Discussion of the historical truth of the Nazi crimes of WW2 is always emotionally charged. Any departure, however small, from the official narrative is universally treated with contempt by officialdom, regardless of the veracity of the arguments put forward. Generalplan Ost is no exception.
While I have no problem accepting that the Nazis were a bunch of psychotic racist bastards, I am in all honesty not convinced that Generalplan Ost is anything more than a post-WW2 propaganda invention by the Allies. No copy of the plan was ever found, and the convenient "explanation" that all copies were destroyed is just too convenient. Wikipedia (how I hate it..) puts it best when it states:
"Although no copies of the actual document have survived, most of the plan's essential elements have been reconstructed from related memos, abstracts and other ancillary documents"
This to me is just too evasive. Much is made of the testimony of Hans Erlich (the man accused of being one of the authors of the plan), but he himself was never charged with war crimes, which is absurd given the agenda he is accused of. I suspect that he co-operated with occupation authorities and borne false witness to bolster the post-war de-Nazification program, and was subsequently rewarded with his record being expunged (he received less than 2 year sentence, and was released for time in custody, and went on to a long career as a physician, eventually dying in 1991 without further prosecution).
Before other forum members decry this as absurd, consider the case of other Nazi testimonies which time has shown to be a pack of lies. A classic case is that of Rudolf Höss, the Commandant of Auschwitz. Much has been made of his testimony regarding gas chambers at Auschwitz, yet it is known with absolute certainty that key claims are simply incorrect and are disproved by recent evidence released from the Soviet archives after the breakup of the USSR. Modern estimates of the total Auschwitz dead are ~ 1.2 million, of which ~900K are Jewish, yet in his memoirs, Höss states the following:
"I commanded Auschwitz until 1 December 1943, and estimate that at least 2,500,000 victims were executed and exterminated there by gassing and burning, and at least another half million succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total dead of about 3,000,000. This figure represents about 70% or 80% of all persons sent to Auschwitz as prisoners, the remainder having been selected and used for slave labor in the concentration camp industries. Included among the executed and burnt were approximately 20,000 Russian prisoners of war (previously screened out of Prisoner of War cages by the Gestapo) who were delivered at Auschwitz in Wehrmacht transports operated by regular Wehrmacht officers and men. The remainder of the total number of victims included about 100,000 German Jews, and great numbers of citizens (mostly Jewish) from Holland, France, Belgium, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Greece, or other countries. We executed about 400,000 Hungarian Jews alone at Auschwitz in the summer of 1944."
Why would Höss claim this when it clearly was not true? IMHO his "testimonies" are simply the propaganda prepared by the NKVD, written in his own hand. Höss co-operated under the threat that if he refused, the NKVD would take retribution on his son who was a prisoner of the British. Höss himself was captured by the British and beaten into signing a false confession written in English, before being handed over to the Polish military, ie into the hands of the NKVD. Given that he was handed over, why would he not believe that his son would likewise be handed over if the Soviets sought him? The man protected his family by acting as propaganda exhibit #1 and keeping his silence to the grave.
There is other key evidence that undermines the official narrative. Death records from the Auschwitz camp doctors (from the Soviet archives) indicate most prisoner deaths were due to typhus, eg the epidemics of 1942, and when added up, the records agree with recent estimates of prisoner deaths. The two architects/engineers that designed and constructed the Birkenau crematoriums (Walter Dejaco and Fritz Ertl) were prosecuted in 1964/65, but they were acquitted due to "a lack of evidence", though in actuality they were able to prove with the original blueprints that the complexes were only crematoria, and that no features required for mass homicidal poisoning with cyanide were included in the design. The existence of homicidal gas chambers at Birkenau is essentially disproved, yet the orthodox narrative remains and is repeated endlessly to the public while nay-sayers are criminalised and prosecuted.
Again, I assert that I believe that Hitler was a psychopath and his Nazi movement was guilty of outrageous crimes, however simply because much of the allegations are true, does NOT mean that ALL allegations are true. The difficulty in separating fact from fiction is that the Nazi crimes have been endlessly amplified and politicized for decades and large scale organised lying used to further the narrative, and all opportunity to critically examine the claims is strenuously denied, with anyone attempting to do being accused of being either a NAZI-supporter, anti-semite or "Holocaust denier", and in modern times, subjected to legal harassement and a ruthless demolition of their professional reputation, personal finances and ultimately incarceration.
Finally, before anyone launches into some hysterical attack on me for writing this post, I state categorically that I am no Nazi sympathiser or crazy hate-filled anti-semite, but I absolutely HATE being lied to. I have watched for decades how the US/NATO axis uses outrageous lies and propaganda to twist the publics perception to create hatred and hostility, and to manufacture fake reasons for their numerous wars and geo-political aggression. I see how the corrupt privately-owned and corporate-controlled media distributed and amplified the lies of the warmongering of US/EU/NATO. Witness the planned demolition by US/EU/NATO of a non-aligned socialist Yugoslavia on Europe's flank, and the successive absorption of its splintered republics into the EU/NATO monstrosity, while the Serbs are crudely demonized, made the sole scape-goat and her political/military elite are then persecuted by a NATO kangaroo court. can anyone really deny the obvious parallels with the official WW2 narrative and post-war de-nazification program?
Considering the example of Yugoslavia, I have little problem imaging how the Allied occupation authorities dealt with post-war Germany. De-nazification was the order of the day, and the German people were manipulated into co-operating with the re-engineering of their society by a comprehensive propaganda campaign intended to make them ashamed of themselves and of their nation (and in truth they had many reasons to believe and accept it). Anyone who hated the Nazis (and there were many, and with good reason) were free to tell the most outrageous tales without any fear of exposure of their lies (as were the Croat neo-fascists, Bosnian muslim fundamentalists and Kosovo Albanian irredentists), and German public figures of the new political order were mandated to accept the narrative (eg turncoats like Zoran Djindjic). Refusal meant exclusion from the political system, and possible prosecution as "Nazi-sympathizers" (eg Slobodan Milosevic, Vojislav Šešelj, Radovan Karadzic, Biljana Plavsic etc).
In summary, why do i have doubts about some aspects of the WW2 Nazi war-crimes? Because I see the same sort of lies and falsifications abound within the current hegemonic system, and the parallels with the post-WW2 period are simply too strong to ignore.
Final thought - we should probably open a new thread to segregate this kind of debate from the "legitimate" discussions on the forum. While there should be nothing wrong with a free and open debate supported by facts and well-reasoned conjecture, the subject material is intensely controversial and will always attract the sort of inflamed passions and vitriol that we are seeing here. Lets not detract from the discussion of Ukrainian affairs (dare I say celebration of the UkroWehmarchts downfall?) as it cheapens us all, and makes it easy for Russophobic detractors to point fingers and accuse pro-Russian commenters are being some kind of crazed "Putler/Hitler-loving fascists"
Apologies if anyone is offended by my challenging the Holocaust narrative, but truth should be considered sacrosanct, even when it is inconvenient or contrary to some peoples cherished beliefs.