Generalplan Ost

• 1. Introduction

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  Generalplan Ost, abbreviated GPO, was Nazi Germany's blueprint for the permanent colonization of Central and Eastern Europe through mass murder, forced starvation, and the wholesale removal of entire peoples. Had it been carried out in full, planners estimated more than 60 million people would have perished. The questions this documentary will explore are as disturbing as they are necessary: who designed this program, how far was it actually implemented, and what happened to the evidence when Germany's defeat made the plan impossible to complete?

• 2. Ideological Foundations

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  Adolf Hitler's doctrine of Lebensraum, the German term for "living space," formed the ideological spine of Generalplan Ost. It envisaged mass killings, enslavement, and ethnic cleansing of Slavic inhabitants across Eastern Europe, followed by colonization of those lands by Germanic settlers.

  Nazi anti-Slavism drew on older currents of racism in German society, but it also leaned on what the regime called "scientific racism." The so-called Master Race doctrine placed Slavs in a category the Nazis termed "Untermenschen," a German word meaning something close to "subhumans." Under this framing, Slavic peoples were judged incapable of autonomous civilization and therefore fit only for subjugation or destruction.

  The plan was also tied to the Drang nach Osten, or "Drive towards the East," a longstanding ideology of German expansion eastward. Generalplan Ost folded these currents together into a formal state policy, developed in the years 1939 to 1942, that was intended to be part of what the Nazi leadership called the New Order in Europe.

  For Nazi planners, economic calculation ran a distant second to ideological fanaticism and racism. The GPO was not primarily a resource-extraction scheme. It was structured around the belief that Germanic peoples had a racial right to Eastern European territory, and that the current inhabitants had no right to remain.

• 3. Himmler and the Planning Apparatus

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  Heinrich Himmler's SS organization was the bureaucratic engine behind Generalplan Ost. The Reich Security Main Office, known by its German initials as the RSHA, was formally responsible for commissioning and revising the document. The document was classified at the highest level, its contents shared only with the upper tier of the Nazi hierarchy.

  Between 1940 and 1943, Himmler supervised at least five variants of the plan. Four came from the office of the Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Nationhood, known as the RKFDV; one came from the RSHA itself. SS-Standartenführer Hans Ehlich, who testified at the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials, confirmed the original version was drafted in 1940. He identified himself as the man responsible for its drafting, working alongside Konrad Meyer, who headed the Planning Office of Himmler's RKFDV.

  The SS Race and Settlement Main Office and the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories were also involved. The document circulated within the Ostministerium in early 1942 as the war in the east was progressing in Germany's favor.

  Himmler spoke about the plan's goals in explicit terms even before the war began. SS-Obergruppenführer Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, testifying as a prosecution witness at trials of SS Race and Settlement Main Office officials, recounted what Himmler had stated openly: "It is a question of existence, thus it will be a racial struggle of pitiless severity, in the course of which 20 to 30 million Slavs and Jews will perish through military actions and crises of food supply."

  A significant revision occurred on the 24th of June 1941, just two days after the start of Operation Barbarossa. At that point, what the Nazis called the "solution" to the Jewish question was separated from the GPO framework and given its own lethal, autonomous priority outside that particular structure.

• 4. The Scale of the Design

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  The final version of Generalplan Ost was divided into two parts. The "Small Plan," or Kleine Planung, covered actions to be carried out during the war itself. The "Big Plan," or Grosse Planung, described the steps to be taken over 25 to 30 years following a German victory.

  The demographic targets were staggering. Russians, Poles, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, and Czechs were each assigned specific percentages for deportation or destruction. For Poles, the plan called for the removal of 80 to 85 percent of the population, or roughly 20 million people. For Lithuanians, the figure was 85 percent. For Latgalians, the figure was 100 percent. Belarusians faced a 75 percent removal rate. Ukrainians were targeted at 65 percent deportation from western Ukraine, with 35 percent potentially subject to Germanization.

  As of June 1941, the deportation plan alone called for moving 31 million Slavs to Siberia. The Hunger Plan, a specific component of the GPO, aimed to cause the deaths of more than 30 million Slavic inhabitants through deliberate starvation by capturing food stocks and redirecting them to German forces.

  In place of the expelled and murdered populations, Nazi planners envisioned settlements of up to 10 million Germans across the expanded territory. Each settlement complex was designed to host around 300 to 400 Germanic settlers. The number of ethnic Germans was recognized as insufficient to populate the vast territories, so some peoples deemed "racially intermediate" between Germans and Russians, such as Latvians and even Czechs, were considered candidates for Germanization and resettlement.

  The cost estimates were worked into the plan as well. The spring 1942 version listed a figure of 45.7 billion Reichsmarks. The broader range across planning documents ran from 40 to 67 billion Reichsmarks, with the upper figure approaching Germany's entire GDP for 1941. More than half the budgeted expenditure was to go toward land remediation, agricultural development, and transport infrastructure.

• 5. Regional Implementation

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  On the 21st of July 1940, Hitler ordered army commander-in-chief Walther von Brauchitsch to prepare a war plan targeting what Hitler described as the "Russian problem." At a meeting before Wehrmacht commanders on the 31st of July 1940, he announced his "final decision" to eliminate Russia through a large military invasion in the spring of 1941.

  During Operation Barbarossa, the scale of killing became visible almost immediately. Out of 3.2 million Soviet prisoners captured by German forces by December 1941, approximately 2 million had been killed by February 1942, mostly through forced starvation, death marches, and mass shootings.

  In Ukraine between 1941 and 1945, approximately three million Ukrainians and other non-Jews were mass-murdered under Nazi extermination policies. Between 850,000 and 1,600,000 Jews were killed in Ukraine during this period, with the assistance of local collaborators. Over 2,300,000 Ukrainians were deported to Germany and forced into slave labor. Nazi seizure of food supplies in Ukraine mirrored what Soviets had done in 1932 to 1933, deliberately driving starvation to depopulate territory for German settlement.

  In Poland, the German leadership decided in 1941 to destroy the Polish nation completely. The plan called for Poland to be fully cleared of ethnic Poles within 15 to 20 years. Approximately two million ethnic Poles were subjected to a forced Germanization campaign. By 1952, according to the plan, only about 3 to 4 million non-Germanized Poles would remain, all of them peasants. Those who still resisted Germanization were to be forbidden to marry, and experiments in mass sterilization at concentration camps may have been intended for the broader population.

  In Belarus, historians later calculated that Nazi Germany sought to exterminate the entire urban populace of approximately 2 million people, and half the rural population of nearly 4.3 million, through mass starvation. These estimates come from the book Kalkulierte Morde, or Calculated Massacres, published by Swiss historian Hans Christian Gerlach in 1999, citing notes the historian attributes to Waldemar von Poletika, an agricultural scientist at Berlin University.

  The Baltic states occupied a different position in the racial hierarchy. Nazi planners classified Baltic peoples as superior to Slavs. Initial designs called for Latvians, Lithuanians, and Estonians to be Germanized within 25 years; Himmler revised that to 20 years. In occupied Lithuania, a semi-autonomous civilian administration was tolerated within the Reichskommissariat Ostland. Such arrangements did not exist in Poland, Ukraine, or Belarus, where German occupation meant full-scale colonization and state terrorism.

  The majority of Germany's 12 million forced laborers were abducted from Eastern Europe, mostly from Soviet territories and Poland. From spring 1943, the SS formally adopted the "Vernichtung durch Arbeit" policy, meaning "Extermination through labour," which shifted from immediate killing to extracting labor from captive populations until death.

• 6. Abandoned and Destroyed

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  After Germany's defeat at the Battle of Stalingrad and other Axis setbacks across the Eastern Front, Nazi planners were forced to practically abandon the extermination campaigns of the GPO by mid-1943. Resources that had been allocated to colonization policies were diverted back to the German war effort.

  Nearly all the wartime documentation on Generalplan Ost was deliberately destroyed shortly before Germany's defeat in May 1945. The full proposal has never been found. Two of the three primary records associated with the plan were lost after the war, including the document drafted by Konrad Meyer and an investigative report from the RSHA's third office.

  Historians reconstructed the plan's essential elements from related memos, abstracts, and supplementary documents. One key surviving document was a memorandum dated the 27th of April 1943, written by the director of the NSDAP Office of Racial Policy. Titled "Opinion and thoughts on the master plan for the East of the Reichsführer SS," this memorandum, known as Wetzel's memorandum, was a broad elaboration of the GPO proposal. It came to light only in 1957.

  An extermination document for the Slavic people of Eastern Europe did survive the war and was quoted by Yale historian Timothy Snyder in 2010. It confirms that ethnic Poles, Ukrainians, and Czechs were primary targets, with Belarusians also a major target.

  At the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer responsible for the transportation aspects of the Final Solution, one of the 15 indictment charges was that he had been responsible for the deportation of 500,000 Poles. He was convicted on all 15 counts. The Nuremberg tribunal denounced Nazi treatment of Soviet prisoners of war, which resulted in the deaths of approximately 3.3 million captured Soviet detainees, as a "crime against humanity." Historian Norman Naimark observed that in the event of a Nazi victory, Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians would surely have shared the fate of the Poles and been eliminated culturally and ethnically as distinct peoples and nations.