Introduction

The Great Patriotic War brought the peoples of the USSR not only enormous sacrifices at the front. Millions of civilians were killed by the slaughter unleashed by the Nazis. Regardless of any norms international law and civilized relations, the fascist army, having declared the total extermination of the Slavic peoples, methodically organized inhuman terror in the territories it occupied.

The regime established on the territory of the USSR, which was temporarily occupied by the troops of Nazi Germany and its satellites during the Great Patriotic War, was distinguished by exceptional cruelty and atrocities towards the population - mass repression and extermination of citizens, destruction and plunder National economy, cultural values.

The essence of the master plan "Ost"

The main feature of the aggressive expansionist program was the desire to conquer the peoples of Eastern Europe with fire and sword, completely deprive them of state independence, national culture and identity, appropriate their national wealth, turn the population of Eastern European states into powerless slaves, and use them as cheap labor.

In 1936, one of the prominent Nazis, Oberführer CA B. Kasche, in a special note “The Future Living Space of the Germans,” outlined the boundaries of the German colonial empire in Eurasia: “The goal will be achieved if beyond the Urals we reach the Ob-Irtysh-Tobol line and if the border from there runs to the Aral Sea and along the western coast of the Caspian Sea, through the southern border of Georgia, across the Black Sea on the Dniester and along the Carpathians through the Czech Republic to the eastern part of Austria, along the southern border to Basel and if the northern borders are the Baltic Sea, the old Finnish border and the Arctic Ocean. It is only a matter of time that in the West the German border will be established north of the Basel-Bay of Biscay line and reach the open sea" "TOP SECRET! FOR COMMAND ONLY!” - Colonel Dashichev - page 97. .

In March 1939, Nazi troops captured Czechoslovakia. It was completely deprived of its independence and transformed into the "Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia." In September 1939, Poland fell under the attacks of the Wehrmacht. According to Hitler's special decree of October 12, 1939, most of the Polish territory - Polish Silesia, Greater Poland, Pomerania, some areas of the Lodz and Warsaw voivodeships - were included in Nazi Germany. Later, the areas of Suwalki, Ciechanow and Bialystok were annexed to the third empire.

The Nazis’ plans for the peoples of the Soviet Union were especially inhuman and cruel, because in the war against the USSR .

To develop specific measures aimed at enslaving the peoples of the Soviet Union, at the beginning of April 1941, the Central Bureau for preparing a solution to the issue of the eastern space, headed by Rosenberg, was formed. The initial plans drawn up under his leadership were based on the old principle: divide and conquer, to which the requirement was added - destroy. It was planned to temporarily place the occupied Soviet territories under the control of imperial commissariats. At the end of the war, which, according to the calculations of the Nazis, should have been expected in the late autumn of 1941, the Baltic republics and Crimea were planned to immediately be turned into areas of German colonization. Belarus, Ukraine and Turkestan were to become buffer states, completely subordinate to Germany. Their borders were supposed to be moved far to the East in order to reduce the territory of Russia, which was doomed to liquidation as a state. In the Caucasus, Rosenberg proposed creating a state association federally associated with Germany, headed by a German commissioner. The plan intended to establish a different, softer attitude towards the population of Ukraine, the Baltic republics and the Caucasus than towards the Russians. This was pursued by the goal of finding among the peoples of the Soviet Union sympathizers with Germany, opponents and haters of Soviet power, in order to fight Russia and the hands of others. "TOP SECRET! FOR COMMANDS ONLY! " - Colonel Dashichev - page 98

Hitler rejected Rosenberg's plan as too lenient. He demanded to go ahead in the colonization of the “eastern space” by the Germans and not to give leniency to any people. In his opinion, the Wehrmacht could carry out its colonialist mission independently, without the help of nationalists, including Ukrainians, and create a powerful colonial empire on the ruins of conquered states, pushed as far as possible to the East.

Soon after the invasion of the armed forces of Nazi Germany on Soviet territory, Hitler declared in a narrow circle of his associates that his main goal in the war against the USSR was to deprive the eastern peoples of any form of state organization and, in accordance with this, keep them at the lowest possible level culture “TOP SECRET! FOR COMMANDS ONLY! " - Colonel Dashichev - page 99.

For the practical implementation of broad imperialist plans for the enslavement of the peoples of the Soviet Union, in accordance with Hitler’s decree of July 17, 1941, the Imperial Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Regions, called for short the “Eastern Ministry,” was created. A. Rosenberg was placed at its head. It was located in Berlin. Rosenberg was subordinate to four imperial commissariats into which it was planned to divide the territory of the Soviet Union, namely: Ostland, Ukrainian, Moscow and Caucasus (they were headed respectively by Lohse, Koch, Kasche and Schickedanz). In turn, the imperial commissariats were divided into general commissariats. The Ostland imperial commissariat included the Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian and Belarusian general commissariats, the Ukrainian - Volyn-Podolsk, Nikolaev, Zhytomyr, Kiev, Dnepropetrovsk and Tauride general commissariats “TOP SECRET! FOR COMMANDS ONLY! " - Colonel Dashichev - page 99. These imperial commissariats began their criminal activities in the occupied Soviet territory in September 1941. The Moscow and Caucasian commissariats were never destined to leave Berlin, since the Soviet Army crossed out the aggressive plans of the Nazi command.

The lowest level of the German occupation administration was the regional commissariat. It was planned to create 1050 such commissariats on occupied Soviet territory. To staff them, 144 CA officers, 711 officials from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the fascist organization “Labor Front” were seconded to the “eastern ministry” “TOP SECRET! FOR COMMANDS ONLY! " - Colonel Dashichev - page 99.

In addition to the "Eastern Ministry", Himmler's department - the Main Directorate of Reich Security - and the command of the German armed forces were also involved in issues of occupation policy. Organization economic exploitation in the occupied territory of the USSR was concentrated in the hands of Goering’s department as the authorized representative for the implementation of the four-year plan. All these bodies of fascist Germany developed and methodically carried out monstrous plans for the robbery and extermination of entire peoples inhabiting the territory of the USSR temporarily captured by the Wehrmacht.

Special rights in the occupied territory were given to the Economic Headquarters Ost, subordinate to Goering, which was previously called the Oldenburg Headquarters. Through this central body, the German monopolies directed the economic plunder of the natural resources and material assets of the Soviet people. It was independent from other organizations of this kind. The nature of his activities is evidenced by the instructions and directives that were collected in the “Green Folder” dated May 23, 1941, sent on June 1 of the same year to various Nazi authorities related to the implementation of the “Eastern Policy.” One of these instructions, dated May 2, 1941, which dealt with the extortion of food from the occupied areas for the Wehrmacht, said: “Undoubtedly, tens of millions of people will die of hunger if we take from this country what we need.” Another instruction, dated May 23, 1941, concerning Russian agriculture, stated: “Many millions of people will become redundant in this territory, they will have to die or move to Siberia. Attempts to save the population there from starvation can only be made to the detriment of supplies to Europe. They will undermine Germany's resilience in the war, they will undermine the ability of Germany and Europe to withstand the blockade." "TOP SECRET! FOR COMMANDS ONLY! " - Colonel Dashichev - page 100

In terms of their cynical cruelty and inhumanity, meticulously elevated into a coherent system of state policy, the instructions of the “Green Folder” can be second only to another document, the “General Plan “Ost”, which is one of the most shameful phenomena in the history of mankind.

Until now, authentic" General plan"Ost" not found. However, after the defeat of Nazi Germany, a very valuable document was found and made available to the Nuremberg military tribunal, which allows one to get an idea of ​​this plan and, in general, of Germany’s policy towards the peoples of Eastern Europe. We are talking about “Comments and proposals on the General Plan “Ost” of the Reichsführer of the SS Troops.” This document was signed on April 27, 1942 by E. Wetzel - head of the colonization department of the 1st Main Political Directorate of the "Eastern Ministry".

As this document testifies, the “General Plan Ost” provided for the eviction of about 31 million people from the territory of Poland and the western part of the Soviet Union within 30 years (80-85 percent of the Polish population, or 16-20.4 million people, 65 percent population of Western Ukraine, 75 percent of the population of Belarus, a significant part of the population of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia) and settle 10 million Germans on these lands. The remaining population here (according to the calculations of the drafters of the plan - 15 million people) was supposed to be gradually Germanized through a number of special events.

The “Eastern Ministry” found the number of residents to be evicted established by the “General Plan Ost” too low and proposed increasing it to 46-51 million people, and this figure did not include about 3.5 million Czechs “not intended for Germanization” ", which were to be "gradually removed from the territory of the empire." For the settlement of these tens of millions of people, the rulers of Nazi Germany targeted Western Siberia, the North Caucasus, as well as South America and Africa.

The “Eastern Ministry” supplemented the “General Plan “Ost” and on the issue of policy towards the Russian people. It was not only about the defeat of the state with its center in Moscow, the point was most likely to defeat the Russians as a people and divide them.

For this purpose, Rosenberg's department proposed dividing the territory inhabited by Russians into various political regions with their own governing bodies in order to ensure separate national development in each of them. To others the most important means To achieve this goal, it was considered the destruction of the intelligentsia as the bearer of the culture of the people, their scientific and technical knowledge, as well as an artificial reduction in the birth rate in order to sharply reduce the population. By taking these measures, the Nazis hoped to undermine the strength of the Russian people and thereby preserve German dominance for a long time.

This is this monstrous plan for reprisals against the peoples of Eastern Europe, which was planned to be carried out after the victory over the Soviet Union.

"The General Plan "Ost" was revised and refined in 1942 in connection with the preparation of a broader, savage "General Colonization Plan", which also included issues of Germanization of the Czech population, Alsace, Lorraine and Northern Slovenia "TOP SECRET! FOR COMMAND ONLY!" - Colonel Dashichev - page 102

The Nazis began to carry out some of the activities outlined in the General Plan Ost during the occupation of Soviet territory. This primarily relates to plans for the systematic extermination of civilians and prisoners of war.

The Germans were guided in their occupation policy in the East by the principle: the more people died, the easier it would be to carry out colonization. In November 1941, Goering told the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs: “This year in Russia between 20 and 30 million people will die of hunger. Maybe it’s even good that this will happen, because some nations need to be reduced.” “TOP SECRET!” FOR COMMANDS ONLY! " - Colonel Dashichev - page 102

This policy bore fruits of the devil by the beginning of 1942, out of 3.9 million Soviet prisoners of war remained alive, according to the official of the Ministry of Labor of Nazi Germany E. Mansfeld, 1.1 million of the 5.75 million Soviet prisoners of war by May 1, 1944 died in the camps 1.981 million people, 1.030 million were “killed while trying to escape” or handed over to the Gestapo for liquidation, 280 thousand died in transit points and camps 19. Thus, according to very incomplete data, about 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war by mid-1944 were brutally tortured and killed in the fascist camp hell. Accurate data on how much Soviet civilian population died during the fascist occupation, no. But we must assume that these victims number more than one million people. If before the war 88 million people lived on enemy-occupied Soviet territory, then after the war this population decreased to 55 million people, i.e. by 33 million, including urban from 25 to 10 million, rural from 63 to 45 million people. Of these 33 million people, 10 million are “TOP SECRET! FOR COMMANDS ONLY! " - Colonel Dashichev - page 103 were evacuated to the rear, part of the population was drafted into the Soviet Army, the rest were driven by the invaders to Germany, destroyed or died from hunger and disease.

From the “Remarks and Suggestions on the Master Plan Ost of the Reichsführer of the SS Troops” “TOP SECRET! FOR COMMANDS ONLY! " - Colonel Dashichev - page 108:

More or less definitely, a line running from Lake Ladoga to the Valdai Hills and further to Bryansk was established as the eastern border of colonization (in its northern and middle part). The settlement of this area by the Germans was supposed to take place for about 30 years after the end of the war. According to the plan, 14 million local residents were to remain in this territory. The Ost master plan provided that after the end of the war the number of settlers for the immediate colonization of the eastern territories should be 4,550 thousand people. These 4,550 thousand Germans were to be distributed in such territories as the Danzig region - West Prussia, the Wart region, Upper Silesia, the General Government, South-East Prussia, the Bialystok region, the Baltic states, Ingermanland, Belarus, and partly also the regions of Ukraine. If we take into account the favorable increase in population through an increase in the birth rate, as well as to a certain extent the influx of immigrants from other countries inhabited by Germanic peoples, then we can count on 8 million Germans to colonize these territories over a period of about 30 years.

According to the plan, these 8 million Germans account for 45 million local residents of non-German origin, of which 31 million should be evicted from these territories.

According to German estimates, there were approximately 36 million people on the territory of former Poland. About 1 million local Germans were excluded from them. The Baltic countries numbered 5.5 million people. Obviously, the master plan "Ost" also took into account the Soviet Zhitomir, Kamenets-Podolsk and partly Vinnytsia regions as territories for colonization. The population of the Zhytomyr and Kamenets-Podolsk regions is approximately 3.6 million people, and the Vinnitsa region is about 2 million people, since a significant part of it was within the sphere of interests of Romania. Consequently, the total population living here is approximately 5.5-5.6 million people. Thus, the total population of the regions under consideration is 51 million. Approximately 5-6 million Jews (Holocaust (from the English holocaust, from other Greek - “burnt offering”) - persecution and mass extermination of Jews in Germany during the Second World War war; systematic persecution and extermination of European Jews by Nazi Germany and collaborators throughout 1933-1945) living in this territory had to be eliminated even before the eviction took place

The plan called for the resettlement of racially undesirable local residents to Western Siberia. At the same time, percentage figures were given for individual peoples, and thereby the fate of these peoples was decided, although there is still no accurate data on their racial composition. Further, the same approach was established for all peoples, without taking into account whether and to what extent the Germanization of the corresponding peoples was envisaged, whether this concerned peoples friendly or hostile to the Germans.

On the issue of Belarusians.

According to the plan, it was envisaged (the eviction of 75 percent of the Belarusian population from the territory they occupied. 25% of Belarusians, according to the plan of the Main Directorate of Imperial Security, were subject to Germanization.

It was believed that the racially undesirable Belarusian population would remain on the territory of Belarus for many years. In this regard, according to the plan, it is necessary to carefully select, if possible, Belarusians of the Nordic type, suitable for racial and political reasons for Germanization, and send them to Germany for the purpose of using them as labor. They can be used in agriculture as farm workers, as well as in industry or as artisans. Since they would be treated as Germans and due to their lack of national feeling, they would soon, at least in the next generation, be completely Germanized.

According to the master plan, Belarusians who are racially unsuitable for Germanization should also be resettled in Western Siberia. According to the Germans, Belarusians are the most harmless and therefore the safest people of all the peoples of the eastern regions. Even those Belarusians who, for racial reasons, cannot be left on the territory intended for colonization by the German people can, to a greater extent than representatives of other peoples of the eastern regions, be used in their own interests. Resettle Belarusians to the Urals or to the regions North Caucasus, which in part could also serve as reserve territories for European colonization.

From Bormann's letter to Rosenberg "regarding politics

in the occupied territories" "TOP SECRET! FOR COMMAND ONLY!" - Colonel Dashichev - page 122 it can be understood that the fascists highlighted the following principles:

They were interested in reducing population growth in the occupied eastern regions through abortion. German lawyers should not have interfered with this under any circumstances. Widespread trade in protective equipment should have been allowed in the occupied eastern territories. Germany was not interested in the non-German population multiplying.

Therefore, German service should not have been introduced for the local population of the occupied eastern regions. For example, under no circumstances were vaccinations or other health measures to be carried out for the non-German population.

Under no circumstances should the local population be given more high education. The Germans saw this as a great threat. Therefore, it was quite enough to teach the local population, including Ukrainians, only reading and writing. In no case should any measures be taken to develop feelings of superiority among the local population. It was necessary to do just the opposite.

Instead of the current alphabet, in the future it was planned to introduce the Latin script for teaching in schools.

The Germans must be removed from Ukrainian cities. Even placing them in barracks outside the cities is better than settling inside the cities, according to the invaders. Under no circumstances should Russian (Ukrainian) cities be built or improved, because the local population should not have a higher standard of living.

The Germans had to live in newly built cities and villages, strictly isolated from the Russian (Ukrainian) population. Therefore, houses built for Germans should not be similar to Russian (Ukrainian) ones. Huts, thatched roofs, etc. for Germans are excluded.

In the indigenous territory of Germany, too many things are regulated by law, according to the fascists. This should not have been practiced by the Germans in the occupied eastern regions. It was not necessary to issue too many laws for the local population - here it was necessary to limit it to the most necessary. The German administration therefore had to be small. The regional commissioner was supposed to work with local elders. Under no circumstances should a unified Ukrainian government be created at the level of the General Commissariat or even the Reichskommissariat.

Dear comrades, the finished translation into Russian of “General Plan Ost” is posted ----->> in pdf.
translations were made by the Essence of Time Club and posted on the Foreign Forum. Recently, NTV once again attracted public attention to the topic of the Ost master plan, reporting that for the first time the text... which has enormous historical value, has been made publicly available. In fact, the text of the document under discussion has long been “widely available” on the same website; a facsimile of it from the Bundesarchive was simply added to it (however, this is not the only inaccuracy in this short report). After participating in a couple of regular discussions on the topic of GPO, I realized that I was tired of repeating the same thing over and over again, and I decided to systematize the main questions and answers to them. Of course, this text is a “working” version and does not pretend to finally close the topic of the “master plan”.

The most frequently asked questions are:

2. What is the history of the emergence of GPO? What documents relate to it?
3. What is the content of the GPO?
5. The plan does not contain the signature of Hitler or any other senior official of the Reich, which means it is invalid.

8. When were the documents on the Ost plan discovered? Is there a possibility that they are falsified?
9. What additional information can you read about GPO?

1. What is “General Plan Ost?”

By “General Plan Ost” (GPO), modern historians understand a set of plans, draft plans and memos devoted to the issues of settling the so-called. "eastern territories" (Poland and the Soviet Union) in the event of a German victory in the war. The GPO concept was developed on the basis of Nazi racial doctrine under the patronage of the Reichskommissariat for the Strengthening of German Statehood (RKF), which was headed by SS Reichsführer Himmler, and was supposed to serve as a theoretical foundation for the colonization and Germanization of the occupied territories.

2.What is the history of the emergence of GPO? What documents relate to it?

A general overview of the documents is given in the table below (with links to materials posted online):

Work on plans for the settlement of the eastern territories began virtually immediately after the creation of the Reichskommissariat to strengthen German statehood in October 1939. Headed by Prof. Konrad Mayer, the planning department of the RKF presented the first plan concerning the settlement of the western regions of Poland annexed to the Reich already in February 1940. It was under the leadership of Mayer that five of the six documents listed above were prepared (the Institute of Agriculture, which appears in document 5, was headed by the same Mayer ). It should be noted that RKF was not the only department thinking about the future of the eastern territories, similar work was carried out both in the Rosenberg ministry and in the department responsible for the four-year plan, which was headed by Goering (the so-called “Green Folder”). It is this competitive situation that explains, in part, the critical response of Wetzel, an employee of the Ministry of the Occupied Eastern Territories, to the version of the Ost plan presented by the RSHA planning group (document 4). Nevertheless, Himmler, not least thanks to the success of the propaganda exhibition “Planning and Building a New Order in the East” in March 1941, gradually managed to achieve a dominant position. Document 5, for example, speaks of “the priority of the Reich Commissioner for strengthening German statehood in matters of settlement (of colonized territories) and planning.”

To understand the logic of the development of the GPO, two responses from Himmler to the plans presented by Mayer are important. In the first, dated 06/12/42 (BA, NS 19/1739, Russian translation), Himmler demands to expand the plan to include not only the “eastern”, but also other territories subject to Germanization (West Prussia, the Czech Republic, Alsace-Lorraine, etc.). etc.), reduce the time frame and set the goal of the complete Germanization of Estonia, Latvia and the entire General Government.

The consequence of this was the renaming of the GPO into the “master settlement plan” (document 6), while, however, some territories present in document 5 were excluded from the plan, to which Himmler immediately draws attention (letter to Mayer dated January 12, 1943, BA, NS 19 /1739): “The eastern territories for settlement should include Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Belarus, Ingria, as well as Crimea and Tavria [...] The named territories should be completely Germanized/fully populated.”

Mayer never presented the next version of the plan: the course of the war made further work on it pointless.

The following table uses data organized by M. Burchard:

Let us dwell in more detail on the fully preserved and most elaborated document 5: it is expected to be gradually implemented over 25 years, Germanization quotas are introduced for various nationalities, it is proposed to prohibit the indigenous population from owning property in cities in order to push them out into the countryside and use them in agriculture. To control territories with a non-dominant German population at first, a form of margraviate is introduced, the first three: Ingria (Leningrad region), Gotengau (Crimea, Kherson), and Memel-Narev (Lithuania - Bialystok). In Ingria, the population of cities should be reduced from 3 million to 200 thousand. In Poland, Belarus, the Baltic states, and Ukraine, a network of strongholds is being formed, with a total of 36, ensuring effective communication of the margraviates with each other and with the metropolis (see reconstruction). After 25-30 years, the margraviates should be Germanized by 50%, and strongholds by 25-30% (In the review we already know, Himmler demanded that the implementation period of the plan be reduced to 20 years, that the complete Germanization of Estonia and Latvia and a more active Germanization of Poland be considered).

In conclusion, it is emphasized that the success of the settlement program will depend on the will and colonization power of the Germans, and if it passes these tests, then the next generation will be able to close the northern and southern flanks of colonization (i.e., populate Ukraine and central Russia.)

It should be noted that documents 5 and 6 do not include specific numbers of residents subject to eviction; however, they are derived from the difference between the actual number of residents and the planned number (taking into account German settlers and the local population suitable for Germanization). Document 4 names Western Siberia as the territory to which residents unsuitable for Germanization should be evicted. The leaders of the Reich have repeatedly spoken about the desire to Germanize the European territory of Russia up to the Urals.

From a racial point of view, Russians were considered the least Germanic

a ruined people, moreover, poisoned for 25 years by the poison of “Judeo-Bolshevism”. It is difficult to say unequivocally how the policy of decimation of the Slavic population would be carried out. According to one of the testimonies, Himmler, before the start of Operation Barbarossa, called the goal of the campaign against Russia “to reduce the Slavic population by 30 million.” Wetzel wrote about measures to reduce the birth rate (encouraging abortion, sterilization, abandoning the fight against infant mortality, etc.), Hitler himself expressed himself more directly: “Local residents? We'll have to start filtering them. We will remove destructive Jews altogether. My impression of the Belarusian territory is still better than that of the Ukrainian one. We will not go to Russian cities, they must completely die out. We should not torment ourselves with remorse. We don’t need to get used to the role of a nanny; we have no obligations to the local residents. Renovate houses, catch lice, German teachers, newspapers? No! It’s better that we open a radio station under our control, but otherwise they just need to know the road signs so as not to get in our way! By freedom, these people understand the right to wash only on holidays. If we come with shampoo, it will not attract sympathy. There you need to relearn. There is only one task: to carry out Germanization through the importation of Germans, and the former inhabitants must be considered as Indians.”

4. In fact, the GPO was developed by a minor official, should it be taken seriously?

A minor official, Prof. Konrad Mayer was not. As mentioned above, he headed the planning department of the RKF, as well as the land department of the same Reichskommissariat and the Institute of Agriculture at the University of Berlin. He was a Standartenführer, and later an Oberführer (in the military ranks above colonel, but below major general) of the SS. By the way, another popular misconception is that the GPO was supposedly a figment of the fevered imagination of one crazy SS man. This is also not true: agrarians, economists, managers and other specialists from academic circles worked on the GPO. For example, in the cover letter to document 5 Mayer writes

t about the assistance of “my closest collaborators in the planning department and the general land office, as well as the financial expert Dr. Besler (Jen).” Additional funding came through the German Research Society (DFG): 510 thousand RM were allocated for “scientific planning work to strengthen German statehood” from 1941 to 1945, of which Mayer spent 60-70 thousand per year to his working group, the rest went as grants to scientists conducting research relevant to RKF. For comparison, maintaining a scientist with a scientific degree costs approximately 6 thousand RM per year (data from the report of I. Heinemann.)

It is important to note that Mayer worked on the GPO on the initiative and on the instructions of RKF chief Himmler and in close connection with him, while correspondence was conducted both through the chief of staff of the RKF Greifelt and directly. The photographs taken during the exhibition “Planning and Building a New Order in the East”, in which Mayer speaks to Himmler, Hess, Heydrich and Todt, are widely known.

5. The plan does not have the signature of Hitler or another Nazi leader, which means it is invalid.

GPO hasn't really progressed any further project stage, which was greatly facilitated by the course of military operations - from 1943 the plan began to quickly lose relevance. Of course, the GPO was not signed by Hitler or anyone else, since it was a plan for the post-war settlement of the occupied regions. The very first sentence of Document 5 states this directly: “Thanks to German weapons, the eastern territories, which were the object of disputes that had lasted for many centuries, were finally annexed to the Reich.”

Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to infer from this the disinterest of Hitler and the Reich leadership in the GPO. As shown above, work on the plan took place according to the instructions and under the constant patronage of Himmler, who, in turn, “would like to convey this plan to the Fuhrer at a convenient time” (letter dated 06/12/1942)

Let us recall that already in Mein Kampf Hitler wrote: “We stop the eternal advance of the Germans to the south and west of Europe and direct our gaze to the eastern lands.” The concept of “living space in the east” was repeatedly mentioned by the Fuhrer in the 30s (for example, immediately after coming to power, 02/03/1933, speaking to the Reichswehr generals, he spoke about “the need to conquer living space in the east and its decisive Germanization” ), after the start of the war it acquired clear outlines. Here is a recording of one of Hitler’s monologues dated 10/17/1941:

The Fuhrer once again outlined his thoughts on the development of the eastern regions. The most important thing is the roads. He told Dr. Todt that the original plan he had prepared needed to be significantly expanded. In the next twenty years, he will have three million prisoners at his disposal to solve this problem... German cities should appear at large river crossings in which the Wehrmacht, the police, the administrative apparatus and the party will be based.
German troops will be founded along the roads. peasant farms, and the monochromatic Asian-looking steppe will soon take on a completely different look. In 10 years, 4 million will move there, in 20 - 10 million Germans. They will come not only from the Reich, but also from America, as well as Scandinavia, Holland and Flanders. The rest of Europe can also take part in annexing Russian spaces. The Russian cities, those that will survive the war - Moscow and Leningrad must not survive it under any circumstances - should not be touched by a German. They must vegetate in their own shit away from German roads. The Fuhrer again raised the topic that “contrary to the opinion of individual headquarters,” neither the education of the local population nor the care of it should be dealt with...
He, the Fuhrer, will introduce new control with an iron hand; what the Slavs will think about this does not bother him at all. Anyone who eats German bread today doesn't think much about the fact that the fields east of the Elbe were conquered by the sword in the 12th century.

Of course, his subordinates echoed him. For example, on October 2, 1941, Heydrich described future colonization as follows:

Other lands are eastern lands, partly inhabited by Slavs, these are lands where one must clearly understand that kindness will be perceived as a sign of weakness. These are lands where the Slav himself does not want to have equal rights with the master, where he is used to being in service. These are the lands in the east that we will have to manage and hold. These are lands where, after the military issue is resolved, German control should be introduced up to the Urals, and they should serve us as a source of minerals, labor, like helots, roughly speaking. These are lands that must be treated as when building a dam and draining the coast: far in the east a protective wall is being built to protect them from Asian storms, and from the west the gradual annexation of these lands to the Reich begins. It is from this point of view that we must consider what is happening in the east. The first step would be to create a protectorate of the provinces of Danzig-West Prussia and Warthegau. A year ago, another eight million Poles lived in these provinces, as well as in East Prussia and the Silesian part. These are lands that will gradually be populated by the Germans; the Polish element will be squeezed out step by step. These are lands that will one day become completely German. And then further east, to the Baltic states, which will also one day become completely German, although here you need to think about what part of the blood of Latvians, Estonians and Lithuanians is suitable for Germanization. Racially speaking, the best people here are Estonians, they have strong Swedish influences, then Latvians, and the worst are Lithuanians.
Then the turn of the rest of Poland will come, this is the next territory that should be gradually populated by the Germans, and the Poles should be squeezed out further to the east. Then Ukraine, which at first, as an intermediate solution, should be using, of course, the national idea still dormant in the subconscious, was separated from the rest of Russia and used as a source of minerals and provisions under German control. Of course, not allowing the people there to strengthen or strengthen themselves, raising their educational level, since from this later an opposition may grow, which, with the weakening of the central government, will strive for independence...

A year later, on November 23, 1942, Himmler spoke about the same thing:

The main colony of our Reich lies in the east. Today - a colony, tomorrow - a settlement area, the day after tomorrow - the Reich! [...] If in next year or in a year Russia will probably be defeated in a bitter struggle, we will still have a great task before us. After the victory of the German peoples, the settlement space in the east must be developed, settled and annexed to European culture. Over the next 20 years - counting from the end of the war - I have set myself the task (and I hope that I can solve it with your help) to move the German border about 500 km to the east. This means that we must resettle farming families there, the resettlement of the best carriers of German blood will begin and the ordering of the million-strong Russian people for our tasks... 20 years of struggle to achieve peace lie before us... Then this east will be cleansed of foreign blood and ours families will settle there as legal owners.

As is easy to see, all three quotes perfectly correlate with the main provisions of the GPO.

6. GPO was a purely theoretical concept.

In a broad sense, this is true: there is no reason to implement a plan for the post-war settlement of the occupied territories until the war is over. This does not mean, however, that measures to Germanize certain regions were not carried out at all. First of all, it should be noted here that the western regions of Poland (West Prussia and Warthegau) annexed to the Reich, the settlement of which was discussed in document 1. During multi-stage measures for the deportation of Jews and Polish (the former were first deported, like the Poles, to the General Government, then they were taken into ghettos and extermination camps on their own territory: of the 435,000 Jews of Warthegau, 12,000 remained alive) by March 1941. More than 280 thousand people were taken from Warthegau alone. The total number of Poles deported from West Prussia and Warthegau to the General Government is estimated at 365 thousand people. Their yards and apartments were occupied by German settlers, of whom there were already 287 thousand in these two regions by March 1942.

At the end of November 1942, on the initiative of Himmler, the so-called. "Action Zamość", the goal of which was the Germanization of the Zamość district, which was declared the "first area of ​​German settlement" in the General Government. By August 1943, 110 thousand Poles were evicted: about half were deported, the rest fled on their own, many joined the partisans. To protect future settlers, it was decided to take advantage of the hostility between Poles and Ukrainians and create a defensive ring of Ukrainian villages around the settlement area. Due to a lack of forces to support order, the action was stopped in August 1943. By that time, only about 9,000 of the 60,000 planned settlers had moved to the Zamość district.

Finally, in 1943, not far from Himmler’s headquarters in Zhitomir, the German town of Hegewald was created: the place of 15,000 Ukrainians expelled from their homes was taken by 10,000 Germans. At the same time, the first settlers went to Crimea.
All these activities also fully correlate with GPO. It is interesting to note that prof. Mayer visited during business trips and Western Poland, and Zamosc, and Zhitomir, and Crimea, i.e., he assessed the feasibility of his concept on the ground.

7. Implementing such a plan is unrealistic.

Of course, one can only guess about the reality of implementing the GPO in the form in which it is described in the documents that have reached us. We are talking about the resettlement of tens of millions (and, apparently, the extermination of millions) of people; the need for migrants is estimated at 5-10 million people. The discontent of the expelled population and, as a consequence, a new round of armed struggle against the occupiers is practically guaranteed. It is unlikely that settlers would be eager to move to areas where guerrilla warfare continues.

On the other side we're talking about not just about the fix idea of ​​the Reich leadership, but also about scientists (economists, planners, managers) who projected this fix idea onto reality: no supernatural or impossible obligations were set, the task of Germanization of the Baltic states, Ingria, Crimea, Poland, parts of Ukraine and Belarus had to be solved in small steps over 20 years; along the way, details (for example, the percentage of suitability for Germanization) would be adjusted and clarified. As for the “unrealism of the GPO” in terms of scale, we must not forget that, for example, the number of Germans expelled during and after the end of the Second World War from the territories in which they lived is also described as an eight-digit number. And it took not 20 years, but five times less.

Hopes (expressed today, mainly by adherents of General Vlasov and other collaborators) that some part of the occupied territories would gain independence or at least self-government are not reflected in real Nazi plans (see, for example, Hitler in Bormann's notes, 07/16/41:

We will again emphasize that we were forced to occupy this or that area, restore order in it and secure it. In the interests of the population, we are forced to take care of peace, food, communications, etc., so we are introducing our own rules here. No one should recognize that in this way we are introducing our rules forever! Despite this, we are carrying out and can carry out all the necessary measures - executions, evictions, etc.
We, however, do not wish to prematurely turn anyone into our enemies. Therefore, for now we will act as if this area is a mandated territory. But it must be absolutely clear to us that we will never leave it. [...]
The most basic:
The formation of a power to the west of the Urals capable of waging war should never be allowed, even if we have to fight for another hundred years. All the Fuhrer's successors must know: the Reich will only be safe if there is no foreign army west of the Urals; Germany takes upon itself the defense of this space from all possible threats.
The iron law should read: “No one other than Germans should ever be allowed to bear arms!”

At the same time, it makes no sense to compare the situation of 1941-42 with the situation of 1944, when the Nazis made promises much more easily, since they were happy with almost any help: active conscription into the ROA began, Bandera was released, etc. Like the Nazis belonged to the allies who pursued goals not approved in Berlin, including those who advocated for (albeit puppet) independence in 1941-42, the example of the same Bandera clearly shows.

8.When were the documents on the Ost plan discovered? Is there a possibility that they are falsified?

Dr. Wetzel's opinion and a number of accompanying documents appeared already at the Nuremberg trials; documents 5 and 6 were discovered in American archives and published by Czeslaw Madajczyk (Przeglad Zachodni Nr. 3 1961).
Theoretically, the possibility that a particular document is falsified always exists. In this case, however, it is important that we are dealing not with one or two, but with a whole complex of documents, which includes not only the main ones discussed above, but also various accompanying notes, reviews, letters, protocols - in the classic The collection of Ch. Madaychik contains more than a hundred relevant documents. Therefore, it is absolutely not enough to call one document a falsification, taking it out of the context of the others. If, for example, document 6 is a falsification, then what does Himmler write to Mayer in his response to it? Or, if Himmler’s review of 06.12.42 is a falsification, then why is Document 6 embodied the instructions contained in this review? And most importantly, why do the GPO documents, if they are falsified, correlate so well with the statements of Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich, etc.?

Those. here you need to build a whole conspiracy theory, explaining by whose evil intent the documents and speeches of Nazi bosses found at different times in different archives are built into a coherent picture. And to question the reliability of individual documents (as some authors do, counting on the uneducated reading public) is quite pointless.

First of all, books in German:

Collection of documents compiled by C. Madayczyk Vom Generalplan Ost zum Generalsiedlungsplan, Saur, München 1994;

— Mechthild Rössler, Sabine Schleiermacher (Hrsg.): Der „Generalplan Ost“. Hauptlinien der nationalsozialistischen Planungs- und Vernichtungspolitik, Akademie, Berlin 1993;

— Rolf-Dieter Müller: Hitlers Ostkrieg und die deutsche Siedlungspolitik, Frankfurt am Main 1991;

Isabel Heinemann: Rasse, Siedlung, deutsches Blut. Das Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt der SS und die rassenpolitische Neuordnung Europas, Wallstein: Göttingen 2003 (partially available)

Plan Ost is a fairly extensive topic for discussion and an entire book could easily be written about it, which we will not do now. In this article we will look at the Ost plan briefly and to the point. And let's start, probably, with the definition of this term.

Plan Ost or General Plan Ost (this term is also found) is a very extensive policy of world domination by the Third Reich of Nazi Germany in Eastern Europe.

One of the main goals of the Germans during the Ost plan was the full-scale eviction of the population of Poland (approximately 85%) and the settlement of these territories with Germans.

This plan had to be fully realized within thirty long years. The development of this project was carried out by the famous political and military figure of the Reich, Heinrich Himmler. In addition to him, it should also be noted such a person as Erhard Wetzel, because he was one of the main authors of this plan.

The idea called the Ost plan most likely appeared back in 1940 and its initiator was the same Himmler.

Himmler decided to implement his plan immediately after the imminent victory over the USSR, but the turning point in the Great Patriotic War completely set aside the implementation of this project, it was completely abandoned in 1943, as the Reich had to find a way to regain its advantage in the war.

In total, this document is divided into four large sections, which should be discussed in detail.

The issue of resettlement of Germans is discussed in the first section. According to the plan, they were supposed to occupy the eastern territories. At the same time, representatives of the Slavic peoples were also supposed to remain in these territories, but their number should not exceed 14 million people - these are small numbers, approximately 15% of the total population of those territories. In addition, this section states that all Jews living in these territories, and this is at least 6 million people, must be completely liquidated - that is, they all had to be killed without any exceptions.

The second question does not deserve special attention, but with the third the situation is different. It discussed the most pressing issue - the Polish one, because the Nazis believed that the Poles were the most hostile ethnic group towards the Germans and their issue needed to be resolved radically.

The author of the document says that it is impossible to kill all the Poles, this would completely undermine the trust of other peoples in the Germans, which the Germans did not want at all. Instead, they decided to resettle almost all the Germans somewhere. It was planned to deport them to the territory of South America, namely to the territory of modern Brazil.

In addition to the Poles, the future fate of Ukrainians and Belarusians was considered here. It was also not planned to kill these peoples.

Approximately 65% ​​of all Ukrainians were to be deported to Siberia, 75% of Belarusians were to follow the Ukrainians. It also says about the Czechs: 50% are to be deported and 50% should be Germanized.

The fourth section discusses the fate of the Russian people. The fourth section is one of the most important, since the Germans considered the Russian people to be one of the most problematic in the East, of course, after the Jews.

The Germans understood that the Russian people were extremely dangerous for them, they identified this in their biology, but they simply did not have the opportunity to destroy them completely. As a result, they wanted to find a way to somehow control the Russian population in the East. They developed a system that would reduce the birth rate among the Russian people.

Exists interesting fact, many historians believe that the word “eviction” cannot be interpreted directly, since the Germans considered this word to be the complete liquidation of those percentages of the population that were designated in the document.

In total, approximately 6.5 million ethnic Germans were supposed to move to the East, who were supposed to look after the remaining Slavic population (14 million). This was a document from 1941, but already in 1942 it was decided to double the number of immigrants - almost 13 million Germans.

Among this large number of Germans, about 20-30% should have been people engaged in agriculture, which would provide the entire German people with the necessary amount of food.

It is interesting that there was never a final version of the Ost plan, there were only a few projects, and even those were constantly rewritten and changed. The Germans planned to spend huge sums on the implementation of all these processes - more than 100 billion marks.

As a conclusion, it should be said that although the Ost plan was not implemented, which saved the lives of millions of people, many still died. Approximately 6 or 7 million people were killed during the German occupation of Eastern Europe. Moreover, of these 6-7 million civilians, the majority, which is quite understandable, of those killed were representatives of the Jewish ethnic group.

The very last document of the Ost plan was published in 2009 and anyone, having found the necessary scientific literature, can familiarize themselves with its full content and, so to speak, plunge into the monstrous plans of the leadership of the Third Reich regarding the population of Eastern Europe.

About the Nazi program of extermination of entire nations

A truly cannibalistic document of Nazi Germany was the Ost general plan - a plan for the enslavement and destruction of the peoples of the USSR, the Jewish and Slavic population of the conquered territories.

An idea of ​​how the Nazi elite saw the conduct of a war of annihilation can be gained from Hitler’s speeches to the highest command of the Wehrmacht on January 9, March 17 and 30, 1941. The Fuhrer stated that a war against the USSR would be “the complete opposite of a normal war in the West and North of Europe,” it provides for “total destruction,” “the destruction of Russia as a state.” Trying to provide an ideological basis for these criminal plans, Hitler announced that the upcoming war against the USSR would be a “struggle of two ideologies” with “the use of brutal violence”, that in this war it would be necessary to defeat not only the Red Army, but also the “control mechanism” of the USSR, “ destroy the commissars and communist intelligentsia,” functionaries and in this way destroy the “worldview bonds” of the Russian people.

On April 28, 1941, Brauchitsch issued a special order “Procedure for the use of security police and SD in ground forces formations.” According to it, Wehrmacht soldiers and officers were relieved of responsibility for future crimes in the occupied territory of the USSR. They were ordered to be ruthless, to shoot on the spot without trial or investigation anyone who offered even the slightest resistance or showed sympathy for the partisans.

Citizens were destined for either exile to Siberia without means of subsistence, or the fate of slaves of the Aryan masters. These goals were justified by the racist views of the Nazi leadership, contempt for the Slavs and other “subhuman” peoples who interfered with the “existence and reproduction of the superior race,” allegedly due to its catastrophic lack of “living space.”

“Racial theory” and “living space theory” originated in Germany long before the Nazis came to power, but only under them acquired the status of a state ideology that embraced wide sections of the population.

The war against the USSR was considered by the Nazi elite primarily as a war against the Slavic peoples. In a conversation with the President of the Danzig Senate, H. Rauschning, Hitler explained: “One of the main tasks of German government is to forever prevent by all possible means the development of the Slavic races. The natural instincts of all living beings tell us not only the need to defeat our enemies, but also to destroy them.” Other leaders of Nazi Germany adhered to a similar attitude, primarily one of Hitler’s closest accomplices, Reichsführer SS G. Himmler, who on October 7, 1939 simultaneously took the post of “Reich Commissioner for Strengthening the German Race.” Hitler instructed him to deal with the issues of the “return” of Imperial Germans and Volksdeutsche from other countries and the creation of new settlements as the German “living space in the East” expanded during the war. Himmler played a leading role in deciding the future that would await the population in Soviet territory up to the Urals after the German victory.

Hitler, who throughout his political career advocated the dismemberment of the USSR, on July 16, at a meeting at his headquarters with the participation of Goering, Rosenberg, Lammers, Bormann and Keitel, defined the tasks of National Socialist policy in Russia: “The main principle is that this pie divide it in the most convenient way, so that we can: firstly, own it, secondly, manage it and, thirdly, exploit it.” At the same meeting, Hitler announced that after the defeat of the USSR, the territory of the Third Reich should be expanded in the east at least to the Urals. He stated: “The entire Baltic region should become a region of the empire, Crimea with the adjacent regions, the Volga regions should become a region of the empire in the same way as the Baku region.”

At a meeting of the Wehrmacht high command held on July 31, 1940, dedicated to preparing an attack on the USSR, Hitler again stated: “Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic states are for us.” He then intended to transfer the northwestern regions of Russia up to Arkhangelsk to Finland.

On May 25, 1940, Himmler prepared and presented to Hitler his “Some Thoughts on the Treatment of the Local Population of the Eastern Regions.” He wrote: “We are extremely interested in under no circumstances uniting the peoples of the eastern regions, but, on the contrary, splitting them into the smallest possible branches and groups.”

A secret document initiated by Himmler called General Plan Ost was presented to him on July 15. The plan provided for the destruction and deportation of 80–85% of the population from Poland, 85% from Lithuania, 65% from Western Ukraine, 75% from Belarus and 50% of residents from Latvia, Estonia and the Czech Republic within 25–30 years.

45 million people lived in the area subject to German colonization. At least 31 million of them who would be declared “undesirable by racial indicators” were supposed to be evicted to Siberia, and immediately after the defeat of the USSR, up to 840 thousand Germans were to be resettled in the liberated territories. Over the next two to three decades, two more waves of settlers were planned, numbering 1.1 and 2.6 million people. In September 1941, Hitler declared that on Soviet lands, which should become “provinces of the Reich,” it is necessary to pursue a “planned racial policy,” sending there and allocating lands not only to Germans, but also to “Norwegians and Swedes related to them by language and blood.” , Danes and Dutch." “When settling the Russian space,” he said, “we must provide the imperial peasants with unusually luxurious housing. German institutions should be housed in magnificent buildings - governor's palaces. Everything necessary for the life of the Germans will be grown around them. Around the cities, within a radius of 30–40 km, there will be German villages that are striking in their beauty, connected by the best roads. Another world will emerge in which Russians will be allowed to live as they please. But on one condition: we will be masters. In the event of a rebellion, all we have to do is drop a couple of bombs on their cities, and the job is done. And once a year we will take a group of Kyrgyz people around the capital of the Reich so that they become aware of the power and grandeur of its architectural monuments. The eastern spaces will become for us what India was for England.” After the defeat near Moscow, Hitler consoled his interlocutors: “Losses will be restored to many times their volume in the settlements for purebred Germans that I will create in the East... The right to land, according to the eternal law of nature, belongs to the one who conquered it, based on the fact that old borders are holding back the growth of the population. And the fact that we have children who want to live justifies our claims to the newly conquered eastern territories.” Continuing this thought, Hitler said: “In the East there is iron, coal, wheat, wood. We will build luxurious houses and roads, and those who grow up there will love their homeland and one day, like the Volga Germans, will forever link their destiny with it.”

The Nazis had special plans for the Russian people. One of the developers of the Ost master plan, Dr. E. Wetzel, a referent on racial issues in the Eastern Ministry of Rosenberg, prepared a document for Himmler in which it was stated that “without complete destruction” or weakening by any means “the biological strength of the Russian people” to establish “German domination in Europe" will not succeed.

“This is not only about the defeat of a state centered in Moscow,” he wrote. – Achieving this historical goal would never mean a complete solution to the problem. The point, most likely, is to defeat the Russians as a people, to divide them.”

Hitler's deep hostility towards the Slavs is evidenced by the recordings of his table conversations, which from June 21, 1941 to July 1942 were conducted first by ministerial adviser G. Geim, and then by Dr. G. Picker; as well as notes on the goals and methods of occupation policy on the territory of the USSR, made by the representative of the Eastern Ministry at Hitler’s headquarters, W. Keppen, from September 6 to November 7, 1941. After Hitler’s trip to Ukraine in September 1941, Keppen records conversations at Headquarters: “At An entire block of Kiev burned down, but there are still quite a few people living in the city. a large number of Human. They make a very bad impression, outwardly they look like proletarians, and therefore their numbers should be reduced by 80-90%. The Fuhrer immediately supported the proposal of the Reichsfuehrer (H. Himmler) to confiscate the ancient Russian monastery located near Kiev, so that it would not turn into a center for the revival of the Orthodox faith and national spirit.” Both Russians, Ukrainians, and Slavs in general, according to Hitler, belonged to a race unworthy of humane treatment and the expense of education.

After a conversation with Hitler on July 8, 1941, the Chief of the General Staff of the Ground Forces, Colonel General F. Halder, writes in his diary: “The Fuhrer’s decision to raze Moscow and Leningrad to the ground is unshakable in order to completely get rid of the population of these cities, which otherwise we will then forced to feed during the winter. The task of destroying these cities must be carried out by aviation. Tanks should not be used for this. This will be a national disaster that will deprive not only Bolshevism of centers, but also Muscovites (Russians) in general.” Köppen specifies Halder’s conversation with Hitler on the extermination of the population of Leningrad as follows: “The city will only need to be encircled, subjected to artillery fire and starved to death...”.

Assessing the situation at the front, on October 9, Koeppen writes: “The Fuhrer gave an order to prohibit German soldiers from entering the territory of Moscow. The city will be surrounded and wiped off the face of the earth." The corresponding order was signed on October 7 and confirmed by the main command of the ground forces in the “Instruction on the procedure for the capture of Moscow and the treatment of its population” dated October 12, 1941.

The instructions emphasized that “it would be completely irresponsible to risk the lives of German soldiers to save Russian cities from fires or to feed their population at the expense of Germany.” German troops were ordered to apply similar tactics to all Soviet cities, while it was explained that “the more the population of Soviet cities rushes into internal Russia, the more chaos in Russia will increase and the easier it will be to control and use the occupied eastern regions.” In an entry dated October 17, Koeppen also notes that Hitler made it clear to the generals that after the victory he intended to retain only a few Russian cities.

Trying to divide the population of the occupied territories in areas where Soviet power was established only in 1939–1940. (Western Ukraine, Western Belarus, Baltic states), the fascists established close contacts with the nationalists.

To stimulate them, it was decided to allow “local self-government”. However, the restoration of their own statehood to the peoples of the Baltic states and Belarus was denied. When, following the entry of German troops into Lithuania, nationalists, without the sanction of Berlin, created a government headed by Colonel K. Skirpa, the German leadership refused to recognize it, declaring that the issue of forming a government in Vilna would be resolved only after victory in the war. Berlin did not allow the idea of ​​restoring statehood in the Baltic republics and Belarus, resolutely rejecting requests from “racially inferior” collaborators to create their own armed forces and other attributes of power. At the same time, the Wehrmacht leadership willingly used them to form volunteer foreign units, which, under the command of German officers, participated in combat operations against partisans and at the front. They also served as burgomasters, village elders, in auxiliary police units, etc.

In the Reichskommissariat "Ukraine", from which a significant part of the territory was torn away, included in Transnistria and the General Government in Poland, any attempts by nationalists not only to revive statehood, but also to create "Ukrainian self-government in a politically expedient form" were suppressed.

When preparing an attack on the USSR, the Nazi leadership attached paramount importance to the development of plans for using the Soviet economic potential in the interests of ensuring the conquest of world domination. At a meeting with the Wehrmacht command on January 9, 1941, Hitler said that if Germany “gets into its hands the incalculable riches of the vast Russian territories,” then “in the future it will be able to fight against any continents.”

In March 1941, for the exploitation of the occupied territory of the USSR, a paramilitary state-monopoly organization was created in Berlin - the Headquarters of the Economic Leadership “Vostok”. It was headed by two old associates of Hitler: Deputy G. Goering, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of the Hermann Goering concern, State Secretary P. Kerner and Head of the OKW War Industry and Armament Directorate, Lieutenant General G. Thomas. In addition to the “leadership group”, which also dealt with the labor force, the headquarters included groups from industry, agriculture, enterprise management and forestry. From the very beginning, it was dominated by representatives of German concerns: Mansfeld, Krupp, Zeiss, Flick, I. G. Farben." On October 15, 1941, excluding the economic commands in the Baltic states and the corresponding specialists in the army, the headquarters numbered about 10, and by the end of the year - 11 thousand people.

The plans of the German leadership for the exploitation of Soviet industry were set out in the “Directives for Management in the Newly Occupied Areas,” which received the name Goering’s “Green Folder” based on the color of the binding.

The directives provided for organizing on the territory of the USSR the extraction and export to Germany of those types of raw materials that were important for the functioning of the German military economy, and for restoring a number of factories for the purpose of repairing Wehrmacht equipment and producing certain types of weapons.

Most of the Soviet enterprises producing civilian products were planned to be destroyed. Goering and representatives of military-industrial concerns showed particular interest in the seizure of Soviet oil-bearing regions. In March 1941, an oil company called Continental A.G. was founded, the chairman of the board of which was E. Fischer from the IG Farben concern and K. Blessing, a former director of the Reichsbank.

The general instructions of the organization "East" dated May 23, 1941 on economic policy in the field of agriculture stated that the goal of the military campaign against the USSR was "to supply the German armed forces, as well as to provide food for the German civilian population for many years." It was planned to realize this goal by “reducing Russia’s own consumption” by cutting off the supply of products from the southern black earth regions to the northern non-black earth zone, including to such industrial centers as Moscow and Leningrad. Those who prepared these instructions were well aware that this would lead to the starvation of millions of Soviet citizens. At one of the meetings of the Vostok headquarters it was said: “If we manage to pump everything we need out of the country, then tens of millions of people will be doomed to starvation.”

Economic inspectorates operating in the operational rear of German troops on the Eastern Front, economic departments in the rear of armies, including technical battalions of specialists in the mining and oil industries, and units involved in the seizure of raw materials, agricultural products and production tools were subordinate to the headquarters of the economic leadership "Vostok". Economic teams were created in divisions, economic groups - in field commandant's offices. In the units expropriating raw materials and controlling the work of captured enterprises, specialists from German concerns were advisors. To the Commissioner for Scrap Metal, Captain B.-G. Shu and the inspector general for the seizure of raw materials, V. Witting, were ordered to hand over the trophies to the military concerns of Flick and I. G. Farben."

Germany's satellites also counted on rich booty for complicity in aggression.

The ruling elite of Romania, led by dictator I. Antonescu, intended not only to return Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, which it had to cede to the USSR in the summer of 1940, but also to obtain a significant part of the territory of Ukraine.

In Budapest, for participation in the attack on the USSR, they dreamed of getting the former Eastern Galicia, including the oil-bearing areas in Drohobych, as well as all of Transylvania.

In a keynote speech at a meeting of SS leaders on October 2, 1941, the head of the Main Directorate of Imperial Security, R. Heydrich, stated that after the war, Europe would be divided into a “German great space”, where the German population would live - Germans, Dutch, Flemings, Norwegians, Danes both the Swedes and the “eastern space”, which will become a raw material base for the German state and where the “German upper class” will use the conquered local population as “helots”, that is, slaves. G. Himmler had a different opinion on this matter. He was not satisfied with the policy of Germanization of the population of the occupied territories pursued by the Kaiser's Germany. He considered it erroneous that the old authorities were trying to force the conquered peoples to renounce only their native language, national culture, lead a German way of life and obey German laws.

In the SS newspaper Das Schwarze Kor dated August 20, 1942, in the article “Should we Germanize?”, Himmler wrote: “Our task is not to Germanize the East in the old sense of the word, that is, to instill in the population German and German laws, but to ensure that only people of truly German, Germanic blood live in the East.”

The achievement of this goal was served by the mass extermination of civilians and prisoners of war, which occurred from the very beginning of the invasion of German troops into the territory of the USSR. Simultaneously with the Barbarossa plan, the OKH order of April 28, 1941 “Procedure for the use of security police and SD in ground forces formations” came into force. In accordance with this order, the main role in the mass extermination of communists, Komsomol members, deputies of regional, city, district and village councils, Soviet intelligentsia and Jews in the occupied territory was played by four punitive units, the so-called Einsatzgruppen, designated by the letters of the Latin alphabet A, B, C, D. Einsatzgruppe A was attached to Army Group North and operated in the Baltic republics (led by SS-Brigadeführer W. Stahlecker). Einsatzgruppe B in Belarus (headed by the head of the 5th Directorate of the RSHA, SS Gruppenführer A. Nebe) was assigned to Army Group Center. Einsatzgruppe C (Ukraine, chief – SS Brigadeführer O. Rasch, inspector of the Security Police and SD in Königsberg) “served” Army Group “South”. Einsatzgruppe D, attached to the 2nd Army, operated in the southern part of Ukraine and Crimea. It was commanded by O. Ohlendorf, head of the 3rd Directorate of the RSHA (domestic security service) and at the same time the chief manager of the Imperial Trade Group. In addition, in the operational rear of the German formations advancing on Moscow, the punitive team “Moscow”, led by SS-Brigadeführer F.-A., operated. Zix, head of the 7th Directorate of the RSHA (worldview research and its use). Each Einsatzgruppen consisted of 800 to 1,200 personnel (SS, SD, criminal police, Gestapo and order police) under the jurisdiction of the SS. Following on the heels of the advancing German troops, by mid-November 1941, the Einsatzgruppen Army North, Center and South had exterminated more than 300 thousand civilians in the Baltics, Belarus and Ukraine. They were engaged in mass murders and robbery until the end of 1942. According to the most conservative estimates, they accounted for over a million victims. Then the Einsatzgruppen were formally liquidated, becoming part of the rear forces.

In development of the “Order on Commissars”, the Wehrmacht High Command entered into an agreement on July 16, 1941 with the Main Directorate of Reich Security, according to which special teams of the Security Police and SD under the auspices of the head of the 4th Main Directorate of the Secret State Police (Gestapo) G. Müller were obliged to identify politically and racially “unacceptable” “elements” among Soviet prisoners of war delivered from the front to stationary camps.

Not only party workers of all ranks, but also “all representatives of the intelligentsia, all fanatical communists and all Jews” were considered “unacceptable.”

It was emphasized that the use of weapons against Soviet prisoners of war is considered “as a rule, legal.” Such a phrase meant official permission to kill. In May 1942, the OKW was forced to cancel this order at the request of some high-ranking front-line soldiers, who reported that the publication of the facts of the execution of political instructors led to a sharp increase in the strength of resistance from the Red Army. From now on, political instructors began to be destroyed not immediately after captivity, but in the Mauthausen concentration camp.

After the defeat of the USSR, it was planned “within the shortest possible time” to create and populate three imperial districts: the Ingria district (Leningrad, Pskov and Novgorod regions), the Gothic district (Crimea and Kherson region) and the Memel-Narev district (Bialystok region and Western Lithuania). To ensure connections between Germany and the Ingermanland and Gotha districts, it was planned to build two highways, each with a length of up to 2 thousand km. One would reach Leningrad, the other would reach the Crimean Peninsula. To secure the highways, it was planned to create 36 paramilitary German settlements (strong points) along them: 14 in Poland, 8 in Ukraine and 14 in the Baltic states. It was proposed to declare the entire territory in the East that would be captured by the Wehrmacht as state property, transferring power over it to the SS administrative apparatus headed by Himmler, who would personally decide issues related to granting German settlers the rights to own land. According to Nazi scientists, it would have taken 25 years and up to 66.6 billion Reichsmarks to build highways, accommodate 4.85 million Germans in three districts and settle them down.

Having approved this project in principle, Himmler demanded that it provide for the “total Germanization of Estonia, Latvia and the General Government”: their settlement by Germans within about 20 years. In September 1942, when German troops reached Stalingrad and the foothills of the Caucasus, at a meeting with SS commanders in Zhitomir, Himmler announced that the network of German strongholds (military settlements) would be expanded to the Don and Volga.

The second “General Plan of Settlement”, taking into account Himmler’s wishes to finalize the April version, was ready on December 23, 1942. The main directions of colonization in it were named northern (East Prussia - Baltic countries) and southern (Krakow - Lviv - Black Sea region). It was assumed that the territory of German settlements would be 700 thousand square meters. km, of which 350 thousand are arable lands (the entire territory of the Reich in 1938 was less than 600 thousand sq. km).

The “General Plan Ost” provided for the physical extermination of the entire Jewish population of Europe, the mass murder of Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Bulgarians, Hungarians, and the physical extermination of 25–30 million Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians.

L. Bezymensky, calling the Ost plan a “cannibal document”, “a plan for the liquidation of the Slavs in Russia,” argued: “One should not be deceived by the term “eviction”: this was a familiar designation for the Nazis for killing people.”

“The General Plan Ost” belongs to history - the history of the forced relocation of individuals and entire nations,” said the report of the modern German researcher Dietrich Achholz at a joint meeting of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and the Christian Peace Conference “Munich Agreements - General Plan Ost - Benes Decrees. Causes of flight and forced relocation in Eastern Europe” in Berlin on May 15, 2004 – This story is as old as the history of humanity itself. But Plan Ost opened up a new dimension of fear. It represented a carefully planned genocide of races and peoples, and this in the industrialized era of the mid-20th century!” We are not talking here about the struggle for pastures and hunting grounds, for livestock and women, as in ancient times. The Ost master plan, under the guise of a misanthropic, atavistic racial ideology, was about profits for big capital, fertile lands for large landowners, wealthy peasants and generals, and profits for countless petty Nazi criminals and hangers-on. “The murderers themselves, who, as part of the SS task forces, in countless units of the Wehrmacht and in key positions of the occupation bureaucracy, brought death and fires to the occupied territories, only a small part of them were punished for their actions,” stated D. Achholz. “Tens of thousands of them “dissolved” and were able, some time after the war, to lead a “normal” life in West Germany or elsewhere, for the most part avoiding persecution or at least censure.”

As an example, the researcher cited the fate of the leading SS scientist and expert Himmler, who developed the most important versions of the Ost master plan.” He stood out among those dozens, even hundreds of scientists - Earth researchers of various specializations, specialists in territorial and demographic planners, racial ideologists and eugenics specialists, ethnologists and anthropologists, biologists and doctors, economists and historians - who supplied data to the killers of entire nations for their bloody work. “It was precisely this “master plan Ost” of May 28, 1942 that was one of the high-quality products of such killers at their desks,” the speaker notes. It really was, as the Czech historian Miroslav Karni wrote, a plan “in which scholarship and advanced technical techniques were invested scientific work, the ingenuity and vanity of the leading scientists of Nazi Germany,” a plan “that transformed the criminal phantasmagoria of Hitler and Himmler into a fully developed system, thought out to the smallest detail, calculated to the last mark.”

The author responsible for this plan, full professor and head of the Institute of Agronomy and Agricultural Policy at the University of Berlin, Konrad Meyer, called Meyer-Hetling, was an exemplary example of such a scientist. Himmler made him head of the "main staff service for planning and land holdings" in his "Imperial Commissariat for the Strengthening of the Spirit of the German Nation" and first as a Standarten and later as an SS Oberführer (corresponding to the rank of colonel). In addition, as a leading land planner in the Reich Ministry of Food and Agriculture, who was recognized by the Reichsfuehrer of Agriculture and the Ministry of the Occupied Eastern Regions, in 1942 Meyer was promoted to the position of chief planner for the development of all areas subject to Germany.

From the beginning of the war, Meyer knew in every detail about all the planned abominations; Moreover, he himself drew up decisive conclusions and plans for this. In the annexed Polish regions, as he officially announced already in 1940, it was assumed “that the entire Jewish population of this region, numbering 560 thousand people, had already been evacuated and, accordingly, would leave the region during this winter” (that is, they would be imprisoned in concentration camps, where will undergo systematic destruction).

In order to populate the annexed areas with at least 4.5 million Germans (until now 1.1 million people had permanently lived there), it was necessary to “expel 3.4 million Poles train by train.”

Meyer died peacefully in 1973 at the age of 72 as a retired West German professor. The scandal surrounding this Nazi killer began after the war with his participation in the Nuremberg war crimes trials. He was indicted along with other SS ranks in the case of the so-called General Office for Race and Resettlement, sentenced by a United States court to a minor punishment only for membership in the SS and released in 1948. Although in the verdict the American judges agreed that he, as a senior SS officer and a person who worked closely with Himmler, should have “known” about the criminal activities of the SS, they confirmed that there was “nothing aggravating” for him under the “Ost General Plan” it cannot be argued that he “knew nothing about evacuations and other radical measures”, and that this plan “was never put into practice” anyway. “The prosecution representative really could not present undeniable evidence at that time, since the sources, especially the “master plan” of 1942, had not yet been discovered,” D. Achholz notes bitterly.

And the court even then made decisions in the spirit of “ cold war“, which meant the release of “honest” Nazi criminals and likely future allies, and did not think at all about attracting Polish and Soviet experts as witnesses.”

As for the extent to which the Ost master plan was implemented or not, the example of Belarus clearly demonstrates. The Extraordinary State Commission to reveal the crimes of the invaders determined that only the direct losses of this republic during the war years amounted to 75 billion rubles. in 1941 prices. The most painful and severe loss for Belarus was the extermination of over 2.2 million people. Hundreds of villages and hamlets were deserted, and the urban population sharply decreased. In Minsk at the time of liberation, less than 40% of the population remained, in the Mogilev region - only 35% of the urban population, Polesie - 29, Vitebsk - 27, Gomel - 18%. The occupiers burned and destroyed 209 of 270 cities and district centers, 9,200 villages and hamlets. 100,465 enterprises were destroyed, more than 6 thousand km railway, 10 thousand collective farms, 92 state farms and MTS were plundered, 420,996 houses of collective farmers and almost all power plants were destroyed. 90% of the machine tools and technical equipment, about 96% of energy capacity, about 18.5 thousand vehicles, more than 9 thousand tractors and tractors, thousands of cubic meters of wood, lumber, hundreds of hectares of forests, gardens, etc. were cut down. By the summer of 1944, only 39% of the pre-war number of horses, 31% of cattle, 11% of pigs, 22% of sheep and goats remained in Belarus. The enemy destroyed thousands of educational, health, scientific and cultural institutions, including 8825 schools, the Academy of Sciences of the BSSR, 219 libraries, 5425 museums, theaters and clubs, 2187 hospitals and outpatient clinics, 2651 children's institutions.

Thus, the cannibalistic plan for the extermination of millions of people, the destruction of the entire material and spiritual potential of the conquered Slavic states, which in fact was the Ost master plan, was carried out by the Nazis consistently and persistently. And all the more majestic, grandiose is the immortal feat of the soldiers and commanders of the Red Army, partisans and underground fighters, who did not spare their lives to rid Europe and the world of the brown plague.

Especially for "Century"

The article was published as part of socially significant project carried out using funds state support allocated as a grant in accordance with the order of the President Russian Federation No. 11-rp dated January 17, 2014 and on the basis of a competition held by the All-Russian public organization Society "Knowledge" of Russia.

Master plan "Ost"(German) Generalplan Ost) - a secret plan of the German government of the Third Reich to carry out ethnic cleansing in Eastern Europe and its German colonization after the victory over the USSR.

A version of the plan was developed in 1941 by the Main Directorate of Reich Security and presented on May 28, 1942 by an employee of the Office of the Headquarters of the Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of the German People, SS Oberführer Meyer-Hetling under the title “General Plan Ost - the foundations of the legal, economic and territorial structure of the East.” The text of this document was found in the German Federal Archives in the late 1980s, some documents from there were presented at an exhibition in 1991, but was completely digitized and published only in November-December 2009.

At the Nuremberg trials, the only evidence of the existence of the plan was the “Comments and proposals of the “Eastern Ministry” on the Ost master plan,” according to prosecutors, written on April 27, 1942 by an employee of the Ministry of the Eastern Territories E. Wetzel after familiarizing himself with the draft plan prepared by the RSHA.

Rosenberg Project

The master plan was preceded by a project developed by the Reich Ministry for Occupied Territories, headed by Alfred Rosenberg. On May 9, 1941, Rosenberg presented the Fuhrer with draft directives on policy issues in the territories that were to be occupied as a result of aggression against the USSR.

Rosenberg proposed creating five governorates on the territory of the USSR. Hitler opposed the autonomy of Ukraine and replaced the term “governorate” with “Reichskommissariat” for it. As a result, Rosenberg’s ideas took the following forms of implementation.

• Ostland - was supposed to include Belarus, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Ostland, where, according to Rosenberg, a population with Aryan blood lived, was subject to complete Germanization within two generations.
• Ukraine - would include the territory of the former Ukrainian SSR, Crimea, a number of territories along the Don and Volga, as well as the lands of the abolished Soviet Autonomous Republic of the Volga Germans. According to Rosenberg's idea, the governorate was supposed to gain autonomy and become the support of the Third Reich in the East.
• Caucasus - would include the republics of the North Caucasus and Transcaucasia and would separate Russia from the Black Sea.
• Muscovy - Russia to the Urals.
• The fifth governorate was to be Turkestan.

The success of the German campaign in the summer-autumn of 1941 led to a revision and tightening of the German plans for the eastern lands, and as a result, the Ost plan was born.

Plan Description

According to some reports, the “Plan Ost” was divided into two - the “Small Plan” (German. Kleine Planung) and "Big Plan" (German) Große Planung). The small plan was to be carried out during the war. On Big plan the German government wanted to concentrate after the war. The plan provided for different percentages of Germanization for the various conquered Slavic and other peoples. The “non-Germanized” were to be deported to Western Siberia or subjected to physical destruction. The execution of the plan was to ensure that the conquered territories would acquire an irrevocably German character.

Wetzel's comments and suggestions

A document known as “Comments and proposals of the “Eastern Ministry” on the “Ost” master plan” has become widespread among historians. The text of this document has often been presented as Plan Ost itself, although it has little in common with the text of the Plan published at the end of 2009.

Wetzel envisioned the expulsion of tens of millions of Slavs beyond the Urals. The Poles, according to Wetzel, “were the most hostile to the Germans, numerically the largest and therefore the most dangerous people.”

"Generalplan Ost", as it should be understood, also meant the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" (German. Endlösung der Judenfrage), according to which the Jews were subject to total destruction:

In the Baltics, Latvians were considered more suitable for "Germanization", but Lithuanians and Latgalians were not, since there were too many "Slavic admixtures" among them. According to Wetzel's proposals, the Russian people were to be subjected to measures such as assimilation (“Germanization”) and population reduction through a reduction in the birth rate - such actions are defined as genocide.

Developed variants of the Ost plan

The following documents were developed by the planning team Gr. lll B planning service of the Main Staff Office of the Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of the German People Heinrich Himmler (Reichskommissar für die Festigung Deutschen Volkstums (RKFDV) and the Institute of Agrarian Policy of the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin:

• Document 1: “Planning Fundamentals” was created in February 1940 by the RKFDV planning service (volume: 21 pages). Contents: Description of the extent of the planned eastern colonization in West Prussia and Wartheland. The colonization area was to be 87,600 km², of which 59,000 km² was agricultural land. About 100,000 settlement farms of 29 hectares each were to be created on this territory. It was planned to resettle about 4.3 million Germans into this territory; of which 3.15 million are in rural areas and 1.15 million in cities. At the same time, 560,000 Jews (100% of the population of the region of this nationality) and 3.4 million Poles (44% of the population of the region of this nationality) were to be gradually eliminated. The costs of implementing these plans have not been estimated.

• Document 2: Materials for the report “Colonization”, developed in December 1940 by the RKFDV planning service (volume 5 pages). Contents: Fundamental article to the “Requirement of territories for forced resettlement from the Old Reich” with a specific requirement for 130,000 km² of land for 480,000 new viable settlement farms of 25 hectares each, as well as in addition 40% of the territory for forest, for the needs of the army and reserve areas in Wartheland and Poland.

Documents created after the attack on the USSR on June 22, 1941

• Document 3 (missing, exact contents unknown): “General Plan Ost”, created in July 1941 by the RKFDV planning service. Contents: Description of the extent of the planned eastern colonization in the USSR with the boundaries of specific areas of colonization.

• Document 4 (missing, exact contents unknown): “ Overall plan Ost", created in December 1941 by the planning group Gr. lll B RSHA. Contents: Description of the scale of the planned eastern colonization in the USSR and the General Government with specific boundaries of individual areas of settlement.

• Document 5: “General Plan Ost”, created in May 1942 by the Institute of Agriculture and Politics of the Friedrich-Wilhelms-University of Berlin (volume 68 pages).

Contents: Description of the scale of the planned eastern colonization in the USSR with specific boundaries of individual areas of settlement. The colonization area was supposed to cover 364,231 km², including 36 strong points and three administrative districts in the Leningrad region, Kherson-Crimean region and in the Bialystok region. At the same time, settlement farms with an area of ​​40-100 hectares, as well as large agricultural enterprises with an area of ​​at least 250 hectares, should have emerged. Required amount displaced people were estimated at 5.65 million. The areas planned for settlement were to be cleared of approximately 25 million people. The cost of implementing the plan was estimated at 66.6 billion Reichsmarks.

• Document 6: “Master Plan for Colonization” (German) Generalsiedlungsplan), created in September 1942 by the RKF planning service (volume: 200 pages, including 25 maps and tables).

Contents: Description of the scale of the planned colonization of all areas envisaged for this with specific boundaries of individual settlement areas. The region was supposed to cover an area of ​​330,000 km² with 360,100 rural households. The required number of migrants was estimated at 12.21 million people (of which 2.859 million were peasants and those employed in forestry). The area planned for settlement was to be cleared of approximately 30.8 million people. The cost of implementing the plan was estimated at 144 billion Reichsmarks.

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