Bravo,Hey, I think I'm the new guy on the block so sorry if this has been posted before. What would Hitler have done had the war in the East been won? Would it have been new farmland? Or would he have built a German utopia? Thank you for any replies even if this has been talked to death on here.
In assessing the likely outcome of a counter-factual German victory over the Soviet Union, it is necessary to distinguish between wild euphoric dreams and hard reality.
The crucial factor on which any mass settlement of Germans on conquered territory in the East would have depended would have been the demographic development of the German people. As at 1939, there were simply not enough Germans to colonise Poland and European Russia, even including the several million ethnic Germans scattered over Eastern Europe, and any such colonisation would have depended on a massive increase in the german population, combined with successful germanisation of suitable parts of the native population.
However, the German rate of natural increase had been falling for some time, due to economic development and increasing standards of living, which invariably lead to a fall in the birthrate to below replacement level, as has occurred in all developed countries. All the efforts of the National Socialist regime to encourage an increase in the German birthrate ultimately failed.
Even the most pwerful dictator cannot make German women have babies if they do not want to.
So the bottom line was that in the event of a German victory there would simply not have been enough Germans to colonise the East, and with each passing decade there would have been fewer. That fact was well known to the experts that Himmler had assembled to draw up plans for German colonisation; they explicitly stated that their plans depended on the availability of a surplus German population ready and willing to settle in the East, and they stated their opinion that such a surplus would not be available since the expected post-war economic boom after a German victory would soak up all available labour within Germany and even suck in non-German labour from outside the country (as in fact happened in post-war West Germany). Furthermore, rising standards of living within Germany would make its population extremely unwilling to move to the dreary wastes of Russia.
The reality is that German rule in a conquered European Russia would have necessity have consisted of a small class of bureacrats dominating a brutalised peasant population tied to the land and an impoverished proletariat without freedom of movement, ie exactly the same system in force in the Soviet Union prior to the German invasion, except that the bureaucratic ruling class would have consisted of Germans assisted by members of some of the Soviet minorities, eg of the Baltic peoples, rather than of members of the Communist Party drawn from various ethnic groups but primarily Russian.
The only area that could realistically have been thoroughly germanised would have been the annexed areas of Western Poland. That could have been achieved by concentrating the ethnic German minority of Poland in that area, together with ethnic Germans brought from other parts of Eastern Europe, eg from the Baltic States, Ukraine or Romania, and germanising part of the native Polish population. But the process of concentrating ethnic Germans in Western Poland would have meant by definition reducing the ethnic German population in other parts of Eastern Europe.
The upshot is that German colonisation of the whole of Poland and the conquered Soviet territories could never have been achieved, even if Germany had won the war. In evaluating the wilder fantasies of Hitler, Himmler and others, it is necessary to determine, on the basis of observable criteria such as normal socio-economic and demographic dynamics, whether they culd ever have been achieved in reality; the answer is that they could not.