There are numerous myths being repeated about Generalplan Ost here. In fact, Tooze in Wages of Destruction defends it, saying on pages 469-70
"(as) Meyer... put it in a programmatic article: 'The land folk of tomorrow will be a different people from that of yesterday... For our rural population the dawning of this new age means a fundamental change of character... The choice between traditional or progressive, primitive or modern, can only be resolved in favour of a healthy, communally conscious idea of progress and performance. This implies a clear decision in favour of struggle as opposed to those... who see the salvation of the peasantry in the protection of a nature reserve. There can be no return to the 'good old days.' It is therefore best to give up complaining about the fact that the 'old peasantry' is gone and to affirm the new peasantry of the Third Reich and to fight for it.' The vision that inspired the German colonial project in the East had more in common with the American ideology of the frontier than it did with the Middle Ages. In the autumn of 1941 Hitler returned repeatedly to the American example in discussing Germany's future in the East. The Volga, he declared, would be Germany's Mississippi... The Generalplan Ost envisioned, not a return to the past, but a new and expansive phase of German economic development... Nor were the agronomists working... under any illusion about the standard of living that could be expected in a society consisting entirely of peasant farmers. Instead, Meyer's ideal was the population structure of Bavaria or Hanover, which in the 1930s sustained an uncluttered balance of agriculture, industry, and services. The Generalplan projected an agricultural share of the workforce of no more than one-third..."
On page 472 "But the agrarian planners did not merely intend to seize land and redistribute population... An enormous flow of German capital would have to follow the German settlers... The farms would need to be well-equipped with livestock and machinery. But most important of all was the need to improve the transport infrastructure. Modern agriculture could not prosper without links to the towns and cities... Half a million marks was to be sunk into every square kilometer of Germany's vast new Eastern empire... Here too there is no trace of backward-looking nostalgia. On the plans... land remediation and agriculture would claim only 36 percent of Germany's investment... The rest was earmarked for investments in transport infrastructure, industry, and urban settlement. And this was only the state-directed element... Huge sums were expected to flow from private industry..."
In short, the blithe predictions of failure in this thread are essentially wishful thinking based on an incorrect view of the nature of the settlement plans and likely a desire to believe that a cold war with a victorious Germany would have been as easy for the Wallies as the historical one with the USSR. As for finding enough settlers, the book gives on pages 468-69 a number of 10 million over a 20-30 year period. I don't see what's so impossible about such a number given the large number of construction jobs GP Ost would have necessitated and the fact much of the settled area was extremely good farmland. That said, I do think the plans would probably change to some extent after Hitler's death, (which was always going to be soon given the toxins being administrated to him by Morell) depending on who took over afterwards.
