Hitler often used British India as a model for German rule over the conquered territories in the East. He praised the way in which a few tens of thousands of Englishmen were able to lord it over hundreds of millions of Indians, and saw German rule as being similar, ie a small number of Germans controlling much larger numbers of non-Germans.If so, what exactly do you think would have happened to the Slavic population of the areas under Nazi rule in the event of a Nazi victory? Would they have become slaves/helots to their new Nazi overlords, or what?
Hitler's image of British India was of course not based on any deep academic study of the region, and reflected commonly held popular views. For example, his image of elite SS troops living in bases along a future eastern frontier of German territory, close to the Urals, and constantly battling against attempts by the uncontrolled eastern peoples to cross it, was no doubt based on popular images of British troops based on the North-West Frontier of British India battling against wild Afghan tribesmen.
The south-western part of Siberia was very much a food-surplus region, an area with good farmland and a relatively small population. It could certainly have accommodated a considerably larger population that it had in the 1940s.Michael, you previously said that you believe that there would have been enough resources (including food) in Siberia to accommodate additional tens of millions of people, correct?
You need to bear in mind that since the late 19th Century the Russian Imperial Government had been promoting the mass migration of surplus peasants across the Urals into Siberia, and agricultural settlement in that region. It was obviously possible for the West Siberian region to absorb large numbers of agricultural settlers. Later, in the 1950s, the Soviet Government organised large-scale agricultural settlement in the northern part of Kazakhstan, which involved the movement of large numbers of people from west of the Urals to that region. Furthermore, during the 1980s, about 15 million Soviet citizens changed their place of residence within the USSR each year, compared with the estimated annual movement of just over one million persons foreseen in the Generalplan-Ost, out of regions designated for ethnic German settlement.
It needs to be borne in mind that the Generalplan-Ost envisaged the germanisation of only a small part of the Soviet territory west of the Urals, so the people moved out of the regions designated for German settlement would not necessarily be sent to Siberia, but more probably would have been resettled in the regions west of the Urals not designated for germanisation.
For example, the one project that began to be implemented under the Generalplan-Ost, the Hegewald settlement, situated between Berdichev and Mogilev, involved the moving out of the Ukrainian peasants living in the area and their resettlement in other parts of Ukraine, while ethnic Germans living in Ukraine were gathered and moved into the area.
The 1939 Soviet census found that some 40% of Soviet Jews belonged to the socio-economic category of "sluzhashchie", literally "serving people". This was a category comprising persons working in white-collar managerial functions, ranging from the most senior bureaucrats down to the humblest office clerks, and their families. Thus, the proportion of Jews in this category was much higher than the proportion of the entire Soviet population, or of any other Soviet nationality.What percentage of the 1.1 million Jews who were killed in 1941 were actually in state and party positions, though?
The Soviet Jewish population in 1939 was somewhat over three million, meaning that the number of Jewish "sluzashchie" and their family members would have been of the order of 1.2 million. Although there is an apparent resemblance of that figure to the number of Soviet Jews killed in 1941, it does not mean that the slain Jews were all "sluzhashchie".
The Soviet Government evacuated well over one million Jews out of areas that came under German occupation, and since the evacuees were drawn largely from the cities, it is quite likely that a large proportion of the Jewish "sluzhashchie", possibly the majority, were evacuated to safety. Thus, it is most probable that the majority of the Jews killed were not members of the bureaucracy or the intelligentsia, but were humble workers.
When Heydrich included "Jews in State and Party positions" among the categories of persons subject to summary execution, he was probably under the impression, based on National Socialist ideology, that the Soviet State and party bureaucracy was dominated by Jews, and that the number of Jews in State and Party positions would be very large, a considerable proportion of the Jewish population. That assumption was mistaken, as some of the Einsatzgruppen leaders subsequently discovered.
An interesting example is provided by an Einsatzgruppen unit that came across a Jewish kolkhoz in Ukraine, one where all the inhabitants were Jews. The EG men were surprised to find Jews working on the land, and did not know what to do with them; they obviously had interpreted their mission as being to kill Jews working in managerial positions, but were unsure whether that mission extended to Jews who were not bureaucrats but workers on the land, the same as any Russian or Ukrainian peasant. They asked their superiors for advice from their superiors as to what to do with the Jewish workers, and eventually received orders to kill all the Jews living on the kolkhoz.
It is obvious that the German security police very quickly went beyond the orders originally given by Heydrich, and began killing Jews who were in no way "in State and Party positions".
An interesting opinion is expressed by Michael McQueen in the book "Bitter Legacy: Confronting the Holocaust in the Soviet Union", edited by Zvi Gitelman (Indiana University Press, 1997). It is in Chapter 7 of the book, "Nazi Policy in the Reichskommissariat Ostland, June-Decmber 1941: From White Terror to Holocaust in Lithuania", written by McQueen. This opinion is noteworthy, in that it was precisely in occupied Lithuania that the mass killing of Jewish women and children began.
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One might further speculate that Jaeger [commander of EK 3 of EG A] engaged in a competition with other Einsatzkommando leaders, in the expectation that demonstrated zeal in the pursuit of the racial goals of Nazi policy, above and beyond the guidelines established by Heydrich in his orders, would be rewarded. It is clear that he and the other EK leaders expressly violated the orders on the treatment of the Jews issued by the civilian administration of the Reichskommissariat Ostland and military-economic apparatus of the Wehrmacht.
