Edward Reid - General Plan Ost скачать в хорошем качестве

Edward Reid - General Plan Ost

Many people in the West don't know Poles were victims of the Germans, and in fact, some people even think the Polish nation collaborated. So let's put that to rest; Magnus Brechtken, in his book Political and Transitional Justice in Germany, Poland, and the Soviet Union from the 1930s to the 1950s, states that Polish collaboration was .1 percent, Which means cooperation is not worth mentioning. Almost everyone knows about the Final Solution of the Jews, which began almost two years into the war, but there was a Final Solution meant for the Poles. This was called General Plan Ost, the eventual extermination of the Poles, something that was to be extremely horrific and prolonged. Some other aspects of the War many Westerners don't know is that Poles were the first victims of the war and that Poland was invaded virtually simultaneously as the Soviets and Germans collaborated. .The Germans invaded on September 1st, and the Soviets on September 17th in their agreement to take over Poland, the Molotov Ribbentrop pact. For the first two years of the war in German-occupied Poland, Poles were being murdered at a 9:1 higher ratio than Jews, and Poles were even wearing the Star of David or hiding in the ghetto to avoid roundups. Although when the Jews did become the victims when the Final Solution began, Poles took every action necessary to warn the world repeatedly, to no avail. The Polish government-in-exile, Jan Karski, and Witold Pilecki are just a few that tried to get the word out to the West, but no one cared or did anything, including many Jews. In fact, it was also in Poland that Poles, their whole families, and often the whole village faced the death penalty for aiding a Jew in any manner – this meant even giving a Jew water. There must be a reason for this, it’s because Poles were so overwhelmingly helpful to the Jews that the Germans had to put in draconian punishments. Here are some examples why this decree became necessary: On July 3rd, 1941, Gazeta Czestochowska, an official German newspaper published in Polish, complained; "The cases multiply, when Polish peasants, impelled by dangerous sympathy for the Jewish rabble, smuggle products into the ghetto and sell them at even cheaper prices than to their own Polish brethren. Such persons are warned of severe measures against them."' In October 1941, the German county supervisor in Krasnik remarked with angry incredulity: "according to my observations, the enforcement of this decree [forbidding the Jews to leave the Jewish quarter] is absolutely necessary because in my entire two years of duty in the East I have never experienced a situation where the Jews wander in such a (free) manner from one locality to another as I have observed here." In January 1942, the Germans again voiced their anger about the fact that there was no negative reaction on the part of Poles toward Jewish beggars. Poland even had their own group dedicated to saving Jews, Zegota, and could save up to 40 -50 thousand lives; in total, it is estimated that Poles aided 3 million Jews in some fashion even though they faced these risks. These quotes reflect the hateful Nazi ideology of the German people, and they should be seen as reprehensible and morally repugnant. We should also remember that many Germans who followed this regime were never punished and believed this philosophy to their core. The extermination of the Polish intelligentsia was beginning, which was to be the outcome for the rest of the Poles. This would have been completed if the Germans had the workforce and the resources. Author Isabel Heinemann points out that physical extermination was an unambiguous implication of this plan. She comments, "Although none of the plans made it explicit, it is evident that for the racial experts, mass death posed a necessary condition for the entire Germanization process." There were some implications for "resettlement," but that was just code for eliminating the Poles in time. Ultimately the plan demanded, over ten years, the extermination, expulsion, and enslavement of most or all Poles. What was meant by expulsion and enslavement meant being brutally worked to death. "techniques of genocide were neither so quick nor perhaps so simple as outright mass extermination, yet they were far crueler and equally effective." States Heineman. Indeed General Plan Ost was a prolonged genocide. Hans Frank, the General Governor of German-occupied Poland, stated ""The Polish nation is not worthy of life and should be destroyed." And Himmler echoed Hitler when he said, "All Poles will disappear from the world. It is essential that the great German people should consider it as its major task to destroy all Poles." That was essentially what the Germans had planned for the Polish; that they would disappear from the world, and their major task was to destroy them.