); however, Soviet leaders were not tried for being part of the same conspiracy.[78] Instead, the Tribunal proclaimed the Secret Protocols of the Non-Aggression Pact to be a forgery. Moreover, Allied Powers Britain and Soviet Union were not tried for preparing and conducting the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran and the Winter War, respectively. . . .

The trials were conducted under their own rules of evidence. The Charter of the International Military Tribunal permitted the use of normally inadmissible “evidence”. Article 19 specified that “The Tribunal shall not be bound by technical rules of evidence.” [In other words, they were free to make stuff up.] . . .

Freda Utley, in her 1949 book The High Cost of Vengeance[83] charged the court with amongst other things double standards. She pointed to the Allied use of civilian forced labor, and deliberate starvation of civilians[84][85] in the occupied territories. She also noted that General Rudenko, the chief Soviet prosecutor, after the trials became commandant of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. . . .

The main Soviet judge, Iona Nikitchenko, presided over some of the most notorious of Joseph Stalin’s show trials during the Great Purges of 1936 to 1938, where he among other things sentenced Kamenev and Zinoviev.[88] According to the declassified Soviet archives, 681,692 people arrested for “counter-revolutionary and state crimes” were shot in 1937 and 1938 alone–an average of over 900 executions a day.[89]

The Soviet prosecutor, Roman Rudenko, later became commandant of NKVD special camp Nr. 7.[90] By the time the camp closed in the spring of 1950, at least 12,000 prisoners had died due to the catastrophic prison conditions, hunger and psychological or physical exhaustion.[91] . . .

In an editorial at the time The Economist, a British weekly newspaper, criticised the hypocrisy of both Britain and France. “Among crimes against humanity stands the offence of the indiscriminate bombing of civilian populations. Can the Americans who dropped the atom bomb and the British who destroyed the cities of western Germany plead ‘not guilty’ on this count? Crimes against humanity also include the mass expulsion of populations. Can the Anglo-Saxon leaders who at Potsdam condoned the expulsion of millions of Germans from their homes hold themselves completely innocent?”

After WWII, Britain operated a concentration camp/torture camp at Bad Nenndorf. Below is a quote from a Guardian article.

Initially, most of the detainees were Nazi party members or former members of the SS . . .

Former prisoners told Hayward that they had been whipped as well as beaten. This, the detective said, seemed unbelievable, until “our inquiries of warders and guards produced most unexpected corroboration”. Threats to execute prisoners, or to arrest, torture and murder their wives and children were considered “perfectly proper”, on the grounds that such threats were never carried out.

Moreover, any prisoner thought to be uncooperative during interrogation was taken to a punishment cell where they would be stripped and repeatedly doused in water. This punishment could continue for weeks, even in sub-zero temperatures. . . .

One victim of the cold cell punishment was Buttlar, who swallowed the spoon handle to escape. An anti-Nazi, he had spent two years as a prisoner of the Gestapo. “I never in all those two years had undergone such treatments,” he said.

If the British were willing to torture Nazi prisoners, and threaten those prisoners’ families, any confessions those prisoners made must be regarded as highly suspect. No more credible than the confessions made at Soviet show trials.

KurtGodel7

Private Panic wrote,

Clearly the Nazis’ genocidal policies were evil. I myself am as yet undecided wrt the allies’ blockade, which merits debate.

The Allies’ food blockade does not merit debate. It merits condemnation. It was among the most serious crimes committed in the entire history of humanity. The fairness or unfairness of the Nazis’ distribution of famine-related deaths is a separate subject. The bottom line is that unless the Nazis surrendered to all the Allies–including the most murderous regime in human history–tens of millions of innocent people were going to starve to death as a result of the Allied food blockade. I don’t see how it’s possible for the Allies to on the one hand stir up moral outrage about the ghastly appearance of human skeletons in the Nazi concentration camps; and on the other to use food as a weapon with which to kill 20 - 30 million innocent people. Allied politicians oozed hypocrisy, but that’s hypocritical even for them!

Private-Panic

That’s one side of an argument Kurt. I am not going to be persuaded by your strength of feeling, no matter how sincere. With me it takes consideration of both sides via a debate, rather than a polemic.

I don’t want to waste your time with another post in response, so let me be helpfully clear - at this point I am sure in my own mind that having such a debate on these boards will not work. Certain things would need to change, such as the thread being dominated by those who are open-minded about the question.

Sorry!

National Socialism vs. Communism.

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