Effort Commenter Part Three

Part 1, Part 2, Part 4, Part 5

To continue our dive into the Hunger Plan we need to go back to the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (IMT). The IMT was a show trial that used questionable evidence and took judicial notice of all the atrocity accusations against the Germans. In a just world, everything from the IMT would be stricken from the record. That will never happen, though. Holocaust affirmers want the people to believe that a trial put on by the winners of a war against their vanquished foes is somehow legitimate. The following image is an article from the IMT:

In Wikipedia’s entry on the Hunger plan they state:

“A meeting on 2 May 1941 between the permanent secretaries responsible for logistical planning for the invasion of the Soviet Union, as well as other high-ranking Nazi party functionaries, state officials and military officers, included in its conclusions:

1.) The war can only be continued if the entire Wehrmacht is fed from Russia in the third year of the war.
2.) If we take what we need out of the country, there can be no doubt that tens of millions of people will die of starvation.^[2]“

The citation for this assertion are documents from the IMT—documents that the average person has no access to.

Citing testimony and IMT documents, Wikipedia states the following: “The minutes of the meeting exemplify German planning for the occupation of the Soviet Union. They present a deliberate decision on the life and death of vast parts of the local population as a logical, inevitable development.^3]“

Just for fun, I took a look at another Wikipedia source that was available to me: “Germany’s Staatssekretäre, Mass Starvation and the Meeting of 2 May 1941”, by Alex Kay. This 16-page paper contains fourteen references to the IMT. It is clear that the IMT shaped how the Hunger Plan is perceived.

In this CoDoH forum thread I found another document presented at the IMT. The following is said to be a quote from Hermann Göring (full context here):

“In all the occupied territories I see people living there stuffed full of food, while our own people are going hungry. For God’s sake, you haven’t been sent there to work for the well being of the peoples entrusted to you, but to get hold of as much as you can so that the German people can live. I expect you to devote your energies to that. This continual concern for the aliens must come to an end once and for all. I could not care less when you say that people under your administration are dying of hunger. Let them perish so long as no German starves.”

What this quote shows is a policy of Germany putting Germans first during difficult times (you know, WW2). What this quote does not show is genocidal intent. What the Holocaust affirmers are doing here is taking a reasonable course of action and trying to twist it into something to make Nazi Germany look evil.

Thanks to the book, Extermination Camps of Aktion Reinhardt, by Carlo Mattogno, we can view some of these documents for ourselves and draw conclusions that haven’t been filtered through biased sources.

From page 171 of Mattogno’s book we can see the full context of a document that is often mined for quotes:

“From all this it results that the German administration in this area might well strive to mitigate the consequences of the certainly impending famine and to accelerate the naturalization process. One might strive to cultivate these areas more intensively in terms of an increase of the area cultivated with potatoes and other high-yielding crops important for consumption. Famine in this region cannot [however] be avoided thereby. Many tens of millions of people in this area will be superfluous and will have to die or migrate to Siberia. Attempts to save the population there from famine by using the surplus production from the black-earth zone can only be made at the expense of provisioning Europe. They undermine Germany’s chances of perseverance in the war, they undermine Germany’s and Europe’s ability to endure the blockade. The manufacturing industry of Belgium and France is far more important to Germany and the German war effort than that of Russia. It is thus much more important to secure the nutritional needs of those areas with surpluses from the East, than to seek out of ambition to preserve Russian industry in the [Soviet] consumption zone. […]

The guideline in all things must be: no dispersion [of resources] on dependencies, but resolution of the main task, relief of the food situation of Greater Germany.” (Emphasis in original)

As cold and calculating as this might be, it does not show an aim to murder Soviets and Jews just for being Soviet and Jewish. Rather, the intention to relieve a critical food supply situation and withstand food blockades. Demonizing a country for doing what they needed to do to fight a war is par for the course when it comes to how the Allies represent the Nazis.

Now that I’ve set the record straight for the Hunger Plan let’s get back to Herbert Williams’ effort comment.

If you’ll recall, Herbert stated:

“The fact of the matter is it was openly stated in the Hunger Plan that while the war was ongoing, food would be given to Germans at the expensive of Soviet POWs, even if it mean complete starvation. The idea that Germany would have prioritized Jews higher is laughable. “

Since the Hunger Plan was not genocidal, nor done with malice, it is silly to use it as an argument to say that the Nazis were deliberately starving the Jewish inmates. In fact, I have already written an article that has evidence to the contrary. The following excerpt is from a Holocaust-affirming book called The Buchenwald Report, by David A. Hackett. In a report from a former inmate that lists the rations allowed to the inmates, it is admitted that camp food rations were about equal to the civilian population and had remained constant until February 1945, which was just two months before the end of the war.

Herbert then says:

 “If anything Germany letting these Jewish civilians slowly starve to death or die from brutal disease is even worse. This is clearly what Hitler meant with this statement in his final testimony. [You can view the full version of Hitler’s last testament here.]

“I have also made it quite plain that, if the nations of Europe are again to be regarded as mere shares to be bought and sold by these international conspirators in money and finance, then that race, Jewry, which is the real criminal of this murderous struggle, will be saddled with the responsibility. I further left no one in doubt that this time not only would millions of children of Europe’s Aryan peoples die of hunger, not only would millions of grown men suffer death, and not only hundreds of thousands of women and children be burnt and bombed to death in the towns, without the real criminal having to atone for this guilt, even if by more humane means.“

While it is impossible for anyone to know exactly what Hitler meant, there is clearly a contradiction between what Herbert is asserting and what Hitler said. Hitler specifically said that the punishment would be more humane than millions of people dying of hunger. If that’s the best evidence there is for the allegation that Hitler intended to have Jews starve or die of disease, then the argument has failed. Furthermore, someone saying something isn’t the same as the thing actually happening. Holocaust affirmers rely on diary entries, speeches, etc., because they lack physical evidence. If they had such evidence they wouldn’t have to resort to telling you that someone clearly meant something when they did not.

That’s it for part three. Continue to part four.