Generalplan Ost: The Plan to Erase Poland

Generalplan Ost (General Plan for the East) was a secret Nazi German master plan for the demographic transformation of Eastern Europe, developed between 1940 and 1942 under Heinrich Himmler’s direction. It called for the elimination or deportation of 80 to 85 percent of Poland’s population, the removal or killing of tens of millions of people across the occupied East, and the resettlement of the emptied territories with German colonists. For Poland, it was not a plan for occupation or exploitation. It was a plan for erasure.

Origins and ideology

The ideological foundation of Generalplan Ost lay in Hitler’s concept of Lebensraum, living space, articulated in Mein Kampf in 1925. Hitler argued that Germany’s survival as a great power required territorial expansion eastward, into the lands inhabited by Slavic peoples whom he regarded as racially inferior and historically destined for subjugation. The eastern territories would provide Germany with agricultural land, raw materials, and the demographic space to sustain a growing German population. The Slavic peoples in the way were not to be assimilated; they were to be removed.

The plan was developed as a practical document by the Reich Security Main Office under Himmler, with technical input from planners, geographers, agronomists, and racial scientists at German universities. The principal drafter was SS Professor Konrad Meyer-Hetling of Berlin University. Multiple versions were produced between 1940 and 1942, each expanding the scope of the planned demographic transformation as German conquests extended further east.

What the plan said about Poland

The plan called for the elimination or deportation of 80 to 85 percent of Poland’s population , approximately 20 million people. A small residual population deemed to be of partial German ancestry and therefore potentially “Germanisable” would be dispersed among the German population and absorbed over generations. The rest were to be deported to western Siberia, where the conditions were expected to kill most of them within years. The plan was explicit about what deportation to Siberia meant. One planning document noted that “many tens of millions of people in this territory will become superfluous and will have to die or migrate to Siberia.”

What was actually implemented

Germany did not win the war on the eastern front, so the full scale of Generalplan Ost was never executed. But significant portions of the plan were implemented during the occupation. Over 920,000 Poles were expelled from territories annexed into the Reich in 1939-40 to make room for ethnic German settlers brought from the Soviet Union and the Baltic states under the Heim ins Reich programme. The Zamość expulsions of 1942-43 were the first large-scale implementation of the plan in the General Government area, clearing 116,000 Poles from 297 villages and attempting to replace them with German colonists. Tens of thousands of Polish children were subjected to racial examination and those deemed sufficiently “Nordic” were taken from their families and placed with German families to be raised as Germans.

The plan in Hitler’s own words

Hitler’s statements about Polish policy leave no ambiguity. On the eve of the invasion in August 1939 he told his generals that he had sent his SS Death’s Head units to Poland “with orders to kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of Polish descent or language.” In March 1941 he described the General Government as a territory that would be “purely German” within fifteen to twenty years, its Polish population displaced.

See also

Sources

  • Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
  • Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
  • Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
  • Yisrael Gutman, ed, The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, 4 vols, Macmillan, 1995