Folkmord på slaver

In the long run, the Nazis’ Generalplan Ost involved seizing farmland, destroying those who farmed it, and settling it with Germans. [...]

As German planners saw matters, the collective farm should be used again to starve millions of people: in fact, this time, the intention was to kill tens of millions. Collectivization had brought starvation to Soviet Ukraine, first as an unintended result of inefficiencies and unrealistic grain targets, and then as an intended consequence of the vengeful extractions of late 1932 and early 1933. Hitler, on the other hand, planned in advance to starve unwanted Soviet populations to death. German planners were contemplating the parts of Europe already under German domination, requiring imports to feed about twenty-five million people. They also regarded a Soviet Union whose urban population had grown by about twenty-five million since the First World War. They saw an apparently simple solution: the latter would die, so that the former could live. By their calculations, the collective farms produced just the right amount of food to sustain Germans, but not enough to sustain the peoples of the East. So in that sense they were the ideal tool for political control and economic balance.14

This was the Hunger Plan, as formulated by 23 May 1941: during and after the war on the USSR, the Germans intended to feed German soldiers and German (and west European) civilians by starving the Soviet citizens they would conquer, especially those in the big cities. Food from Ukraine would now be sent not north to feed Russia and the rest of the Soviet Union but rather west to nourish Germany and the rest of Europe. In the German understanding, Ukraine (along with parts of southern Russia) was a “surplus region,” which produced more food than it needed, while Russia and Belarus were “deficit regions.” Inhabitants of Ukrainian cities, and almost everyone in Belarus and in northwestern Russia, would have to starve or flee. The cities would be destroyed, the terrain would be returned to natural forest, and about thirty million people would starve to death in the winter of 1941–1942. The Hunger Plan involved the “extinction of industry as well as a great part of the population in the deficit regions.” These guidelines of 23 May 1941 included some of the most explicit Nazi language about intentions to kill large numbers of people. “Many tens of millions of people in this territory will become superfluous and will die or must emigrate to Siberia. Attempts to rescue the population there from death through starvation by obtaining surpluses from the black earth zone can only come at the expense of the provisioning of Europe. They prevent the possibility of Germany holding out until the end of the war, they prevent Germany and Europe from resisting the blockade. With regard to this, absolute clarity must reign.”15

VON DEM BACH-ZELEWSKI: I am of the opinion that this step was closely connected with a speech made by Heinrich Himmler at Weselsburg [Wewelsburg] at the beginning of 1941, prior to the campaign against Russia, when he spoke of the purpose of the Russian campaign, which was, he said, to decimate the Slav population by 30 million, and that it was in order to achieve this purpose that troops of such inferior caliber were introduced. [...]

COL. POKROVSKY: You have told us that the Germans intended to destroy the Slav population in order to reduce the number of Slavs to 30 million. Where did you get this figure and this order?

VON DEM BACH-ZELEWSKI: I must correct that: Not to reduce to 30 million, but by 30 million. Himmler mentioned this figure in his speech at the Weselsburg.

COL. POKROVSKY: Do you confirm the fact that actually all the measures carried out by the German commanders and by the Wehrmacht in the occupied Russian territories were directed to the sole purpose of reducing the number of Slavs and Jews by 30 million?

VON DEM BACH-ZELEWSKI: The meaning of that is not quite clear to me. Did the Wehrmacht know that the Slav population was to be diminished by 30 million? Would you please repeat the question, it wasn't quite clear?

COL. POKROVSKY: I asked: Can you actually and truthfully confirm that the measures taken by the Wehrmacht Command in the district administrative areas then occupied by the Germans were directed to the purpose of diminishing the Slavs and Jews by 30 million? Do you now understand the question?

VON DEM BACH-ZELEWSKI: I believe that these methods would definitely have resulted in the extermination of 30 million if they had been continued, and if developments of that time had not completely changed the situation.

GEN. RUDENKO: These rules of warfare are well known to us. Please tell me, do you know about Himmler's directives given in 1941 about the extermination of 30 million Slavs? You heard about it from the witness Von dem Bach-Zelewski here in court. Do you remember that?

Goering: Yes. First of all it was not an order but a speech. Secondly, it was an assertion by Zelewski. And thirdly, in all speeches that Himmler made to subordinate leaders, he insisted on the strictest secrecy. In other words, this is a statement from a witness about what he had heard, and not an order. Consequently, I have no knowledge of this nonsense.

GEN. RUDENKO: You did not know about it. Very well. Tell me, in the German totalitarian state was there not a governing center, which meant Hitler and his immediate entourage, in which you acted as deputy? These directives must have concerned Keitel and Himmler also. Could Himmler of his own volition have issued directives for the extermination of 30 million Slavs without being empowered by Hitler or by you?

Goering: Himmler gave no order for the extermination of 30 million Slavs. The witness said that he made a speech in which he said that 30 million Slavs must be exterminated. Had Himmler issued such an order de facto, if he kept to regulations, he would have had to ask the Fuehrer -- not me, but the Fuehrer -- and the latter would probably have told him at once that it was impossible.

GEN. RUDENKO: I did not say it was an order; I said it was a directive from Himmler. You therefore admit, or you state rather, that Himmler could have issued instructions without discussing them with Hitler?

Goering: I emphasize that such instructions could not have been given by Himmler, and I know of no instructions; also no directive has been mentioned here.

GEN. RUDENKO: I shall repeat the question once more: Is it not true that the directives and the orders of the OKW with regard to the treatment of the civilian population and prisoners of war in the occupied Soviet territories were part of the general directives for the extermination of the Slavs? That is what I want to know.

Goering: Not at all. At no time has there been a directive from the Fuehrer, or anybody I know of, concerning the extermination of the Slavs.

Let us have a closer look at Oberstgruppenführer von dem Bach-Zelewski’s fate.86 According to the official “holocaust” story, he was one of the worst criminals. He is supposed to have ordered the murder of 27,800 Jews near Riga and the massacre of tens of thousands of Soviet civilians. Under these circumstances, one would assume that he was certainly put on trial and sentenced to hang after the war, but precisely this did not happen. At the Nuremberg trial, he was used as a witness for the prosecution and then released. Obviously this lenient treatment was the reward for having made statements as the one quoted above, which allowed the allies to accuse the Germans of having planned not only the total extermination of the Jews, but also a gruesome genocide of tens of millions of Slavs.

It is true that von dem Bach-Zelewski was later tried by the West German justice, but not for his alleged role in the “holocaust” or the slaughter of Soviet citizens. He was tried for two murders he was accused of having committed in 1934.8

Starvation and colonization were German policy: discussed, agreed, formulated, distributed, and understood. The framework of the Hunger Plan was established by March 1941. An appropriate set of “Economic Policy Guidelines” was issued in May. A somewhat sanitized version, known as the “Green Folder,” was circulated in one thousand copies to German officials that June. Just before the invasion, both Himmler and Göring were overseeing important aspects of the postwar planning: Himmler the long-term racial colony of Generalplan Ost, Göring the short-term starvation and destruction of the Hunger Plan. German intentions were to fight a war of destruction that would transform eastern Eu- rope into an exterminatory agrarian colony.

GEN. RUDENKO: Do you know that before the beginning of the war against the Soviet Union the Defendant Goering issued a so-called Green Folder containing directives on the economic matters in the territories of the U.S.S.R. intended for occupation?

KEITEL: Yes, that is known to me. [...]

GEN. RUDENKO: Do you admit that the directives contained in Goering's Green Folder were aimed at the plunder of the material wealth of the Soviet Union and all her citizens?

KEITEL: No. In my opinion nothing was said about destruction in the Green Folder. Instead of destruction one ought to say, to make good use of surplus, especially in the field of the food supply and the utilization of raw materials for the entire war economy of Germany, but not the destruction of them.

GEN. RUDENKO: Please repeat what you have said.

KEITEL: I said that in the Green Folder there were principles for the utilization of present and future reserves which were considered surplus, but never for their destruction. To let the Soviet population starve at the same time, on account of this, that was not the case. I have seen these things on the spot and therefore I am qualified to speak about them.

Conditions are peculiar in the Eastern theater of war because there was no private economy in Russia but only a national economy strictly regulated by a central office. The juridical situation here was that property of the enemy state could generally be claimed as war loot. For the rest, a particularly careful regulation was made, which was defined in the so-called "Green folder." The regulations contained in the "Green folder" did not suggest any looting or annihilation of the population, as asserted by the prosecution. Its tenor was rather the mobilization of economy and the rules for keeping it going, the seizure and the orderly utilization of stocks and traffic installations in the zones to be occupied in the course of fighting, whereby account had to be taken of the Russian behavior and the far-reaching destruction to be expected in consequence. The folder does not contain any order or suggestion which might convict certain groups of the population of activities beyond the needs conditioned by war. This decree, for which the defendant Goering has taken full responsibility, does not furnish any reason for an indictment.

GEN. ALEXANDROV: But you yourself admit that there was a tremendous mortality rate from starvation among the prisoners of war. You admitted so yourself here yesterday, did you not?

VON MANSTEIN: I did not say that that was so in my army, but that I could see from the documents of the Prosecution that after the large battles of encirclement in the area of Army Group Center, in which hundreds of thousands of prisoners were taken, many apparently died from starvation, first, because they were half-starved when they emerged from the pockets, and secondly, because no army was in a position to take over the feeding and care of, let us say, half a million prisoners arriving quite suddenly. This naturally resulted in difficulties which in view of the physical condition of the Russian soldiers when they arrived very probably led to a large number of deaths. But when I said this before, I was referring to the prisoners taken in the battles of encirclement and not those in my area.

DR. LATERNSER: Can you give any explanation for the mass casualties amongst Russian prisoners of war during that first winter?

VON MANSTEIN: My army too had huge numbers of prisoners later on, up to 150,000, and it is of course always difficult to provide suddenly the necessary food and accommodation for such large numbers. As far as my army was concerned, we managed to do that. We gave permission to the population, for instance, to bring food into the camps for the prisoners and thus ease the situation.

During the large battles of encirclement in 1941 which took place within the Army Group Center and near Kiev, where the prisoners ran into many hundreds of thousands, the situation was different. When the Russian soldiers came out of the encircled areas in which they had held out to the last, they were already half-starved, and in this case, an army with its transportation space cannot possibly bring with it the means to feed 500,000 prisoners at once, and accommodate them in Central Russia. After all, the same conditions arose in Germany after the capitulation, when hundreds of thousands of soldiers spent weeks in the open and could not be fed properly either.

Stalin took much the same view: that Red Army soldiers should not allow themselves to be taken alive. He could not counsel the possibility that Soviet soldiers would retreat and surrender. They were supposed to advance and kill and die. Stalin announced in August 1941 that Soviet prisoners of war would be treated as deserters, and their families arrested. When Stalin’s son was taken prisoner by the Germans, he had his own daughter-in-law arrested. This tyranny of the offensive in Soviet planning caused Soviet soldiers to be captured. Soviet commanders were fearful of ordering withdrawals, lest they be personally blamed (purged, and executed). Thus their soldiers held positions for too long, and were encircled and taken prisoner.

At Buchenwald in November 1941, the SS arranged a method of mass murder of Soviet prisoners that strikingly resembled Soviet methods in the Great Terror, though exhibiting greater duplicity and sophistication. Prisoners were led into a room in the middle of a stable, where the surroundings were rather loud. They found themselves in what seemed to be a clinical examination room, surrounded by men in white coats—SS-men, pretending to be doctors. They would have the prisoner stand against the wall at a certain place, supposedly to measure his height. Running through the wall was a vertical slit, which the prisoner’s neck would cover. In an adjoining room was another SS-man with a pistol. When he saw the neck through the slit, he would fire. The corpse would then be thrown into a third room, the “examination room,” be quickly cleaned, and the next prisoner invited inside. Batches of thirty-five to forty corpses would be taken by truck to a crematorium: a technical advance over Soviet practices.58

On the 2d day of May 1945, there was captured in Berlin a member of the SS, Paul Ludwig Gottlieb Waldmann. [...] Paul Ludwig Gottlieb Waldmann testified-you will find the excerpt I am quoting on Page 82-that:

"The Russian prisoners of war had to walk about one kilometer from the station to the camp. In the camp they stayed one night without food. The next night they were led away for execution. The prisoners were constantly being transferred from the inner camp on three trucks, one of which was driven by me. The inner camp was approximately one and three-quarters of a kilometer from the execution grounds. The execution itself took place in the barracks which had recently been constructed for this purpose.

"One room was reserved for undressing and another for waiting; in one of them a radio played rather loudly. It was done purposely so that the prisoners could not guess that death awaited them. From the second room they went, one by one, through a passage into a small fenced-in room with an iron grid let into the floor. Under the grid was a drain. As soon as a prisoner of war was killed, the corpse was carried out by two German prisoners while the blood was washed off the grid.

"In this small room there was a slot in the wall, approximately 50 centimeters in length. The prisoner of war stood with the back of his head against the slot and a sniper shot at him from behind the slot. In practice this arrangement did not prove satisfactory, since the sniper often missed the prisoner.

After 8 days a new arrangement was made. The prisoner, as before, was placed against the wall; an iron plate was then slowly lowered onto his head. The prisoner was under the impression that he was being measured for height. The iron plate contained a ramrod which shot out suddenly and poleaxed the prisoner with a blow on the back of the head. He dropped dead. The iron plate was operated by a foot lever in a corner of the room. The personnel working in the room belonged to the above-mentioned Sonderkommando.

"By request of the execution squad, I was also forced to work this apparatus. I shall refer to the subject later. The bodies of prisoners thus murdered were burned in four mobile crematories transported in trailers and attached to motor cars. I had to ride constantly from the inner camp to the execution yard. I had to make 10 trips a night with 10 minutes' interval between trips. It was during these intervals that I witnessed the executions...."

At Buchenwald in November 1941, the SS arranged a method of mass murder of Soviet prisoners that strikingly resembled Soviet methods in the Great Terror, though exhibiting greater duplicity and sophistication. Prisoners were led into a room in the middle of a stable, where the surroundings were rather loud. They found themselves in what seemed to be a clinical examination room, surrounded by men in white coats—SS-men, pretending to be doctors. They would have the prisoner stand against the wall at a certain place, supposedly to measure his height. Running through the wall was a vertical slit, which the prisoner’s neck would cover. In an adjoining room was another SS-man with a pistol. When he saw the neck through the slit, he would fire. The corpse would then be thrown into a third room, the “examination room,” be quickly cleaned, and the next prisoner invited inside. Batches of thirty-five to forty corpses would be taken by truck to a crematorium: a technical advance over Soviet practices.58

Snyder, a historian of Eastern Europe who reads many of the local languages, obviously feels the pain of the other victims of totalitarian crimes and seeks to contribute to a redress of their legitimate grievances by reframing the events of 1932-1945 in such a way that the Holocaust will no longer occupy the center stage it deserves in European history. [...]

The problem is, however, that this book is already on its way to becoming the bible of the Holocaust distorters in post-Communist Eastern Europe.

Ever since the fall of the Soviet Union and the transition to democracy, the nations that suffered under Communism ‏(both inside and outside the Bloodlands‏) have suffered from a severe case of “Holocaust envy,” which lamentably spawned the Prague Declaration of June 2008, which calls for a rewriting of historical studies and textbooks to reflect the ‏(historically false‏) equivalency between Communist and Nazi crimes.

An accepted equivalency between the crimes committed by the two dictatorships will grant Communist crimes the status of genocide, something that will relieve the pressure on these societies to confront their past, since they will then be able to point to the participation of Jewish Communists in genocidal crimes against them, thus undermining any quest for justice and historical truth.