Cooper was talking about Russian POW’s (and Russian civilians) in the interview, pointing out the neglect in planning.
I did NOT hear him say that the Jewish Holocaust was “unintentional”, so if he did and I missed it (which is possible) if you can provide a timestamp I would appreciate it.
Thing is, I don’t believe that point of view from Cooper is in outer space or incompatible with known facts. (I am not a fan of his in any way. But that doesn’t make me right and him wrong). It may not be completely correct in every aspect.
It is the feeding of the POW’s, I believe that may have put the Germans in that state where they had to choose between Germans eating and “sub-human” Russians eating.
Feeding 5.7 million people every day is no small matter.
I maintain it is believable, because of the scale-It wasn’t that the Germans captured 200,000 Russian soldiers...They captured 5.7 million Russian soldiers, and 3.5 million of those Russians died in captivity.
On the condition of the Russian POW’s-something that is not, and never has been in question, only a very small portion of those 3.5 million dead prisoners were shot outright, I would guess. The vast number of them were viewed as unimportant and expendable, if not worthy of extermination.
But I am unaware of a codified plan, laid down on paper in advance to shoot, starve, or work to death Soviet POWs. Not like the plan the Nazis put into action at the Wannsee Conference in 1942. That is why I believe Cooper termed it “unintentional”. If they HAD codified it in the same way they did with Jews, then it would indeed be intentional.
And it is not beyond the imagining that in their already racist view of Slavs, they may not have, in their hatred, differentiated much between Russians and Jews in any case. I believe the Nazi term to lump them all together was “Untermenschen”. Subhumans to them,
So the treatment is not far different in the camps...to the point I have read an account (can’t remember which) where there were Jews in one of the concentration camps took pity on seeing the Russian POWs on the other side of the wire. (The Nazis kept the camps segregated, and the work parties too.)
3.3 million dead speaks for itself, but the sight of Jewish concentration camp inmates feeling sorry for them because their situation was so pathetically horrible really brings that home.
That said, if they had 5 million prisoners, they had to feed them. In a country being bombed, resources going to the military, and farming manpower on the battlefield, there was going to be less food to start with, fewer people to harvest crops and create food, and food destroyed on the way to people who needed it in population centers. Anything that moved on the ground was attacked by Allied aircraft.
In the face of all that, how much food were they going to take away to feed Russian POW’s? Those same POW’s who were responsible of the death of their loved ones? (Not saying that was right-just describing how the situation could have been framed.
It is at that point where the choice is shoot them all, or work them to death. And they worked 3.5 million Russians to death. My point is, I agree that it could have reached that point because they did not forsee it.
That’s all. And that is what I got from watching it.
If the Germans’ killing of Soviet POWs was purely an accident caused by limited resources... why didn’t they also systematically starve the 1.8 million French POWs they also captured? Zero French POWs were starved to death while in German captivity. This fails basic logic.
The German invasion of Russia included the Einsatzgruppen.
Einsatzgruppen were mobile SS death squads organized and run by Heinreich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich. Senior Nazi party officials directly accountable to Hitler. The Einsatzgruppen had operated as early as the Polish invasion of 1939.
They weren’t killing out of some kind of starvation necessity, to use the rationale that you proffer. This was just mass murder that originated in Nazi ideology.
There were four Einsatzgruppen units operating in Barbarossa and they are estimated to have killed 1.5 million people. Not soldiers, they were non-combatants, after the front line had moved on.
The fact that “historian” Cooper never mentions or addresses it means that he’s either too stupid to be taken seriously or he’s purposely ignoring it because it’s a glaring example of the evil that was a basic part of Nazism.
When my dad arrived in North Africa with Operation Torch his first assignment was to process German POWs. Part of that meant culling out SS from the regular German soldiers, a task made easier by the distinctive SS arm tattoo. The US Army in 1942 knew that there was something particularly wrong with the SS. Maybe our youthful historian ought to find out why.