• @KurtGodel7:

    Mazal’s willingness to rely on documentation from Soviet-controlled courts detracts significantly from his own credibility.

    And your  naivety and willingness to swallow  wholesale right wing sources  (as well as distorting Toze) shows you to be something we call a  ‘useful idiot’

    Here are the calorie  counts given in Tooze:

    Ration levels in German occupied areas in 1940/41
    German soldier: 4000
    German civilian: 2570
    Norwegian: 1600
    Czech: 1600
    Belgian: 1300
    French: 1300
    Pole (General Government): 609 (later 938)
    Polish Jew (General Government): 503 (later 369)
    Belorussian Jew: 420

    More:
    The average German allocation was 3000 calories prewar.
    2078 calories in 1942/3
    1981 calories 1943/4
    1671 calories 1944/5
    1412 calories 1945/6

    Hitler, before WW2:

    _What then is the question? Only that we need grain and timber. For the grain I need space in the east; for the timber I need a colony, only one [colony]. We can survive. Our harvests in 1938 and in this year were excellent. We can survive, in spite of the triumphant cries of others that we will starve. We have achieved these harvests thanks to the persistence of our people and above all due to the use of chemical fertilizers. However, one day the soil will have had enough … What then? I cannot stand by and let my people starve. Am I not better off then in putting two million men on the battlefield, than in losing them to starvation? Perhaps there are still among the apostles of humanity (i.e., those who seek peace at any cost), those who remember 1919. I do not want to repeat that. I will not repeat that. Free trade, open borders, that is all practical, we had these things. However when everything depends upon those masters of the seas (i.e., the English), when we can be brought low by a blockade, then it is my duty to create a situation whereby by my people can live off of their own fat. That is the only question, the rest is insanity."

    "I do not harbor any romantic aims. I have no wish to rule. Above all I want nothing from the West; nothing today and nothing tomorrow. I desire nothing from the thickly settled regions of the world … All of the notions that are ascribed to me by other people are inventions.

    ‘Everything I undertake is directed against Russia. If the West is too stupid and too blind to comprehend this I will be forced to reach an understanding with the Russians, turn and strike the West, and then after their defeat turn back against the Soviet Union with my collected strength. I need the Ukraine and with that no one can starve us out as they did in the last war.’“however, I must have a free hand in the east. To repeat: it is a question of grain and timber, which I can find only outside of Europe.”_

    The people in the east were marked down as expendable long before WW2  and the blockade started


  • Hey the Czechs! My people! Okay so the Germans got more food big deal. If my country was invaded and I needed to feed occupied nations by rationing I’d give my people more food. That’s just being bias. But I’d also give those occupied people more food if things were going better. Simple. Stop using history references with your MASSIVE amouts of cliff notes and just use COMMON SENSE!


  • @Lazarus:

    The people in the east were marked down as expendable long before WW2  and the blockade started

    The quotes you provided from Hitler do not support that conclusion. The fact that the stated aim of the Nazi foreign policy was to expand at the expense of the Soviet government (which is what he said) does not prove that he had made plans to exterminate Eastern Europeans (which seems to be what you want him to have said).

    You complained that I did not address the caloric figures you’d provided earlier. I’d already addressed the subject of Germany’s food shortage in my earlier posts, and saw no reason to repeat myself. But to avoid misunderstandings, the picture Tooze painted in his book was remarkably clear. The Nazi leadership was deathly afraid of damaging civilian morale within Germany, and felt that significant food reductions would do exactly that. Even so, there were times when Germany’s food crisis was so bad that significant reductions in rations to German citizens were made. Those reductions caused health problems, and confirmed the Nazi leadership’s fears about the loss of civilian morale. The Nazi government responded by extracting more food from its occupied territories. That worsened the food situation in those occupied territories–and especially among Jews–while allowing the German government to undo the previous ration reductions to its own citizens.

    As Private Ryan has pointed out, it is normal for a government to place a higher priority on feeding its own citizens than on feeding the non-citizen residents of territories it occupies. If the U.S. was subjected to famine or near-famine conditions, would it allow its own people to experience severe deprivation and malnutrition in order to feed people in occupied Afghanistan and Iraq? Portraying the Nazi government’s unequal allocation of food as somehow indicative of the Nazis’ uniquely evil/genocidal nature simply ignores how most governments throughout human history respond to famine.

    You claimed that, “the German plans for Russia (made long before any blockade began to have any effect and before the invasion of Russia ) specificaly state that millions of Russians and Poles were going to be denied food and thus would die of starvation.” I’m not exactly clear on what source you are using to support that claim. For the record, I do not consider Mazal a credible source. If, however, you are relying on Tooze (a credible source) for that claim, it is important to look at the description Tooze actually gave.

    Tooze wrote that in 1940, the German leadership had recognized its food situation was unsustainable. Germany itself was a food deficit nation, as were all the major nations it occupied. (Not to mention most or all of the smaller nations it occupied.) It was felt that a successful invasion of the Soviet Union would produce many benefits, among which would be the elimination of this food problem. However, most territories in the western Soviet Union (with the exception of the Ukraine) ran at food deficits. Even the surplus of the Ukraine was not as large as it once had been, due to Stalin’s urbanization and industrialization. An invasion of the Soviet Union would actually increase the absolute magnitude of Germany’s food deficit. But by diverting food away from the conquered Soviet territory, outright starvation could be averted in other territory occupied by Germany.

    In addition, the raw materials, manpower, and industrial capacity of captured Soviet territory were to be used to build airplanes. Airplanes which would allow Germany to cancel out the influence of the large numbers of military aircraft being built in British and American factories; and which were being used to attack German cities.

    The invasion of the Soviet Union was done to eliminate communism; which Hitler hated. It was also done because it was felt that conquering Soviet territory would give Germany its best chance to survive the British food blockade and the Anglo-American military aircraft production effort.


  • So Germany was short of food.

    To help stop the shortages she was ‘forced’ to attack Poland.
    Now she had to feed the Poles as well as her own people.
    Now she had to invade Russia to get food to feed the Poles.
    Once in Russia she had to feed the Russians……
    and on and on and on.
    Can you not see the stupidity of such an argument?
    If she had not invaded other countries then she would not have  to feed the populations.
    If she did not invade Poland she  would not be blockaded and could buy food.
    This is complete and utter madness and I am suprised anyone could be so gullible.

    October 1941, Hitler Monologue, Führer Headquarters, in Madajczyk, Generalny, pp. 69-70.

    _“The [eastern] region must lose the character of the Asiatic steppe, it must be Europeanized!  It is for this purpose that we are building great highways to the southern tip of the Crime and to the Caucasus.  German cities established along these roadways will stretch like a string of pearls, and around these will be German settlements.  The two or three million people we need [for this program] can be found quicker than we think.  We will take them from Germany, the Scandinavian lands, Western Europe, and America.  Chances are that I will not live to see this, but in twenty years twenty million people will inhabit this territory.  In three hundred years we will have a blossoming parkland of extraordinary beauty!

    As for the people indigenous to the area, we will be sure to select those [of importance].  We will remove the destructive Jews entirely. … We will not enter Russian cities, they must die out completely.

    24 October 1939, Heinrich Himmler: Geheimreden 1933 bis 1945 und andere Ansprachen. Edited by B.F. Smith and A.F. Peterson (Frankfurt/Main: Propyläen Verlag, 1974), pp. 124-125.

    “When we consider the issue [of eastern people], we first have to recognize that we have already long occupied ourselves with the Polish-Slavic problem … then we must clearly conclude, and thus have I received my tasks from the Führer, that in at least in the provinces which currently belong to Germany, the problem of the Polish minority must be solved, it must be eliminated in our lifetime.

    ========================================
    19410523 Document: *EC-126; Description: Economic Policy Directive for Economic
    Organization, East, Agricultural Group, 5/23/1941. (USA 316)
    must be eliminated
    Document EC-126: Economic Policy Directives for Economic Organization, East, Agricultural Group [partial translation]", in Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression. Volume VII: US Government Printing Office, District of Columbia: 1947. pp. 295-298:

    Dated    5/23/1941

    In future, Southern Russia must turn its face towards Europe. Its food surpluses, however, will only be paid for if it purchases its industrial consumer goods from Germany, of Europe. Russian competition from the forest zone must therefore be abolished. It follows from all that has been said that the German administration in these territories may well attempt to mitigate the consequences of the famine which undoubtedly will take place, and to accelerate the return to primitive agricultural conditions. An attempt might be made to intensify cultivation in these areas by expanding the acreage under potatoes or other important food crops giving a high yield. However, these measures will not avert famine. Many tens of millions of people in this area will become redundant and will either die or have to emigrate to Siberia. Any attempt to save the population there from death by starvation by importing surpluses from the black soil zone would be at the expense of supplies to Europe. It would reduce Germany’s staying power in the war, an would undermine Germany’s and Europe’s power to resist the blockade. This must be clearly and absolutely understood._

    The above was written before the invasion of Russia and whilst Germany had no food shortages at all.
    It was at a time Germany could import food via Spain, Portugal, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Turkey and Sweden.
    A time when Germany could buy food from Russia rather than attack and starve the Russians.

    Plenty more documents exist that show the plan was to deliberately starve millions of Poles and Russians by stealing their food.
    It was nothing to do with a blockade.


  • @Lazarus:

    So Germany was short of food.

    To help stop the shortages she was ‘forced’ to attack Poland.

    Do you honestly believe the above is an accurate representation of anything I’ve written?

    I attempted to look up the source for the first quote you provided–the so-called “Hitler Monologue” source–but without success. If you would provide more information about it, it would be helpful.

    The second quote you provided was written by Heinrich Himmler. The main theme of the second quote was Himmler’s thought that the “problem” of the Polish minority needed to be solved. That quote supports a statement I had already made: namely, that the Nazi government had drawn up plans to forcibly relocate 30 - 50 million Poles eastward in the postwar era.

    The third quote you provided was written in May of 1941–shortly before the invasion of the Soviet Union. It described the Nazi government’s plans for diverting a portion of the food from conquered Soviet territory westward, to ease the food crisis elsewhere. Those who formulated this plan clearly recognized that Germany would be unable to feed everyone within its borders, and had decided that residents of conquered Soviet territories would be among the millions who starved. Adequately feeding people in the conquered Soviet territories would have increased starvation elsewhere.

    In reference to the third quote, you erroneously claimed that “The above was written before the invasion of Russia and whilst Germany had no food shortages at all. It was at a time Germany could import food via Spain, Portugal, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Turkey and Sweden.” The British food blockade was also directed against neutral nations which bordered Germany. A nation such as Spain, for example, was allowed to import as much food as might be required to meet its own food deficit, but not more than that. This would prevent it from acquiring a food surplus to sell to Germany. While that measure did not create starvation in the neutral nations in question, it did mean that those nations were unable to prevent the British government from causing widespread starvation in German-held territory. In The Wages of Destruction, Tooze illustrated the British blockade’s effectiveness at causing starvation.

    pp. 418-419


    After 1939 the supply of food in Western Europe was no less constrained than the supply of coal. . . . Grain imports in the late 1930s had run at the rate of more than 7 million tons per annum mostly from Argentina and Canada. These sources of supply were closed off by the British blockade. . . . By the summer of 1940, Germany was facing a Europe-wide agricultural crisis. . . . By 1941 there were already signs of mounting discontent due to the inadequate food supply. In Belgium and France, the official ration allocated to ‘normal consumers’ of as little as 1,300 calories per day, was an open invitation to resort to the black market.


  • '12

    There is only one thing this thread convinces me about.  That those who make excuses for what the Nazis did are douches.  It is nothing short of amazing that educated people can even ‘debate’ this.


  • Guys keep the thread clean. This is just a healthy disscussion. I think what Kurt says makes sense. Like I said before. Hitler had a “list” of sorts that said "okay the Poles lose food first. Then the French. Then the Germans.


  • The attempts to portay Germany as the innocent victim in all this are risable.
    All Germany had to do was stop invading Poland and there would be no blockade.
    It is also  silly to claim that it was food shortages that led to the murder of millions.
    Long before the war mental Adolf made no secret that he was going to kill all the Jews and take  ground in Russia. There are dozens of documents where this is laid out in great detail.
    The plan was to remove the population of Poland and Russia. This meant the 10’s of millions who lived there would  be left to starve.
    These plans were made when there were no food shortages and only the most rabid Nazi fanbois would try and claim it was unintentional.
    Murder was the aim right from the start and it is sickening to see otherwise intelligent people try and claim it was all Britain’s fault.
    Nazi propaganda obviously worked  and feeble minded people who  try and make excuses for mass murder are sick.

    My inability to post links is crippling me here and I simply have not got the time to try and work round the restrictions
    This is not my most important task at the moment I am afraid I am just going to have to answer in general terms.


  • Yes  he did plan on killing the Jews. But that wasn’t from lack of food. It was from “The Final Solution”. He didn’t plan on killing the Slavs until later. Actually he first was to send them to Siberia not kill them.


  • Yes the  fiction they were to be sent to Siberia.
    Perhaps you can explain how these 20 million+ plus people were to get to Siberia when Germany took all their trains, all their  livestock, all their food, all their vehicles?
    How are the young and the old to make a journey of several thousands miles on foot with no food?
    This is just more excuse making.


  • HEY! I never said no body was gonna die on the way. But hey if 20 million people are going somewhere I’d say at least of couple hundred thousand are gonna make it. You see I’m not making excuses. I’m IMPLYING! Use you Noggin bud. In the words of Samuel Clemens, a fellow Missourian of mine (of course YOU may know him as Mark Twain) “It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt,”. In other words think of your answer REAL hard.


  • @Lazarus:

    How are the young and the old to make a journey of several thousands miles on foot with no food?
    This is just more excuse making.

    German POW´s did walk that kind of a distance…without food all the way to gulags in siberia… Stalingrad , Massgraveyard…


  • Walked all the way without any food?

    I know they thought they were superman but that does not mean they all came from Krypton!

    Rubbish, pure and simple.


  • Wow… Just… WOW… Please using superhero references makes what your saying even MORE confusing. I think you’d find some food in the wilderness. What about the Trail of Tears hmmm? I’m part Cherokee. Next thing your gonna tell me the US government planned to kill all them but had a few setbacks so they couldn’t. Just because you send someone on a death march doesn’t mean their gonna die ( :?). Lets look at another historical reference. The Battan Death March. Nuff said…


  • @Pvt.Ryan:

    Guys keep the thread clean. This is just a healthy disscussion. I think what Kurt says makes sense. Like I said before. Hitler had a “list” of sorts that said "okay the Poles lose food first. Then the French. Then the Germans.

    Thanks for your cool-headed response, and for trying to calm the discussion. Some of the subjects in this thread are difficult to discuss objectively.

    One of the reasons for this is the way that most Western schools teach history. When I was in school, we were told about the Holocaust, and about the large numbers of people who died in Eastern Europe under Nazi rule. Nothing was said about the British naval blockade or Germany’s food supply, and the implication was that Germany could have fed everyone within its borders had it chosen to do so. Passing references were sometimes made to a small subset of the Soviet Union’s mass murders. But there was no effort at all to humanize the victims: we were never shown pictures or video footage of them, never shown their diaries or other writings, and were never told any of their names. No mention was made of JSC 1067, or the effort to inflict starvation on postwar Germany. Instead the emphasis was on America’s generosity in providing Germany with the Marshall Plan–a plan which had not been put into effect until 1948, after three years of deliberate starvation.

    We were not told of Hitler’s fear of a Soviet invasion of Germany, once the Soviets had finished Stalin’s program of militarization and industrialization. Nor were we told that no major Western democracy had an anti-Soviet foreign policy, or seriously opposed Soviet expansionism, until 1948. When Poland and the Soviet Union went to war in 1919, and when the Soviets were on the verge of annexing all of Poland, the Western democracies did nothing, or (in the case of France) next to nothing. No mention was made of this war. Hitler’s efforts to expand Germany were presented as the acts of a madman, or at very least as a result of an all-consuming need to conquer. Never once was the possibility suggested that Hitler felt the need to expand because of the Western democracies’ moral failure–of their failure to oppose the spread of communism. The fact that many Western democratic leaders, including FDR, were strongly pro-communist was simply not mentioned.

    We were told that Hitler had planned all along to exterminate the Jews, and that any reasonable person who read Mein Kampf would come away with this same conclusion. We were told that the Germans were collectively guilty for having democratically elected such an obviously evil man. We were not told that Hitler wanted to export Germany’s Jews to Madagascar, or that under Hitler’s government 10% of Germany’s Jews emigrated to Palestine, while a greater number emigrated elsewhere. Such arguments would have undercut the (false) notion that Hitler had planned on exterminating the Jews from the very beginning; and would have absolved the German people of the burden of collective guilt which many were so eager to bestow.

    Moral outrage and indignation were sometimes expressed about Germany’s bombing of British cities. The Allies’ far more massive bombing raids against German cities were described in far more innocuous terms.

    No mention is made of the rape and murder that the Red Army inflicted on Germany as it advanced westward. Children are not asked to read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s poem “Prussian Nights;” nor are they told about its historical context. They are not told that, as part of the Yalta Conference, Britain and the U.S. had agreed that citizens of the Soviet Union found in conquered German territory would be turned over to the Soviets, regardless of their consent. This meant that millions of people who had fled westward to escape the Red Army would be placed at the mercy of Joseph Stalin.


    Tolstoy described the scene of Americans returning to the internment camp after having delivered a shipment of people to the Russians. “The Americans returned to Plattling visibly shamefaced. Before their departure from the rendezvous in the forest, many had seen rows of bodies already hanging from the branches of nearby trees.”[10]


    We are told neither that FDR liked and admired Joseph Stalin, nor that he directly cooperated with Soviet mass murder. We are not told that among those who died as a result of Operation Keelhaul were Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians who had bravely fought the Soviet Union to defend their families and their homes from Soviet invasion, Soviet mass murder, and Soviet tyranny. They also included many women and children who had fled westward to escape Stalin’s paranoia and bloodlust, and the terror of the Red Army.

    The education we received was propagandistic, included numerous false assertions, and often bore only a passing resemblance to reality. An education such as this was designed to create the impression that the Nazis were pure evil and had to be stopped at all costs; and that the communists, while imperfect, were considerably less evil. In order to create that emotional impression, a number of false or misleading statements had to be made, and a great deal of factual evidence swept under the rug. The effect of such an education is interesting, in that the emotional impressions it has created seem to remain behind, even when many factual misrepresentations have been corrected.

    Those who champion this kind of propagandistic education are often fond of phrases such as “history forgotten is bound to be repeated.” And yet . . . which historical mistakes are we avoiding by engaging in this kind of propaganda? People subjected to it conclude (at least in some cases) that using food as a weapon against civilian populations is okay, as long as the victims are Germans or people living in German-controlled territory, and as long as Germany had provoked the situation by invading Poland. This kind of propagandistic educational effort does not teach the lesson that genocide is wrong, that the laws of war should be respected, that it is wrong to target enemy civilians, or that it is wrong to commit atrocities. The lesson being learned is that atrocities and attacks on civilians are okay if committed by Western democratic governments, or perhaps even by communists, but represent the ultimate embodiment of evil when committed by Nazis. This kind of bias and inability to discern right from wrong is not morality. It is the kind of thinking which causes people to believe it’s okay for Britain to “defend” Poland by imposing a food blockade that starves millions of Poles, for the United States to kill tens of thousands of German women and children in places like Dresden and many other German cities, and for the Allies to use hunger to slowly kill Germans (especially babies, children, and the very old) during the postwar era.


  • You are  now telling lies to try and salvage the reputation of the madman Hitler.
    There was no forced starvation of post war Germany.
    You are making it up.

    Germany was the world leasder in baby killing and even the most basic google will give you dozens of photos of Germans hanging Soviet  female civilians and grinning at the camers.
    The dozens of photos of naked Jewish women being murdered by ordinary German soldiers show that you are blind to the crimes of the Nazis. You would have us believe it was ‘mercy killing’ because the bad Allies were slowly starving them to death.
    No matter how hard you try you are  nothing more than a Nazi apologist who refuses to face reality.
    The aim was to kill the  millions of people in the east. It was worked out before the war. Nothing you invent  can change the facts.


  • Ok this thread is nothing but a bitch fest.

    So sorry closed… Its not like anybody will prove anything.

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