Utopian plans of the Third Reich for the defeated USSR

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Even before the start of World War II, the leadership of the Third Reich thought about what needs to be done first of all in the occupied territories. The Germans also had a plan for the development of the Soviet Union.

DISPUTES ON THE TOPIC

There is still no (and cannot be) a consensus among historians about what would have happened to the Soviet Union if Germany had won the Second World War.

This topic is speculative by definition. However, the documented plans of the Nazis for the development of the conquered territories do exist, and their study continues, revealing more and more details.

The plans of the Third Reich regarding the development of the conquered territories of the USSR are usually associated with the "General Plan Ost". You need to understand that this is not one document, but rather a draft, because historians do not have the full text of the document officially approved by Hitler.

The very concept of the Plan Ost was developed on the basis of Nazi racial doctrine under the patronage of the Reichskommissariat for the Strengthening of German Statehood (RKF), headed by SS Reichsfuehrer Himmler. After the victory over the USSR, the concept of the General Plan Ost was supposed to serve as a theoretical foundation for the colonization and Germanization of the occupied territories.

KIPIT WORK …

The Nazis began to think about how to "arrange life" in the conquered territories back in 1940. In February of this year, Professor Konrad Mayer and the planning department of the RKF, headed by him, presented the first plan for the settlement of the western regions of Poland annexed to the Reich. The Reichskommissariat itself for strengthening German statehood was created less than six months earlier - in October 1939. Mayer oversaw the creation of five of the six documents listed above.

The execution of the "General Plan Ost" was divided into two parts: the close plan - for the already occupied territories, and the distant - for the eastern territories of the USSR, which still had to be captured. The Germans began to fulfill the "close plan" already at the beginning of the war, in 1941.

OSTLAND AND REICH COMMISSIONER UKRAINE

Already on July 17, 1941, on the basis of the order of Adolf Hitler "On civil administration in the occupied eastern regions" under the leadership of Alfred Rosenberg, the "Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories" was created, subordinating to itself two administrative units: the Reichskommissariat Ostland with the center in Riga and the Reichskommissariat Ukraine with the center in Rivne.

The Nazis also planned to create the Reichskommissariat of Muscovy, which would include the entire European part of Russia. It was also planned to create the Reiskommissariat Don-Volga, Caucasus and Turkestan.

NON-TALKING

One of the main points of the Ost plan was the so-called Germanization of the population of the occupied territories. The racist concept of the Third Reich considered the Russians and Slavs to be Untermensch, that is, "non-humans." Russians were recognized as the most non-Germanized people, moreover, they were "poisoned by the poison of Judo-Bolshevism."

Therefore, they either had to be destroyed or evicted. To Western Siberia. The European part of the USSR, according to the Ost plan, was to be completely Germanized.

Himmler has said more than once that the goal of the Barbarossa plan is to destroy the Slavic population of 30 million, Wetzel wrote in his memoirs about the need to take measures to limit the birth rate (campaigning for abortion, popularizing contraception, refusing to combat child mortality).

Hitler himself wrote frankly about the program of extermination of the local population of the USSR:

“Locals? We'll have to do some filtering. We will remove destructive Jews altogether. So far, my impression of the Belarusian territory is better than that of the Ukrainian one. We will not go to Russian cities, they must completely die out. There is only one task: to carry out Germanization by bringing in Germans, and the former inhabitants must be regarded as Indians."

PLANS

The occupied territories of the USSR were primarily supposed to serve as a raw material and food base for the Third Reich, and their population as a cheap labor force. Therefore, Hitler, whenever possible, demanded that agriculture and industry be preserved here, which were of great interest to the German war economy.

Ost Mayer set aside 25 years to implement the plan. During this time, most of the population of the occupied territories had to be "Germanized" in accordance with the quotas for nationality. The indigenous population was deprived of the right to private property in cities with the aim of ousting it “on land”.

According to the Ost plan, margraves were introduced to control those territories where the percentage of the German population was initially low. As, for example, Ingermanlandia (Leningrad region), Gotengau (Crimea, Kherson), and Memel-Narev (Lithuania - Bialystok).

In Ingermanland, it was planned to reduce the urban population from 3 million to 200 thousand. Mayer planned the creation of 36 strong points in Poland, Belarus, the Baltic States and Ukraine, which would ensure effective communication of the margraves with each other and with the metropolis.

After 25-30 years, the Margrave were to be Germanized by 50%, strong points by 25-30%. Himmler allotted only 20 years for these tasks and suggested considering the complete Germanization of Latvia and Estonia, as well as more active Germanization of Poland.

All these plans, on which scientists and managers, economists and business executives worked, on the development of which 510 thousand Reichsmarks were spent - all of them were postponed. The Third Reich had no time for fantasies.