Talk:Hunger Plan

Untitled

I think the phrase "the food ratios for German citizens" should read "the food rations for German citizens". However, I'm not certain, so I did not make the change.

Book advertisement?

There is not one citation in the entire article. There is only one reference, which is not a primary source. If the article is not an ad for his book, it should at least be presented in the context that some bloke called Adam Tooze says it is so. I'm new to Wikipedia, so I'll not make the change myself, but I find it shocking that such a badly written article can be promoted by a link from the MainPage DidYouKnow … section, Start-Class or not. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Like minded username (talk • contribs) 00:05, 26 January 2008 (UTC) Like minded username (talk) 00:13, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

Perhaps a section of the very first sentence in the article should be changed from "Germans were given priority over food … ." to "Germans were given priority in the area of food … " or something similar. JGC1010 (talk) 02:50, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

I have Tooze's book in front of me and it is a very throughly researched work which has been accepted by the community of historians. (I did see some minor errors, but these I would ascribe to translation issues.) The article is not an advertisement for the book, which covers a wide variety of other economic topics. I added sources for what I could see in doing research on a rewrite of Herbert Backe. The balance of the article also seems to be well within what Tooze and other sources are saying.Mtsmallwood (talk) 21:48, 25 July 2009 (UTC)

Motivation of "Hunger Plan"

It should be mentioned that during and immediately after the First World War, Germany and Austria suffered severe food shortages as a result of the British naval blockade of Germany. (See Wikipedia's article: "Blockade of Germany".) The Germans were determined to avoid a repeat of that experience, if only because the resulting famine was a contributing motive to the overthrow of the German government shortly after the armistice was signed with the western allies. Cwkmail (talk) 20:18, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

That would create a subliminal unintentially POV Moral equivalence which has no place in the article. I am totally AGF here, but it would be unwise. Irondome (talk) 20:30, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

The intention of my suggestion is not to suggest that the British intended to engage in genocide by blockading Germany during the First World War. Blockades had long been a standard strategy of warfare; e.g., the Union blockaded the Confederacy during the U.S. Civil War. Rather, my intention is merely to reveal one of the Nazis' motives for the Hunger Plan. In part, that famine had led to Germany's defeat in the First World War and to the overthrow of the German state. Almost everyone in Hitler's regime would have had keen memories of those events; the Nazis were determined not to repeat that mistake.

To say, for example, that the Nazi regime developed advanced military technology during the war (e.g., jet aircraft, liquid-fueled rockets, cruise missiles, etc.) does not excuse the regime's many crimes — such as the fact that much of that technology was built with slave labor that was deliberately starved to death. Similarly, to point out that the regime wanted to avoid a repeat of the famine during the First World War does not excuse the Nazi regime's criminal intention to perpetrate genocide; rather, mention of their fear merely reveals one motive (among several) for their (abominable) actions.

Indeed, one could argue that having experienced famine themselves, the Nazis' Hunger Plan was especially egregious, since they knew intimately the pain and suffering that their plan would inflict. The genocidal famine that was intended in the Hunger Plan was not an abstraction; every single person who helped plan it had had first-hand experience of famine. They knew precisely what they were doing and what the result would be. The 1918-1919 famine made them more culpable, not less.Cwkmail (talk) 22:14, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

You make some compelling points. However it would have to be very carefully worded, would have to be very judiciously placed in the most relevant area of mainspace and we will need much more input from interested colleagues. Re wording, I think it might be good to revisit Tooze and Niall Ferguson's The War Of The World especially, to see if there are any supporting passages. I seem to recall TWOTW discusses this topic, and has not been used in any article cites thus far. Irondome (talk) 22:25, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

User:Diannaa, do you have any initial thoughts on this? Irondome (talk) 23:26, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

There's probably some content on this topic in Longerich (The Holocaust) or Snyder (Bloodlands) though I don't personally have time to work on this article myself right now. -- Diannaa (talk) 00:09, 2 October 2014 (UTC)

Removed IP trolling;

Removed an IP trolling wall of text as per guidelines WP:NOTFORUM. Irondome (talk) 01:21, 5 April 2015 (UTC)

Holodomor

I'm not sure what I would propose, but it seems like this article should connect in some way to the article on the Holodomor. Among other things, the Alex Kay quote seems really strange, given that the Hunger Plan looks a whole lot like Stalin's program to starve Ukraine into submission. Rks13 (talk) 03:45, 24 August 2016 (UTC)

Except Stalin never had any plan to starve people. Otherwise he wouldn't try to buy grain in Iran 2A02:2121:61B:8AFF:0:0:4BC8:E22F (talk) 15:31, 23 June 2023 (UTC)

Uncited

Food was also shipped to Germany from France and other occupied territories in the West, although the West was never subjected to the genocidal starvation experienced in the East. Let us eat lettuce (talk) 02:33, 7 June 2017 (UTC)

Units of energy, wrong usage

1 calorie is the amount of energy we need to increase the temperature (by 1°C) of 1 gram water. 1 calorie = 4.184 Joule. So 420 calorie doesn't equals 1800 kJ! 420 KILOcalorie equals 1800 kJ! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.21.44.240 (talk) 10:48, 1 September 2019 (UTC)

Crimes against humanity category removal

Crimes against humanity is a specific legal concept. In order to be included in the category, the event (s) must have been prosecuted as a crime against humanity, or at a bare minimum be described as such by most reliable sources. Most of the articles that were formerly in this category did not mention crimes against humanity at all, and the inclusion of the category was purely original research. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 07:49, 14 February 2024 (UTC)

POV issues

The article discounts that some sources say that "plan" may be something of a misnomer, as it might imply that the "plans" were more coherent than they actually were.

It is also important to separate the planning done before the war started, versus the actual policies implemented, which greatly differ.

The article also is confusing because it doesn't make it clear that this plan/policy was integrally connected to the invasion of the Soviet Union and was directed towards the occupied Soviet Union in particular. (t · c) buidhe 05:10, 31 March 2024 (UTC)