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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   36583 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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Slavs were even regarded as Aryan under the Third Reich.

No, the plan was to culturally assimilate the more Aryan looking ones (huge genetic overlap between Czechs and Germans etc) and exterminate the rest.

With Russians, Germans openly planned to starve to death all Russian urban population as a food saving measures. (look up Hunger plan). They never managed that due to bureaucratic ineptness and unwilligness to go through with it on lower levels.

They never managed that due to bureaucratic ineptness and unwilligness to go through with it on lower levels.

This is not true. The so-called "Hunger Plan" is yet another fabrication that takes a grain of truth and spins it into a plan of genocide. That so-called "plan" just referred to an estimate for the number of deaths of starvation that would happen as a consequence of German occupation of Soviet territory until the end of the war.

This starvation was estimated as a consequence of provisioning their own army through the end of the war. For example, from the wikipedia article:

1.) The war can only be continued if the entire Wehrmacht is fed from Russia in the third year of the war.

2.) If we take what we need out of the country, there can be no doubt that tens of millions of people will die of starvation.

This is not even close to some secret plan to exterminate the Slavs because they were not considered Aryan. It was an estimate of the effect of provisioning their army to continue the war.

Edit: There is also the fact that the Germans fielded one of the largest volunteer foreign armies in history, composed predominantly of Slavs. The volunteer rate of Ukranians to the German side rivaled the volunteer rate of British for the war effort. I know it's fashionable to think that the Germans had plans to turn around and genocide the people that were helping them, but there's no evidence for that. The best the mainstream narrative can do is misrepresent things like the "hunger plan" to assert genocidal plans that did not exist.

Are you seriously claiming that reaching an agreement to not supply cca thirty million people with any food because it might inconvenience your homeland and bring back memories of WW1 rationing & recognizing this would cause these people to die isn't planning mass murder ?

The claim that is at controversy is that the Germans had a plan to exterminate the Slavs. Those documents do not support that conclusion. It shows that the Germans considered mass starvation as a dilemma to provisioning their army to continue the war. You can say they should have surrendered and they are murderers for continuing the war. That's fine. But to say that this estimate was part of a secret scheme to genocide the Slavs is just not true.

There was mass starvation in India and Greece as a result of Allied blockades and diversions of food resources. Nobody would call that a planned genocide, even if you want to call it murder.

The claim that is at controversy is that the Germans had a plan to exterminate the Slavs

I never said that.

What they had a plan was for killing millions of conquered Soviet urban dwellers on account of the tight food supply.

was part of a secret scheme to genocide

It wasn't 'secret' in the slightest. Maybe not discussed in public or propagandised much, but forced population expulsions of Slavs and Germanisation of the more Aryan looking ones was a plan.

I never said that.

Come on. This is exactly what you said:

No, the plan was to culturally assimilate the more Aryan looking ones (huge genetic overlap between Czechs and Germans etc) and exterminate the rest.

With Russians, Germans openly planned to starve to death all Russian urban population as a food saving measures. (look up Hunger plan). They never managed that due to bureaucratic ineptness and unwilligness to go through with it on lower levels.

You said:

  • They had a plan to assimilate the Aryan looking ones and exterminate the rest of the Slavs.

  • As part of that plan, they planned to use hunger as the extermination method to achieve their goals.

  • The plan wasn't carried out due to lower level officers not following orders.

None of this is true. The reality is that there are some documents that assessed the logistical reality of the situation, and concluded that the Wehrmacht could only be fed from Russia in the third year of the war, and there was no alternative. This assessment soberly predicted mass starvation and regarded the situation as catastrophic. You can say that the Germans should have prioritized feeding the locals above feeding their army. Or that they should have surrendered at this point upon realizing the human cost of continuing the war. But that is all very different from the ahistorical claims you have made in your post.

These documents that historians use to spin a "Hunger plan" actually described the pragmatic concerns of the food situation rather than an implementation of some plan to exterminate the Slavs.

Lastly, Germany prioritized feeding locals based on those employed in the German war effort. Your notion that they went around giving food to those they thought looked Aryan enough and let the rest starve in order to exterminate them is a testament to the abysmal failure of mainstream historiography to move beyond ethnic hatred in interpreting history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost

Planned for moving most of the Slavic population in eastern Europe to Siberia and assimilating the racially acceptable part.

There were also plans to just exterminate certain populations, such as Poles.

None of this is true. The reality is that there are some documents that assessed the logistical reality of the situation, and concluded that the Wehrmacht could only be fed from Russia in the third year of the war, and there was no alternative.

That's untrue; I've just finished reading a comprehensive economic history of WW2, and it wasn't that there was no alternative. It was simply deemed more acceptable to plan to starve millions of Russians to death than to scale back meat farming in Germany and thus reduce the standard of living.

Bullshit. Was their army powered by corpses? They (would have) died because the germans wanted them to die.

You’re doing a bait-and-switch by focussing on motive, as if a ridiculously small legitimate benefit makes the murder incidental and exonerates the murderer. ‘I didn’t kill him out of hate, he had 10 dollars in his wallet, so I had no choice’.

IIRC the definition of "aryan" was flexible and tended to widen over time, with groups that exhibited good military performance usually being defined as Aryan.

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