WW2: A Story of Ordinary Exterminations

A possible front cover for my new book on exterminations, in preparation. The image is the Haserot Angel sculpture in the Lake View Cemetery in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. I like it, but it may be too strong. What do you think? If you have a moment, please let me know in the comments. The text below is extracted from one of the chapters of the book.

Eighty years after D-Day, the anniversary celebrations saw a series of remarkable historical distortions, apparently fashionable for our rulers who keep thinking that they can “create their own reality.” So, let me try a little retelling of the events that generated D-Day and led us to the world in which we live. It is a story of ordinary exterminations carried out by both sides.

First, why did the Germans attack Russia in 1941? From our perspective, it looks like such a colossal mistake that you may think only a group of madmen could have made the decision. But it was not a mistake; it was a desperate gamble, and it almost worked. As always, there is logic in evil, although that doesn’t make it less evil.

The story starts during WWI, which may have seen the first case of famines used as an extermination weapon on a continental scale. Early during the war, the Allies imposed a naval blockade on the Central Empires with the specific scope of killing as many Germans as possible. The effect was not immediate but, slowly, the Germans started going hungry.

A curious sideline of the blockade was that it was circumvented by the Allies themselves. Throughout the war, the United States kept supplying food to Belgium, occupied by the Germans, knowing that it would have largely been used to feed German soldiers. In the book Prolonging the Agony (2018), the authors, Docherty and Macgregor, argue that it was an especially evil plot to keep the Germans alive in order to keep killing them on the battlefield and keep making money on the war. It is speculation, of course, but history gives us plenty of examples of how evil humans can be.

Despite the food shipped to Belgium, the blockade became more and more effective as WWI went on. The number of casualties is variously estimated from 400,000 to more than 700,000 in Germany alone. In a show of exquisite cruelty, the Allies maintained the blockade for about one more year after Germany had surrendered, killing some 100,000 more Germans. The physical debilitation of Europeans during the last phases of the war was one of the reasons for the spreading of the "Spanish flu," which killed over two million people more in Europe and perhaps ten times as many worldwide.

A result of the terrible experience of WWI was that the Germans became acutely aware of their vulnerability to food shortages. This idea shaped the strategy of World War II, and it was one of the main reasons for the Molotov-Ribbentrop Agreement, signed in 1939. Only using food coming from Ukraine and Russia could the Germans think of engaging in an attack on France. As we know, it was successful, and the next step for Germany was subduing Britain.

As with the best plans of mice and men, things went agley for Germany. The aerial attack on Britain failed utterly after just a few months. In 1940, with the British navy still dominating the sea lanes and blocking food shipments to continental Europe, the Germans saw the specter of a new famine in front of them. It could be kept at bay only as long as the Soviets were willing to supply Germany with food. But what if the Soviets decided to ally with the British and starve the Germans again?

At this stage, the decision to attack the Soviet Union had a certain logic. The difference in power between the two blocks was favorable to the Soviet Union, but it was not so large. Then, the Germans had just experimented with their shock and awe strategy that had worked so well in France. It was reasonable to think that it could have the same effect on the Soviet Union. It was a desperate gamble, but the odds were not impossible.

We may also imagine that the decision to attack the Soviet Union was due to the peculiar mindset of Adolf Hitler. He saw the British as fellow Arians (he even had a British lover before the war (*) ), but he considered the Slavs as an inferior race. They were Untermenschen to be enslaved or exterminated by the superior race of the Herrenvolk, the Germans. Hitler described the extermination of the Slavs as something similar to how the Americans had treated the “Redskins.”

These ideas took shape in the form of the “Generalplan Ost” (General Plan for the East) (1942) -- also known as the “Ostplan.” It was a combination of evil ideas; racism, desperation, delusion of grandeur, bloodlust, and more. Once conquered, the fertile lands of Eastern Europe were to be used to provide abundant food for the Germans and their allies. It was clear what that implied. The developer of the plan, Herbert Backe, noted a "surplus population" in Russia of about 20 to 30 million. It meant that they would have to be eliminated one way or another. Either killed on the spot, starved to death in concentration camps, or pushed to the other side of the Urals, where they would have to fend for themselves, if they could. We tend to focus all our attention on Adolf Hitler, but he was not alone. Evil had been percolating down from the high levels of the German government, touching just about everyone.

The evil plan was full of evil details. The Slavic lands West of the Urals were to be occupied by German farmer-warriors, some 6 to 12 million of them. Colonies would be established in three main areas: the Baltic, the Leningrad Area, and Crimea, with a total of 36 new towns with 20,000 inhabitants each. The towns were reserved for the Germans; the surviving Slavs, about 14 million of them, would live in villages and work as a slaves for their German masters. They would be provided with only the minimum needed to survive and reproduce. Some of them would be taught how to read and write, but the Cyrillic alphabet would be abolished and replaced by the Latin one. Even the words Russia and Russian were to be forbidden, replaced with Muscovy and Muscovites. The whole area would become part of the Grossraum (the German economic space). It was not so different from what the English had done when they occupied Ireland at the time of Oliver Cromwell and turned the Irish into servants. You can read more about the Ostplan in a recent article.

Again, plans have a certain way of turning against their developers, and the Germans never had a chance to carry the Ostplan to completion, even though they did their best to exterminate as many Slavs as they could. Then, they underwent a treatment similar to what they had planned and partly realized for the Slavs. During the years of the war, from 1939 to 1946, the German population decreased from 80 million to around 65 million. Just like what happened after World War 1, the end of the WW2 didn’t mean the end of the troubles for the surviving Germans. There are no reliable numbers on how many perished in concentration camps or simply in their homes for lack of food. But it could have been much worse if the “Morgenthau Plan,” approved by President Roosevelt, had been implemented.

The Morgenthau Plan was hardly better than the Ostplan. It aimed to destroy the German industry and turn Germany into a purely agricultural country at the technological level of the Middle Ages. That implied the extermination of several million Germans simply because low-technology agriculture couldn’t support the German population. Fortunately, the US and their allies soon abandoned the plan when they realized they needed an economically strong German as a barrier against the Soviet Union.

So, we can see World War II is a story of ordinary exterminations, planned and put into practice by the psychopaths that ruled the governments of the time, possibly not especially worse than those who rule us in our times. Just as one more speculation, what would have been the fate of the Eastern European plains had the German gamble paid out? Several sci-fi authors have imagined just that. Among them, Philip K. Dick described this dystopic future in his novel titled "The Man in the High Castle" (1962). Here is how he describes the alternate future of the Slavic lands.

…<the Germans> had been successful with the Jews and Gypsies and Bible Students. And the Slavs had been rolled back two thousand years' worth, to their heartland in Asia. Out of Europe entirely, to everyone's relief. Back to riding yaks and hunting with bow and arrow. And those great glossy magazines printed in Munich and circulated around to all the libraries and newsstands . . . one could see the full-page color pictures for oneself: the blue-eyed, blond-haired Aryan settlers who now industriously tilled, culled, plowed, and so forth in the vast grain bowl of the world, the Ukraine. Those fellows certainly looked happy. And their farms and cottages were clean. You didn't see pictures of drunken dull-wilted Poles any more, slouched on sagging porches or hawking a few sickly turnips at the village market. All a thing of the past, like rutted dirt roads that once turned to slop in the rainy season, bogging down the carts.

Dystopic, indeed. But if there is one constant in history, it is that elites tend to be corrupted by the power they yield. They become weak, they lose control, and they are toppled by their underlings. Eventually, the Slavic Untermenschen would have risen and destroyed the herrenvolk who had occupied their lands. History never ends, and people are carried by it like leaves in the wind. We only know we’ll land somewhere, but not where.

(*) Hitler’s British lover was named Unity Mitford, and she probably was a secret agent for the British government. We will never know if she was the one who “planted” in Hitler’s mind the idea that he should not attack Britain but the Soviet Union. Maybe it is pure speculation, but the human mind is normally unfathomable, and Hitler may really have made to believe, as some sources suggested, that the British would have helped Germany subdue the Soviet Union after Hitler had shown his goodwill by stopping the bombardment campaign on Britain in 1940. I speculated on this subject in a post of mine on my “Chimeras” Blog.