Albert Speer's Empire of Blood: How the Nazis Ruled Europe

[gruts]

Interesting new book about how the Nazis ruled over the peoples they conquered in WW2 and how they planned to extend that rule into the future. Quite chilling really....

http://www.nysun.com/arts/an-empire-of-blood-how-the-nazis-ruled-europ e/85051/

An Empire of Blood: How the Nazis Ruled Europe
By ADAM KIRSCH | September 3, 2008

In the summer of 1942, Albert Speer visited Adolf Hitler at the Führer's field headquarters in the Ukraine. "One quiet evening," Mark Mazower writes in "Hitler's Empire" (Penguin Press, 726 pages, $39.95), Hitler dilated to Speer on his favorite subject: what the world would look like after the German victory, which he still believed was inevitable. By the end of the year, he predicted, the Wehrmacht would have taken the Soviet Caucasus. "If in the course of the next year we manage to cover only the same distance ... by the end of 1943 we will pitch our tents in Teheran, in Baghdad and on the Persian Gulf," Hitler gloated. He went on to do a back-of-the-envelope calculation of how many Germans would be available to colonize this vast new territory. Combining true Germans with their racial "cousins," such as the Dutch, Hitler, Mr. Mazower writes, came up "with a grand total of 127 million real or potential Germans ... [and] then started projecting birth rates far into the future."

In this mad monologue, Mr. Mazower finds a perfect snapshot of the irrational forces that both created Hitler's brief empire and led to its destruction. What Hitler craved, Mr. Mazower makes clear, was a territorial tabula rasa on which he could write his racial and imperial fantasies. Just as Europeans had once supplanted the Indians in the Western Hemisphere, so Aryans would drive out the subhumans who populated Eastern Europe: Poles, Ukrainians, Byelorussians, and especially Jews. Once these peoples were exterminated or reduced to slavery, their lands would be colonized by German pioneers — 20th-century versions of the medieval Teutonic Knights, living as warrior-farmers on feudal estates.

The Nazis never did get as far as Baghdad, of course, nor did Hitler have the chance to build the titanic monuments to himself that he dreamed about — for instance, the supersized Golden Gate Bridge that was to stretch across the Elbe, "so that Germans entering Hamburg by sea would say: 'What is so extraordinary about America and its bridges? We can do just the same.'" But between 1938, when Germany swallowed up Austria and part of Czechoslovakia without firing a shot, and 1942, when the tide of war began to turn against the Wehrmacht in Russia, Hitler did manage to bring more of Europe under his control than any conqueror since Napoleon.

Mr. Mazower tallies his conquests: "Germany occupied approximately one-third of the European land-mass and ruled nearly half its inhabitants. The swastika flew over the Channel Islands in the west and over Mount Elbrus in the Caucasus, from northern Norway to the Sahara." Yet just three years later, not only had Germany lost all its conquests, but it was itself conquered, and its eastern half would remain under Soviet occupation for the next half-century.

How did the Nazis rule in the empire they so quickly and unexpectedly won, and what did they hope to do with it in the thousand-year Reich that never was? Why did nemeses follow so quickly on their hubris? In "Hitler's Empire," Mr. Mazower, a professor of history at Columbia University, gives thoughtful answers to these questions. Drawing on an enormous amount of research, yet always writing clearly and well, Mr. Mazower takes the reader on a guided tour through every corner of the Nazis' domains. He examines their economic policies, their diplomatic strategies, and their internal debates over the future of Europe. At the same time, he reports the gassings, shootings, starvation, deportation, torture, and rape that the Nazis inflicted, in various degrees, on almost every people they ruled.

But while the Nazis destroyed whole towns in occupied France, Bohemia, Greece, and even Italy (after the collapse of Mussolini's government), it was in the East that their imperial fantasies truly ran wild. The difference can be explained by the racist ideology which drove Nazism from the beginning. While Hitler treated the French as enemies to be defeated, he saw the Slavs as a demographic threat to be eradicated. In this, Mr. Mazower shows, the Nazis were following a tradition of German thought that stretched back to before World War I. As early as Bismarck's time, there had been a Royal Prussian Colonization Commission to settle German farmers in the country's majority-Polish eastern provinces. When Himmler declared that he wanted to "build a blond province" in what used to be Poland, he was restating an old German ambition in biological terms.

Yet it was precisely this element of biological racism in the Nazis' worldview that made them a different kind of imperialist. No Prussian bureaucrat could have invented a scheme as diabolical as Himmler's Lebensborn program, in which the SS kidnapped Polish children who appeared Aryan and gave them to German mothers to raise. This was what Himmler called "see[ing] to it that none of our blood is ever lost to the outside world." Mr. Mazower chronicles the embarrassments that the Nazis' crackpot racism brought on them, when they realized that there simply were not enough Germans to settle the territories they had conquered. Albert Forster, the Gauleiter of Danzig, solved the problem by simply declaring that most of the Poles under his control were actually "Kashubians," a different racial type that was not Slavic but "ripe for Germanization."

More important to the Nazis than creating new Germans, however, was getting rid of non-Germans. General Plan East, the Nazis' blueprint for Eastern Europe, called for murder on a scale undreamed of in human history. Mr. Mazower quotes Erhard Wetzel, a Nazi "race expert," who estimated that Germanizing the East would require getting rid of "some 60-65 million people," starting with 20 million Poles, who were "the most dangerous of all the alien ethnic groups which the Plan envisages for resettlement." When the Germans launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, in 1941, Goering looked forward to "the biggest mass death in Europe since the Thirty Years War." Some planners in the SS, where the younger, more ideological, and visionary Nazis tended to congregate, did not want to stop even at the Urals, the traditional border between Europe and Asia. Wetzel was already worried about the race war that would ensue when German colonists brushed up against "a Great Asia and an independent India," which "posed a greater long-term threat to Europe's racial purity than even the Slavs."

Moments like these underscore one of the major themes of "Hitler's Empire," which is that the Holocaust, now remembered as the greatest of the Nazis' crimes, was actually just a prelude to what they had in mind. Because of the central role of anti-Semitism in Nazi ideology, the Nazis made the extermination of the Jews their first priority. But there is every reason to believe that the techniques the Nazis perfected in the Holocaust would have been used, in the event of a German victory, to clear all of Eastern Europe for German settlement. Poles and Ukrainians who eagerly assisted in killing Jews in 1941-2 began to realize, as the war stretched on, that their turn might be next. Mr. Mazower quotes one German officer in Poland who explained that the Polish resistance was fueled by the Poles' belief that the Holocaust offered "an atrocious picture of their own destiny." Reinhard Heydrich, the SS ruler of what had been Czechoslovakia, spoke of sending millions of Czechs to Siberia — a clear echo of the euphemism used for the Jewish genocide, "resettlement in the East."

What strikes the reader most forcibly in "Hitler's Empire" is the bizarrely casual way in which the Nazis disposed of lives and nations. They lacked respect, not just for human life, but for reality itself; as Hannah Arendt put it, their totalitarianism was an "experiment against reality." Especially after the amazing victories of 1940, Hitler believed that anything he desired could be made to happen. This nearly psychotic grandiosity helps to explain the consistently self-defeating quality of Nazi policy in so many areas explored by Mr. Mazower. Hitler killed millions upon millions of Jews and Soviet POWs, even as the Reich faced severe labor shortages; he treated the Poles and Ukrainians as slave races, instead of enlisting them as allies against the hated Soviets; he refused to allow the Wehrmacht to fall back to defensible positions, insisting that tactical retreat was equivalent to treason. In all these ways and more, Mr. Mazower shows, the ideology that fueled Hitler's empire also ensured its swift destruction.

[TonyGosling]

This book I take it


http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hitlers-Empire-Occupied-Europe-History/dp/0713 996811

Maybe a slightly different title in the UK

[gruts]

yes that's the one - it's already out in the UK but I was unaware of it until I read the above review on a mailing list I belong to (it's released in the US this month).

I often wonder how amazon.co.uk make a profit - they sell it to you for virtually half price and also deliver it for free....

[TonyGosling]

Rehabilitating the Nazis: Leon Krier, Prince Charles, Albert Speer and Poundbury

Link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lr7Qjpo_HrU

Nazi war criminal Albert Speer DID know about Hitler's atrocities - and he even deported Jews, claims new book
The biography, dubbed the first 'truly scientific' study of Speer, who was dubbed a "good Nazi" claims he was at the very heart of the Holocaust
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/nazi-war-criminal-albert-speer -10536971

BY ALLAN HALL 18:51, 31 MAY 2017UPDATED19:05, 31 MAY 2017


Nazi war criminal Albert Speer – who escaped death by claiming he did not know of Hitler’s atrocities – was at the heart of the Holocaust, a book claims.

A self-professed “good Nazi”, Speer convinced Nuremberg judges of his innocence and was instead sent to Spandau Prison for 20 years.

He later became a prominent speaker on the horrors of the Nazi regime and managed to portray his own life as that of a 'clean man' for decades.

But a new biography by historian Magnus Brechtken, described as the first 'truly scientific' study of Speer, shows he was instrumental in the persecution of Jews, including exploiting forced labour.

READ MORE
Hitler's last days: Personal bodyguard on life in the bunker and how Nazi dictator and wife Eva Braun committed suicide

Albert Speer protested his innocence for decades (Photo: Mirrorpix)
Published next week, Albert Speer, A German Career, also reveals his previously unknown role in deporting Jews from Berlin and his membership of the ultra-right Nazi automobile club in the 1930s.

"Speer," says Brechtken, "was an ideal projection surface for millions of Germans who wanted to tell exactly the same story about putting distance between them and National Socialism as Speer did."

The book is published at the same time as a major exhibition opens at the site of the pompous Nuremberg parade ground about the man who fooled the postwar world about his real role in the Third Reich.

READ MORE
Secret files reveal Nazis 'tested nuclear bomb' before end of WW2 as Adolf Hitler plotted to decimate Britain

But Albert Speer, pictured here second left, knew full well about the atrocities, it is claimed (Photo: Getty)
As armaments minister he was charged with accelerating munitions and weapons production in a land reeling from Allied air bombardments.

To achieve this he relied heavily on the slave labour battalions recruited from the concentration camp gulag.

He saw these people on his frequent visits to armaments factories and must have known of their suffering.

"So it goes on in Brechtken's book, page by page," said Die Welt. "The Munich historian has succeeded in writing the deconstruction of the liar Albert Speer extremely fluently."

[Whitehall_Bin_Men]

Background
The Nazi Party Platform was a 25-point program for the creation of a Nazi state and society. Hitler presented the program at the Hofbräuhaus Beerhall in Munich, Germany on February 24, 1920.
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nazi-party-platform


The 25 points combined extreme nationalism, racial antisemitism, and socialist concepts with German outrage over the Versailles peace settlement following their defeat in World War I. The program called for German rejection of the Versailles Treaty and for the inclusion of all Germans (especially those living in Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland) into a Greater German state. The Nazis also publicly declared their intention to segregate Jews from "Aryan" German society and to abrogate the political, legal, and civil rights of Jews in Germany.

The 25 points also included also several measures designed to appeal to workers, the largest voting bloc in the Weimar Republic. These included calls for profit-sharing in large industries, the nationalization of trusts, free education, and an increase in pension payments.

After the Nazi Rise to Power
The 25 points remained the Nazi Party's official statement of goals, though in later years the Nazis ignored many points. Still, they achieved some of the goals. For example, they revoked German citizenship from Jews (the Nuremberg Race Laws) and excluded Jews from German society. Ultimately, the exclusion of Jews from society resulted in their deportation from Germany, which began in 1941.

Translation
(English translation of the 25-point program.1 German source text as published in Der Aufstieg der NSDAP in Augenzeugenberichten, 1974.)2

The Program of the German Workers’ Party is designed to be of limited duration. The leaders have no intention, once the aims announced in it have been achieved, of establishing fresh ones, merely in order to increase, artificially, the discontent of the masses and so ensure the continued existence of the Party.

1. We demand the union of all Germans in a Greater Germany on the basis of the right of national self-determination.

2. We demand equality of rights for the German people in its dealings with other nations, and the revocation of the peace treaties of Versailles and Saint-Germain.

3. We demand land and territory (colonies) to feed our people and to settle our surplus population.

4. Only members of the nation may be citizens of the State. Only those of German blood, whatever their creed, may be members of the nation. Accordingly, no Jew may be a member of the nation.

5. Non-citizens may live in Germany only as guests and must be subject to laws for aliens.

6. The right to vote on the State’s government and legislation shall be enjoyed by the citizens of the State alone. We demand therefore that all official appointments, of whatever kind, whether in the Reich, in the states or in the smaller localities, shall be held by none but citizens.

We oppose the corrupting parliamentary custom of filling posts merely in accordance with party considerations, and without reference to character or abilities.

7. We demand that the State shall make it its primary duty to provide a livelihood for its citizens. If it should prove impossible to feed the entire population, foreign nationals (non-citizens) must be deported from the Reich.

8. All non-German immigration must be prevented. We demand that all non-Germans who entered Germany after 2 August 1914 shall be required to leave the Reich forthwith.

9. All citizens shall have equal rights and duties.

10. It must be the first duty of every citizen to perform physical or mental work. The activities of the individual must not clash with the general interest, but must proceed within the framework of the community and be for the general good.

We demand therefore:

11. The abolition of incomes unearned by work.

The breaking of the slavery of interest

12. In view of the enormous sacrifices of life and property demanded of a nation by any war, personal enrichment from war must be regarded as a crime against the nation. We demand therefore the ruthless confiscation of all war profits.

13. We demand the nationalization of all businesses which have been formed into corporations (trusts).

14. We demand profit-sharing in large industrial enterprises.

15. We demand the extensive development of insurance for old age.

16. We demand the creation and maintenance of a healthy middle class, the immediate communalizing of big department stores, and their lease at a cheap rate to small traders, and that the utmost consideration shall be shown to all small traders in the placing of State and municipal orders.

17. We demand a land reform suitable to our national requirements, the passing of a law for the expropriation of land for communal purposes without compensation; the abolition of ground rent, and the prohibition of all speculation in land.

18. We demand the ruthless prosecution of those whose activities are injurious to the common interest. Common criminals, usurers, profiteers, etc., must be punished with death, whatever their creed or race.

19. We demand that Roman Law, which serves a materialistic world order, be replaced by a German common law.

20. The State must consider a thorough reconstruction of our national system of education (with the aim of opening up to every able and hard-working German the possibility of higher education and of thus obtaining advancement). The curricula of all educational establishments must be brought into line with the requirements of practical life. The aim of the school must be to give the pupil, beginning with the first sign of intelligence, a grasp of the notion of the State (through the study of civic affairs). We demand the education of gifted children of poor parents, whatever their class or occupation, at the expense of the State.

21. The State must ensure that the nation’s health standards are raised by protecting mothers and infants, by prohibiting child labor, by promoting physical strength through legislation providing for compulsory gymnastics and sports, and by the extensive support of clubs engaged in the physical training of youth.

22. We demand the abolition of the mercenary [i.e. professional] army and the formation of a people’s army.

23. We demand legal warfare on deliberate political mendacity and its dissemination in the press. To facilitate the creation of a German national press we demand:

(a) that all editors of, and contributors to newspapers appearing in the German language must be members of the nation;

(b) that no non-German newspapers may appear without the express permission of the State. They must not be printed in the German language;

(c) that non-Germans shall be prohibited by law from participating financially in or influencing German newspapers, and that the penalty for contravening such a law shall be the suppression of any such newspaper, and the immediate deportation of the non-Germans involved.

The publishing of papers which are not conducive to the national welfare must be forbidden. We demand the legal prosecution of all those tendencies in art and literature which corrupt our national life, and the suppression of cultural events which violate this demand.

24. We demand freedom for all religious denominations in the State, provided they do not threaten its existence nor offend the moral feelings of the German race.

The Party, as such, stands for positive Christianity, but does not commit itself to any particular denomination. It combats the Jewish-materialist spirit within and without us, and is convinced that our nation can achieve permanent health only from within on the basis of the principle: The common interest before self-interest.

25. To put the whole of this program into effect, we demand the creation of a strong central state power for the Reich; the unconditional authority of the political central Parliament over the entire Reich and its organizations; and the formation of Corporations based on estate and occupation for the purpose of carrying out the general legislation passed by the Reich in the various German states.

The leaders of the Party promise to work ruthlessly—if need be to sacrifice their very lives—to translate this program into action.