Plan Ost: myth or fact?

Now there is no doubt that the plans of the German fascists were the elimination of millions of Slavs. On the other hand, there is no reliable evidence that the so-called Ost plan existed. The statement about the Nazi aspiration to destroy the inhabitants of the European part of the Soviet Union appeared during the trial of the tribunal in Nuremberg. It is quite natural that even before that time such a thought was repeatedly voiced by allied information struggle professionals, but at that time it was just propaganda.

Supporters of the idea of the extermination of the Slavs by the Germans refer to several documents at once. The general plan of Ost is the main one, even though its original version has not been discovered even to our time. Whatever it was, he was still mentioned during the Nuremberg trial. The only thing that was then available was only "Proposal and remarks to the plan." The authorship of this document is attributed to E. Wetzel, who was in charge of the Ministry of the Eastern Occupied Territories during the war. In general, he was a sketch made in a pencil in an ordinary notebook. The source, which was officially published, consists of four parts. The first was "Remarks that should be included in the Ost plan". The second section - "Remarks on Germanization", and the third - "The solution of the Polish question." The document completed the part that was called "The Question of Future Treatment of the Russian Population."

According to Wetzel, on The wastewater at the initial stage was to be resettled by four and a half thousand Germans. At the same time undesirable in the racial plan, the local residents should be sent to the West Siberian region. As for the Jews, they had to be exterminated before that. In the second part, the issue of including Germans with Nordic origin into the Reichs orbit is considered, and in the next most dangerous people Poles are named. At the same time, he stressed that it was impossible to liquidate them completely to solve the problem. In the final, fourth, section, the author admires the racial type of Russians, and therefore notes the inadmissibility of their elimination. In spite of everything, there are many obvious inaccuracies and mistakes in the remarks on what should be included in Ost's plan, which concern directly the activities of the department entrusted to Wetzel. All this places great doubt on the authenticity of this document and suggests the idea of its falsification. It is not ruled out that specialists working on it, representing the interests of the Allies, worked on it beforehand.

Most Western historians and scholars have long since seriously taken this document and do not consider it to be authentic. On the other hand, to assert that Ost's fascist plan is a fiction, in no case be impossible, even though even a copy of it was not found. Whatever it was, the monstrous acts of the Nazis during the war should have been something to regulate. Undoubtedly, Hitler's plans included the destruction of a huge number of Jews and Slavs, which numbered in the millions. There was or is not really such a document as the Ost plan, against this background it is no longer so important.