Vassals of the Third Reich - Part 2
Plundering the resources of a country is one thing but plundering the people is quite another. For one thing, you need the latter to produce the former! In this, as in so many other things, Hitler seemed bent on self-destruction. From the very outset, his words and personal vision were fixed on lebensraum but, although there was some re-settlement of Germans in Poland, his directives for that country and for Russia was so to reduce them as economic units that the lie was given to this reason for waging war. In October 1940 Hitler, in meetings with top officials, had already decided that half the population of the Czech rump was to be used as slave labour there or in Germany, and the other half including all intellectuals was to be eliminated.' As for Poland, the people of which were considered by Hitler to be wholly untermensch, sub-human, his words reveal a mentality completely detached from what we consider humanity: "The Poles are especially born for low labour...the Poles are lazy...Polish priests will preach what we want them to preach...(they are)to keep the Poles quiet, stupid and dull witted....The Polish gentry must cease to exist...The Polish intelligentsia are to be exterminated...." These words, echoed time and again by the Nazi leaders, show how they had lost all touch with reality. The reality of any lebensraum is that it will function as an already habitable place with its infrastructure in place and with sufficient people to maintain that infrastructure. The few crude re-settlement programmes saw the native population thrown out of their homes and Germans put in them, most of the time lock, stock and barrel, with the incomers taking over all the possessions of those evicted. Those moved were usually farmers and, having no knowledge of the area to which they had been sent, these transmigrations usually failed.
As we have already seen, Hitler's programme for Russia was spelt out in even more detail while his overall thoughts were contained in an address to a meeting he called in the Wolfschanze in July 1941. Goering, Keitel and Rosenberg were among the group and Hitler was euphoric as the German armies seemed about to swallow Russia whole. Hitler spoke like a man in a dream as he described how "...the entire Baltic will have to be incorporated into Germany (and) the Crimea has to be evacuated ...and settled by Germans only." He would "...raze Leningrad to the ground and then hand it(sic) over to the Finns ...The Baku oilfields would become a German concession..." and so on. There was some disagreement how to maintain order in such a huge tract of land, stretching right up to the Urals. Goering had answers: "drop bombs in case of riots" and "shoot anybody who look(s) sideways", which can only be described as manic nonsense - but there is no record what the meeting actually did suggest as practical ways of keeping control!
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