The impact of a failed Generalplan Ost

[A Piece of History]

For the un-initiated, I will quckly explain what Generalplan Ost is. Generalplan Ost was the Nazi endgame for their conquest of Eastern Europe. Eastern Europeans were to be deprived of their respective nations and expelled to Western Siberia with Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia expected to be Germanized within 20 years, Poles were to be enslaved until they went extinct as both a nation and a people and deliberate starvation policies were to be implemented in the Ukraine to depopulate the area for German settlement. If you want a more detailed explanation, here is a Wikipedia link to a article about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost

Everytime I've asked about Generalplan Ost, I've heard that it would've massively backfired against the Nazis and was unfeasible, so I was curious about how Generalplan Ost could've failed and what impact it could've had on the Nazis and the world as a whole.

For the purposes of this scenario, the Nazis have conquered Britain and installed a puppet regime in 1940 and invaded the Soviet Union in April 1941, as was intended in our timeline. Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev all fall within a matter of weeks/months, the Soviets capitulate and the Nazis seize all of Eastern Europe up to a line stretching from Arkhangelsk to Astrakhan, known as the A-A line.

 

[James Ricker]

The Germans would be facing a well supplied resistance movement in all of Eastern Europe.
Think Vietnam from the Black Sea to the Baltic. That will be a drain on resources and Manpower for decades at minimum.
Not to mention the third reich's actions in Eastern Europe would piss off the rest of the world with the possible exception of Japan.

 

[sloreck]

Resistance in German occupied lands would be a nuisance for the Germans for a while. If you are willing to eliminate every living soul in a village near an incident, if you remove populations to slave labor concentrations, and if there is no real outside help or hope of victory, what will eventually happen is resistance will consist of isolated individuals or groups deciding to take one Nazi with them to the grave. The reality is that no so movement can exist without a supportive population, and in modern times some outside help. OTL WWII the resistance groups in occupied Europe and parts of Asia often did not really get going until later in the war when both Allied help and the reasonable prospect of Allied victory were there. Yes, there was some resistance from day one but limited. In the "Nazis win" scenario, neither is really present. Other than relatively close to the border in Russia nobody is getting much help from the outside. While Generalplan Ost was going to reduce the population of Untermenschen, with the exception of the Jews and Roma 100% extermination was not in the cards. As long as the prospect of life for you and your family, even as plantation slaves, exists, most folks won't decide "liberty or death". You can be sure that the first folks in the east to be killed off will be intellectuals, soldiers (especially officers), and others who could potentially lead such movements.

OTL there were small anticommunist groups in Eastern Europe in to the early 50s - absent real support from the outside, and the willingness of the USSR to use collective punishment and relocation they died away. The Nazis would be much more brutal.

 

[Wolttaire]

Yes but they stopped that otl because it was to draining on the troops

 

[Kalga]

I think most of the people pointing out the supposed point of failure tend to be in the economically related, as mass murder and the whole "blood and soil" thingy isn't really all that useful economically in height of the industrial era.

Basically the Nazis had a plan in destroying the existing economic activities of Eastern Europe (mass murder and city razing), however what they plan to replace (even if one assumes that they can get enough Aryan people to move there) isn't going to be all that useful in contributing to the overall economy that Germany needs. So in a sense the very success of the plan would be an economic catastrophe.

So if the plan fails (or abandoned), perhaps ironically the economy would be better off since that would imply there's still something to exploit there, or it was precisely the dire economic situation that would led them to abandon the plan to begin with...

 

[patton2]

I think that the conditions for the scenario are implausible. Germany could not conquer Britain and, even if they managed to reach the A-A line, I doubt that the Soviet Union would surrender.

And even if they managed to do that, the local populations would resist. It would be a situation of fighting or dying. Think in Vietnam just bigger and nastier.

Ultimately the germans would find the territories not worthy economically.

 

[Max Sinister]

Jared wrote in DoD that guerillas need support from abroad, or they'll fail. But since the border between nazi-occupied Russia and free (well, more-or-less free, if they stay Communist) Russia is pretty long, it could work.

What I found odd: The nazis had planned "Siedlungsstützpunkte", relatively small areas that were supposed to be Germanified 20-25% only.

 

[Lucius Verus]

What about smuggling? Not only would Nazi Germany have to keep people in but also forbidden goods out. I'm not sure Germany could sustain it's economy after it plunders it's former trade partners. I'd imagine that racial standards will be relaxed for "acceptable" sub races such as the Danes who looked pleasing enough.

Smuggling corrupts the enforcers of law and is nearly impossible to stop across a .