Even when imagery of the Teutonic Knights was used, it was not in an “atavistic”, backwards-looking sense; the calculating, commercial character of the Ostsiedlung’s settlements was emphasized. But the historical process that was taken as a model was the conquest of the American West. The construction of a German East was a thoroughly modernizing project and sought a high-intensive living space with cities, livestock and machinery on the farms and an extensive infrastructure network.
To pay this 67 billion Reichsmarks -more than had been spent on rearmament- would be raised from the national budget, local government, a special RKF fund, the Reichsbahn and debt, with more from the private sector; it would be a grandiose eastward movement not just of population but of capital.
Alongside massive expenses, this would require a large workforce; 400,000–800,000 were expected for the first phase. Forced labor would be used extensively and could reduce labor costs by 20%.
Some of this workforce would be lost to wastage, contributing to the demographic rearrangement that was expected to take place: a large part of the local population would starve or be moved to the east of the Reich’s new border. The mechanism for this was the one defined by short-term planning, which, as discussed, could not be implemented as expected. Expulsion from immediate areas of settlement was also considered, and a “trial run” done in the General Government. Starting on July 1942, the Polish population around Zamosc was expelled. This had limited success: many locals escaped to the forests, resistance activities heightened and the operation could only be carried out with a lot of German manpower.
This topic is part of wider controversies on wartime population management, for which Tooze has an insight. From the perspective of manpower, populations were an asset and it was desirable for the Reich to have them as large as possible for absorption into its war economy. Yet there was large-scale loss of population, including many potentially useful workers, through the treatment of Soviet POWs and foreign workers, the distribution of food and other factors, with further loss expected in plans that were not realized. This is a grave contradiction. The most commonly cited explanation is that counterposed to the desire for manpower was ideology, with a struggle taking place between a committed minority of SS officers and a pragmatic majority of Wehrmacht and civilian bureaucrats. Himmler himself sometimes used the rhetoric.
This ignores that there was another rational, economic concern on the same level as manpower: food. From this perspective, given Europe’s agricultural crisis populations were a liability and it was not desirable to have too many people. The three competing factors of manpower, ideology and food would over the course of the war evolve into a synthesis.
The gist of it was that scarce resources would be concentrated on the economically useful, with population loss left to the economically useless. The economically useful included the German population itself, which was kept at the top of the food hierarchy at all costs. It extended to the foreign workers - volunteers, conscripts and in the camps. As shown, in time their wastage was dealt with and the Reich tried to keep them alive and productive. Mortality among foreign workers was successfully brought to fairly low levels. Even the section of the camp population rented out to the war industry had its conditions improved. Some expected losses such as among the Soviet urban population did not take place, at least not as imagined. The concentration is also visible in small scale in performance feeding. In turn, the occupied countries with low productivity were at the bottom of the food hierarchy. Populations captured by the SS were subjected to “Selektion”, separating those who could be used by the war economy and those who couldn’t.