Would the German public support Generalplan Ost?

Would the German public support Generalplan Ost?

  • Yes

    Votes: 42 41.6%
  • No

    Votes: 11 10.9%
  • To a degree

    Votes: 48 47.5%

  • Total voters
    101

Deleted member 1487

What makes you think it would be a disaster?
The problems with the Nazi education system, plus the potential issue of ongoing resistance in the East, as well as the problem the Soviets had: investing too much in the periphery and neglecting the core of their economy, which resulted in a lot of problems with primary sectors like agriculture. Spending vast sums on creating 'model' Nazi colonies in the East (which may or may not work through forcing Germans to settle there) will probably not be helpful for the economy, especially if Hitler tries then to emphasize a closed economic system cut off from trade with the rest of the world to innoculate the economy from market forces. Plus there is the real chance he goes nuts or just makes plain bad decisions and political problems result. Also there is likely the chance that the public will get sick of Nazi rule in peacetime without a war making them loyal and committed to the cause. The party outside of Hitler was never particularly popular, once he goes the Nazis are going to have public relations problems.

The Nazis could easily put in some reforms to maximize efficiency once Hitler dies. I don't see a Nazi State collapsing due to economic failure, I see it collapsing due to biting off a lot more than it can chew geopolitically.
They could...they also could not and fuck up everything, considering they were a party of kleptocrats. Goering for instance looted everything he could, took bribes, and didn't do his work. Part of the reason they lost the war. He was removed from real power in the economy only to see his replacement, Speer, ultimately also get sidelined within 2 years in favor of Himmler...who was about as competent as you'd think.
 
Goering for instance looted everything he could, took bribes, and didn't do his work.
Goering's looting habits are often brought up but I've never read anything about him stealing anything of actual value to the war effort. It seems like he just looted paintings, jewelry and furniture.
 
The Nazis could easily put in some reforms to maximize efficiency once Hitler dies.

I'm curious, which part of the sociopathic government where backstabbing was encouraged and loyalty to party dogma over reality leads you to think that they will be: a. interested in maximizing efficiency, or b. easy to pull off?

Nazi Germany was one of the least efficient states that took part in the war. Hell, the whole country seems designed to be as INefficient as possible. Okay, maybe that's slight hyperbole, but not by much. To maximize efficiency they would have to act in a manner completely opposite to the way they operated for literally the entire course of their existence. You might as well say, the Soviet Union could have survived if only they had done literally everything different.
Plus there is the real chance he goes nuts or just makes plain bad decisions and political problems result.

Chance?
 
What do you consider the industrial looting of Europe?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichswerke_Hermann_Göring
Was the industrial looting of Europe detrimental to the overall Nazi war effort though?

Would industrial looting be detrimental to the Reich's longevity if the Nazis won the war and had control of Europe?

Also your source says that the conglomerate produced 1/8 of German steel output during the war and that Goering didn't make personal profit from it directly.
 

Deleted member 1487

Was the industrial looting of Europe detrimental to the overall Nazi war effort though?

Would industrial looting be detrimental to the Reich's longevity if the Nazis won the war and had control of Europe?

Also your source says that the conglomerate produced 1/8 of German steel output during the war and that Goering didn't make personal profit from it directly.
Goering's management of the economy was. He was only interested in his own power and profit. Like the SS having the means of production under his control meant political power.
 

trajen777

Banned
I agree the whole thing could have fizzled out in the 50s, but the Nazis were hoping for a massive growth rate increase and, at high levels, they seemed to genuinely want Germans to settle the east. It is a core part of Nazi doctrine (Volk ohne Raum, people without space) that Germany had too many people crammed into too little space. (They would have marveled at the level of density in democratic Germany today... practically all the land is developed in some way.) I think that, no matter what the outcome of Generalplan Ost, there would be an influx of people into the annexed areas of the Reich, that is, the areas lost after 1918. That could happen with the same level of population growth.

But, again, that's not what top-level Nazis wanted. There is a set of wall posters about population and the urban/rural divide here. For a more in-depth discussion on space and birth rates see here. One slide shows the average family size in 1870-1900 compared to 1900-1930. The author clearly views the 1870-1900 condition as preferable, and the ideal in the poster is a farm family with eight children. Overall, eight children is roughly what the Nazis wanted a good German family to have: four as a bare minimum (200% growth per generation), six as average (300% growth) and eight or more as ideal (400+% growth).

The question is, then, how the Nazi government was going to facilitate that high birth rate. Plans were underway, with the sanctification of large families via the Cross of the German Mother, and undoubtedly many Reichsmarks would have been spent post-war on benefits for large families. I don't think the Nazis would have forced people to have large families, via things like banning contraception; they would have encouraged having eight children as the summit of achievement for a German woman, and they would have believed that woman's daughters would be selected (by social Darwinism) to be good child-bearers in turn. Women who didn't want to have children weren't the sort of women Hitler was looking for.

What I mean by all this is that a leap in birth rates is entirely plausible. Ultimately the plan would succeed or fail by the willingness of German women to bear the appropriate number of children, but with some encouragement it's possible to see a return to 1870-1900 family sizes. What this means for Generalplan Ost is that there's a good chance the necessary people would be available in the 50s and 60s. Many of the post-war generation would choose to stay in the old Reich, but some would have to move to the East.

Earlier I said that Eastern Front soldiers might be the first in line to settle; I think that was well refuted. One eager category, perhaps, would be the well-indoctrinated children born in 1933 or later, children who had never known anything except the Nazi state, and who would be unfailingly loyal to it. (They'd be loyal to the state before their parents, in Orwellian fashion.) In other words, when a boy at a Hitler Youth camp got a little too close to a similarly aged girl in the BdM -- which happened all the time -- then it would be accepted without question that they should start a family in the East.

Between the increased birth rate, the government driving the birth rate through supportive programs, the stealing of young children and moving them to German family, and offer of free land etc to German x pats (Brazil and south america / cant see lots of N Americans going back) i think you would have (over 40 years) a sizable portion of the east colonized. I think you would need to expel (or worse) sizable portions of the slavic populations (or take the children and indoctrinate them in some type of camps etc). All of this i would see in a phase program
1. Expel or worse Slavic populations not acceptable ( i think the Nazi had some type of acceptable vs non acceptable guide (lith ok Poles not ?) Years 1-10
2. Take children that looked Nordic (this they did ) in to German parents or camps (years 3 - 15)
3. Colonization and bring German x pats back (year 4 - 50 ) -- Offer free land to anyone in the world (that meets their standards to bring in more people)
This would all be done by priority of land (tier 1 land - first - tier 2 land next -- etc -- ), lots of the very productive land based upon wheat could end up like western Canada with endless fields of wheat with little population (mechanization).
 
Also there is likely the chance that the public will get sick of Nazi rule in peacetime without a war making them loyal and committed to the cause.

Well, it's not as if the Nazis were reluctant to pick a war whenever they really needed one. If worst comes to worst, they might let some remnant of the Soviet Union survive East of the Urals, chiefly to use it as the occasional sparring partner.
Plus, there would be the... well... "war on terror".
 

Deleted member 1487

Well, it's not as if the Nazis were reluctant to pick a war whenever they really needed one. If worst comes to worst, they might let some remnant of the Soviet Union survive East of the Urals, chiefly to use it as the occasional sparring partner.
Plus, there would be the... well... "war on terror".
That actually was the plan:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wehrbauer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ural_Mountains_in_Nazi_planning#.22Living_wall.22
Hitler later rejected the mountains as an adequate border, calling it absurd that "these middle-sized mountains" represented the boundary between the "European and Asiatic worlds", stating that one might as well accord that title to one of the large Russian rivers.[15] He explained that only a "living [racial] wall" of Aryan fighters would do as a frontier, and to keep a permanent state of war present in the east in order to "preserve the vitality of the race".

The theme of a "living wall" was used by Hitler as early as Mein Kampf (published 1925-1926).[17] In it he presented the future German state under National Socialist rule as a "father's house" (Vaterhaus), a safe place which would keep in the "right human elements", and keep out those which were undesirable.[17] This metaphorical building was to have solid and supportive foundations (Fundamente) and walls (Mauern), and could only be protected by a living wall (lebendige Mauer) of patriotic and fanatically devoted German people.[17]

The idea became more prominent in Hitler's mind as the war went on.[18] On 10 December 1942 (as the Battle of Stalingrad was turning unfavourably against the Germans) he told Anton Mussert, a Dutch Nazi collaborator, that the "Asiatic waves were threatening to overrun Europe and exterminate the higher races", and that this threat could only be countered by wall-building and long-term fighting.[18]
 
Of course the Germans would have gone along with Generalplan Ost. What is happening in the east is happening to people the Germans as a whole do not see and know and have not seen or known, and have been demonized completely since 1933. This means that almost all Germans under the age of 18-20 at the end of the war have been taught the "truth" about the Slavs and their "proper" place in the Nazi world order. Look at what happened to the Jews of Germany and Austria. Most Germans knew a "good" Jew, their neighbor Herr Schwartz and his family were nice folks and good neighbors. So sad they had to be resettled in the east, but Jews as a group were viruses infecting the German body so... The OTL reality is that a significant percentage of the adult German population had a pretty good idea what the fate of "resettled" Jews was, let alone those from the occupied countries in the west or what went on in the east. Letters home, photographs, and loot made this apparent and a HUGE number of individual Germans benefited from the pauperization of German/Austrian Jews either from direct acquisition, purchase of homes or businesses resold at bargain prices, or even business improvement due to the elimination of Jewish owned business competitors.

Since Slavs would be reduced to slave/serf status, this simply can't be hidden as you'll see these slaves in the Reich proper (and how much protest was there about slave workers of all sources in Germany during the war - not just in factories but also house slaves). The reduction in population either actively or through planned starvation will become known about as settlers visit on vacation or soldiers rotate back to Germany or are demobilized. Young people who have been raised with Nazi indoctrination from a very young age will certainly be OK with this, many older folks who are also dedicated Nazis will be OK. The bulk of the rest will turn a blind eye or perhaps at home tut-tut the "vulgarity" of it. Even in a Nazi Germany that was losing the war, people kept quiet and very few complained or did anything to slow the Holocaust. In a Nazi victory, complainers or resisters will be very few indeed, and have short lives.
 
Everyone born after ~1923 (22 in 1945) would have been indoctrinated by the Hitler Youth/BdM. This certainly meant disagreeing with one's parents; the film Hitlerjunge Quex involves a Communist father who falls out of favor with his son, mostly because the Hitler Youth have a really cool song. (The father tries to get the son to sing the Internationale, but he prefers the Hitler Youth song "Vorwarts, vorwarts, schmettern die helle Fanfaren (Unsere Fahne flattert uns voran)") It would have been forbidden, probably even in peacetime, to be opposed to Generalplan Ost or to any Nazi policy. Opposition to policy was seen as "complaining" or "defeatism" and was illegal. It was widespread, of course; it was the sort of crime where society would collapse if all the criminals were locked up, but a short visit from the proper authorities could set a person right about their thinking.

Listening to foreign radio was also illegal*; if ITTL the BBC survived post-war, it undoubtedly would have leaked the truth about Generalplan Ost, but I suspect most people would have been deeply in denial. The Nazi party line about the events in the East could be carefully controlled. There wasn't enough food for everyone, because of Churchill's blockade (or Roosevelt's, or whatever). Therefore hard choices had to be made, and Germans had to be fed first. The tragic results -- you can see them in the newsreels, perhaps -- are not the fault of Germany but of the same old Judeo-Bolshevist/plutocratic conspiracy that caused the War in the first place. Soldiers from the Eastern Front might have talked to their mothers about the ghastly truth, and the tales would have been believed at the family level, but it is certain that no one would or could speak publicly about what was going on.

It would be all too easy to believe, especially in a culture where announcements from on high were automatically believed to a greater extent than in the Anglosphere, where pragmatic cynicism and criticism of government always coexisted with the applause. And sloreck is quite correct that resistance, even resistance of the simplest kinds, was difficult and dangerous during the war and would have been even more so after it.

*: Look up "denke daran" for images of the red notice to be placed on all German radio dials. "Think about it! Listening to foreign radio stations is a crime against the security of our people! By decree of the Führer, it is punishable by imprisonment with hard labor!"
 
I think a major problem for the Nazi iwould be that they have won. While at war the population consolidate behind a Regime, but a massive scale genocide of the Slavs, would demand millions of German conscripts being send to do the dirty work, while Germany are at peace. Where would be resistance to that in peace time, the German civilian population would have to deal with the traumatized and demoralized soldier returning, the capitists would see their captured markets being destroyed by the government and the army would see themselves being reduced to butchers. I have a hard time imagine we won't see a reaction, it's one thing to destroy a widespread minority while in war, it's another to depopulate entire countries. So I think the plan will begin and be dropped again.
 
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