The Gateway Chronicle 2020

11
reason to kill people if they acted German
and showed no ’racial concerns’. There
were also further disagreements where
the Reich decided a person was Jewish if
they had 3 Jewish grandparents, but the
Einsatzgruppen decided it was if you had
one Jewish grandparent, weather you
practiced the religion or not, further showing
the inconsistencies of the pseudoscience
and the unlucky dip that was Nazi
racial policy.
The Kleine Planung resulted in some of the
largest man-made losses of life in history,
and this is just the ’small’ half of the plan
carried out over 6 years. The Gross Planung
was to be even more horrific,
involving the removal of 45 million
people from Central and Eastern
Europe via being sent to the death
camps, deliberate starvation due to
seizure of food supplies or deportation
to Siberia. This would involve
50-60% of Russians exterminated
with 15% being driven to Siberia,
nearly 50% of Estonians, 50%
of Latvians, 50% of Czechs, 65% of
Ukrainians, 75% of Belarussians,
80-85% of Poles, 85% of Lithuanians
and 100% of Latgalians. Deportation
to Siberia is simply a euphamism
for mass murder as, with
very little infrastructure to accommodate
to new arrivals, they
would freeze or starve to death in
the wilderness. Even the most advanced
countries today would struggle heavily to
properly provide for an influx of millions
of people, let alone the less developed areas
of what was to be a military crushed
USSR. The regions would then be repopulated
by 8-10 million German settlers and
all the recently Germanised peoples over
the next 2-3 decades in order to fully
transform the Slavic lands into German
ones. As there were not enough Germans
to properly populate the new conquests,
people judged to be racially between Germans
and Russians called Mittleschicht (e.g
Latvians and Czechs) were also to be settled
there. Near the end of the war, all
copies of Generalplan Ost were destroyed
as the horrific plans detailed within which
would almost certainly warrant the death
penalty for anyone involved in its execution,
but we have been able to reconstruct
the main points of it through various documents
referring to it or supplementing it
as well as the testimonies of SS officers
during the Nuremburg trials.
The Second World War was a long time
ago and to many of us and numbers on a
page are hard to comprehend. The total
death toll of Lebensraum is hard to accurately
place, but civilian casualties sat in
the tens of millions due to this one idea,
‘Danzig greets its leader!’ –
civilians who had parents, The Nazi invasion of Poland,
children or siblings as entire
September 1939
towns and villages were
mercilessly wiped out. The idea of Lebensraum
was a horrific one and it is a
dark stain on humanity that it proceeded
as far as it did without seeing severe ethical
objections about from the German
army or high command. We can only
thank God that the Allies managed to defeat
the forces of evil, resulting in unprecedented
growth in the latter half of the 20 th
century, instead of the unspeakable atrocities
that would have come about if Generalplan
Ost was seen to its conclusion.
Henry, L6JRW