rise-and-fall-of-the-third-reich-william-shirer-pdf

Chapter 27THE NEW ORDERNo comprehensive blueprint for the New Order was ever drawn up, but it isclear from the captured documents and from what took place that Hitler knewvery well what he wanted it to be: a Nazi-ruled Europe whose resources wouldbe exploited for the profit of Germany, whose people would be made the slavesof the German master race and whose ”undesirable elements” – above all, theJews, but also many Slavs in the East, especially the intelligentsia among them– would be exterminated.The Jews and the Slavic peoples were the Untermenschen – subhumans.To Hitler they had no right to live, except as some of them, among the Slavs,might be needed to toil in the fields and the mines as slaves of their Germanmasters. Not only were the great cities of the East, Moscow, Leningrad andWarsaw, to be permanently erased ∗ but the culture of the Russians and Polesand other Slavs was to be stamped out and formal education denied them.Their thriving industries were to be dismantled and shipped to Germany andthe people themselves confined to the pursuits of agriculture so that they couldgrow food for Germans, being allowed to keep for themselves just enough tosubsist on. Europe itself, as the Nazi leaders put it, must be made ”Jew-free.””What happens to a Russian, to a Czech, does not interest me in the slightest,”declared Heinrich Himmler on October 4, 1943, in a confidential addressto his S.S. officers at Posen. By this time Himmler, as chief of the S.S. and theentire police apparatus of the Third Reich, was next to Hitler in importance,holding the power of life and death not only over eighty million Germans butover twice that many conquered people.What the nations [Himmler continued] can offer in the way of goodblood of our type, we will take, if necessary by kidnaping their childrenand raising them here with us. Whether nations live in prosperityor starve to death like cattle interests me only in so far as weneed them as slaves to our Kultur; otherwise it is of no interest tome.Whether 10,000 Russian females fall down from exhaustion while∗ As early as September 18, 1941, Hitler had specifically ordered that Leningrad was to be”wiped off the face of the earth.” After being surrounded it was to be ”razed to the ground”by bombardment and bombing and its population (three millions) was to be destroyed withit. See above, p. 767.843