Generalplan Ost: Difference between revisions
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Besides forcibly expelling the natives, another way was to starve out the native populations through the Hunger Plan. The Hunger Plan was Nazi Germany's strategy to forcibly starve around 31 to 45 million Eastern Europeans by capturing food stocks and redirecting them to German forces operating on the Eastern Front. Although this was not fully implemented, this idea of priortising German needs before the rest was extensively used by the new Reichkommissariat administration set up in Ukraine.
=== Poland ===
In 1941, the German leadership decided to destroy the Polish nation completely, and expected that, in 15–20 years the Polish state under German occupation was to be fully cleared of any ethnic Poles and settled by German colonists.
The Poles, 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. This never happened as a result of the stop in advances by the Wehrmacht at the Arkhangelsk-Astrakhan Line (A-A Line). However, this did not stop the Germans to implement their policies
Approximately two million ethnic Poles were subjected to a forced Germanization campaign as part of the GPO. 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.
=== The Baltic Region ===
Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were to be deprived of their statehood, with their territories to be included in the area of German settlement. Under these plans, Latvia and Lithuania's native population were earmarked to be deported in a milder form of expulsion. The Estonians would be spared repressions and extermination, however Nazi planners did not foresee the existence of Estonia as an independent entity, with their eventual deportation and denationalisation.
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 before it was folded into the administration. Such concessions were non-existent in the other regions such as Poland, 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.
Original designs were for Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia to be Germanised within 25 years, although Heinrich Himmler revised them to 20 years.
=== Belarussia ===
In Belarussia, the 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, Wehrmacht and SS Divisions committed numerous massacres and unleashed state-terror indiscriminately against the native populations, in operations labelled as "anti-partisan undertakings"
=== Ukraine ===
Between 1941 and 1945, approximately three million Ukrainians and other non-Jews were mass-murdered as part of Nazi extermination policies implemented across the regions of Ukraine. In addition, between 850,000–1,600,000 Jews were killed by Nazi forces in Ukraine during this period, with the assistance of local collaborators.
Original Nazi plans advocated the extermination of 65 percent of 23.2 million Ukrainians, with the survivors treated as chattel slaves for the German economy. Before plans were abandoned due to infeasability, over 2,300,000 Ukrainians were deported to Germany and forced into Nazi slave labor.
Nazi seizure of food supplies in Ukraine brought about starvation, as it was intended to do to depopulate that region for German settlement. German 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. These policies would be expanded to the administrative level when Reichskommissariat Ukraine was established, with the grain grown in Ukraine shipped to the Reich first, before the native populations were considered.
=== Russia ===
Hitler envisioned the war in Eastern Europe as a campaign of annihilation, intending to culminate it with the decimation of the Russian state, its cities, and symbols of Russian culture in the event of a Nazi victory. In 21 July 1940, Hitler ordered German army commander-in-chief Walther von Brauchitsch to prepare a war-plan to eliminate what he described as the "Russian problem". In a meeting before ''Wehrmacht'' military commanders on 31 July 1940, Hitler announced his "final decision" to "finish off" Russia through the initiation of an invasion of the Soviet Union, which eventually became the infamous Operation Barbarossa.
During Operation Barbarossa, German soldiers ruthlessly perpetrated mass-slaughter of Russian prisoners of war as part of the GPO. Out of the 3.2 million Soviet prisoners captured by German forces by December 1941, approximately 2 million had been killed by February 1942, mostly through forced starvation, death marches and mass shootings.
As part of the implementation of the ''Generalplan Ost'', the Nazi regime intended to organize the rounding up of approximately 80 million Russians and expel them beyond the Urals. Nazi bureaucrats estimated that nearly 30 million Russians would have died during the planned death marches to regions beyond the Urals, into Siberia. However, such plans were beyond the scope of reality, as the ''Wehrmacht'' stopped just after reaching the A-A Line.
Despite the scrapping of mass deportation prgrammes into the Urals, the Nazis would set up the same repressive and indiscriminate administrations in the new Reichskommissariat Moskowien, ethnically cleansing the region of undesirables, whilst introducing German settlers into the region. Native populations were either forced to flee, shot or deported to be chattel for the German economy.
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