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

Occupied Economies: An Economic History of Nazi-occupied Europe, 1939-1945, by Hein Klemann and Sergei Kudryashov. 2012. Berg, London and New York

Nazi Slaughter. Slavs, not Jews, Win the Victim Trophy. Generalplan Ost Exterminatory

This detailed book goes beyond the usual Jewish-centered focus and provides little-known information. I focus on this.

HERESY! POLES AND JEWS AS EQUAL VICTIMS. BIG NAZI SLAUGHTER: GENERALPLAN OST EXTERMINATORY

Authors Klemann and Kudryashov speak heresy. They write, “Nazi racism was an extreme threat. Fanatical National Socialists thought the Slavic population should be removed and thought it a waste of resources to feed these people if their production was of no immediate importance to Germany.” (p. 153).

The authors commit the unpardonable sin of equating Poles and Jews! They comment, “Destruction of the Poles or Belarussians was not delayed until some future point in time because Hitler thought them less evil than the Jews, but because they were considered different. They are treated as animals that still had some value for Germany and therefore were kept alive. That they in the long run had to disappear as well was because they lived on land wanted for Germany. In the long run, had Hitler won the war, they, too, would have been annihilated along with the Jews and gypsies. In this sense [Polish historian] Madajczyk was right.” (p. 120. Emphasis added).

The fact that the Germans did not exterminate the Poles to the extent they did the Jews owed not to lack of trying. The authors write, “The fact that most people did survive in Poland, Belorussia, Greece and Serbia was in spite of, not because of, any German policy. Food clandestinely produced by millions of smallholders for themselves and their families, and only secondarily for the local black markets, made survival possible.” (p. 369. Emphasis added).

For more on the exterminatory character of GENERALPLAN OST, see:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2023/08/04/nazi-racial-restructuring-nazism-radicalized-not-only-against-jews-bystander-holocaustspeak-rejected-poles-traumatized-by-the-extermination-of-the-jews-generalplan-ost-versions-ingrao/

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2019/11/04/polokaust-generalplan-ost-madajczyk/

GERMAN OCCUPATION OF EASTERN EUROPE WAS INCOMPARABLY WORSE THAN THAT OF WESTERN EUROPE

In the customary Judeocentric contextual vacuum that rules over WWII-related thinking, Jews are treated as the only people that suffered, and the vast differences in the intensities of the Nazi German occupation of various different nations are ignored. Thus, for example, the lightly occupied “heroic” Danes are glorified and the heavily occupied “anti-Semitic Poles” are despised. Ironically, the authors write, “All over occupied Europe, with only the exception of Denmark, fats and animal products were scarce while consumption of vegetables, potatoes, and brown bread improved–in some countries not only relatively, but even in absolute amounts.” (p. 374. Emphasis added).

Nazi Slaughter? Klemann and Kudryashov underline the stark contrast between different European nations under the Nazi German boot, “Liberman concluded that in Western Europe the population could expect reasonable treatment as long as they were more or less cooperative…In Eastern and South Eastern Europe, however, the Germans treated the despised population so badly that resistance was, if not the only way to survive, at least hardly more dangerous than obedience…In Eastern Europe the population was starved to death when the Germans wanted their food; imprisoned soldiers were mass murdered, and unthinkable forms of violence were used to get slave labor. All this proved counterproductive. It only increased resistance, violence and hatred. From 1942 on the threat of guerrilla armies became so severe that some German commanders wanted all slave hunting abolished to limit recruiting opportunities for these guerrilla forces.” (p. 152).

They add that, “In Greece and Yugoslavia, as in Poland and the USSR, the guerrilla warfare that developed from the harsh wartime conditions was made worse by the terror created by the German reprisals against the local populations.” (p. 68).

VAST DIFFERENCES IN LOSS OF LIFE BETWEEN WESTERN AND EASTERN EUROPE

In terms of the Nazi slaughter, the contrast between East and West is underlined by the following, “Eastern European countries like Poland, the USSR, Latvia and Lithuania all lost between 6.1 percent and 8.5 percent of their non-Jewish civil population as victims of actual warfare, terror, or want…In Western Europe the situation was quite different…In countries like France or Belgium, the risk of non-Jewish civilians dying as war victims was around 0.5 percent and thus less than a tenth of that for a Pole, Russian, Belarussian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, or Latvian…For Danes such risks hardly existed…” (p. 417. Emphasis added).

GERMANY DELIGITIMIZED POLES AND POLAND FROM THE BEGINNING

The authors elaborate, “The exploitation that began in Poland in 1939 and in the occupied parts of the USSR in 1941 amounted to wholesale scavenging of all the Germans could get their hands on.” (p. 53).

They add that, “To get rid of restrictions resulting from international treaties, Polish POWs were reclassified as civilians. In June 1941, after the invasion of the USSR, Berlin absorbed all of Poland or made it part of constructions such as Ostland, so that it could claim that since Poland no longer existed, it could not have a national army, and as there was no Polish army, there could be no Polish POWs. Hence, for this category, treaties protecting POWs could be ignored.” (p. 123). Mighty convenient.

Any German “benevolence” to Poles, in the face of Nazi slaughter, was strictly utilitarian, “…Germany’s economic needs demanded that the Poles were kept sufficiently fed.” (p. 89).

In addition, “Forced labor can be split again into at least two categories: forced but relatively well-treated workers–Western Europeans and, until 1943, Italians–and people treated as slaves: Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians.” (p. 121). Also, “Although from the preceding remarks it is clear that the German economic advantages of the labor-recruiting policy in Poland are disputable, the objections against Poles entering the Reich were ideological, never economic.” (p. 132. Emphasis added). The Polish and Soviet forced laborers that died in captivity are in the 8-10% range. (p. 133).

NAZI SLAUGHTER. COMPARATIVE GENOCIDE: SLAVS WIN THE VICTIM TROPHY

About 26.6 million Soviet citizens died in WWII, of which 8.7 million were Red Army soldiers that fell in combat or died in captivity. (p. 414). Thus, the “non-military” Slavic losses in the Soviet Union alone exceed the canonical Jewish 6 million figure. As noted throughout this review, the Germans targeted Slavs because they were Slavs, and not because they were specifically Poles, Russians, Belorussians, etc. Therefore the Slavs should replace the Jews as the main victims of Nazi Germany, and schools worldwide should change to reflect this fact.

THE “WASTED JEWISH LIVES” HOLOCAUST ARGUMENT FAILS

Holocaust supremacists make much of the fact that the Holocaust was “irrational” in that the Third Reich killed millions of Jews that it could have instead used profitably as forced laborers for the war effort. However, exactly the same “irrationality” is true of the 3.4 million Soviet POWs that the Germans murdered at the same time! Klemann and Kudryashov write, “By 1942 Germany needed all the workers it could get…As table 10.3 shows, the 3.4 million Soviet prisoners squandered in 1941 and 1942 would have more than equaled 80 per cent of all the foreign labor recruited by Germany from across Europe in the next few years with enormous effort and grave consequences.” (p. 139). Such were the consequences of Nazi slaughter.