Generalplan Ost

Generalplan Ost
The , abbreviated GPO, was Nazi Germany's plan for large-scale ethnic cleansing, extermination and genocide of Slavs, Eastern European Jews and other ethnic groups categorised as "Untermensch" in Nazi ideology. The plan was intended to be the precursor for a program which would involve the colonisation of Central and Eastern Europe by German settlers, after the elimination of national identities of various Slavic peoples.
Generalplan Ost was only partially implemented during the war in territories occupied by Germany on the Eastern Front during World War II, resulting indirectly and directly in the deaths of millions by shootings, starvation, disease, extermination through labour, and genocide. However, its full implementation was not considered practicable during major military operations, and never materialised due to Germany's defeat. Under direct orders from Nazi leadership, around 11 million Slavs were killed in systemic violence and state terrorism carried out as part of the GPO. In addition to genocide, millions more were forced into slave labour to serve the German war economy.
The program's operational guidelines were based on the policy of Lebensraum proposed by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in fulfilment of the Drang nach Osten (drive to the East) ideology of German expansionism. As such, it was intended to be a part of the New Order in Europe. Approximately 3.3 million Soviet POWs captured by the Wehrmacht were killed as part of the GPO. The plan intended for the genocide of the majority of Slavic inhabitants by various means - mass killings, forced starvations, slave labour and other occupation policies. The remaining populations were to be forcibly deported beyond the Urals, paving the way for German settlers.
The plan was a work in progress. There are four known versions of it, developed as time went on. After the invasion of Poland, the original blueprint for (GPO) was discussed by the RKFDV in mid-1940 during the Nazi–Soviet population transfers. The second known version of GPO was procured by the RSHA from in April 1942. The third version was officially dated June 1942. The final settlement master plan for the East came in from the RKFDV on October 29, 1942. However, after the German defeat at Stalingrad, planning of the colonization in the East was suspended, and the program was gradually abandoned. The planning had nonetheless included implementation cost estimates, which ranged from 40 to 67 billion Reichsmarks, the latter figure being close to Germany's entire GDP for 1941. A cost estimate of 45.7 billion Reichsmarks was included in the spring 1942 version of the plan, in which more than half the expenditure was to be allocated to land remediation, agricultural development, and transport infrastructure. This aspect of the funding was to be provided directly from state sources and the remainder, for urban and industrial development projects, was to be raised on commercial terms.
Development and reconstruction of the plan
Ideological motivations
was a secret Nazi German plan for the colonization of Central and Eastern Europe. Implementing it would have necessitated genocide and ethnic cleansing on a vast scale to be undertaken in the European territories occupied by Germany during World War II. It would have included the extermination or de-population of most Slavic people in Europe.
The plan, prepared in the years 1939–1942, was part of Adolf Hitler's and the Nazi movement's Lebensraum policy and a fulfilment of the Drang nach Osten ideology of German expansion to the east, both of them part of the larger plan to establish the New Order. More than economic calculations, ideological fanaticism and racism played a central role in Nazi regime's implementation of extermination programs such as the GPO.
Although racist views against Slavs had precedent in German society before Hitler's rule, Nazi anti-Slavism was also based on the doctrines of scientific racism. The "Master Race" doctrine of Nazi ideology condemned Slavs to permanent domination by Germanic peoples, since it viewed them as primitive people who lacked the ability to undertake autonomous activities.
Himmler's role
The body responsible for the was the SS's Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) under Heinrich Himmler, which commissioned the work. The document was revised several times between June 1941 and spring 1942 as the war in the east progressed successfully. It was a strictly confidential proposal whose content was known only to those at the top level of the Nazi hierarchy; it was circulated by RSHA to the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories (Ostministerium) in early 1942.
According to testimony of SS-Standartenführer Hans Ehlich (one of the witnesses before the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials), the original version of the plan was drafted in 1940. As a high official in the RSHA, Ehlich was the man responsible for the drafting of along with Konrad Meyer, Chief of the Planning Office of Himmler's Reich Commission for the Strengthening of Germandom. It had been preceded by the Ostforschung.
The preliminary versions were discussed by Heinrich Himmler and his most trusted colleagues even before the outbreak of war. This was mentioned by SS-Obergruppenführer Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski during his evidence as a prosecution witness in the trial of officials of the SS Race and Settlement Main Office (RuSHA). According to Bach-Zelewski, Himmler stated openly: "It is a question of existence, thus it will be a racial struggle of pitiless severity, in the course of which 20 to 30 million Slavs and Jews will perish through military actions and crises of food supply." A fundamental change in the plan was introduced on June 24, 1941 – two days after the start of Operation Barbarossa – when the 'solution' to the Jewish question ceased to be part of that particular framework gaining a lethal, autonomous priority.
Destruction of documents, post-war reconstruction
Nearly all the wartime documentation on was deliberately destroyed shortly before Germany's defeat in May 1945, and the full proposal has never been found, though several documents refer to it or supplement it. Nonetheless, most of the plan's essential elements have been reconstructed from related memos, abstracts and other documents. Following the war, two out of the three primary records associated with the Generalplan Ost were lost. These included the document drafted by Konrad Meyer; in addition to an investigative report of RSHA's 3rd office.
A major document which enabled historians to accurately reconstruct the was a memorandum released on April 27, 1943, by , director of the NSDAP Office of Racial Policy, entitled "Opinion and thoughts on the master plan for the East of the Reichsführer SS". Wetzel's memorandum was a broad elaboration of the proposal. It came to light only in 1957. Wetzel's report has enabled attempts to re-construct the document on GPO prepared by RSHA's 3rd office.
The extermination document for the Slavic people of Eastern Europe did survive the war and was quoted by Yale historian Timothy Snyder in 2010. It shows that ethnic Poles were a primary target of . Belorussians were also a major target. According to the book "Kalkulierte Morde" ("Calculated massacres") published by Swiss historian Hans Christian Gerlach in 1999, Nazi Germany sought to exterminate the entire urban populace (approximately 2 million) and half the rural population (nearly 4.3 million) of Belorussia alone, through mass-starvations. These estimates were calculated by citing the notes of an anonymous author, whom Gerlach postulates to be Waldemar von Poletika, an agricultural scientist at Berlin University.
Phases of the plan and its implementation
Widely varying policies were envisioned by the creators of , and some of them were actually implemented by Germany in regards to the different Slavic territories and ethnic groups. For example, by August–September 1939 (Operation Tannenberg followed by the A-B Aktion in 1940), Einsatzgruppen death squads and concentration camps had been employed to deal with the Polish elite, while the small number of Czech intelligentsia were allowed to emigrate overseas. Parts of Poland were annexed by Germany early in the war (leaving aside the rump German-controlled General Government and the areas previously annexed by the Soviet Union), while the other territories were officially occupied by or allied to Germany (for example, the Slovak part of Czechoslovakia became a theoretically independent puppet state, while the ethnic-Czech parts of the Czech lands (so excluding the Sudetenland) became a "protectorate"). The plan was partially attempted during the war, resulting indirectly and directly in millions of deaths of ethnic Slavs by starvation, disease, or extermination through labor. The majority of Germany's 12 million forced laborers were abducted from Eastern Europe, mostly in the Soviet territories and Poland.
The final version of the proposal was divided into two parts; the "Small Plan" (Kleine Planung), which covered actions carried out in the course of the war; and the "Big Plan" (Grosse Planung), which described steps to be taken gradually over a period of 25 to 30 years after the war was won. Both plans entailed the policy of ethnic cleansing. As of June 1941, the policy envisaged the deportation of 31 million Slavs to Siberia. 75% of Belorussians were regarded unfit for "Germanization" and targeted for extermination or expulsion.
The proposal offered various percentages of the conquered or colonized people who were targeted for removal and physical destruction; the net effect of which would be to ensure that the conquered territories would become German. In ten years' time, the plan effectively called for the extermination, expulsion, Germanization or enslavement of most or all East and West Slavs living behind the front lines of East-Central Europe. The "Small Plan" was to be put into practice as the Germans conquered the areas to the east of their pre-war borders. After the war, under the "Big Plan", more people in Eastern Europe were to be affected.
In their place, settlements of up to 10 million Germans were planned to be established in an extended "living space" (Lebensraum), as part of the GPO plan. Because the number of Germans appeared to be insufficient to populate the vast territories of Central and Eastern Europe, the peoples judged to lie racially between the Germans and the Russians (Mittelschicht), namely, Latvians and even Czechs, were also supposed to be resettled there. As early as the initial phase of Operation Barbarossa, when Wehrmacht was advancing deep inside Soviet territories while facing little or no local insurrections, Adolf Hitler had contemplated the utility of anti-insurgency campaigns in advancing his Lebensraum program:
While various Wehrmacht commanders wanted to portray Germans as "liberators" of Eastern Europe and incite anti-communist dissidents to foment a pro-Axis partisan warfare against Soviet Union, Nazi ruling elites sought outright suppression of what they regarded as Slavic "untermenschen". Hardliners like Himmler were averse to initiating agreements with Slavic natives. Hitler was strongly opposed to the entry of Slavic volunteers into the German army and issued orders to disarm the natives. The initial assessment of Hitler and Wehrmacht generals was that Operation Barbarossa could be completed within months without any outside support. During a speech in 16 July 1941, Hitler proclaimed: "No one but the Germans should ever be allowed to bear arms ... Only a German should bear arms: not a Slav, a Czech, a Cossack or a Ukrainian."
German implementation of Nazi racial principles, combined with the severity of the war in the Eastern Front, resulted in German-occupation forces inflicting brutal measures during its anti-insurgency campaigns. The Schutzstaffel military apparatus, packed with militants ideologically indoctrinated to view Slavs as subhumans, fanatically implemented "Herrenvolk vs. Untermensch" racist criteria in their dealings with natives. Military leadership issued orders to inflict collective punishment against native inhabitants. However, as Axis advances gave way to a war of attrition and as German losses mounted, some Wehrmacht officers began proposing collaborationist policies with the natives, with the purpose of advancing German economic and geo-strategic interests. Even as deteriorating conditions in the front brought around a change in military strategy, speeches of various Wehrmacht generals continued to explicitly and implicitly designate German fighters as "the last bulwark of European civilisation against Slav hordes".
Exploiting anti-semitic sentiments which had persisted since the Tsarist period in occupied territories, collaborationism was also incited amongst the native inhabitants to assist Nazi Germany in implementing the Holocaust. The collaborationist bodies were viewed with suspicion due to the hardline anti-Slavic policy of German occupiers, and their Nazi sponsors largely used these groups as cannon fodder for German war efforts. As a consequence of the ideological constraints of National Socialism and Wehrmacht's rising casualties across the Eastern Front, German units faced shortages of personnel in carrying out the "Final Solution".
According to Nazi intentions, attempts at Germanization were to be undertaken only in the case of those foreign nationals in Central and Eastern Europe who could be considered a desirable element for the future Reich from the point of view of its racial theories. The plan stipulated that there were to be different methods of treating particular nations and even particular groups within them. Attempts were even made to establish the basic criteria to be used in determining whether a given group lent itself to Germanization. These criteria were to be applied more liberally in the case of nations whose racial material (rassische Substanz) and level of cultural development made them more suitable than others for Germanization. The plan considered that there were a large number of such elements among the Baltic states. Erhard Wetzel felt that thought should be given to a possible Germanization of the whole of the Estonian nation and a sizable proportion of the Latvians. On the other hand, the Lithuanians seemed less desirable since "they contained too great an admixture of Slav blood." Himmler's view was that "almost the whole of the Lithuanian nation would have to be deported to the East". Himmler is described as having had a positive attitude towards Germanising the populations of border areas of Slovenia (Upper Carniola and Southern Styria) and Bohemia-Moravia, but not Lithuania, claiming its population to be of "inferior race".
Himmler's notorious policies included the weaponization of schooling system in occupied territories to Germanize kids and indoctrinate them with Nazi doctrines. Special institutes for children in occupied territories were operated to separate kids who were categorised by Nazi authorities as "racially suitable" from the local inhabitants, wherein they were indoctrinated to be transferred to families in Germany.
GPO implementation by region
Baltic region
Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were to be deprived of their statehood, while their territories were to be included in the area of German settlement. This meant that Latvia and especially Lithuania would be covered by the deportation plans, though in a somewhat milder form than the expulsion of Slavs to western Siberia. While the Estonians would be spared repressions and physical liquidation (that the Jews and the Poles were experiencing), in the long term the Nazi planners did not foresee their existence as independent entities and they would ultimately be deported as well, with eventual denationalisation; initial designs were for Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia to be Germanised within 25 years; Heinrich Himmler revised them to 20 years.
Despite German opposition to their attempts of state-formation, Baltic natives were classified as "superior" to Slavs in the Nazi racial hierarchy. Therefore, German authorities implemented a deeper scale of collaborationist policy in the Baltic society. Nazi collaborationists amongst the Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian natives were given senior posts in the administrative bodies of the German occupation. In German-occupied Lithuania, a civilian administration which controlled its internal security was tolerated. This semi-autonomous entity existed within the Reichskommissariat Ostland. Such concessions were non-existent in Ukraine and Belarussia, where the Germanic occupation policy was characterised by full-blown colonization, exploitation of resources, state-terrorism and forcing natives into slave labour.
Belarussia
RSHA's GPO program had categorised 75% of Belarussians as "Eindeutschungsunfähig" (trans: "ineligible for Germanization"); targeting them for ethnic cleansing or violent eradication. After forcibly expelling or exterminating an estimated 5-6 millions of its native inhabitants, these lands were then supposed to be handed over to Germanic settlers for implementing the Lebensraum agenda. Child indoctrination institutions which hosted numerous Belarussian children forcibly were also opened, wherein kids categorised as "racially suitable" were prepared to be transferred to Germany. The first of these centres in Belarus was set up in Bobruysk.
Nazi anti-insurgency warfare conducted across occupied Eastern Europe was also used as an opportunity by German authorities to advance the objectives of GPO and Lebensraum settler-colonial agenda. In Belarussia, divisions of Wehrmacht and SS committed numerous massacres and unleashed state-terror indiscriminately against the native populations, in operations labelled "anti-partisan undertakings".
Poland
In 1941, the German leadership decided to destroy the Polish nation completely, and in 15–20 years the Polish state under German occupation was to be fully cleared of any ethnic Poles and settled by German colonists. A majority of them, now deprived of their leaders and most of their intelligentsia (through mass murder, destruction of culture, banning education above the absolutely basic level, and kidnapping of children for Germanization), would have to be deported to regions in the East and scattered over as wide an area of Western Siberia as possible. According to the plan, this would result in their assimilation by the local populations, which would cause the Poles to vanish as a nation.
According to the plan, by 1952 only about 3–4 million 'non-Germanized' Poles (all of them peasants) were to be left residing in the former Poland. Those of them who would still not Germanize were to be forbidden to marry, the existing ban on any medical help to Poles in Germany would be extended, and eventually Poles would cease to exist. Experiments in mass sterilization in concentration camps may also have been intended for use on the populations. The Wehrbauer, or soldier-peasants, would be settled in a fortified line to prevent civilization reanimating beyond the Ural Mountains and threatening Germany. "Tough peasant races" would serve as a bulwark against attackhowever, it was not very far east of the "frontier" that the westernmost reaches within continental Asia of the Nazi Germany's major Axis partner, Imperial Japan's own Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere would have existed, had a complete defeat of the Soviet Union occurred.
Ukraine
The seizure of food supplies in Ukraine brought about starvation, as it was intended to do to depopulate that region for German settlement. Soldiers were told to steel their hearts against starving women and children, because every bit of food given to them was stolen from the German people, endangering their nourishment.
Yugoslavia
After conquering Yugoslavia in April 1941, Nazi Germany partitioned the country and installed puppet dictatorships in Serbia and Croatia. Many of the Yugoslavian territories were annexed by Germany, Italy, Hungary and Bulgaria. Despite the vast population of Slavs in Yugoslavia, Nazi Germany mainly focused on targeting the nation's Jewish and Roma population.
Post-war
One of the indictment charges at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the S.S. officer responsible for the transportation aspects of the Final Solution, was that he was responsible for the deportation of 500,000 Poles. Eichmann was convicted on all 15 counts. Poland's Supreme National Tribunal stated that "the wholesale extermination was first directed at Jews and also at Poles and had all the characteristics of genocide in the biological meaning of this term."
See also
World War II casualties of the Soviet Union
World War II casualties of Poland
A-A line, military goal of Operation Barbarossa
Areas annexed by Nazi Germany
Barbarossa decree
Chronicles of Terror
Einsatzgruppen
Expulsion of Poles by Nazi Germany
Holocaust victims
Manifest destiny
Hunger Plan to seize food from the Soviet Union
Nazi crimes against ethnic Poles
Nazi crimes against Soviet POWs
Nazism and race
Racial policy of Nazi Germany
World War II evacuation and expulsion
Forced labor under German rule during World War II
Footnotes
References
Primary sources
In
Further reading
Bakoubayi Billy, Jonas: Musterkolonie des Rassenstaats: Togo in der kolonialpolitischen Propaganda und Planung Deutschlands 1919-1943, J.H.Röll-Verlag, Dettelbach 2011, .
Eichholtz, Dietrich. "Der Generalplan Ost." Über eine Ausgeburt imperialistischer Denkart und Politik, Jahrbuch für Geschichte, Volume 26, 1982.
Heiber, Helmut. "Der Generalplan Ost." Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, Volume 3, 1958.
Madajczyk, Czesław. Die Okkupationspolitik Nazideutschlands in Polen 1939-1945, Cologne, 1988.
Madajczyk, Czesław. Generalny Plan Wschodni: Zbiór dokumentów, Główna Komisja Badania Zbrodni Hitlerowskich w Polsce, Warszawa, 1990.
Roth, Karl-Heinz, "Erster Generalplan Ost." (April/May 1940) von Konrad Meyer, Dokumentationsstelle zur NS-Sozialpolitik, Mittelungen, Volume 1, 1985.
Szcześniak, Andrzej Leszek. Plan Zagłady Słowian. Generalplan Ost, Polskie Wydawnictwo Encyklopedyczne, Radom, 2001.
Wildt, Michael. "The Spirit of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA)." Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions (2005) 6#3 pp. 333–349. Full article available with purchase.
External links
Berlin-Dahlem (May 28, 1942). Full text of the original German document. "Legal, economic and spatial foundations of the East." Digitized copy of the 100-page version from the Bundesarchiv Berlin-Licherfelde.
Worldfuturefund.org: Documentary sources regarding Generalplan Ost
Dac.neu.edu: Hitler's Plans for Eastern Europe
Der Generalplan Ost der Nationalsozialisten.
Deutsches Historisches Museum (2009), Berlin, Übersichtskarte: Planungsszenarien zur "völkischen Flurbereinigung" in Osteuropa.
Notes
Genocides in Europe
Eastern Front (World War II)
Ethnic cleansing in Europe
Forced migration
Anti-Slavic sentiment
Antisemitic attacks and incidents
Anti-Estonian sentiment
Anti-Latvian sentiment
Anti-Lithuanian sentiment
Anti-Polish sentiment
Anti-Russian sentiment
Anti-Ukrainian sentiment
German colonial empire
Holocaust terminology
Heinrich Himmler
Nazi SS
The Holocaust in Belarus
The Holocaust in Estonia
The Holocaust in Latvia
The Holocaust in Lithuania
The Holocaust in Poland
The Holocaust in Russia
The Holocaust in Ukraine
Axis powers
Nazi war crimes in the Soviet Union
Germanization