The Holocaust and Generalplan Ost

Today I am going to be talking about some of the great stains on the legacy of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany — stains which seem to not only heavily influence the pathology of the world’s most disproportionately powerful ethnic group on earth, but in general seem to form a bedrock for the current civic religion of America and the western world in general (and also, in a different way, the Eastern world).

Now, as most Holocaust revisionists believe, I agree with the mainstream narrative that some amount of Jews was systemically murdered in the camps by the Germans. Do I think that 6 million Jews were killed by the Germans? No, although I can’t really say how many I think were killed. All I would say is that 6 million is probably overexaggerating to a significant degree, based mostly on 3 things: Firstly, I don’t believe that there were ever 6 million Jews within Nazi-occupied territory. This is primarily due to the proficiency with which Jews evacuated out of Nazi-occupied or Nazi-threatened territory being unrepresented in the Soviet census (this was intentional. The Soviets were known for tampering with the population and ethnic demographics of their census at this time). Secondly, I am skeptical of cremation techniques allegedly used by the Germans in disposing of excavated Jewish corpses (I don’t believe the Germans would have lacked the crematory power to burn 6 million corpses, but the idea that they were turning waterlogged mass graves into pyres is insane to me on all sorts of levels. Thirdly, there much of the statements made at Nuremburg which were once used as concrete Holocaust testimony have been thrown out by most mainstream Holocaust historians, putting the lines of evidence which have stayed relevant into question.

But, I’m not here to talk about Holocaust revisionism in the numerical sense. I’m here to talk about the significantly less dangerous argument of Holocaust Functionalism vs Holocaust Intentionalism — that is, the Germans were never attempting to kill all Jews in Europe, and the Holocaust did not arise out of a need to kill all Jews in Europe. This is even given the “official narrative”.

I think the “Madagascar Plan” is quite well known about in right-wing circles already. The Nazi top brass wanted to repatriate European Jewry out of Europe, into some location in Africa. This is stereotypically considered as Madagascar, but Central Africa and Eritrea were also on the table. This was the plan for European Jewry until the UK blockade made such a plan essentially impossible. Another problem which arose was the closing off of emigration to British Palestine in 1939. I’ve already talked extensively about the Nazi-Zionist relation in this post, but basically the Nazis were promoting German-Jewish immigration to British Palestine basically up until the war. Hitler himself was untrustworthy of a Jewish state in such a significant area, so his decision to promote European Jews immigrating here for half a decade completely derails this idea that Hitler wanted to exterminate European Jewry. He really just wanted them outside of Europe, but preferred somewhere faraway and unimportant like Madagascar.

But what about during the war? That’s what matters, right? That’s when the Holocaust started, right? And what about Hitler’s “prophecy” to the Jews, where he says Jews in Europe will be no more if they bring Germany to war?

Oh, and what about Wannsee? The supposed “decision to enact the final solution”? Well, first of all, Wannsee never calls for the annihilation of all Jews. Wannsee arose at a time when Germany was having food shortages. From the point of view of the German government, they were making a choice between feeding a problematic fifth column, and feeding their soldiers. Churchill was comfortable with the same decision in Bengal, albeit I doubt the British were actually responsible for the Bengal Famine. Stalin was certainly comfortable with his own citizens starving and dying to achieve war goals. Heydrich made many exemptions for Jewish groups he perceived as unproblematic in the Wannsee protocols.

A second issue raised by the Jews specifically in relation to the war, was the danger of a Jewish revolt in the general government. People for some reason take Himmler’s Posen Speeches as evidence of an intention to genocide all Jews, but never consider the context of the speech. According to the official numbers, the the primary surge of Jewish deaths had already happened during 1942. Himmler was speaking with reference particularly to the Jews being deported to concentration camps from the General Government in response to the Warsaw Uprising around half a year prior. The threat of a general Jewish uprising in the General Government was a problem since the beginning of the war and certainly would have promoted a culling of the Jewish population, although never was there a particular goal to kill all of the Jews. After the so-called Operation Reinhard had ended in 1943 the Germans cut down heavily on the number of Jews being deported to ‘death camps’. Later in the war the Germans would be relying on hundreds of thousands of Jewish workers. During Operation Reinhard, we have private diary entries and reports from Hitler’s inner circles never meant to reach an outside audience which suggest Hitler and other Nazi big-wigs were not yet under any impression that the Germans were completely liquidating Jews within their territory.

Here’s some Pasta:

7 March 1942. I read a detailed report from the SD and police regarding a final solution of the Jewish Question. Any final solution involves a tremendous number of new viewpoints. The Jewish Question must be solved within a pan-European frame. There are 11 million Jews still in Europe. They will have to be concentrated later, to begin with, in the East; possibly an island, such as Madagascar, can be assigned to them after the war. —Diary of Joseph Goebbels

Why would the SD lie to Goebbels?

30 May 1942. the Führer does not at all wish that the Jews should be evacuated to Siberia. There, under the harshest living conditions, they would undoubtedly develop again a strong life-element. He would much prefer to resettle them in central Africa. There they would live in a climate that would certainly not make them strong and resistant. In any case, it is the Führer’s goal to make Western Europe completely Jew-free. Here they may no longer have their homeland.

Why would Hitler himself lie to Goebbels? Or are people gonna suggest Goebbels wrote his diaries in 1942 with the foreknowledge that they would be read some day after Germany lost the war?

This also adds a lot of context to the quotes at Wannsee involving a general distaste with allowing certain Jews to form a “Jewish revival” in Siberia having to be dealt with accordingly — often interpreted as meaning that those Jews who do not die from labor must be killed.

Other people near Hitler also reported contrary opinions against the “official narrative”, but it’s very clear that Hitler did not view the Holocaust as the actual Final Solution in his private circles, but rather a wartime necessity which will be followed up by some sort of colonial project in an irrelevant part of the world (for those Jews who survive the war).

This is all quotes post-Wannsee. There are many quotes as well as the aforementioned activities of German officials which completely deconstruct the Intentionalism narrative before Wannsee. But this is something I think most Holocaust historians already believe anyways. My point here is that the actions the Germans took against the Jews during World War II were not historically exceptional. They likely weren’t even the most successful mass killing against the Jews, but that’s a subject for another day. No side during WWII was indignantly opposed to the mass murder of civilians for the war effort.

Now, the other great attack on the Nazi regime is their alleged plan to genocide the Slavs, the so-called “Master Plan for the East”.

Now, to say Hitler was not anti-Slavic would be wrong. Obviously he had his sentiments against the Slavs. I mean, he’s German. This would be like getting mad at Armenians for having grievances with Azeris. Obviously judging by his many Slavic allies during the war, it was also something flexible. But, did Hitler just want to maniacally starve all Slavs? No.

The Hunger Plan — the German plan to pillage the Slavic countryside in order to feed their own men (something which was completely ordinary wartime conduct before the 19th century and the rise of supply lines) is usually falsely conflated with Generalplan Ost in this matter. These are two different things, the Hunger Plan was a war initiative while Generalplan Ost was to happen after the war. Generalplan Ost was supposed to happen over the course of 25-30 years. The Hunger Plan was certainly not friendly to the local populace, but it was completely enabled by the Soviet Union’s willingness to starve its own population anyways and burn their own fields on the retreat. In fact, most of the German barbarity against the soviets was an attempt to pressure the Soviets into negotiating a peace in order to save their country from the destruction. The depopulation of the area was an incidental plus.

Generalplan Ost was a plan for after the war. Just for the record, people mention Generalplan Ost like it was some sort of official policy, which is not true. Generalplan Ost was just a blueprint drawn up by the interior of the SS which was shelved mid-war. The SS is not in charge of German policy, this would be an extremely expensive decades-long project which would be checked by various different offices before actually institutionalized by Hitler. Plans on what to do in the east varied widely across German governors. Alfred Rosenberg, who Hitler had put in charge of eastern affairs, had a soft spot for the Slavs and believed they could potentially be upstanding members of European civilization with the right treatment. Of course, Hitler sidelined Rosenberg’s influence mid-war for leaders with harsher policies towards Slavs, but that’s because then was not the time for idealistic meanderings. Hitler wanted the partisans plaguing the Ruthenian countryside dealt with through harshness. Had Germany won the war it is fair to assume that much of Rosenberg’s influence on eastern affairs would be restored.

People misunderstand Hitler’s ambitions as involving a complete conquest of the Soviet Union and subsequent replacement of the entire country with Germans, just another part of the myth that the Nazis wanted to control the entire world (usually based on random military operations theorized up in the government which obviously were not meant to be realized, something all countries have). Hitler’s personal memoirs suggest he was fine with the continued existence of the Soviet Union so long as they were knocked out of Europe and knocked out of geopolitical significance. Partially because Hitler viewed Stalin and his posse not as Bolsheviks, but just as Machiavellians wearing red. Debatable. Beyond the Urals, the USSR at least served as an interesting experiment. Without their oil fields or fertile wheat fields it was less of an issue, not to mention that the Volga and Ural Mountains provide a much stronger border.

Hitler suggested varying opinions on what should go on in Russia after the war. Mark Mazower’s Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe suggests an unorthodox approach:

Hmm, British rule in India? That doesn’t sound very genocidal, and despite what Indians say they are a testament to it not being genocidal. I believe in other books Hitler is said to compare it to Manifest Destiny, which some may say was genocidal, but… Ehh, I don’t know. This is hardly very different from German plans for Eastern Europe following World War One, which would see it turned into German client states whose economic capital would largely be managed by a German ruling class. Plans for Poland were different, but I’ll talk about Poland in a bit. Keep in mind that at the end of World War One, Germany was occupying a huge swathe of Russia, which the Nazis felt had been incorrectly taken from them at the end of the war and essentially handed over to a power hostile to the West.

Also, Germans already sort of formed something of a local elite in Southern Russia. Germans before the Bolshevik purges owned a third of the farmland in Southern Russia and Ukraine, and made up 15% of Kulaks despite being only 2% of the population.

Either way, 25 to 30 years is a lot of time to move Slavs wherever. The Soviets had already been heavily involved in mass population transfers, moving ethnicities all across Siberia, Assyrian-style. Given that the plan envisioned the deportation of around 30 million people (much of the Slavic population was meant to be assimilated, usually ranging from 1/2 to 1/4 with the exception of Poland), that would entail an average deportation rate of around 1 million per year. And in actuality, the program probably would have taken a much longer period of time due to bureaucratic drag and western kvetching. The Soviets were able to spontaneously deport significantly more than 1 million people during some years.

Another very important thing to note about Generalplan Ost is that much of the deportation had already been done by the Soviets themselves. The Soviets not only successfully moved most of their industry to Transuralic cities during the war, but also over 10 million of their own citizens. This was especially the case in cities.

Following the defeat of the Germans, the Soviet government engaged in large-scale ethnic cleansing of Germans living in Eastern Europe, resulting in the deaths of 500,000 to 3 million German civilians who had mostly belonged to Eastern European communities dating back centuries, as well as Germans living in German territories now given to Poland (which would be peopled by Poles mostly from Eastern Poland, now being taken by the USSR).

It’s worth noting that this map is somewhat misleading, because those areas in red were likely also inhabited by non-Germans (ex: a city with a German quarter, a Jewish quarter, and a Polish quarter), but the point is that Germans had a significant presence in Eastern Europe for multiple reasons. Germans settled in the Baltic countries and Poland since medieval times, while Germans in Ukraine and Hungary are more the result of encouraged settlement by the ethnically German monarchs ruling those areas.

A major justification of Generalplan Ost, was that Eastern Europe had historically been Germanic anyways. Particularly, Poland and significant parts of Ukraine had been settled by Eastern Germanic tribes. That which wasn’t German, was probably not Slavic. Balts may have had a greater range. Germans had been in Poland for a very long time, probably before 500 BC. Germans in Eastern Europe had already been forced to flee somewhat by the Huns, but the Slavic migrations did them in. We don’t have verifiably proto-Slavic populations DNA afaik, but the earliest Slavs are already fairly similar to modern Slavs, so I don’t think they mixed much with local Goths and certainly not with Scythians.

Both the Holocaust and Generalplan Ost are framed as exceptionally bad events despite being historically ordinary events, which are not even especially cruel compared to the ambitions of other powers during the war. The Morgenthau plan called for the starvation of 40% of Germany’s population, and was only avoided due to it being exposed to the media as a plan which would necessitate mass starvation. And like I said, the Soviets were already knees-deep in throwing their own groups all over the place. Empires have been doing this since at least the Assyrians.