Generalplan Ost. Adolf Hitler
In the personal view of Adolf Hitler, and thus in the official policy of the Third Reich, peoples of Slavic descent were untermenschen – subhuman – and the lands they populated were too valuable to be wasted on them. Hitler wanted the lands of central and eastern Europe to be colonized by Aryans, believed by the Nazis to be superior to all other races.
Generalplan Ost was developed by and amended over time by the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), under the supervision of Heinrich Himmler. Much of the plan was in place prior to the start of the war, which Himmler envisioned as largely a racial struggle, and in which he predicted that “…20 to 30 million Slavs and Jews will perish through military actions and crises of food supply…” In 1941 the plan was changed when the Jewish situation gained its own separate “Final Solution.”
In June of 1941 the plan included the deportation of more than 30 million Slavs to Siberia after the successful completion of the war against the Soviet Union. The plan discussed the planned forced relocation of Slavic people well into the 1950s, and as the war progressed and the Germans found themselves unable to secure much of the envisioned territory, changes from relocation to extermination were put in place. It had been intended by the plan to remove all food stocks from the Ukraine and other areas seized from the Soviets, allowing for starvation to eliminate the people left behind.
Nearly 14 million Russian and Eastern European civilians died during the Second World War according to Russian sources, with nearly 8 million the result of German policies as spelled out in Generalplan Ost. The plan specified the Hunger Plan which would through starvation reduce the Slavic populations to what the Nazis determined to be acceptable levels.
The Hunger Plan was implemented in most of the areas occupied by the Germans, and was likely responsible for the majority of the deaths which occurred among the civilian population, which reached nearly 20% of the 68 million who found themselves behind the German lines for most of the war. Generalplan Ost led to between 4.5 or 13.7 million civilian deaths, depending on the source of the estimate, between June 1941 and May 1945.
