Could Generalplan Ost "work"

[Deleted member 6086]

Disclaimer: Generalplan Ost would have been likely the single greatest crime in human history, at least on the timescale of a single lifetime. By "work" I do not mean that it would ever have been a good thing for the world in any way.

Rather, here I define "work" here as meeting two basic Nazi objectives, both requiring a German conquest of the European USSR as a prerequisite. In order of priority, they would be:

1) Making the former European regions of the USSR a largely ethnic German realm, through a process of colonization inspired by the medieval Germanization of today's Eastern Germany.

2) Having this region be a net gain rather than a sink on German resources within a reasonable timeframe (presumably, a few decades). A complication is that there was an ideological emphasis on the "model settlement" being a medieval-style utopic farming village, which frankly sounds ludicrous for an industrial society like 20th century Germany

My feeling is that any serious attempt to achieve 1) hurts 2) and vice versa, but I'd like to hear your opinions.

 

[RedSword12]

There weren't enough Germans to settle the East, nor was there a sizable number who would forsake their comfortable lives in modernized Germany for an "idyllic" agrarian lifestyle taking constant potshots from partizans.

 

[Sam R.]

The enslavement plans mean Germanisation fails.

the economic plan was for a general loss benefitting a particular culture. Honestly this too would fail. It is tractors. Not slaves.

 

[SIngemeister]

It would end up being the world's most horrific passive rewilding project.

 

[Wesley_Lewt]

As I understand it the objective was to make Greater Germany food and oil sufficient so Greater Germany could economically withstand being cut of from the world market as war with the the USA and Britain would always inevitably entail.

Of course moving the food from Ukraine etc to Germany in sufficient quanitity wasn't going to work, so you move people. Sending a huge army and having it supply itself partially acieved this. As far as I am aware they had percentage population reduction targets for all eastern european ethnic groups. They didn't intend to kill all agricultural labourers. The urban population was to be almost completely eliminated.

Hunger Plan - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Anyway that's how Adam Tooze tells it

The Wages of Destruction - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[DougM]

Do not het me wrong. Ost would have been unbelievably horrid and an abomination but lets not act like it has nothing similar. If you look at some of Stalins orders and his overall purges and if you look at Chinas stunts and at the KhmerRouge we see other insane dictators doing sinilaly horrible things,
That being said it would be a mess that would be seeing fighting for as long as German decendents are living there or at least as long as the locals still exist in the area. Kind of like the. mess we see in various areas such as the middle east.

 

[Johnrankins]

Bluntly it is insane. Where are they going to get the men to become farmers? They could turn some of the soldiers into farmers which means the farmers are less guarded against any partisans that escaped the round up and any rump USSR that might be around. They could take factory workers which means less industrial production. They could move German famers east who don't know how to farm out east and would take time to adapt to the new conditions and would need to be replaced themselves on their own farms.

 

[Deleted member 6086]

They could move German famers east who don't know how to farm out east and would take time to adapt to the new conditions and would need to be replaced themselves on their own farms.

I might be wrong here, but I'd expect that German agriculture was as generally mechanized/intensive in the 1940s as the rest of Western Europe - i.e., you don't need so many farmers anymore. But if you want most rural Germans in the East to be farmers themselves and not just overseers of native farm labor, which apparently the Nazis wanted for ideological reasons, you'd probably have to keep things as primitive as possible. I can't see "who wants to roleplay a 1870s Russian farm" being a very popular option with urban or rural Germans.

 

[Johnrankins]

I might be wrong here, but I'd expect that German agriculture was as generally mechanized/intensive in the 1940s as the rest of Western Europe - i.e., you don't need so many farmers anymore. But if you want most rural Germans in the East to be farmers themselves and not just overseers of native farm labor, which apparently the Nazis wanted for ideological reasons, you'd probably have to keep things as primitive as possible. I can't see "who wants to roleplay a 1870s Russian farm" being a very popular option with urban or rural Germans.

Mechanization or no mechanization you will still need farmers. Not as many as 1800 but those tractors don't drive themselves.

 

[Aisha Clan-Clan]

In terms of exterminating the slavs, central asians, koreans and chinese? Yeah, sure it'd be possible. Horrible but possible to do. Do note my proposal shall we say expands the targetted area slightly to OTL's less ambitious plans.

Actually getting germans to go become farmers? No. nonstarter given the demographic transition.

 

[Wesley_Lewt]

Bluntly it is insane. Where are they going to get the men to become farmers? They could turn some of the soldiers into farmers which means the farmers are less guarded against any partisans that escaped the round up and any rump USSR that might be around. They could take factory workers which means less industrial production. They could move German famers east who don't know how to farm out east and would take time to adapt to the new conditions and would need to be replaced themselves on their own farms.

The farmers would mostly be enslaved eastern europeans. Also some Germans because Germany had more people than it could feed while cut off from the world market.

They didn't plan on a round up, just grabbing the food and those not assigned rations emigrate east or die. They called it 'the hunger plan'.

They intended to eliminate almost all urban centres and industrial production in the east.

 

[Wesley_Lewt]

Actually getting germans to go become farmers? No. nonstarter given the demographic transition.

Even if they are starving in Germany and increased food rations are offered in the east because there is a surplus there given the extermination of the eastern urban populations and transport problems?

 

[EWHM]

Put bluntly, Germany didn't have anywhere near the fertility levels necessary to ethnically cleanse and occupy all that much territory. They probably could have largely swallowed Poland and maybe a little of the Baltics, if you presume they got a Baby Boom as victors in the war like the US got historically. But it's really hard to occupy that much Lebensraum when you doing have enough people to 'Leben' in the 'raum'.

 

[EagleKeeper]

It could have worked if they had accepted the fact that many of the native people in the region saw them and welcomed them. If they had provided a system that provided a 'caste' system that allowed people to hope that they, or their children, or even their children's children could be assimilated into the new society they could have made use of the large region and all its resources. This is what the British Empire did. the empire fed raw material into the factories and institutions of the home country. A select few of the colonial empire were allowed to move upward either in their home area or if very lucky (and had skills and or brains) were able to come to the center of the empire.

You don't do this by systematically killing off the entire population of the conquered territory. You keep the locals as the core muscle of the enterprises but bring in people from the 'home country' in management, technical and educational roles. But you always give the locals hope that they will be able to move up.

The Germans did not do this so they could not hope to make use of those conquered territories

 

[Captain Homicide]

Informative discussions on Generalplan Ost can be found if you read through these threads though you can find more on the topic elsewhere.

1: Making the former European regions of the USSR a largely ethnic German realm, through a process of colonization inspired by the medieval Germanization of today's Eastern Germany.

I believe they could do this over the 25 year period described in Generalplan Ost. As elaborated in the threads I linked it wouldn’t be difficult for the Reich to kill most of the Slavs (85% of Poles, 50% of Estonians etc) through extermination through labor, starvation, exposure and disease and enslave the survivors as chattel. Much of the depopulation would be hands off due to the harsh climate of Eastern Europe and German forces simply taking food and medicine. IOTL Stalin and Mao showed it’s easy to kill millions through starvation and neglect in a short period and they weren’t devoted to genocide like the Reich was and would be if they won the war.

Regarding the settlers the plan was to have 12 million Aryan settlers in Eastern Europe (80 people per square kilometer). They likely couldn’t get 12 million but I think half that is plausible. As to whether or not they could kill 100+ million Slavs and subsequently make Eastern Europe profitable is a different subject and I’m not well versed in economics so I won’t comment on it.

Here is a budget breakdown of the version of Generalplan Ost approved by Hitler:

 

[ObssesedNuker]

I'll just toss in my posts on the subject:

“Full completion of Generalplan Ost” and “reformed/successful” Nazi Germany are total oxymorons. Full completion of Generalplan Ost would be economic, industrial and military suicide for Germany - even if they could stomach the monstrous inhumanity of it. Within the Reich, Germany was to be the industrial heart of Europe in order to maintain its control, fed food and raw materials by its colonies. The problem is that this economic future was in direct contradiction to the eastern colonization plans that Ost called for. Germany could have one or the other, not both.

Nazi economist, SS-Hauptsurmfuhrer Helmut Schubert laid it out very clearly in a 1942 critique of Generalplan Ost. The fundamental problem was manpower. Germany was rapidly urbanizing and was already having problems finding labour for farms within its borders. Schubert correctly predicted that his process could be expected to accelerate post war which would leave Germany ever shorter on potential settler-farmers for the east. Small infusions of a few thousand Germans wouldn't work. They'd just marry into the locals and dillute the blood. But large forced displacements of millions would wreck the German economy and endanger Germany's ability to hold down its empire with industrialized and mechanized force. In fact, to maintain the German industry Schubert foresaw (again correctly) that post-war Germany would actually need to import large numbers of foreign workers. In short, Germany had to choose between economic control of Europe, or de-industrialization and settlement of the East. [Mazower, "Hitler's Empire, pp.217-218]

The “just use the locals as slaves” or “aryanize the locals” suggestion also don’t ultimately hold water. On the former, Generalplan Ost called for butchering the locals on the order of tens of millions, which now meant there would be a manpower hole in the tens of millions. Even only moderating themselves to “only” the elimination of 50% of the population in a 30-year period left them without enough workers to adequately operate the economy of Poland, never mind the occupied territories of the USSR. Some some Nazi administrators resorted to arbitrarily "Germanizing" conquered peoples, but even with them conjuring something on the order of 40 million or so “Germans” from the occupied populace left them with a vast, crippling manpower shortage.

The actual fate of those arbitrarily reclassified “Germans” also shows the fatal flaw with trying “aryanize the locals” suggestion. None of these peoples were actually Germans and everyone knew it regardless of what the official paperwork said. As a result, the actual Germans still treated these new "Germans" like shit. It was made clear that all those called Germans would not be equal in the New Order. Suffice to say, that's grounds for future rebellion right there.

Actually going through with Generalplan Ost makes the collapse of the Reich an inevitability. There would be too much internal and external pressure, even if it had managed to achieve Hitler's ideal frontiers. It was never based on a sound concept, and better managed colonial Empires died to lesser stresses.

The only way Nazi Germany has any shot at reforming, as implausible as that is, is if the internal contradictions in Generalplan Ost force the Germans too abandon it. If the Germans dogmatically stick to it, they wind up dispersed into a weakened cabal of agrarian feudal overlords, barely capable of holding themselves together in the face of even domestic rebellions. They then would have been crushed by the Western Allies and/or the rump Soviets/Russians, who would have even more overwhelming industrial and military superiority, and the will to use it due to the ongoing outrages perpetrated by murderous Nazi rule. The question would only be how many more people would have to die before it happened.

Britain in India is a classic case-in-point. Often Hitler's model, he neatly ignored that economically it was a huge drag even before the World Wars weakened Britain's economic ability to hold onto them. The various African and Asian colonies actually tell a similar story: financially, they cost more then they put out and were generally propped up by the homeland rather then the other way around. Predictably, they universally fell into bankrupt, disillusionment, and collapse sooner or later. And note, all these cases were where the various European ruling powers tried to make some kind of power-sharing arrangement with at least some of the locals so as to offload some of the burden of control, something which GeneralPlan Ost uncategorically rejected.

WWII Germany was already bankrupt when they started the war and Nazi fervor for a slave empire wasn't going to last forever, particularly since the average German would see little benefit from it. Even if we assume the Nazis actually managed to achieve Hitler's goals, then after his death and with the aging of the Nazi old guard there'd be increasing questions by the Germans at large about just what the point of all this colossal expense, death, and continual war was.

How am I “forgetting that” when it’s totally irrelevant to my point? Gandhi wasn’t the fundamental reason Britain had to quit India. The fundamental reason was the British Empire was so broke that it couldn’t afford to meet the costs in maintaining it’s hold over India without sacrificing the health and stability of it’s domestic homeland. So the British Empire, when confronted with the economic cost of empire at a time when they couldn’t afford said costs, acquiesced to reality. Had India been a place the British were actually turning a profit from, they would have done everything in their power to paint Gandhi as just a loser troublemaker and used that to justify a whole bunch of repressive measures to keep their grip on the colony.

As it was with Britain, so it will be with Germany. The main difference is that Nazi Germany might not acquiesce to reality and stubbornly try to defy it. But as the economic costs mount of having to maintain military garrisons within the occupied territories to keep them from revolting - because the endless atrocities mean they aren’t getting any loyalty from these territories - the health of their homeland will begin to whither, and after that their domestic stability. The result will be a Germany that just gets weaker, and weaker, and weaker... until at last they hit some tipping point where they are so weak that the Western democracies or the Russian/Soviet rump state are able to club them over the head and take their empire anyways.


Which leaves them without enough Slavs to adequately fill in the resulting manpower gap. It was a circle the Nazis were never going to be able to square.

 

[Deleted member 6086]

Idea: have a Nazi state lottery that is actually the opposite of a lottery. Have Germans be "encouraged" to take part, and the "winners" (a small but significant percentage) get a free farm on the Don and a one-way ticket. Of course, no winner would want to ignore the Fuhrer's generosity, right?

 

[EWHM]

Found a link with Germany fertility rates https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033102/fertility-rate-germany-1800-2020/
1935 Germany bottomed out at around 1.77, and 1940 Germany was about 2.2. It peaks out around 2.5 at the height of its own baby boom in 1965.
Those aren't numbers you can ethnically cleanse with. By comparison, Germany around 1900 is around 5. With that you can. US around 1800 is 7

United States: fertility rate 1800-2020 | Statista

The fertility rate of a country is the average number of children that women from that country will have throughout their reproductive years.

www.statista.com

That doesn't count massive immigration into the US also. The US's pattern of ethnic cleansing of American Indians, which is one of the models Hitler tried to emulate is clearly not feasible for Germany.

 

[Raferty]

Feasible in terms of able to be done, I suppose, but with limits. Massacring the Slavs, yes. Turning Moscow into a big lake, maybe. Keeping all of this on the quiet, probably not

But doing what Hitler wanted from it, uh, no.

The Wehrbauer concept was never going to work. They'd probably just resettle Volksdeutsche there for the most part, as Industrial Workers in Germany are not going back to the land. The Crimea thing may be workable but that is it.

 

[Johnrankins]

Informative discussions on Generalplan Ost can be found if you read through these threads though you can find more on the topic elsewhere.

I believe they could do this over the 25 year period described in Generalplan Ost. As elaborated in the threads I linked it wouldn’t be difficult for the Reich to kill most of the Slavs (85% of Poles, 50% of Estonians etc) through extermination through labor, starvation, exposure and disease and enslave the survivors as chattel. Much of the depopulation would be hands off due to the harsh climate of Eastern Europe and German forces simply taking food and medicine. IOTL Stalin and Mao showed it’s easy to kill millions through starvation and neglect in a short period and they weren’t devoted to genocide like the Reich was and would be if they won the war.

Regarding the settlers the plan was to have 12 million Aryan settlers in Eastern Europe (80 people per square kilometer). They likely couldn’t get 12 million but I think half that is plausible. As to whether or not they could kill 100+ million Slavs and subsequently make Eastern Europe profitable is a different subject and I’m not well versed in economics so I won’t comment on it.

Here is a budget breakdown of the version of Generalplan Ost approved by Hitler:

And then what? The Nazis based their entire society on hatred and death. When all the Jews and Slavs are gone, what then? Do they stop or do they find more and more "non-Aryans" to include left handed people, people who need glasses or have diabetes or whatever ridiculous nonsense they come up with? I would assume the latter and they would eventually eat their own.