Would a victorious Nazi Germany go ahead with Generalplan Ost?

[BlondieBC]

If the Nazis had trouble finding voluntary settlers, they'd probably forcibly resettle people to the East. They did IOTL with relocated Baltic Germans in the aborted colonial attempts in Ukraine.

In a surviving Reich scenario, they would probably expand this forcible deportation to non-German, yet Germanic citizens of the puppet states like Norway and the Netherlands, to break them up over a larger area and assimilate them.

I have no doubt they would try, I doubt they can find them due to demographics (war dead, long term birth rate decline, lack of births due to the war, etc). A lot of their plans called for 80% plus reduction in populations, often up in the mid to high 90's. So what does this mean. While the surviving people are spread out more, it basically means the equivalent of everyone east of the bug river and the Baltic states die. The German population is not rapidly growing. Neither are the near Germans (Danish, French, etc). Where do the 100 million plus new settlers come from in 15 years after the war (1945-1960)? They don't exist. You can't import from other continents due to racial issues. I doubt we are going to see forced whole sale abandonment of cities in Germany or "Germanic" areas. The Germans would be lucky to find one settler for every 10-20 Slavs killed.

So what does this world look like. The key mines remain open, staffed by Slavs with Germanic supervisors. The best agricultural areas are farmed (parts of the Ukraine) with ever increasing amounts of mechanization. The Germans probably reconfigure the railroads to hit the key mining and farming areas only. We will have a series of forts along the borders, really garrison locations for mobile formations. The Germans might be able to utilize 80% of the land the Soviets did. The rest is a vast boreal forest, swamp, and steppe. As I have stated many times, the German plan as executed will create something that looks like a vast Chernobyl disaster zone.

Now once we assume the Nazi win and stay in power, the Nazi will not care that much. They will be able to feed their population without using soviet lands due to rising yield per acre. There will be plenty of metals and industrial goods. Media will be limited. It will basically be a very large North Korea with plenty of food and nuclear weapons by the mid 1960's. And I kind of suspect the expansionistic tendencies will die by that time period. There will just be so much open land.

 

[BlondieBC]

Where would the Einsatzgruppen factor into Generalplan Ost?

I doubt it. They were used less as the war progressed because they were resource inefficient.

 

[Emperor Norton I]

Nazi Europe would look like the worst fever dream of Kim Jong Il. The relative normalcy leading up to the war and during the war was something to placate the common person and to keep them fat and happy under the watchful eye of fascism. The Nazis were not in a position to enact everything they wanted while securing power and dealing with foreign adversaries. If they rule Europe unopposed, short of a moderate rising to power, they are going to begin enacting sweeping upheavals of society that are going to be insane, vicious, and bloody, reaping misery across Europe and leading to a total collapse of the continent into a nightmare scape. All the wacky hijinks of evil and idiocy of the various Communist dictators of Asia is what Nazi Europe would quickly become. It would be a continent spanning Khmer Rouge.

 

[John Dusk]

Nazi Europe would look like the worst fever dream of Kim Jong Il... All the wacky hijinks of evil and idiocy of the various Communist dictators of Asia is what Nazi Europe would quickly become. It would be a continent spanning Khmer Rouge.

I 100% agree.

Other dictatorships like Stalin's USSR and Mao's China were brutal and hellish at their worst. The Greater Germanic Reich in this scenario would be Hell. The killing would only stop when there were no "subhumans" left to kill.

As was stated earlier, you could replace Hitler, Himmler, Goering, Goebbels, Bormann etc with literal demons and there wouldn't be much of a difference besides their uniforms wouldn't be as snazzy.

@CalBear regarding the extermination camps the Reich set up IOTL, in your opinion was it simply a matter of Germany being an advanced/industrialized state as to why they established them when no other group ever did (or has done since) or was it the ideology of Nazism itself that spawned Auschwitz and the rest?

If the Ottomans, the Serbs, the Hutu and other genocide perpetrators had the means to do so, would they have built gas chambers for their targets or would they have stuck to old fashioned means of killing like the Einsatzgruppen that were originally employed in the Final Solution?

 

[BlondieBC]

Two questions:

1: Since the number of Slavs designated for extermination/removal is an order of magnitude larger than the Jews (9.5 million vs 100+ million), would those Nazi officials carrying out the task find the sheer number of victims daunting in any way? Or would it be a matter of mere statistics/extra paperwork to them?

2: How many native collaborators do you think the Reich would be able to enlist in the East?

I will help with the math. Back of the envelop stuff. I believe the Nazi ran about 4.5 million jews and about 1.5 million non-Jews thru the death camps in about 3 years. Call it 2 million a year. Likely once the Jews were finished, they would simply start with other nearby populations to keep the camps running for another 10 years or so. Assume a little efficiency gain over time (or minor expansion), and these camps can probably do in the order of 25 to 30 million in a decade. Now assuming the Germans only plan to use camps, they will probably need another 3. They will be located on backhaul locations to minimize freight. So in the Ukraine somewhere, they will another cluster of death camps. Probably another one near Moscow due to the way the railroad is setup. And another at some location.

An pretty standard modern slaughter house can process 4 million pounds of finished meat per week. That is 8 million live weight, or about the weight of 50,000 humans. Mass slaughter is not physically hard with modern technology. It takes maybe a thousand or so people. The animals are transported in live, but from closer distances than the Nazi would need. It is our morality that restrains us, not technology or costs.

Little quick work on Auschwitz. A total of 7K Germans worked at the camps, but I did not find the maximum staffing levels. The bulk of the killing was done in 2 or 2.5 years, so it is probably under 14,000 man years of labor. 1.1 million killed. So less than 78 man years per killed jew/slav. So at this rate, it takes 1.3 million man years to kill 100 million people, or 130K people working for ten years. 65K if spread over two decades. Auschwitz complex was run by a captain, so I suspect that I am an order of magnitude too high. It looks like it was run by a battalion size formation.

I suspect if that the Nazi only wanted to kill, the entire effort can be completed by a corp sized formation in 10 years.

Now in reality, the Nazi will probably achieve the majority of deaths via starvation, overwork, and diseases. If you flee the work zones in small family groups, I doubt the Germans will spend too much time looking for you. Within a few years you will die of lack of resources. Many will be worked to death in the mines. In some ways we can do a parallel with slavery in the sugar plantations outside the USA. The average slave lived 10 years, and it was cheaper to get another than to feed them more. The Nazi's are trying to recreate this system to some extent.

 

[yourworstnightmare]

They'd try it, it would probably not work out the way they imagined it, but in the end there would be millions of dead.

 

[James Ricker]

The Nazi economy wasn't very efficient,it needed to loot and plunder to survive and the Nazis liked killing people,the life savings of 200,000,000 people could keep the Third Reich financially solvent for at least a decade.
Auschwitz killed 1,000,000 people in 1944,it was considered a prototype camp.The Nazis planed at least ten to twenty more.If you do the math it is doable.

 

[John Dusk]

The sheer banality of it.

Many, actually most, of the Reich's functionaries overseeing the Death Camps, the mistreatment of the populations in the East, the vast number of war crimes committed that would make a billy goat puke, did it with zero emotional buy-in. The administrator's would be overseeing the mass murder of thousands of human beings a day, and their main concern would be achieving production quotas or getting their reports in on time. They would have desks figuratively dipped in gore, get up at quitting time, put on their jacket, go home and eat dinner. The SS troops running the camps TOOK home movies if it, then used the same cameras to document the company picnic.

They were NOT visible monsters. They were friggin accountants, except they were adding up mega-deaths.

I recently read that in Auschwitz SS doctors complained about cramps in their hands from signing so many death certificates for the camp inmates so they eventually commissioned special stamps with their signature to make things easier. It doesn't get more banal and callous than that.

 

[Darzin]

Does anyone know the plans for non slavic groups in the east? Were Georgians and Tartars also slated for elimination? I heard somewhere that Georgians were treated well by the Nazis as they considered them Europeans.

 

[25or6to4]

Does anyone know the plans for non slavic groups in the east? Were Georgians and Tartars also slated for elimination? I heard somewhere that Georgians were treated well by the Nazis as they considered them Europeans.

In Wenn Hitler den Krieg gewonnen hätte. Die Pläne der Nazis nach dem Endsieg by Ralph Giordano, there was supposedly an SS order not to harm them, and in Himmler's Black Order: A History of The SS, 1923-45 it says the SS recruited from the Tartars

 

[Mr.Wigglemunch]

How will this play out for rivalry between the Heer and SS?

 

[FlyingSquirrel]

Military personnel remain because it was, frankly, vastly safer to work at a Camp than go to the Eastern Front and because they did not want to expose themselves to negative peer pressure. Civilians, even more horribly, stayed because the living conditions for Staff was very good, better than in many of the cities being pounded flat by the CBO, and both the pay and opportunity to plunder the effects of the inmates were excellent (again, something demonstrated at a number of post war tribunals).

Catching up on this thread late, but wouldn't this perhaps be evidence in favor of the notion that the Nazis would have had trouble carrying this out when not in a state of war? If your choices are (a) fighting the Soviets on the Eastern Front; (b) staying closer to home where you're at risk of being killed in an air strike; or (c) working a morally repulsive but physically less risky job at a concentration camp, then perhaps some people will reluctantly opt for (c) because it's less likely to get them killed. But if there is no more war, and your choices are the camp job vs. going back home or working a routine military assignment at a base somewhere, what's the incentive for choosing the camp job? And without the wartime psychological mobilization, maybe even some of the convinced racists start to ask themselves, "Is it really necessary to kill these people? We won the war, why not just expel them?"

 

[John Dusk]

But if there is no more war, and your choices are the camp job vs. going back home or working a routine military assignment at a base somewhere, what's the incentive for choosing the camp job?

Beyond the fact that soldiers often perform tasks even when they don't want to do them, the motivation would be primarily ideological. People would stay in the camp job or another task dealing with the extermination of the Slavs because they believe that it is necessary and desirable from a political/racial standpoint to do so. There wouldn't be a shortage of true believers willing to get their hands dirty in a victorious Reich especially once the generational indoctrination kicks in.

And without the wartime psychological mobilization, maybe even some of the convinced racists start to ask themselves, "Is it really necessary to kill these people? We won the war, why not just expel them?"

Expelling 100+ million people across the Urals is impossible and is a waste of slave labor. Even if some of the fanatics and true believers change their mind about Generalplan Ost that doesn't mean that the required amount of manpower wouldn't be available. In a dictatorship like the Reich having everyone in the government or the military agree with decisions made by Hitler and his inner circle isn't required. Hitler made plenty of decisions that were disagreed with but Nazi ideology and the idea of "Working towards the Fuhrer" meant that they were carried out anyway without a significant amount of complaint.

The Reich had no trouble finding Germans who were willing to guard, mistreat and kill those they saw as subhuman because they believed in what they were doing. This wouldn't change significantly once the war is over.

 

[FlyingSquirrel]

@CalBear regarding the extermination camps the Reich set up IOTL, in your opinion was it simply a matter of Germany being an advanced/industrialized state as to why they established them when no other group ever did (or has done since) or was it the ideology of Nazism itself that spawned Auschwitz and the rest?

Essentially, were they the most evil, the most efficient, or both? Quite possibly both. I suppose there's a sinister element to Nazism because of the virulent racism mixed with the almost mystical imagery and bizarre nationalism, along with the fact that they did a lot more damage to the rest of the world than, say, the Khmer Rouge or the Kim regime in North Korea. Stalin, I suppose, was a somewhat more typically opportunistic tyrant - maybe he genuinely believed in international communism, but it seems like he had some sense of the limits of the USSR's reach and mostly targeted people thought to be competitors for his power or potential threats to the regime, whereas the Nazis would have targeted Jews, Roma, Slavs, etc. no matter how hard they tried to keep quiet and avoid attention.

I suppose there's also a bit of a chicken-and-egg question here. Was the expansionist scope of Nazism caused by the uniquely twisted mindset of its leaders, or did the possibility of large-scale expansion enable them to become uniquely twisted? I don't imagine that the Khmer Rouge had serious ambitions of subjecting, say, half of Asia to their strange form of agrarian communism, but perhaps the fact that they plainly couldn't without running afoul of China and the USSR precluded their ideas from ever developing in that direction. Germany eventually taking over most of Europe and parts of Asia, while difficult, was not a laughable notion on its face.

If the Ottomans, the Serbs, the Hutu and other genocide perpetrators had the means to do so, would they have built gas chambers for their targets or would they have stuck to old fashioned means of killing like the Einsatzgruppen that were originally employed in the Final Solution?

I'm probably more familiar with Rwanda than the other examples, and from what I've read, I'd actually answer "maybe" to that question - the way the Tutsis were dehumanized as well as the horrific cruelty of some of the killings seem as twisted as some of the worst Nazi abuses. And my understanding is that the people behind it did plan ahead of time and that it wasn't a completely spontaneous eruption of ethnic strife arising from armed unrest and the President's assassination. Did they have ambitions of imposing their regime over all of Central Africa? I assume not, but again, it's tough to say whether that's because they wouldn't or because they couldn't.

 

[John Dusk]

Essentially, were they the most evil, the most efficient, or both? Quite possibly both.

Not only that but it can be argued that they had the worst/most evil plans (Generalplan Ost) in terms of scope, scale and intent. Most genocidal states focus on a single group with little to no planning beforehand and once they're eliminated things go back to normal. The Reich however had an entire list of diverse groups numbering in the tens of millions to wipe out even after all their territorial conquest was through. The genocide would be ongoing even decades after they've won, only ending when there was no one left to kill.

What separates the Reich from other genocidal states in history is that they explicitly desired and made plans to kill over 100 MILLION people in peacetime with the extermination being an end in and of itself as opposed to the means to an end. They not only wanted to kill most of the Slavs but they wanted every trace of their existence, their culture, their cities, their landmarks, and their very language to be a memory which considering how large of a group they were and that they inhabited millions of square miles further adds to the precedent in moral wickedness and ideological insanity that the Nazis set.

Genocide/extermination was essentially the foundation of Nazi ideology and the Nazi state, a significant reason why they waged war in the first place and what they desired to do after the war was over. The same can't be said of many nation states in history.

 

[sloreck]

As to why Germans would continue to work in camps or as overseers in factories or workgangs, participate in the extermination of millions of people in one way or another the answer is fairly straightforward. The extermination and/or enslavement of Untermenschen was as much of a war aim for Germany as winning the military battles against the Allies. The need for Lebensraum in the east had been drilled in to the Germans in propaganda before the Nazis took power and in the educational system after 1933. Those selected for extermination were literally considered non-human/sub-human and especially the Jews seen as an "infection" on the Aryan race. Starting in 1945 those coming of military age (18) will have spent their entire life subjected to propaganda everywhere, and significant indoctrination in school. I attach a children's book Die Giftpilz (the Poison Mushroom) which illustrates how Jews are the poison mushrooms among the healthy ones Aryan children must learn to avoid. It is available online in German and English if you have strong stomach. Any wonder why finding willing workers would not be as hard as one might think.

sorry can't get it right side up..