michael mills wrote:Roberto wrote:
Victor Kravchenko, an activist at the time who later escaped abroad, was told by Khatayevich, one of Stalin’s agents:
<<A ruthless struggle is going on between the peasantry and our regime. It’s a struggle to the death. This year was a test of our strength and their endurance. It took a famine to show them who is master here. It has cost millions of lives, but the collective farm system is here to stay.>> [...]
How typical of Roberto not to tell us Khatayevich's full name (Mendel-Khatayevich) which identifies him as a non-Russian and a non-Ukrainian, in fact a member of the Tibetan Buddhist minority, an ethnic group heavily represented in the Bolshevik leadership and by whose cultural traditions the attitudes of that leadership were greatly influenced.
How typical it is of a gibbering anti-Semitic moron like Mills to make a big bloody fuss about a certain personage's Jewish ethnicity, which I could not possibly have known about (not being as widely read as the dissident researcher and expert from Australia, I ran across the fellow's name for the first time in Bullock's book) and wouldn't have attributed any significance to if I had known.
In the rest of his post, our deplorable expert seems to be making a big deal about why my calculation of the possible effects of the Nazi
Hungerplan, based on the food consumption of Leningrad, is supposed to be wrong.
Let us see:
michael mills wrote:Getting back to that topic, I would like to comment on two points made by Roberto, who has suddenly become an expert on agriculture. The first is his rather creative accounting, based on extrapolating from the food needs of the city of Leningrad, which enabled to arrive at a population of close to 30 million that would be subject to starvation.
The statement was the following:
Roberto wrote:viriato wrote:Roberto I have to disagree with the numbers you stated in your previous post:
...this means that the non-delivery of 5 to 10 million tons of grain to the “forest zone including the industrial centers and Petersburg” would have left between 18 and 36 million people without food supplies.
If the USSR produced 100 million tons of grain per year and was able to both export a little part of it (2,5million tons) and still feed the population in peace time having some 190 million inhabitants, it would mean that you would need half a million tons to feed each million inhabitants (97.5/190). As so the 5 to 10 million tons of grain would feed from 10 to 20 million inhabitants and not the 18 to 36 million we can read in your statement.
Correct, assuming that the population and production figures are accurate and that all grain not exported was distributed to the population (i.e. none stored by the state as a reserve).
My attempt to reconstruct the calculations of Göring, Backe et al, as I pointed out, was based on a German document according to which 700,000 tons would be needed to feed the population of Leningrad, which I estimated at 2,500,000 on the basis of the data in Salisbury's
The 900 Days.
According to this book, page 449, the daily flour ration in Leningrad up to 11 September 1941 was 2,100 tons for 2,500,000 people - which would make 756,000 tons a year or 0.3 tons per person per year. Starvation level was reached, and people started dying like flies, when the daily ration dropped to 510 tons per day, by the end of November 1941.
Which means that, for starvation to come about, food supplies didn't have to be cut by 100 %, but "only" by 75 %.
Which in turn means that the amount you would have to consider are 5,000,000 tons ./. 0,75 = 6,666,667 tons to 10,000,000 tons ./. 0,75 = 13,333,333 tons, corresponding to ca. 13 - 26 million people in the food deficit zone.
By my calculation based on Salisbury's Leningrad figures, on the other hand, the same amounts of flour would correspond to between 22 million and 44 million people, who would be reduced to starvation level if their food supplies were cut by 75 %, i.e. by 5 million or 10 million tons per annum, respectively.
michael mills wrote:That creative accounting might have been meaningful if Leningrad had been the centre of an area with a large population, all fed with imports from the food-surplus areas to the south. However, Leningrad, the earlier St Petersburg, was not a "natural" city, the organic centre of a region; rather it was an artificial creation, founded as a "window on the Baltic" in a sparsely populated area. The whole area of North Russia, the region between Moscow and the then Leningrad, is still a sparsely populated area. Therefore, even though the large population of the city of Leningrad itself lived on food imports, it is quite possible that the sparse population of the areas of North Russia occupied by the German Army could have subsisted on locally grown potatoes and other vegetables which can grow under the climatic and soil conditions of those areas.
Ah, it is "quite possible" - a favorite phrase of Michael Mills.
Especially when he has no evidence to demonstrate what he would badly like to believe in.
Or are there any figures he can show us, like I have done?
Considering what Mills thinks to have been "quite possible", those German planners must have been over-pessimistic (or shall we say "over-optimistic"?) in their assessment of the possibilities of the population of what they called the "forest zone including the industrial centers and Petersburg" subsisting "on locally grown potatoes and other vegetables which can grow under the climatic and soil conditions of those areas", for in their quoted memorandum of 23.05.1941 they wrote (my translation):
[...]There is no German interest in maintaining the productive capacity of these regions, also in what concerns the supplies of the troops stationed there. […] The population of these regions, especially the population of the cities, will have to anticipate a famine of the greatest dimensions.[my emphasis] The issue will be to redirect the population to the Siberian areas. As railway transportation is out of the question, this problem will also be an extremely difficult one. […]
From all this there follows that the German administration in these regions may well attempt to milder the consequences of the famine that will doubtlessly occur and accelerate the naturalization process. It can be attempted to cultivate there areas more extensively in the sense of an extension of the area for cultivating potatoes and other high yield fruits important for consume. This will not stop the famine, however. Many tens of millions of people will become superfluous in this area and will die or have to emigrate to Siberia.[my emphasis] Attempts to save the population from starvation death by using excesses from the black earth zone can only be made at the expense of the supply of Europe. They hinder Germany’s capacity to hold out in the war, they hinder the blockade resistance of Germany and Europe. This must be absolutely clear.[…]
michael mills wrote:As for other industrial cities to which food was no longer to be imported, they were mainly in the south, in the food-surplus area, eg the Donbass. The other main industrial area was in the Urals, was never captured by the Germans, and was fed from the food-surplus area in Western Siberia. Furthermore, a large part of the urban population of the areas occupied by Germany was evacuated prior to the German arrival, thereby reducing the food consumption of most of the occupied cities. (By contrast, the population of Leningrad was not evacuated to anywhere near the same extent, hence the untypical level of starvation in that city).
More general considerations, and again no figures.
As to the evacuation of the population of Leningrad,
Harrison E. Salisbury ([i]The 900 Days[/i], pages 242 and following) wrote:[…]Evacuation from Leningrad had been on-again off-again. For the most part it involved children, first sent to the nearby countryside and then re-evacuated to the Urals and other distant areas. To organize the exodus, a special department had been created by the Leningrad Soviet. Up to the eleventh of August it sent out of Leningrad 467,648 persons. But that figure had been largely nullified by the inward flow of refugees from the Baltic states. On August 10 it was decided to send another 400,000 women and children out of the city. The figure was upped to 700,000 only four days later. In reality, nothing like these numbers were evacuated. When the circle closed, 216,000 persons had been processed but not evacuated. The railroads were not able to handle the volume. They were being heavily bombed. For instance, on August 15 105 German bombers attacked the Chudovo railroad station, and on August 18 they damaged the Volkhov River bridge on the Leningrad-Moscow line, tying up traffic.[…]
As to what, by stark contrast to the horror of Leningrad, the “typical” starvation level in a German-occupied Soviet city was like,
Alexander Werth ([i]Russia at War 1941-1945[/i], 2000 Caroll & Graf Publishers New York, pages 607/608) wrote:
There had been 900.000 people in Kharkov before the war, but when the war spread to Ukraine, and the refugees started pouring in from the west, this figure swelled to 1,200,000 to 1,300,000. Later, in October 1941, with the Germans approaching, the evacuation of Kharkov began in real earnest. Most of the larger plants were more or less successfully evacuated, among them the great Tractor Plant, with nearly all its workers. By the time the Germans came, some 700,000 people had left the city. Now there were only 350,000. What had happened to the rest?
According to the Russian authorities, the disappearance of half the population of October 1941 is accounted for as follows: it has been established that 120,000 people, mostly young people, had been deported as slaves to Germany; some 70,000 or 80,000 had died of hunger, cold and privation, especially during the terrible winter of 1941-2; some 30,000 had been killed by the Germans, among them some 16,000 Jews (men, women and children) who had remained behind in Kharkov; the rest had fled to the villages. Various checks I made in the next days suggested that the figure for deaths from hunger, et cetera, was slightly, but not greatly, exaggerated; so too was the figure for non-Jews shot, but the figure for the Jews was correct. On the other hand, the figure for slave-labor deportations was, if anything, an underestimate.
What relevance the considerations of Mr. Mills are supposed to have, anyway, to the contents of a plan drafted
before the war that - as one of the "leftist" historians Mills keeps gibbering about pointed out -
could never be executed in practice in the form originally foreseen, will probably remain the mystery of this forum's most distinguished "Revisionist" mind.
michael mills wrote:Roberto has made the mistake of not seeing the Soviet wood for the Leningrad trees. In other words, by concentrating on the example of Leningrad he has lost sight of the big picture and drawn incorrect conclusions.
Isn’t it funny to hear that from someone whose only support for the contention that my conclusions are “incorrect” are what he considers “quite possible”?
michael mills wrote:Viriato has already demonstrated Roberto's failure to understand the aggregate statistics.
And I have pointed out what consideration is missing in Viriato's calculations.
In case Mills hasn't noticed, I would have no problem with Viriato's calculation being right and mine being wrong.
What I have a problem with are the moronic insults of a rat-like character who doesn't even provide figures in support of his contentions.
michael mills wrote:In brief, the amount of food that Germany planned to extract from the Soviet Union, amounted to some 10% of total production, and four times the normal level of exports, or double the amount that the Soviet Union had contracted to export to Germany in 1941. While such extraction would have resulted in large-scale food-shortages in the occupied areas, such shortages would not have sufficed to starve to death more than 15% of the entire Soviet population.
Yeah, maybe the number of starvation deaths would not have been around thirty million.
Maybe it would "only" have been between 13 million and twice as many, according to Viriato's calculations as corrected by myself.
Or maybe "only" between 10 and 20 million people would have starved to death, according to Viriato's original calculations, if the
Hungerplan could have been carried out as planned (which, as "leftist" historian Christian Gerlach pointed out, revealed itself to be impossible within three months after the outbreak of the war, prompting the planners to switch over to more limited and thus feasible killing programs, like the starvation of the "non-working" Soviet prisoners of war and the mass slaughter of the Jewish population).
Big deal, given that the
Hungerplan, if carried out as planned, would have been mass murder on a rarely equaled scale even if the Nazi planners had been too "pessimistic", as Mills contends - just like its eventual "redux" versions were.
Which in turn means that Mills' verbosity again tells us a lot about the small and miserable mind of Mills himself, and little else.
michael mills wrote:Furthemore, the Germans never succeeded in extracting the planned quantity of food from the occupied Soviet Union; they got more food from France, without causing starvation there.
Well, in the Soviet Union the German exploitation
did cause starvation, whether or not it satisfied the German needs.
As to whether what the Germans eventually got out of the Soviet Union lived up to their expectations or not, and despite the utter irrelevance thereof to the sinister and criminal nature of the German plan and its execution, I would like to see some figures from a reliable source in support of this contention.
michael mills wrote:On the second point, I asked for the source of the figure of 30 million supposedly condemned to death by starvation under the so-called "Hunger Plan". Roberto replied that he thought that it was mentioned by Goering in a talk with Ciano, but he does produce a record of that conversation; rather he relies on a throw-away line delivered by Peter Longerich in the course of a statement made by him in the context of the Irving court action. I'm still waiting for the source.
Don't wait, Mills.
Ask your friend Longerich, who will surely be glad to help you with the source.
You're not trying to tell us he sucked Göring's statement to Ciano out of his thumb, are you?
michael mills’ cherished friend Peter Longerich wrote:[…]Thus Göring indicated to the Italian Foreign Minister, Count Ciano, in November 1941 that in the course of the year "20-30 million persons will die in Russia of hunger".
Source of quote:
http://www.holocaustdenialontrial.org/e ... /pl202.asp
The complete text of the statement can probably be found on page 374 of the diaries of Count Galeazzo Ciano, 1939-1943, published in Bern in 1946 (entry of 25.11.1941), which Christian Gerlach gives as one of the sources for Göring’s mocking statements about the dying of the Soviet prisoners of war (Christian Gerlach,
Krieg, Ernährung, Völkermord, page 41).
On page 16 of the same book,
Gerlach wrote:[...]Eine lineare Senkung des sowjetischen Konsumniveaus nach einem Einmarsch schien den deutschen Agrarexperten nicht erfolgversprechend, weil dann Schwarzhandel und Selbstversorgung der Bevölkerung nicht kontrollierbar seien. Deshalb müsse man die “Zuschußgebiete” innerhalb der UdSSR abriegeln und damit den Hungertod von “zig Millionen Menschen” – man prognostizierte etwa 30 Millionen Tote – herbeiführen. Dieser bis dahin beispiellose Plan zielte einerseits gegen die Bevölkerung der “Waldzone” (Nord-, Mittel- und mit Einschränkungen Weißrußland), andererseits gegen die Einwohner der Städte im europäischen Teil der UdSSR.[...]
My translation:
[...]A linear reduction of the Soviet consume level after the invasion would not be successful in the opinion of the German agrarian experts, for it would be impossible to control black market trading and food procurement by the population Thus it was considered necessary to seal off the “food-importing areas” within the USSR and thus to cause the death by starvation of “umpteen million people” – 30 million dead were predicted[my emphasis]. This hitherto unparalleled plan was directed against the population of the “forest zone” (northern and central Russia and, with restrictions, Belorussia) on the one hand and against the inhabitants of the cities in the European part of the USSR on the other.[...]
Gerlach (as Mills, who is familiar with the cited work, well knows) gives as his sources the already quoted memorandum of 23.05.1941 by the “Agriculture Group” of the “Economy Staff East” and a file note by General Thomas of the
Wirtschaftsrüstungsamt (Industrial Armament Department) about a meeting with the secretaries of state regarding Barbarossa on 02.05.1941, IMT Volume 31, page 84. The protocol of this meeting contains the following statements, transcribed in the catalogue of the current Wehrmacht War Crimes Exhibition:
[…]1.) Der Krieg ist nur weiterzuführen, wenn die gesamte Wehrmacht im 3. Kriegsjahr aus Rußland ernährt wird.
2.) Hierbei werden zweifellos zig Millionen Menschen verhungern, wenn von uns das für uns Notwendige aus dem Lande herausgeholt wird.
3.) Am wichtigsten ist die Bergung und Abtransport von Ölsaaten, Ölkuchen, dann erst Getreide. Das vorhandene Fett und Fleisch wird voraussichtlich die Truppe verbrauchen.[…]
My translation:
[…]1.) The war can only be continued if the whole Wehrmacht is fed out of Russia in the 3rd war year.
2.) Due to this umpteen million people will doubtlessly starve to death when we take what is necessary for us out of the land.[my emphasis]
3.) Most important is the collection and shipment of oil seeds and oil cake, only thereafter of grain. The available fat and meat will presumably be consumed by the troops.[…]
michael mills wrote:And even if Goering pulled some figure off the top of his head,
He will hardly have “pulled some figure off the top of his head”, considering the backup he had from his economic planning staff, see the quoted protocols of 02.05.1941 and 23.05.1941.
michael mills wrote:that does not prove that there was an actual plan to starve a target figure of 30 million.
Where did I say anything here about such a "target figure"?
What the documents show is that Germans planned to exploit the resources of the Soviet Union
expecting that this exploitation would lead millions of people to die of starvation.
Whether the forecast was "umpteen million", "many tens of millions" or "20 to 30 million", the fact that the Nazis launched a war also for the purpose of ruthless exploitation expecting that this would lead many millions of people to die miserably illustrates their contempt for human life and the monstrously criminal nature of their attitudes, just as Mills' dishonest bickering illustrates what kind of a fellow Mills is.
The greatest weakness of "Revisionist" apologists of the Nazi system, as I like to say, is that they can't help being themselves and endorsing the merciless, criminal attitudes of Hitler's regime.
This observation certainly fits Michael Mills like a glove.