Private Panic wrote,
They saw the murder of six million Jews as very much more preferable (or advantageous) to that of six million of other religions.
The above statement is not entirely accurate. The Nazis were not overly concerned about religion. To them, a Jewish atheist or a Jew who’d converted to Christianity was the same as an observant Jew. The exception to that rule was Jewish Marxists, who were considered worse than Jews generally.
That is what robs the Nazis of the defence of food shortages.
Throughout human history, if almost any major nation was subjected to famine conditions, there would not have been an equality in how those famine effects would have been distributed. The United States’ Declaration of Independence states that all men are created equal. And yet we know that the homeless would suffer more in an American famine than the middle class; and that the middle class would suffer more than Bill Gates or Warren Buffet. One of the core tenets of communism is equality of outcomes. Yet famine deaths in major communist nations have never been equally distributed. Those with the right political connections, or who were part of favored ethnic groups, or who had the right political views, were spared the famines that starved their fellow countrymen. Communists went one step further, and created artificial famines to devastate select groups, while leaving everyone else unharmed.
Perhaps you feel that nations should be held to higher moral standards than those observed by either the 20th century Western democracies or communist nations. If so, I agree with you. But just about any major nation throughout human history would have distributed food unequally during times of famine. If you think I’m wrong about that, I invite you to point to several exceptions: several major nations, at any point in human history, that you think would have treated all categories of people equally during famine.
You wish to target the Allies for their “total war” exigencies (the economic / food blockade) but forgive the Nazis for theirs.
The two cases are not parallel. Britain could have exited the war with Germany any time it chose to, with no territorial loss. The same was also true of France, at least before it fell. Those two nations were at war voluntarily. Their stated reason for going to war was to protect Poland from hostile foreign occupation. But at no point did protection of Poland form any part of their plans, intentions, or policies. Given the circumstances, it made a certain amount of sense for Germany to attempt to use sub warfare to cut Britain off from its food imports on the one hand, while offering it peace without territorial loss or Versailles-type conditions on the other. Had the British people gotten hungry enough, they would have agreed to peace. Had its politicians wanted to continue fighting, they would have been voted out of office.
On the other hand, the Allies imposed a brutal food blockade on Germany–a blockade which resulted in the deaths of millions of Poles. The Allies’ cynical willingness to use food as a weapon to murder so many Poles clearly demonstrates exactly how little concern they had about “protecting” Poland from hostile foreign occupation. Their casual willingness to see Poland annexed by the Soviet Union–despite Stalin’s mass murder of 7 million innocent Ukrainians–is another indication of the contempt with which they regarded Poland and its people.
Soviet attempts to invade and annex Germany began in 1919, with the Polish-Soviet War. Had the Soviet Union won that war, the Red Army would have continued on into Germany. (Which, at the time, was disarmed and on the brink of communist revolution.) After Poland’s victory in the Polish-Soviet War–a victory the Western democracies did nothing at all to assist–the war between Germany and the Soviet Union turned colder. The communists focused first on consolidating their political power and ending the civil war. Once that was achieved, they focused on industrializing. The third stage in the process was to build up their military; and that third stage began no later than 1939. Stage 4 would have consisted of the invasion of Germany.
As long as the Red Army and the Soviet Union stood undefeated, Germany was in mortal danger. The Western democracies could not be trusted to stand up to Soviet expansionism, as they proved again and again. Prior to 1948, no major Western democracy adopted an anti-Soviet foreign policy, or did anything at all to slow the pace of Soviet expansion.
Prior to the beginning of WWII, the Soviet Union had 2.5 times as many people as Germany. It also had far greater access to food, raw materials, and oil than Germany did. Prior to 1944, the Soviets also had a significantly greater ability to produce weapons than did Germany. (In 1942, Soviet military production was 2 - 3 times that of Germany.) Even if the Western democracies had stayed neutral, the Soviet Union alone would have represented a mortal threat to Germany’s very existence. But the Western democracies did not stay neutral. With one brief exception (Chamberlain in 1938), they consistently adopted pro-Soviet, anti-German foreign policies. People say things like “politicians are corrupt” or “politicians are sleazy.” But I don’t think most people realize how corrupt or sleazy or (above all) narcissistic this particular batch of politicians truly was.
Nazi Germany’s circumstances were truly desperate. On the other hand, the consequences of a Soviet occupation would have been (and later turned out to be) unspeakable. It’s been said that desperate times call for desperate measures. If I’m willing to forgive Germany for total war measures which served a military purpose, it’s because I have some inkling of how desperate their military situation was, how unlikely it was for them to avoid the horror of Soviet occupation, and the brutality Bolsheviks consistently imposed upon their victims. None of which excuses any war crimes the Nazis committed which did not serve an underlying military purpose.
If the king selects victims for death on a basis other than being best able to
defend the castle, then his motivation is not defence, but murder.
The king needs to take into account not just ability, but willingness, to defend the castle. If (for example) the king is Polish, and the besiegers are Mongols, the king would be a fool to starve his own Polish subjects in order to feed Mongol prisoners he’d taken. Yes, the Mongol prisoners could do a very good job of helping defend the castle. But they’d be far more likely to assist the Mongol invaders than repel them.
The people most willing to fight for Nazi Germany were the Germans themselves. Those were also the people Hitler most prioritized for scarce food rations. Other groups–such as the Poles–were not willing to fight for Germany; and so received a much lower status on the food totem pole than the Germans received. Romanians were considered about as racially inferior as the Poles. But unlike the Poles, the Romanians were willing to fight for the Axis and against communism. There was not (as far as I’m aware) any effort to starve the Romanians.
