Polish-Jewish Relations: 1,300 Keyword-Phrase-Indexed Book Reviews (by Jan Peczkis)

Vom GENERALPLAN OST, by Czeslaw Madajczyk (ed.) 1962

The Polocaust If Totally Fulfilled: Initial Blueprint for Nazi German Extermination of at Least Tens of Millions of Slavic Peoples

My review is based on the English-language article: GENERALPLAN OST, published by historian Czeslaw Madajczyk in the 1962 issue of POLISH-WESTERN AFFAIRS, Volume 3, Number 2, pp. 390-442. The entire GENERALPLAN OST is reproduced in German (pp. 401-442). The remainder of the article is an analysis, by Madajczyk, of GENERALPLAN OST.

The territories in question include German-occupied Poland and the adjacent regions of the western Soviet Union. Long before WWII, Hitler had dreamed of conquering them, removing their Slavic population, and replacing them with ethnic Germans. This was his LEBENSRAUM program. (p. 400).

GENERALPLAN OST focused on 45 million people, of which 31 million were to be deported to western Siberia. The fate of the remaining 14 million is not mentioned, and Madajczyk considers it reasonable to infer that they would immediately be annihilated. (p. 392).

Let us consider some things not explicitly written by Madajczyk regarding a full-fledged Polocaust. It must be remembered that GENERALPLAN OST was tentative, if only because Nazi plans for genocide had not yet crystallized at the time of its conception (late 1941; p. 391). During this time, the reader must remember, the Nazis were still mulling what form the Final Solution (to the Jewish Problem) would take. Discussions still included the resettling of Jews to various possible locations, including western Siberia. Consequently, not much should be read into the stated goal of mass resettling of Slavs as opposed to their explicit outright extermination.

One must also remember that western Siberia was hardly a habitable place for tens of millions of people. Thus, even a literal resettling of tens of millions of Slavs would have been tantamount to their physical extermination. Finally, the reader must remember that the Nazis were prone to disguise their genocidal policies. Long after they had started deporting Jews east for mass gassing, they still referred to this process through cynical euphemisms such as “resettlement”, “special treatment”, etc.

Madajczyk makes it obvious that the Nazis were serious about their genocidal plans against the Slavs. The military collapse of the USSR was expected by late 1941. It was in this context that Goering had a discussion with Italian Foreign Minister Comte Ciano. Goering told him to take the possible famine in Greece in stride because, that very winter, 20-30 million locals would starve to death in Russia. (p. 399). [Only the unexpectedly-stiff Red Army resistance, and thinned-out German personnel, alleviated the scale of starvation of Soviet peoples.]