The Gateway Chronicle 2020

10
isolation. Firstly, the Holocaust. The Jews
were the focus of their racial hatred and as
a result were the primary focus of the
Nazi's ethnic cleansing. Jews were deported
from across Europe to German
concentration camps, initially designed to
function as work camps, where the death
rates were high but they were not designed
for mass extermination at first. After
the Wanasee Conference on 20 January
1942, where the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish
Question’ was decided. All Jews in Europe
would be killed, worked to death or
deported to undecided locations in the
East. Under these orders, 6,000,000 Jews,
or 2/3 of Europe’s Jewish population,
died through a combination of shootings,
gassings, starvation and being worked literally
to death. Secondly, the rest of Generalplan
Ost where, even in its incomplete
phase, with the total death toll estimated
to be between
4.5 million and
nearly 14 million,
using similar
methods to
the Holocaust,
such as seizing
all farmland in
the Ukraine and
sending all produce back to Germany
combined with German soldiers being ordered
to ‘live off the land’ to avoid having
to manage the chaotic and expensive logistics
of feeding the troops during the
largest ground invasion ever, causing
mass starvation among the occupied areas.
The third was the Nazi occupation of
Poland, in which 13% of Poland’s pre-war
population were killed in an effort to Germanise
the area, to combat the resistance
through methods such as reprisal killings,
more forced labour and the infamous
Warsaw uprising.
From the ruins of the Soviet Union, Germany
planned to set up 4 puppet states
would be carved out. Reichskomissarat(RK)
Ostland, consisting of the Baltic
States, part of Belarus and stretching to
Leningrad, RK Ukraine, RK Kaukasien,
Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and most of
the Russian Caucasus, and RK Moskowien,
all the land east of Ostland and
Ukraine up to an arbitrary line between
Archangelsk and Astrakan (the A-A Line),
with thisthe finish line for Barbarossa. In
reality, only Ostland and Ukraine were
ever set up as Germany’s invasion was
turned around before these other areas
could be brought fully under their control.
Next, the areas acquired in the name of
Lebensraum had to undergo 'Germanisation’
where the culture and often the local
people themselves of a country were destroyed
and replaced with those culturally
or ethnically German. Certain percentages
of the population of the local population
were selected for Germanisation as they
apparently were racially similar enough to
Germans (Nazi racial policy was based on
science that was very shaky at best and extremely
harmful
pseudoscience
“In the relatively short span of 6 years,
the Nazis perpetrated 3 out of the 5
most deadly genocides in history”
at worst). These
figures were
seemingly
picked at random
with 50%
of Czechs, 35%
of Ukrainians
and 10% of Poles possessed ‘Germanic
blood’ and those not selected were to be
killed, sent to forced labour camps or deported
to Siberia. Even children were not
spared. An estimated 50,000 to 200,000
Polish children who were deemed to have
German traits were taken from their parents
to be Germanised and re-introduced
into German society. Only 10-15% ever
made it back to their parents and thousands
ended up in concentration camps.
During the war, 350,000 Baltic Germans
and 1.7 million Poles were the subject of
Germanisation, plus 400,000 Germans
were sent from Germany to help colonise
the new conquests. As the Nazis pushed
further and further east, Germanisation efforts
became confused, with some in
Ukraine being torn between the German
rule of needing 3 German grandparents to
be classed as German whilst some saw no