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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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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.