Oddly no reference to the earlier antecedent and influences on Hitler's Generalplan Ost. German plans for conquest and colonisation of the Slavic east did not begin with Hitler on 22 June 1941 but go pack to the German high command in WWI, known as Ober Ost under Erich Ludendorff, Hitler's future mentor and accomplice in the failed Munich putsch of 1923.
Ludendorff was a fanatically virulent anti-semite and one of the first to recognise Hitler's potential after the war. Under Ludendorff, the German occupation pioneered many of the policies of racial segregation and colonial divide and rules policies that would be adopted by the Nazis, separating ethnic groups according to their place in a pseudo-scientific racial hierarchy and their reliability/loyalty as defined by the occupiers. Of course the Nazis took it much further and were more systematic but the influence of Germany's experiments in occupation in WWI, especially in the Baltic states, have not received the attention they deserve. Not forgetting the chief Nazi ideologue - Alfred Rosenberg - and many influential figures in the early Nazi movement were Baltic Germans.
The seeds of the Nazi war of annihilation in 1941 were sown in the earlier war that also shaped Hitler's ideology world outlook more than anything else, reinforced by a circle of figures who dew lessons from their experience they passed onto Hitler with horrific results.
Despite having lived 20 years in Poland it was this book: Wages of Destruction and likely this part of the book that made me fully realise the scale of the German invasion.
Poles still seem more upset with the Russians than the Germans - makes no sense to me, but a lot of well funded creativity has gone into myth creation (Katyn 2007 for example).
Oh and another post that makes me very certain that while you mostly duck questions of Palestine you are very very aware of them.
m droy, I, too, felt the overwhelming nature of the Nazis' planning, military campaign, execution of genecide, starvation of the people and European colonization described in Wages of Destruction. It was not the first time that I have been overwhelmed by the Nazis' crimes against humanity.
I think that you were generous in stating that Tooze '...mostly duck questions of Palestine...' I don't remember him even mentioning the destruction of Gaza, the number of deaths, the blockaids of services to the Gazans, and attacks on the West Bank by Isreal.
Jack, thank you for bringing these two Chartbooks to my attention as well to other readers. I does not appear that 'Tooze wrote about Gaza plenty of times', but when he did as on these two pieces, they were powerful and essential.
I included a link to #405 for those who may be interested. It is clear and strong in its reporting and analysis.
Chartbook 405 Bulldozing Gaza: (Thanatocene mini-series #4) Aug 22, 2025
Journalist Hagai Amit published these lines in Haaretz on August 19th and they stopped me in my tracks. We all have moments of awakening. Flashes that trigger us. Amit’s reframing of the Gaza invasion as civil engineering, did it for me.
'The excavators, bulldozers and huge D9 Caterpillar tractors in Gaza never stop working, even for a moment – and this is not expected to change. The security cabinet's approval for taking over Gaza City promises Israeli forces many more months in which they can destroy thousands of homes and other buildings …. In practice, some ministers in the security cabinet explicitly said they did not understand why Gaza City was not already in ruins like other cities in Gaza. This is an unprecedented engineering project ….'
As I’ve argued in several of these newsletters, there are several other major conflicts ongoing around the world at present which are having devastating consequences for tens of millions of people. “We”, the West and other outside powers, are implicated in all of them in various ways - raw materials, allies, supply of weapons etc. None of them exists in isolation. All are connected to their broader regional and global context.
The singularity of the Israeli campaign in Gaza lies in the asymmetry of power, its intensity, its enclosure, its direct connection to a settler colonial project. All this leads us back to the 1940s and Raphael Lemkin’s definition of genocide, which he modeled on Nazi-occupied Poland. That line of thought should not be dodged, or silenced by protestations about anti-semitism, or accusations of the application of double standards. It is precisely the global comparison that leads you to this conclusion.
But nor should that particular coupling of histories be allowed to become wrapped up in itself and thus self-defeating. After all, the whole point of having a concept of genocide is to capture a wider array of different projects of massive modern violence. As I argued in Chartbook 258, there were plenty of those in the mid-century. The peculiarity of the Israeli settler colonial project is that for want of superior force in 1948 it was unfinished and so continues to be pursued into the 21st century. The historical setting is anomalous. One is tempted to say anachronistic or belated. But that effort at distancing, betrays itself. The horrifying thing about Israel’s bulldozers is that they remind the West that as Faulkner put it: “The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
___Tooze
It turns out that I had read Chartbook 400, and indicated at the time that I 'liked' it. Actually, I deeply appreciated that Tooze was reporting the truth of what Israel was doing to Gaza and the Palestinian people. A link to it was provided at the end of this reply.
Chartbook 400: Murder not crisis - Why Israel's starvation of Gaza is exceptional in a global context.
For many months, it has been beyond reasonable doubt that the Israeli government, the Israeli military, sections of Israeli politics and society as well as their aiders and abetters abroad, have been deliberately starving the population of Gaza with a view to forcing the population either to flee or to face intensifying misery and ultimately an agonizing death. There is clear evidence of deliberate intent going back to 2023. This clearly warrants charges of genocide.
I've lived and worked in poland as well, speak polish.
Want to cheeze off a pole? Want to send a Tomek, Rysiek or Stasiek into a spitting mad Donald Duck meltdown?
Remind your pole that, whatever else the Soviets did, the only reason that there still are polish people alive in Poland today is because of the Red Army. Watch your pole have an apoplectic fit.
The Poles I know are a little calmer, but I agree, there is no understanding that the Soviets saved them, and even less that with out Molotov-Ribbentrop the Germans would have been far far more brutal than they actually were.
If you look at the UN reprorts on trucks entering Gaza, which now are never allowed to be full, but only at 1/3 of capacity, and compare with what was allowed to get in prior Oct 7 - which was already puting the Palestinians on a diet, Gaza is definitely being starved. West Bank is a different story in this respect, but the Israelis have been hitting upstream, emptying Palestinian banks of cash...
A modicum search will reveal much more information. And of course, robbing civilians has become a pastime for IDF. The latest reports come from Lebanon, where the looting is rife. Reminds me of some stories cited by Mike Duncan in his excellent Revolutions podcast about Cosacks hired by Russian White generals robbing blind in the countryside and being slowed down by the train of horse driven wagons loaded with loot. Lots of privates being hired to carry the loot from South Lebanon into Israel as we speak...
No surprise. Zionism and Nazism are ideological bedfellows and share common interests. Zionists offered repeatedly to work with the Nazis against the British.
What I keep grappling with in these histories is the relationship between such an evil state as the third Reich and it's citizens, especially as it relates for us in America.
I look around and am assured that my countryman are not evil people, but I'm sure the Germans said the same. What is my own country truly capable of? I'm just not sure anymore with leaders like Hegseth and the German example makes clear how a great country filled with good people can be captured by evil when it's citizens allow it.
It terrifies me; not because I'm saying that America will necessarily become that evil, but because I don't see a clear stopping mechanism. Trump himself says his only limit is his own morality and he wants more land for America. God help us.
Sounds to me like the madness of the State of Israel. Kill your way out of your problems. Crush, starve, displace. Accuse me of missing the nuance. Fine. Netanyahu is a Nazi, through and through. The irony is delicious.
Great history, thank you. My paremts and their fellow survivors of the camps would argue who was worse, germans or russians. clearly the germans, for they wanted to extinguish slavs, whereas the Russians wanted to dominate their fellow slavs. When Barbarossa started June 22, the soviets released the poles imprisoned in the north. One family friend escaped through Iran.
In 1942, over 116,000 Polish soldiers and civilians were evacuated from Soviet forced labor camps to Iran. Known as Anders’ Army, this military force was formed by General Władysław Anders and integrated with Polish refugees who had survived starvation and disease in the USSR.Key Aspects of the Polish Army in IranThe Exodus: The main landing point for the evacuees was the Iranian port city of Pahlevi (now Anzali) on the Caspian Sea. Up to 2,500 people arrived per day, consisting of roughly 74,000 troops and 41,000 civilians (many of whom were women and children).
Let’s not forget that prior to 1941, the test invasion was of Czechoslovakia in 1939. Most everything that was implemented from 1941 was done earlier in Czechoslovakia. My uncle was sent to do forced labor as a teen, my father was vetted in primary school as to how Slavic/aryan he was, my mother was deemed a Jew (she was catholic), my grandfather was imprisoned in a concentration camp, then in ‘42 the population of Lidice was erased from the map after the assassination of Heydrich by resistors, and on and on.
This was great and detailed history that Brussels would rather have it burried and continue peddling the idea that the German 3rd Reich and Soviet Union are equally culpable for the second world war.
Given these details, can we also agree that what Israel is doing, at its scale, it is equivalent with Generalplan Ost but carried in the East, South, and North? And because the Generalplan Ost was not ever called a holocaust (25+ plus million people dead, mostly civilians, just ask Belarus, but hey they were commies), the fact that Isrelis are doing the same thing as the nazis were doing in Soviet Union and Poland, but without the gas chambers, they think they cannot be blamed of conducting genocide, 'cause the gas chambers are missing...
The Generalplan Ost has all the markings of genocide and ethnic cleansing and the similarly detailed Israeli plans for the Arab occupied territories around them have similar details and forethought... But if you tell them that they will call you anti-semitic. And I am just doing comparative history...
My father (b. 1912) attended the German-speaking St. Petri School in Saint Petersburg. He was arrested when he was nineteen and transported to the Far East (his father had been worked to death at Alma-Ata the year before). In October 1941, near Vyazma, while working illegally as a construction surveyor, he surrendered to the German advance and was enlisted in Fremde Heere Ost, Gehlen’s German military intelligence. A few years ago, I got a letter from the history department at Pullach, saying that my father was one of the “masterminds” who founded the German CIA. Was news to me.
My father’s younger sister was a medical resident at the siege of Leningrad. She later said that there were not enough live bodies to carry the dead bodies off the street. After the war, she was exiled to Tashkent, where she served out the rest of her medical career as the pathologist of the Karaganda City Hospital.
My mother’s father was a German artillery commander. He is buried in Wesenberg, Ostland (Estonia), beside the military hospital where he was taken after his legs were blown off. In his last letter home he said that, while listening to incoming shells, his hair turned grey in a week. He was 43. My mother’s younger brother perished at Stalingrad. He was 17 or 18. When she died in 1976, my mother was a counselor at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Maryland.
As a USAn, I've always found the Nazi Ost-planners' approving nods to the Anglo westward expansion in North America -- "the Volga as our Mississippi" u.s.w. -- to be ahistorical and silly and unfair and... well, uncomfortable.
The mass death -- in effect, murder -- of Russian POWs in the first year of Barbarossa deserves more communal memory than it gets. Not least because of the still-surviving tendency to see most of the Wehrmacht on the eastern front as just patriotic soldiers just waging war as usual, unlike those terrible SS and Einsatzgruppen. Given all the occupation troops and those moving to and from the front, I find it impossible to believe that there wasn't widespread knowledge of several million unhoused, starving, malnourished POWs in open country behind hasty barbed wire-- and their disappearance. So much for Soldatenehre.
This is all so horrible one has to laugh to stay sane - huge tradition of Jewish comedians in this country. In a different context, but same point - old Hollywood movie Sullivan’s Travels. Is there such an art of ‘serious’ laughter to deal with horror in old USSR or Russia today?
And Adam, I hope you have some fun way to let this all out. For me, I’m a happy subscriber reading this super duper serious stuff then watching the French Taxi movies of early 2000s as I process it all!
In analyzing German policy objectives in 1941 one has to take into account Japanese military moves in the Far East. After the Japanese army was stymied in the Eastern zone of the USSR, Japanese diplomacy readjusted its focus on carving up USSR assets, swinging over to its invasion of China coupled with the creation of puppet governments in geographic sub-districts of Republican China. They signed a non-aggression pact with the USSR which everyone knew would be torn up when circumstances evolved (Stalin obviated the pact after negotiations with the US and the UK in the wake of Germany's collapse). But what would have happened if Germany had captured Leningrad, Moscow, and Stalingrad? Would Japan be able to conquer Siberia? How much did German intelligence know about the Imperial Japanese Navy's intentions to take on the American naval forces whose Pacific headquarters had been moved to Pearl Harbor as a warning to Japan? I gather from some reading I have done that one theme in German genocide policy involved sending Jews and Communists to Siberia where they would be exploited as worker-slaves until they froze to death. Did the Germans care what their Japanese ally might do? Were they hoping Japan would be tied up in their futile effort to crush the Republican government headquartered in Chunking?
Oddly no reference to the earlier antecedent and influences on Hitler's Generalplan Ost. German plans for conquest and colonisation of the Slavic east did not begin with Hitler on 22 June 1941 but go pack to the German high command in WWI, known as Ober Ost under Erich Ludendorff, Hitler's future mentor and accomplice in the failed Munich putsch of 1923.
Ludendorff was a fanatically virulent anti-semite and one of the first to recognise Hitler's potential after the war. Under Ludendorff, the German occupation pioneered many of the policies of racial segregation and colonial divide and rules policies that would be adopted by the Nazis, separating ethnic groups according to their place in a pseudo-scientific racial hierarchy and their reliability/loyalty as defined by the occupiers. Of course the Nazis took it much further and were more systematic but the influence of Germany's experiments in occupation in WWI, especially in the Baltic states, have not received the attention they deserve. Not forgetting the chief Nazi ideologue - Alfred Rosenberg - and many influential figures in the early Nazi movement were Baltic Germans.
The seeds of the Nazi war of annihilation in 1941 were sown in the earlier war that also shaped Hitler's ideology world outlook more than anything else, reinforced by a circle of figures who dew lessons from their experience they passed onto Hitler with horrific results.
Thankyou for the book.
Despite having lived 20 years in Poland it was this book: Wages of Destruction and likely this part of the book that made me fully realise the scale of the German invasion.
Poles still seem more upset with the Russians than the Germans - makes no sense to me, but a lot of well funded creativity has gone into myth creation (Katyn 2007 for example).
Oh and another post that makes me very certain that while you mostly duck questions of Palestine you are very very aware of them.
m droy, I, too, felt the overwhelming nature of the Nazis' planning, military campaign, execution of genecide, starvation of the people and European colonization described in Wages of Destruction. It was not the first time that I have been overwhelmed by the Nazis' crimes against humanity.
I think that you were generous in stating that Tooze '...mostly duck questions of Palestine...' I don't remember him even mentioning the destruction of Gaza, the number of deaths, the blockaids of services to the Gazans, and attacks on the West Bank by Isreal.
Biden had the U.S. providing weaponry.
What do we call that?
Tooze wrote about Gaza plenty of times. Recently chartbook 400 and 405
Jack, thank you for bringing these two Chartbooks to my attention as well to other readers. I does not appear that 'Tooze wrote about Gaza plenty of times', but when he did as on these two pieces, they were powerful and essential.
I included a link to #405 for those who may be interested. It is clear and strong in its reporting and analysis.
Chartbook 405 Bulldozing Gaza: (Thanatocene mini-series #4) Aug 22, 2025
https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-405-bulldozing-gaza-thanatocene?r=dvi9g&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
(Excerpts)
Journalist Hagai Amit published these lines in Haaretz on August 19th and they stopped me in my tracks. We all have moments of awakening. Flashes that trigger us. Amit’s reframing of the Gaza invasion as civil engineering, did it for me.
'The excavators, bulldozers and huge D9 Caterpillar tractors in Gaza never stop working, even for a moment – and this is not expected to change. The security cabinet's approval for taking over Gaza City promises Israeli forces many more months in which they can destroy thousands of homes and other buildings …. In practice, some ministers in the security cabinet explicitly said they did not understand why Gaza City was not already in ruins like other cities in Gaza. This is an unprecedented engineering project ….'
As I’ve argued in several of these newsletters, there are several other major conflicts ongoing around the world at present which are having devastating consequences for tens of millions of people. “We”, the West and other outside powers, are implicated in all of them in various ways - raw materials, allies, supply of weapons etc. None of them exists in isolation. All are connected to their broader regional and global context.
The singularity of the Israeli campaign in Gaza lies in the asymmetry of power, its intensity, its enclosure, its direct connection to a settler colonial project. All this leads us back to the 1940s and Raphael Lemkin’s definition of genocide, which he modeled on Nazi-occupied Poland. That line of thought should not be dodged, or silenced by protestations about anti-semitism, or accusations of the application of double standards. It is precisely the global comparison that leads you to this conclusion.
But nor should that particular coupling of histories be allowed to become wrapped up in itself and thus self-defeating. After all, the whole point of having a concept of genocide is to capture a wider array of different projects of massive modern violence. As I argued in Chartbook 258, there were plenty of those in the mid-century. The peculiarity of the Israeli settler colonial project is that for want of superior force in 1948 it was unfinished and so continues to be pursued into the 21st century. The historical setting is anomalous. One is tempted to say anachronistic or belated. But that effort at distancing, betrays itself. The horrifying thing about Israel’s bulldozers is that they remind the West that as Faulkner put it: “The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
___Tooze
It turns out that I had read Chartbook 400, and indicated at the time that I 'liked' it. Actually, I deeply appreciated that Tooze was reporting the truth of what Israel was doing to Gaza and the Palestinian people. A link to it was provided at the end of this reply.
Chartbook 400: Murder not crisis - Why Israel's starvation of Gaza is exceptional in a global context.
For many months, it has been beyond reasonable doubt that the Israeli government, the Israeli military, sections of Israeli politics and society as well as their aiders and abetters abroad, have been deliberately starving the population of Gaza with a view to forcing the population either to flee or to face intensifying misery and ultimately an agonizing death. There is clear evidence of deliberate intent going back to 2023. This clearly warrants charges of genocide.
___Tooze
https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-400-not-crisis-but-murder
Yes it is occasional but not frequent.
And in some ways the German story is so so obviously similar to Gaza that the comparison might be best implied and not said.
But as you imply without saying, it is the absolute silence of so many leaders and media here in the west which is shocking.
I've lived and worked in poland as well, speak polish.
Want to cheeze off a pole? Want to send a Tomek, Rysiek or Stasiek into a spitting mad Donald Duck meltdown?
Remind your pole that, whatever else the Soviets did, the only reason that there still are polish people alive in Poland today is because of the Red Army. Watch your pole have an apoplectic fit.
The Poles I know are a little calmer, but I agree, there is no understanding that the Soviets saved them, and even less that with out Molotov-Ribbentrop the Germans would have been far far more brutal than they actually were.
As I was reading my weird peabrain was thinking of how Israel may be following the plan for the West Bank non-Jews.
I doubt if Israel will go in for extermination, but they would very likely wish for expulsion.
Starvation is a means of extermination, the cheapest one...
I don't think its being pushed that far. Do you have carefully collected data on what is currently occurring? Ian
If you look at the UN reprorts on trucks entering Gaza, which now are never allowed to be full, but only at 1/3 of capacity, and compare with what was allowed to get in prior Oct 7 - which was already puting the Palestinians on a diet, Gaza is definitely being starved. West Bank is a different story in this respect, but the Israelis have been hitting upstream, emptying Palestinian banks of cash...
Didn't quite understand your reference to Palestinian banks. Where is this occurring? What exactly is going on? Ian
In the West Bank now. IDF is engaged in robbing Palestinian Banks. And of course they did that in Gaza as soon as they had the opportunity: https://www.palestinechronicle.com/robbery-as-a-political-decision-israeli-army-robs-bank-of-palestine-in-gaza/
A modicum search will reveal much more information. And of course, robbing civilians has become a pastime for IDF. The latest reports come from Lebanon, where the looting is rife. Reminds me of some stories cited by Mike Duncan in his excellent Revolutions podcast about Cosacks hired by Russian White generals robbing blind in the countryside and being slowed down by the train of horse driven wagons loaded with loot. Lots of privates being hired to carry the loot from South Lebanon into Israel as we speak...
Thanks. Do you have email addresses for these please. Ian
I don't think so. check the publications that post such news.
Generalplan West Bank. And all the more shameful that Germany is complicit in that as well!
Some Israeli ideologist put it thusly: he applauded nazi methods and aims, his only complaint was their choice of enemies.
No surprise. Zionism and Nazism are ideological bedfellows and share common interests. Zionists offered repeatedly to work with the Nazis against the British.
Horrific. Thanks for writing.
What I keep grappling with in these histories is the relationship between such an evil state as the third Reich and it's citizens, especially as it relates for us in America.
I look around and am assured that my countryman are not evil people, but I'm sure the Germans said the same. What is my own country truly capable of? I'm just not sure anymore with leaders like Hegseth and the German example makes clear how a great country filled with good people can be captured by evil when it's citizens allow it.
It terrifies me; not because I'm saying that America will necessarily become that evil, but because I don't see a clear stopping mechanism. Trump himself says his only limit is his own morality and he wants more land for America. God help us.
Sounds to me like the madness of the State of Israel. Kill your way out of your problems. Crush, starve, displace. Accuse me of missing the nuance. Fine. Netanyahu is a Nazi, through and through. The irony is delicious.
Great history, thank you. My paremts and their fellow survivors of the camps would argue who was worse, germans or russians. clearly the germans, for they wanted to extinguish slavs, whereas the Russians wanted to dominate their fellow slavs. When Barbarossa started June 22, the soviets released the poles imprisoned in the north. One family friend escaped through Iran.
In 1942, over 116,000 Polish soldiers and civilians were evacuated from Soviet forced labor camps to Iran. Known as Anders’ Army, this military force was formed by General Władysław Anders and integrated with Polish refugees who had survived starvation and disease in the USSR.Key Aspects of the Polish Army in IranThe Exodus: The main landing point for the evacuees was the Iranian port city of Pahlevi (now Anzali) on the Caspian Sea. Up to 2,500 people arrived per day, consisting of roughly 74,000 troops and 41,000 civilians (many of whom were women and children).
Let’s not forget that prior to 1941, the test invasion was of Czechoslovakia in 1939. Most everything that was implemented from 1941 was done earlier in Czechoslovakia. My uncle was sent to do forced labor as a teen, my father was vetted in primary school as to how Slavic/aryan he was, my mother was deemed a Jew (she was catholic), my grandfather was imprisoned in a concentration camp, then in ‘42 the population of Lidice was erased from the map after the assassination of Heydrich by resistors, and on and on.
This was great and detailed history that Brussels would rather have it burried and continue peddling the idea that the German 3rd Reich and Soviet Union are equally culpable for the second world war.
Given these details, can we also agree that what Israel is doing, at its scale, it is equivalent with Generalplan Ost but carried in the East, South, and North? And because the Generalplan Ost was not ever called a holocaust (25+ plus million people dead, mostly civilians, just ask Belarus, but hey they were commies), the fact that Isrelis are doing the same thing as the nazis were doing in Soviet Union and Poland, but without the gas chambers, they think they cannot be blamed of conducting genocide, 'cause the gas chambers are missing...
The Generalplan Ost has all the markings of genocide and ethnic cleansing and the similarly detailed Israeli plans for the Arab occupied territories around them have similar details and forethought... But if you tell them that they will call you anti-semitic. And I am just doing comparative history...
Horrifying.
My father (b. 1912) attended the German-speaking St. Petri School in Saint Petersburg. He was arrested when he was nineteen and transported to the Far East (his father had been worked to death at Alma-Ata the year before). In October 1941, near Vyazma, while working illegally as a construction surveyor, he surrendered to the German advance and was enlisted in Fremde Heere Ost, Gehlen’s German military intelligence. A few years ago, I got a letter from the history department at Pullach, saying that my father was one of the “masterminds” who founded the German CIA. Was news to me.
My father’s younger sister was a medical resident at the siege of Leningrad. She later said that there were not enough live bodies to carry the dead bodies off the street. After the war, she was exiled to Tashkent, where she served out the rest of her medical career as the pathologist of the Karaganda City Hospital.
My mother’s father was a German artillery commander. He is buried in Wesenberg, Ostland (Estonia), beside the military hospital where he was taken after his legs were blown off. In his last letter home he said that, while listening to incoming shells, his hair turned grey in a week. He was 43. My mother’s younger brother perished at Stalingrad. He was 17 or 18. When she died in 1976, my mother was a counselor at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Maryland.
Some speak of the future
My love she speaks softly
She knows there's no success like failure
And that failure's no success at all.
What an excellent way to mark the 85th anniversary. A careful dose of truth about a regime built on avoiding much truth. Warmest thanks Ian
As a USAn, I've always found the Nazi Ost-planners' approving nods to the Anglo westward expansion in North America -- "the Volga as our Mississippi" u.s.w. -- to be ahistorical and silly and unfair and... well, uncomfortable.
The mass death -- in effect, murder -- of Russian POWs in the first year of Barbarossa deserves more communal memory than it gets. Not least because of the still-surviving tendency to see most of the Wehrmacht on the eastern front as just patriotic soldiers just waging war as usual, unlike those terrible SS and Einsatzgruppen. Given all the occupation troops and those moving to and from the front, I find it impossible to believe that there wasn't widespread knowledge of several million unhoused, starving, malnourished POWs in open country behind hasty barbed wire-- and their disappearance. So much for Soldatenehre.
War history always reminds me of Auden: "...what schoolboys learn, that those to whom evil has been done will do evil in return."
This is all so horrible one has to laugh to stay sane - huge tradition of Jewish comedians in this country. In a different context, but same point - old Hollywood movie Sullivan’s Travels. Is there such an art of ‘serious’ laughter to deal with horror in old USSR or Russia today?
And Adam, I hope you have some fun way to let this all out. For me, I’m a happy subscriber reading this super duper serious stuff then watching the French Taxi movies of early 2000s as I process it all!
In analyzing German policy objectives in 1941 one has to take into account Japanese military moves in the Far East. After the Japanese army was stymied in the Eastern zone of the USSR, Japanese diplomacy readjusted its focus on carving up USSR assets, swinging over to its invasion of China coupled with the creation of puppet governments in geographic sub-districts of Republican China. They signed a non-aggression pact with the USSR which everyone knew would be torn up when circumstances evolved (Stalin obviated the pact after negotiations with the US and the UK in the wake of Germany's collapse). But what would have happened if Germany had captured Leningrad, Moscow, and Stalingrad? Would Japan be able to conquer Siberia? How much did German intelligence know about the Imperial Japanese Navy's intentions to take on the American naval forces whose Pacific headquarters had been moved to Pearl Harbor as a warning to Japan? I gather from some reading I have done that one theme in German genocide policy involved sending Jews and Communists to Siberia where they would be exploited as worker-slaves until they froze to death. Did the Germans care what their Japanese ally might do? Were they hoping Japan would be tied up in their futile effort to crush the Republican government headquartered in Chunking?
Thank you, Adam! Vitally important historical scholarship.