Inspired by this thread.
In WW2 the Nazis spent a lot of energy - troops, materiel, etc - occupying countries in Europe. Partly through bureaucracy, partly through resistance movements. What if they’d ‘simply’ exterminated the populations and transplanted Germans?
Not enough Germans.
I’m not sure that that’s possible. The Third Reich felt that it was the superior race; however, some races were less inferior than others. There’s no way that the Germans would have “extermined” their fellow Germanic people in England or even the French for that matter. Also, genocide is hard work. I doubt that they would have enough troops and materials to construct and run McDachaus in Western Europe while rounding up all of the people to kill and fighting the inevitable resistance movements.
Why not skip the rigamole and just shoot anything that doesn’t speak German? They tried that on their first Eastern campaign–rounding up Jews and shooting them into mass graves. The thing is for all of their training and indocternation killing that many people by hand, even “inferior” people wasn’t good for morale. Many German soliders snapped and lost their will to fight. The concentration camps were a way of sterilizing the process to make it slightly more palatable.
Finally, the world would come down hard on the Germans for the outright slaughter of entire countries. When picking off the Jews, a relatively small group, could go unnoticed. Killing every French speaker in Alasce-Lorraine is going to get a little ink.
So, if the Germans were to attempt to “exterminate” the countries they invaded the war would have been over a lot quicker. More nations would have gotten involved and the Germans wouldn’t have the manpower to fight the world, the resistance movements, and run the camps.
I think you’re missing something: They Did.
But you can’t kill millions of people overnight. It takes time, energy, and organization, and they simply didn’t finish the job. They would have liked to kill or move all the Poles and Russians and Ukrainians out, but didn’t have the manpower to do all of that all at once while fighting a multi-front war.
So they eradicated the Jews, along with Communists, anyone who happened to get in the way, and the priests, and the poltiicians, and the doctors, and the…
Well, you get the idea. But it was on Hitler’s to-do list. Ironically, this wound up causing immense damage to the Nazi cause. Rebels and partisans constantly interfered with everything in the Eastern Front; many of them figured at first that the Nazis couldn’t be worse than the Commies. They were wrong and took out their fury in particularly nasty ways.
I’d like to echo this. If you want to be truly sickened by man’s capacity for evil, go look up what the Germans did to the city of Warsaw. They were so determined to eradicate the “inferior” Poles and Polish culture (as well as the large Jewish population of Poland) that, aside from killing indiscriminately, they bombed the entire city to rubble and then sent in sappers to further blow up the rubble. Its insane.
No to hijack, but I have a huge soft spot for the Polish role in WWII. No other country stood up more determinedly to the Nazis. They were one of the largest contributors of troops to the allied cause, suffered more civilian casualties than just about anyone, and contributed a huge amount throught their resistance movement. How were they rewarded for their bravery and determination? They were completely sold out the Soviets by Roosevelt and Churchill and had to endure another 40+ communist oprression. Even today, the Poles in WWII are mocked for fighting the Nazi tanks with calvalry. (This is largely a lie concocted by the Soviets to justify their grab of a huge eastern portion of traditionally Polish territory.) When in actuallity, the world at large was quite impressed that Poland held out as long as it did to the massive Nazi war machine, and most likely could have held out longer if not attacked on their rear by the Soviets or if the anticipated French relief that was called for by treaty ever came.
I’ll go with the first answer in the thread…not enough Germans (or enough bullets). Not that the ‘it was on Hitler’s to-do list’ answer is wrong…simply that it was pretty much impossible for the Germans to even attempt this as a short or medium term solution (so it wouldn’t help them with resistance movements…as others have said, quite the opposite).
-XT
Adding to Smiling Bandit’s and MichaelQReilly’s points - Germany did in fact make a strong start towards eradicating the slavic peoples of the eastern occupied lands.
Belarus : The population of Belarus did not regain its pre-war level until 1971.There were also death camps in southern Europe, Croatia and Bosnia.
On the other hand, these massive exterminations don’t seem to have made the German occupiers lives easier, on the contrary, they provoked savage resistance movements on a much greater scale than those in western Europe.
I recall that Shirer reported that the Polish government supported Germany’s occupation of Czechoslovakia, in a well thought-out move, in order to grab a little piece of land along the border.
But their contribution to Enigma and their fighter pilots, not to mention the actual war casualties and time they held out for, more than equals France’s efforts.
What’s the straight dope on how much energy the Nazis actually put into policing their stolen territories?
I remember vaguely reading that there was more romantic legend than fact in the notion that the Resistance caused the Nazis serious losses and troubles, at least in Western Europe.
Ah, but it’s as much the troops diverted to preventing the damage as the damage itself.
Read some accounts by German soldiers. Partisan efforts were massive, involving hundreds of thousands and possibly even millions of fighters (note that I said fighters, not soldiers). They carved up German supply convoys and took untold amounts of time and blood from the Nazi war effort. The Poles alone fielded more than 300,000 partisans in the Home Army alone, which doesn’t include any other groups in Poland, let alone Czechoslovakia, The Ukraine, or the Soviet Union! The totals for Poland alone probably reach way over half a million counting all partisans.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_contribution_to_World_War_II
Wikipedia’s link is not the best source here, but it contains plenty of information on the subject.
It’s worthwhile to cite John Keegan’s opinion, which is generally that the Nazis spent far less effort fighting Resistance forces than we’d like to believe. See his books The Second World War and Intelligence in War.
Here’s an excerpt from a NY Times review of the latter:
Sailboat
I am not a knee-jerk France basher, but the most grating part about this situation is the fact that by rolling over the French managed to come out squeaky clean at the end of the war. While the Polish, who fought more bravely than anyone, still wound up losing their country. I remember reading some accounts of Polish pilots who managed to escape to France who were appaled by the seeming lack of will to fight the Nazis on the part of French pilots during the German invasion of France.
I’m not sure I buy the book’s analysis. The direct casualties were a persistent and nasty drain, if not overwhelming. Toward the end of the way, they were dealing out over a thousand casualties a month just from the Home Army alone. And in lost time and equipment…
shrug
I know Keegan has a sharp mind, but I just can’t agree with him. The resistances never had a shot of winning on their own, but they certainly held up the German war effort, and may have provided a critical barrier to Nazi domination of Russia.
Somewhat off-topic here, but just for the record…
You might want to tell the hundreds of thousands of French who died during the war that they “rolled over”. Now if you’re talking about Maréchal Pétain, you’ll probably get some takers.
I’m not sure that it’s useful to make a France vs Poland comparison, but I should point out that France did in fact hold out for a (slightly) longer time than Poland before surrendering. France also took heavier casualties than Poland during this time, and GB also took heavy losses during the failed defense of France.
France’s “cowardly surrender” is as much a myth as France being “squeaky clean”. In fact to be consistent, we would also need to qualify the British evacuation from Dunkirk as “rolling over” (as many French believed). Poland obviously suffered much more heavily in the years that followed, with Hitler’s genocide / ethnic cleansing lebensraum policies, the back and forth fighting between the Soviets and Germans, the Katyn massacre etc.
Tito’s Yugoslavia took brigades of quality Wehrmacht to keep suppressed. The Russians themselves welcomed the Nazi’s at first (Uncle Joe wasn’t too easy to live with). If the Germans would have just kept trucking on through and left the untermenschen alone they would have had less to deal with…and quite a few Russian divisions as well. Overwhelming feelings of racial superiority, screws yeah every time.
I have Polish ancestry so I feel compelled answer this. At the time Poland surrendered, the entire nation was overrun with Nazi AND Russian forces. Polands pathetic navy fought to a bloody end despite horrific odds in the Danzig Harbor. It was not a question of being outmaneuvered, Poland is simply a flat open prairie and surrounded on all sides by hostiles that could afford far better mechanization, more guns and more men. The numerical, technical and strategic odds where insurmountably stacked against Poland. Yet they still fought for 10 days after Warsaw was surrounded and shelled.
.
France, in contrast, had more planes, tanks (of all sizes), and mobilized men than Germany. They had far better defensive terrain. They had a smaller front line. They had 8 1/2 MONTHS to prepare after war was declared! Yet they surrendered in 1 1/2 months and 12 days after German boots goosestepped over the Seine. At the time of surrender the Germans had possessed…what?.. 10% of France. Petain sold the French out, but the French high command wasn’t on a roll anyway.
There’s some truth to that. Expectations were higher from France as a putative major power, but the fact remains that France fell to Nazi Germany subsequent to a complete military rout, and not due to some mysterious weakness of national character as the myth would have it.
By the time France surrendered, more than 100,000 french soldiers had died in combat, the defeated British Expeditionary Force had evacuated, the French government had fallen (they tried to set up an ad hoc government in Bordeaux), Paris was occupied, the army was in complete dissarray and Italy had declared war in the south.
Having said that, although the French army had already been crushed, the actual decision to surrender was pretty questionable of course, as was made crystal clear at Pétain’s trial. France, like most European countries, was suffering from deep internal rifts by the time of Hitler’s rise to power. Communists and rightists were struggling for dominance, with governments coming and going at a rapid pace. Hitler’s invasion may have looked like a preferable alternative to a communist government to many rightists, so Pétain’s motivations may have run the gamut from trying to save something of a routed nation, to hobbling the communists, to grabbing hold of some power for himself. He was convicted of treason after the war.
The facts are of course considerably more complex than the myths.
I agree with your previous point about Yugoslavia / Soviet Union et al - a lot of the resistance was a direct response to Hitler’s racial policies, which affected France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark etc considerably less.
ETA got some Polish family myself, few survivors
Whoa! No where did I diminish anyone who died fighting in France. I’ll grant that, perhaps, the term “roll over” was a bit strong. All I was refering to is that France, by surrendering to Nazi Germany, was able to preserve their country. While the Poles, by refusing to surrender (among other reasons), had their country destroyed.
You can take issue with my characterization if you want, but I don’t think that anything I said was historically inaccurate in any way.
Further, if I weren’t, as I said, sympathetic to the Poles, I could easily point out that the French reaction may well have been the smarter one seeing that Paris is still standing largely intact and all. Even then, I would have to ignore that the Poles were more likely to fight to the death for their country seeing as they had only recently gotten it back and just finished a long a costly war with Russia to keep it.