What size did Hitler want his Polish puppet state to be?

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Sid Guttridge
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Re: What size did Hitler want his Polish puppet state to be?

#106

Post by Sid Guttridge » 16 May 2020, 01:14

Hi Futurist,

What bad behaviour? The initial emigration agreement was signed by Ana Pauker, who was not only Jewish but had her father and brother in Israel.

It is not as if Israel were enemies at the time, so I don't see the relevance. Any money Israel handed over was not going to subsidize an enemy war effort.

Cheers,

Sid.

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Re: What size did Hitler want his Polish puppet state to be?

#107

Post by Futurist » 16 May 2020, 01:39

Sid Guttridge wrote:
16 May 2020, 01:14
Hi Futurist,

What bad behaviour? The initial emigration agreement was signed by Ana Pauker, who was not only Jewish but had her father and brother in Israel.
Jews can also engage in bad behavior, though.
It is not as if Israel were enemies at the time, so I don't see the relevance. Any money Israel handed over was not going to subsidize an enemy war effort.

Cheers,

Sid.
It wouldn't have subsidized en enemy war effort but it would have subsidized a brutal totalitarian Communist dictatorship--not exactly an ideal thing to do.


Sid Guttridge
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Re: What size did Hitler want his Polish puppet state to be?

#108

Post by Sid Guttridge » 16 May 2020, 02:48

Hi Futurist,

Ideal or not, I don't see the relevance here.

Cheers,

Sid

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Re: What size did Hitler want his Polish puppet state to be?

#109

Post by Futurist » 16 May 2020, 03:07

Sid Guttridge wrote:
16 May 2020, 02:48
Hi Futurist,

Ideal or not, I don't see the relevance here.

Cheers,

Sid
The relevance is that a Communist country is getting money for doing something that it should have been doing for free.

Sid Guttridge
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Re: What size did Hitler want his Polish puppet state to be?

#110

Post by Sid Guttridge » 16 May 2020, 03:19

Hi Futurist,

Again, what is the relevance to this thread? Romania and Israel had peaceful relations and are not the subject of this thread, which is about Poland and Germany at war. Both the subjects and cirvumstancrs differ.

Cheers,

Sid.

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wm
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Re: What size did Hitler want his Polish puppet state to be?

#111

Post by wm » 07 Jun 2020, 19:08

Sid Guttridge wrote:
14 May 2020, 11:54
When did the first German civilians starve to death?
It doesn't matter if any German civilians starved to death.
The point is the Germans believed (correctly) that they didn't have enough food to feed their people and to fight the world war. To remedy that resorted to genocidal measures, including:
- reducing food rations for the Poles below starvation levels,
- including in the Barbarossa Plan mass, man-made starvation of millions of Russians,
- the Holocaust.
Sid Guttridge wrote:
14 May 2020, 11:54
You claim that rural Poles ate better than Berliners. That is possible. However, what is your evidence for this? Did you post that because you presume it might well be true, or do you have some actual evidence, preferably not of the anecdotal variety you have been dismissive of elsewhere?
As the food rations for the Poles were almost nonexistent but still they didn't die it follows the Polish peasants were able to keep them alive thanks to illegal distribution networks.
As food producers, they had access to much more food than anyone else, including the (partially) starved Berliners.

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Re: What size did Hitler want his Polish puppet state to be?

#112

Post by Futurist » 07 Jun 2020, 20:11

Could the Polish peasants have also provided enough food to Polish Jews to ensure that they wouldn't have starved en masse had the Nazis not put the Polish Jews in ghettos en masse and subsequently exterminated them en masse?

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wm
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Re: What size did Hitler want his Polish puppet state to be?

#113

Post by wm » 07 Jun 2020, 20:46

The Jewish ghettos survived for so long solely thanks to food produced by Polish peasants and delivered illegally to the ghettos.
Thanks to (unexpected) bumper crops (between 1942 and 1944) they had much more food than anticipated.
But Poland (and Ukraine) couldn't save them all, the Nazis confiscated the surplus anyway, and the Jews as the least valued people were going to be thrown overboard first.

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Re: What size did Hitler want his Polish puppet state to be?

#114

Post by Sid Guttridge » 08 Jun 2020, 18:37

Hi wm,

So, as far as you know, no German civilians starved to death?

This rather undermines your argument.

The Germans may have believed that they didn't have enough food to feed themselves, but this wasn't, as it turned out, even true in the bad harvest year of 1941/42. So there isn't even a semblance of an excuse for starving millions of Soviet POWs and hundreds of thousands of Greek civilians to death at that time.

By international law, Germany had to provide the same rations to POWs and occupied populations as it did to its own population. Yet, as far as you know, no Germans actually starved to death over 1941/42 or at any other time. So why did others?

You haven't answered my question about the sourcing of your proposition that rural Poles ate better than Berliners. It seems plausible but, without a non-anecdotal source, it is just speculation.

Cheers,

Sid

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wm
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Re: What size did Hitler want his Polish puppet state to be?

#115

Post by wm » 08 Jun 2020, 22:17

It undermines nothing. The fact that the Germans were mistaken (actually they weren't, they merely got lucky later) either.
The Germans obviously planned according to the information they had, not according to the information they didn't have.
I'm not interested in moral judgments. I want to know why they did it, and what they were thinking.
Because I don't believe they were especially different from me and all the other humans.

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Re: What size did Hitler want his Polish puppet state to be?

#116

Post by Futurist » 08 Jun 2020, 22:43

wm wrote:
08 Jun 2020, 22:17
It undermines nothing. The fact that the Germans were mistaken (actually they weren't, they merely got lucky later) either.
The Germans obviously planned according to the information they had, not according to the information they didn't have.
I'm not interested in moral judgments. I want to know why they did it, and what they were thinking.
Because I don't believe they were especially different from me and all the other humans.
Do you believe that the Germans would have made a different judgment if they would have had different information? BTW, why couldn't the Germans adjust their judgment once it became clear that their information was mistaken? AFAIK, the Holocaust in Poland didn't really kick-off on a super-giant scale until mid- or late-1942, correct?

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wm
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Re: What size did Hitler want his Polish puppet state to be?

#117

Post by wm » 08 Jun 2020, 23:26

The bumper crops arrived too late, and they weren't that bumper anyway. They were merely sufficient to save the Poles from famine.

I believe if the Nazis had had enough food (and that was perfectly impossible) the Holocaust and the other nasty things wouldn't have happened.

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Re: What size did Hitler want his Polish puppet state to be?

#118

Post by Futurist » 08 Jun 2020, 23:43

wm wrote:
08 Jun 2020, 23:26
The bumper crops arrived too late, and they weren't that bumper anyway. They were merely sufficient to save the Poles from famine.

I believe if the Nazis had had enough food (and that was perfectly impossible) the Holocaust and the other nasty things wouldn't have happened.
What about the Jews who were murdered by the Nazis in 1943 and later?

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Re: What size did Hitler want his Polish puppet state to be?

#119

Post by Futurist » 09 Jun 2020, 04:14

When did the bumper crops arrive in Germany, by the way?

Sid Guttridge
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Re: What size did Hitler want his Polish puppet state to be?

#120

Post by Sid Guttridge » 09 Jun 2020, 07:59

Hi wm,

On what evidence do you base the proposition that the so-called Holocaust and "other nasty things" were the result of food shortages in Germany?

The Jews in ghettos in Poland already had an increasing differential death rate in 1940 due to severe food rationing below subsistence levels. Furthermore, their murder did not stop once the food situation had eased.

I too believe that the Germans are no different to the rest of us. As individuals, most of us would probably have been complicit.

However, it seems to me that you are trying to find a pragmatic excuse for something that was an act of malevolent will, not force of circumstance.

Cheers,

Sid.

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