Did Stalin plan a second holocaust?

[Galicia]

Nope Oleg, they can't

My accounts rely mostly on eyewitnesses. Newspaper reporters, most of whom were blacklisted, as they wrote against Stalin.

But, let me get this straight. You believe, that the famine in the Ukraine was worth it, so we could feed the Russians. Yeah, real good arguement. If God wills it, you die. You don't steal and murder.

If you want to be sick, go right ahead. I still don't see how you can't admit that after two Government hearing before and after the Cold War, that the Ukrainian MANMADE famine did not exist.

I can't believe you still deny my acccounts. KHRUSCHEV SAID IT WAS TRUE. GORBACHEV SAID IT WAS TRUE. WHAT MORE DO YOU NEED?!

[Oleg Grigoryev]

Nope Oleg, they can't

RIP then.

My accounts rely mostly on eyewitnesses. Newspaper reporters, most of whom were blacklisted, as they wrote against Stalin. So, let me get this straight.

that sure makes them reliable sources than it comes to internal mechnics of process

You believe, that the famine in the Ukraine was worth it, so we could feed the Russians.

not the Russinas- Urban population. But then agin I ma sure in you eyes detht of 20 sometnig mil of city fols would be ok as long as no peasents would strave, or would you then accuse Stalin of man made famine that led to stravation of the cities?

Yeah, real good arguement. Try growing grain for once in your lives. If the climate wills it, you die. You don't steal and murder.

My mother's family who happened to be Russian peasenst were classified as kulaks and exciled to the russian north in the lates 20s -so cut hollier than thou crap.

If you want to be a sick bastard, go right ahead, I'm petitioning that this thread be closed and deleted. You're worthless. I still don't see how you can't admit that after two Government hearing before and after the Cold War, that the Ukrainian MANMADE famine did not exist.

I am not realy sure what heraing you refer to, but since I have documenst to back up my assersion, I think i can do just that.

Now, you still deny my acccounts. KHRUSCHEV SAID IT WAS TRUE. GORBACHEV SAID IT WAS TRUE. YOU ARE A BUMBLING IDIOT NOT TO BELIEVE IT.

I generelly not big on belives nad believrs -sorry. And callimng me names and using caps does not make your case any stronger.

[Galicia]

that sure makes them reliable sources than it comes to internal mechnics of process

Better than Duranty and doctored Soviet Documents.

not the Russinas- Urban population. But then agin I ma sure in you eyes detht of 20 sometnig mil of city fols would be ok as long as no peasents would strave, or would you then accuse Stalin of man made famine that led to stravation of the cities?

If you bothered to read my posts, you'd see that there are stories from Kiev, Lviv and Kharkov.

My mother's family who happened to be Russian peasenst were classified as kulaks and exciled to the russian north in the lates 20s -so cut hollier than thou crap.

Thats my fault, I apologise and it was unneccesary.

I am not realy sure what heraing you refer to, but since I have documenst to back up my assersion, I think i can do just that.

This:

"Their method was like this: they sold grain abroad, while in some regions people were swollen with hunger and even dying for lack of bread."

Granted, my use of name calling was inappropriate and inexcusable. But I feel as if I am sometimes talking to a wall. So, I pose this question to you.

What do you need to see to acknowledge the Ukrainian Famine was man-made and killed millions?

[Oleg Grigoryev]

quote="Galicia"]

that sure makes them reliable sources than it comes to internal mechnics of process

Better than Duranty and doctored Soviet Documents.[/quote] That is a very serious accusation - do you have anything to show that they were doctored?

not the Russinas- Urban population. But then agin I ma sure in you eyes detht of 20 sometnig mil of city fols would be ok as long as no peasents would strave, or would you then accuse Stalin of man made famine that led to stravation of the cities?

If you bothered to read my posts, you'd see that there are stories from Kiev, Lviv and Kharkov.

which would probably wiped out entirely if it was not for grain expropriations.

My mother's family who happened to be Russian peasenst were classified as kulaks and exciled to the russian north in the lates 20s -so cut hollier than thou crap.

Thats my fault, I apologise and it was unneccesary.

all right no problem.

I am not realy sure what heraing you refer to, but since I have documenst to back up my assersion, I think i can do just that.

"Their method was like this: they sold grain abroad, while in some regions people were swollen with hunger and even dying for lack of bread."

[/quote] An if you read my article you would notice that grain export was cut severely in 1932-1933. I made it my business to see how money were spent - most of its were used to by equipment for the factories that would be able to produce agricultural equipments -tractor etc. Some were actually used to buy... better grain from Canada - more cold resistant that is.

, my use of name calling was inappropriate and inexcusable. But I feel as if I am sometimes talking to a wall. So, I pose this question to you.

What do you need to see to acknowledge the Ukrainian Famine was man-made and killed millions?

I would change my opinion if there would be found Soviet document (documents) that would clearly indicate that Starvation of the peasants was in fact the goal. I have read correspondence between Party Bosses in the Voronezh region (also hard hit during the famine -even though it is in Russia) and if anything there is straightforward request form the later (sent to Moscow) to allow the grain stay there it was and clear disbelief on part of Moscow that situation was as bad as Vornezh government wrote. Not exactly what you would expect from the people who considered to starve anybody.

[Galicia]

Yes,

The contradiction of documents against each other. While some documents are true regarding the famine, alot of publically released documents, (pre-Federal era), were doctored.

I will try to dig up as many documents as possible, please be patient with me however. I am glad to see that you are open minded to this situation, most people I have debated this with are not, so forgive me if I was short once again.

[Oleg Grigoryev]

Is there any chance that you read Russian -if you do that might be usefull to you. http://iatp.vspu.ac.ru/itog2001/kraevedenie/golod.htm
http://antisgkm.by.ru/jump/jump3.htm -and the links at the bottom of the page.

http://www.artukraine.com/famineart/hrussia1.htm -this one you can basically join (that if have not done so yet)

[Oleg Grigoryev]

Archival documents make it crystal clear: in the spring of 1932, the regime began a top-secret scramble to cover its very dirty ass as the full extent of the catastrophe it had aided and abetted began to dawn on it. Some of this scramble involved exports.

Politbiuro protocol 91 point 41/9 (osobaia papka) on 8 March 1932 begins with the disingenuous admission, "In view of the fact that, as has become clear in the very recent past, the "shortfall" (nedopod) in [our] Eastern districts has turned out to be more serious than could have been anticipated, ...." It goes on to order a series of palliative measures beginning with the release of roughly 385,000 US tons of seed grain to what looked to be the hardest-hit areas: the Lower and Middle Volga Territories, the Urals, Kazakhstan, the Bashkir and Tatar ASSRs, and Western Siberia. It orders a temporary halt in grain procurements against the annual centralized plan in all provinces, territories and republics save Nizhegorod Territory and the Central Black Earth, Western, and Ivanovo-Voznesenskii Provinces. And most importantly for David Mirams' question, it specifically orders Commissar of Foreign Trade A. P. Rosengol'ts to "curtail grain shipments for export at 85 thousand tons" (prekratit' otgruzku na eksport prodovol'stvennykh kul'tur/85 tys. tonn).

As these orders were percolating through the top levels of the apparat on a need-to-know basis, they collided with another looming crisis in the Far East. There the regime had begun pouring troops and workers into the region in a frenzied attempt to counter the Japanese investiture of Manchuria the previous fall. The rapidly increasing demand for food they created could not possibly be met by regional agriculture, which had been inadequate to start with and had gone spasmodic on account of mass collectivization. As for sending in the necessary grain overland, the regime's desire to hide Far Eastern vulnerability from Japan had ruled out use of the Chinese Eastern Railway and as of December 1931 forced shipments onto the already overburdened Transbaikal, Amur and Ussurii lines. By February-these had broken down completely, causing horrendous backups on the lines feeding them. Somewhere around 1 March Siberian party boss Robert Eikhe reported that nine thousand boxcars for the Far East, many of them containing grain, had piled up on the Tomsk and Omsk railroads leading into the Far East. The resulting situation for the civilian population was bad enough. It was touch and go for the military, which as of 3-4 March was apparently down to 4 days' reserves of both flour and forage and could not have resisted long had the Japanese realized the situation and come across the border in force.

On the basis of coded communication with Army Political Administration boss Ian Gamarnik, Stalin's personal plenipotentiary in the Far East at the time, Stalin and Molotov on or about 6 March gave preliminary assent to the emergency purchase of 3 million puds (83,333 US tons) of grain for the region in Manchuria. Apparently after consulting Commissar of Food Industries Anastas Mikoian, the Politbiuro Far Eastern Commission (Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, Ordzhonikidze and Voroshilov) attempted to reduce the size of the purchase by authorizing the shipment to the Far East of 30,000 metric tons of grain. This was to travel by water from Ukrainian ports. As far as I can tell, it was included in the 85,000-ton export quota authorized on 8 March although technically it was a domestic transfer of resources.

Within a week, Stalin, Molotov et al. reversed themselves on shipping any Ukrainian grain to the Far East. Apparently they realized that it would not arrive in time to avert famine. PB protokol 107 point 69/15 (osobaia papka) on 14 March 1932 therefore ordered the 30,000 tons to be exported, evidently intending to use the money thus raised to buy the grain in either Manchuria or Dairen. All 3 million puds were duly bought (mainly in Harbin) and shipped to Vladivostok. The amount of hard currency involved was fairly substantial - the bills came due in May and totaled roughly a third of the monthly foreign exchange outlay for the entire USSR. However it is not at all clear whether the grain that was supposed to be sold abroad to pay them actually went anywhere.

By the beginning of May, with reports of famine pouring in, the Politbiuro had begun to back away from exporting any of the grain it had authorized on 8 March. PB protocol 100 point 6 (osobaia papka) of 16 May 1932 directed the Commissariat of Foreign Trade to divert 35,000 tons of wheat in Ukrainian ports for Ukrainian needs, and to divert another 30,000 tons heading to Leningrad's port-storage facilities to flour mills there and in Moscow. The regime in fact had begun >importing< grain to try to alleviate at least some of the famine. The same PB osobaia papka ordered the distribution of 3 million puds of emergency grain clandestinely bought in Persia: 2 million into the Caucasus and the remaining million into Moscow.

As spring gave way to summer the Far Eastern situation again approached catastrophe. To ward off the crisis the regime again turned to a combination of secret foreign purchases and shipments from Ukraine. Thus PB protocol 107 point 26 (osobaia papka) of 10 June 1932 authorized the purchase of another 38,000 tons of grain in Manchuria, half of it to be flour, with the dispatch from Black Sea ports of an identical amount. To get the latter to the Far East before winter, it was supposed to leave the harbors no later than 15 August. I have not been able to verify whether this ocean shipment actually took place. However I believe that it probably did (at least, I've not found any order rescinding it), and that in essence it entailed yet another redirection of the 30,000 tons of Ukrainian grain Stalin had originally earmarked for the Far East. If I am right, instead of selling it abroad to help defray foreign purchases the Politbiuro eventually came back around to sending it to the Far East.

What does all of this add up to? In my present opinion it is unlikely that Moscow was cynically selling large quantities of grain abroad while Ukrainian, Volga German, Kazakh, Tatar, Bashkir, Caucasian, and other peasants were eating tree bark and weeds. The convoluted story I've outlined does however raise significant questions about regime priorities. Not the least of them is why Stalin apparently was willing to purchase grain abroad for emergency distribution in the Far East, the Caucasus, and Moscow but not in Kiev, Saratov, or Tambov.

[Oleg Grigoryev]

I never really understood Prof. Tauger's baseless statistical circumlocutions (since the figures themselves are garbage)

Mace - the big famine authority. Why they are "baseless" and "grabage" shall remain a mistery.

[Galicia]

Oleg,

I can basically only find quotes from leaders and eyewitness accounts. Whether you decide to accept them or not is your choice.

They'll be comming tommorow, I'm too lazy to do it right now frankly.

But, to answer you about Tauger. It's because, (from the little I read about him), he basically denies the fact that the Soviet Union had anything to do with the famine.

[Oleg Grigoryev]

These findings do not, of course, free Stalin from responsibility for
the famine. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to assess the extent to
which it would have been possible for Stalin to use part of the grain
stocks available in spring 1933 to feed starving peasants. The state was
a monopoly supplier of grain to urban areas and the army; if the
reserves of this monopoly supply system - which amounted to four-six
weeks' supply - were to have been drained, mass starvation, epidemics
and unrest in the towns could have resulted. Nevertheless, it seems
certain that, if Stalin had risked lower levels of these reserves in
spring and summer 1933, hundreds of thousands - perhaps millions - of
lives could have been saved. In the slightly longer term, if he had been
open about the famine, some international help would certainly have
alleviated the disaster. And if he had been more far-sighted, the
agricultural crisis of 1932-1933 could have been mitigated and perhaps
even avoided altogether. But Stalin was not hoarding immense grain
reserves in these years. On the contrary, he had failed to reach the
levels which he had been imperatively demanding since 1929.

-that is Tauger from the article that I posted - I think you injust to him.

[Galicia]

Tauger is considered to be by most Ukrainians as incorrect. That stuff in bold is so he doesn't look like a complete idiot. In my opinion of course.

Now:

Addendum to the minutes of Politburo [meeting] No. 93.

RESOLUTION OF THE COUNCIL OF PEOPLE'S COMMISSARS OF THE UKRAINIAN SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLIC AND OF THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY (BOLSHEVIK) OF UKRAINE ON BLACKLISTING VILLAGES THAT MALICIOUSLY SABOTAGE THE COLLECTION OF GRAIN.

In view of the shameful collapse of grain collection in the more remote regions of Ukraine, the Council of People's Commissars and the Central Committee call upon the oblast executive committees and the oblast [party] committees as well as the raion executive committees and the raion [party] committees: to break up the sabotage of grain collection, which has been organized by kulak and counterrevolutionary elements; to liquidate the resistance of some of the rural communists, who in fact have become the leaders of the sabotage; to eliminate the passivity and complacency toward the saboteurs, incompatible with being a party member; and to ensure, with maximum speed, full and absolute compliance with the plan for grain collection.

The Council of People's Commissars and the Central Committee resolve:

To place the following villages on the black list for overt disruption of the grain collection plan and for malicious sabotage, organized by kulak and counterrevolutionary elements:

Meaning, they are specifically targeting Ukrainian villages and citizens.

1. village of Verbka in Pavlograd raion, Dnepropetrovsk oblast.

...


5. village of Sviatotroitskoe in Troitsk raion, Odessa oblast. 6. village of Peski in Bashtan raion, Odessa oblast.

The following measures should be undertaken with respect to these villages :

1. Immediate cessation of delivery of goods, complete suspension of cooperative and state trade in the villages, and removal of all available goods from cooperative and state stores.

Meaning that the Politburo had full knowledge and was implementing, (although in this case in a small way), a famine among the populace.

2. Full prohibition of collective farm trade for both collective farms and collective farmers, and for private farmers.

3. Cessation of any sort of credit and demand for early repayment of credit and other financial obligations.

Further measures against Ukrainians.

4. Investigation and purge of all sorts of foreign and hostile elements from cooperative and state institutions, to be carried out by organs of the Workers and Peasants Inspectorate.

Meaning state sponsored murder of the Intellegensia and "Kulaks"

5. Investigation and purge of collective farms in these villages, with removal of counterrevolutionary elements and organizers of grain collection disruption.

Further state sponsored murder jargon.

The Council of People's Commissars and the Central Committee call upon all collective and private farmers who are honest and dedicated to Soviet rule to organize all their efforts for a merciless struggle against kulaks and their accomplices in order to: defeat in their villages the kulak sabotage of grain collection; fulfill honestly and conscientiously their grain collection obligations to the Soviet authorities; and strengthen collective farms.

CHAIRMAN OF THE COUNCIL OF PEOPLE'S COMMISSARS OF THE UKRAINIAN SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLIC - V. CHUBAR'.

SECRETARY OF THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY (BOLSHEVIK) OF UKRAINE - S. KOSIOR.

6 December 1932.

True copy

Does that prove it to you?

[Galicia]

Yes, little birds, eat me alive!

A little historical humor.

[Oleg Grigoryev]

RESOLUTION OF THE COUNCIL OF PEOPLE'S COMMISSARS OF THE UKRAINIAN SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLIC AND OF THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY (BOLSHEVIK) OF UKRAINE ON BLACKLISTING VILLAGES THAT MALICIOUSLY SABOTAGE THE COLLECTION OF GRAIN.

-how could they target anybody else considering that they are from Ukraine - I am sorry this does not advancing your argument, nor does calling Taugert an idiot -especially considering the fact that he can pretty much show you an original archival document for any of his find. Btw how 1500000 dead Russians - who died from hunger fit in the "Ukrainian Genocide" picture? What you essentially prove that Ukrainian party bosses were milking Ukrainian villages -how is that connected to Stalin - especially in 1932 - when he was in the midst of inter-party struggle - against the local party bosses -who for the most part the sent there by Trotsky -the bitter opponent of Stalin? Sorry but you will have to do – a lot better than that.

[Oleg Grigoryev]

Here is something interesting to consider

3 September 1933
SECRET
TO THE CHAIRMEN OF REPUBLIC AND TERRITORIAL (REGIONAL) CONTROL COMMISSIONS AND WORKERS'-PEASANTS' INSPECTORATES (KK/RKI)
Reports of new tactics practiced by the kulaks involving the organization of hunger protests in certain places in the North Caucasus, the Ukraine, and the Lower Volga have reached the Central Control Commission from local Control Commissions and Workers'-Peasants' Inspectorates (KK/RKI).
While reports from certain localities of individual incidents of hunger among the peasants have been verified, cases of feigning hunger and starvation have been noted in spite of hidden and buried reserves of food provisions (Letter from the KK/RKI of the North Caucasus; letter from Comrade Kalinin, the chairman of the KK/RKI of the Lower Volga; dispatches of certain political sections of machine tractor stations of the North Caucasus). This represents a new maneuver on the part of the kulaks in their campaign to undermine the gathering of seeds and spring sowing.
The Central Control Commission of the VKP(b) proposes:
1) That each report of cases of hunger among kolkhoz members be investigated and that, where a case of feigning hunger is brought to light, the perpetrators are to be considered counterrevolutionary elements, and that necessary measures be taken against them.
Decisive measures are to be taken against the organizers of such protests. In addition, it is necessary that this maneuver on the part of the class enemy be exposed in the presence of the members of a given kolkhoz.
2) That, at the same time, a warning be issued against a possible bureaucratic attitude, here and there, to a real absence of food provisions in certain kolkhozy of certain districts suffering from harvest failure, and that help should be organized to provide foodstuffs from available territorial reserves to kolkhozy and kolkhoz members who are in real need.

Which begs the questions:
if Famine was the desired effect – why investigate it – it should be hoorayed -as in “yep we did it working –death to the class enemy” it seems that the occurence of the famine was something that was not counted on

If it was intended -Why help????????????? –kind of undermines the whole purpose of the man-maid famine.
Source for the doc:


Page 69

[michael mills]

And now, as a distraction from this wearisome quarrel between the Russian and the Ukrainian, here is something sensible on the issue, by the German leftist historian Goetz Aly, from the book "Architects of Annihilation":

'Overpopulation' in the Soviet Union

In whatever terms rural overpopulation was described and explained, Oberlaender [Theodor Oberlaender: Director of the Institute of East European Eonomic Studies in Koenigsberg, and a proponent of the need to reduce overpopulation] and his colleagues basically worked on the assumption that Poland and south-east Europe neded to catch up with developments that had already taken place not only in western Europe, but also in the Soviet Union. This meant that the 'backward' agricultural industry in these countries had to be rationalised, and that a proportion of the landless rural population should be drafted into manufacturing industry. The Soviet Union had already taken this step at the beginning of the 1930s, and thereby, as Oberlaender wrote, 'caught up with the trend in western Europe to reduce the size of the rural population by undertaking a massive purge of peasant farmers in the name of collectivisation'. Enforced collectivisation under Stalin, he wrote, had amalgamated 25 million smallholdings into 250,000 collective farms, and 'within a relatively short space of time the individual smallholding' had simply disappeared. At the same time industrialisation had 'alleviated the population factor'. In the elimination of millions of Soviet peasant farmers Oberlaender saw the successful attempt 'to establish a balance between feeding capacity and population numbers'. His barely concealed admiration for Soviet strong-arm methods presumably had something to do with the fact that Stalin's agrarian policy had dealt with the problem of rural overpopulation in the Soviet Union in very short order - virtually within a decade, in fact.

Following the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks had initially reintroducd the old Russian system of land distribution, the so-called mir system, in order to strengthen their power base. Abolished a decade earlier by Stolypin's agrarian reforms, this system favoured families with large numbers of children, and at the same time put economic checks on migration from the land to the towns and cities. The result was that the land owned by the commune had to be divided up between more and more people.

In the early 1920s the Soviet government sought to accumulate capital from the agrarian sector for the development of the country's industry. To this end it kept the prices of industrial goods and taxation levels relatively high, while prices for agricultural produce remained low. But - just like capitalist Poland - the gap between industrial and agricultural prices encouraged peasant farmers to keep their produce for their own consumption rather than selling it on.

When the grain bought up by the government in 1927-8 fell well below the projected figures, despite a good harvest, the government reintroduced the compulsory delivery of agricultural produce. It had used similar tactics to incite the peasant population against the new Soviet power during the period of War Communism. In the 1920s Soviet economists shared the view that large tracts of the Soviet Union were overpopulated - although their estimates of how many people constituted 'too many' were as widely divergent as thir ideas about how to solve the problem. Together with an intensified programme of industrialisation, mass resettlement was seen as an effective method, not least because it would also open up hitherto undeveloped regions in the east of the country to economic exploitation. Initially people were encouraged to resettle in Siberia by offers of government aid. But when this failed to have the desired effect, the authorities resorted once again to forcible methods.

The year 1929 marked the beginning of the wholesale elimination of the kulaks as a class - the process described by Oberlaender as 'a massive purge of peasant farmers in the name of collectivisation'. Between then and 1932 millions of Soviet peasant families were dispossessed and divided into three groups. The first group was either summarily murdered or imprisoned, the second was deported to Siberia and the third was 'merely' banished from the district. This last group could be absorbed into a kolkhoz or collective farm after a probationary period of three to five years. The majority of kulaks belonged to the second group. In the Russian Soviet Republic alone an estimated 820,000 families - some four million people - were deported. Many of them - the exact number is not known - died in transit. To escape the terror many people fled from the countryside into the towns and cities, where they tried to find work illegally in industry.

The black-earth region of the Ukraine, the 'bread basket of the Soviet Union', was regarded as particularly 'overpopulated'. The Ukraine played an important economic role, most notably as an exporter of grain. After the population had already been severely decimated by the elimination of the kulak class, somthing like a fifth to a quarter of the population fell victim in 1932-3 to the goverment's policy of deliberate starvation. The cause of the famine was not failed harvests or natural disasters, but the abnormally high delivery quotas for grain imposed on the farmers. Until this quota had been met, keeping back even small amounts of grain for one's own use was punishable by severe penalties. The starving populace tried once more to flee the countryside and seek refuge in the cities, but special units of troops were deployed to prevent them. According to new Soviet estimates, a total of nine million pople died as a result of resettlement and famine - the consequences of a policy designed to rationalise agriculture at any price in order to create the necessary conditions for industrialisation.

Contrary to the official political line, the drive to eliminate the kulak class was directed not only against well-to-do peasant farmers who were accused of exploiting poorer villagers, but also - soon enough - against families on tiny smallholdings who barely had enough to live on themselves. So collectivisation was not the great achievement born of the class struggle that the Soviet Communist Party made out, but an attempt, as ruthless as it was successful, to eradicate rural overpopulation by various means and to accumulate capital in order to impose a modern economic structure on the country in the shortest possible time. Obrlaender was in no doubt 'that the Soviet Union has embarked on the path of industrialisation under the pressure of agrarian overpopulation, and in so doing has taken one of the paths by which agrarian overpopulation may be combatted'. Dispossession, famine, resettlement and mass murder were evidently viewed in the Soviet Union, as they later were in German-occupied Poland, as necessary and legitimate methods for 'correcting' the country's demographic make-up. In the Soviet Union this 'correction' was justified in terms of the 'laws of the class struggle', while in the German plans for a new European order it was justified by racist arguments. In their semantic parallelism the German terms 'Entkulakisierung' and 'Entjudung' ['the elimination of the kulak class' and 'the elimination of Jewish elements'] point to a certain similarity in the two programmes, while at the same time identifying their differing ideological thrust. When Oberlaender cited the Soviet Union as a model and exemplar in his study of 'Ostmitteleuropa', he put the ideological baggage to one side and reduced both programmes to a common denominator of population policy: the eradication of population groups who were classed as 'extra mouths to feed' .

It is of interest that Aly recognises the model that the Soviet elimination of unwanted population groups through mass-killing, among other methods, provided for influential German theoreticians such as Oberlaender