1. Georg Thomas was a German general who served during World War II.
18 Facts About Georg Thomas
1. 2.
Georg Thomas was a leading participant in planning and carrying out economic exploitation of the Soviet Union, most notably the Hunger Plan.
3.
Georg Thomas joined Infantry Regiment 63 as an ensign and a career soldier in 1908.
4.
From 1928 to 1938, Georg Thomas worked as the Chief of Staff for the Army Weapons Office in the Reich Defence Ministry, where he studied national economics and war preparations, pushing forward the idea of a "defense economy", the accumulation of Germany's resources for the purpose of war under a central planning commission.
5.
Georg Thomas was a member of the board of Kontinentale Ol AG as well as Reichswerke Hermann Goring, an iron and steel company.
6.
Georg Thomas was promoted in 1940 to General of Infantry, recognized early on that Germany's ability to wage a lengthy war was limited by the state of its economy.
7.
Georg Thomas informed Colonel-General Franz Halder, the Chief of the OKH General Staff, that the attack on the Soviet Union would experience logistical delays due to the fact that Russian railways were of a different gauge than German ones.
8.
Georg Thomas warned Halder of the insufficiency of German transport vehicle tires for the task ahead of them, and most significantly, Georg Thomas revealed to Halder that the Germans only had two months' worth of fuel oil and petrol for the invasion.
9.
Inexplicably, Halder did not convey this information to Hitler and when Georg Thomas tried to, General Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel suppressed the report.
10.
In November 1942, Georg Thomas resigned from the Defence Economy and Armament Office.
11.
The Chief of the Operations Staff for the OKW, Colonel-General Alfred Jodl, submitted the report to Hitler but he became irate when the estimates were given to him, mentioning Georg Thomas, who "rated the Soviet war potential as high".
12.
Apparently Georg Thomas tried several times to bring the German General Staff and Hitler back to reality.
13.
Georg Thomas was transferred to the Flossenburg and Dachau concentration camps.
14.
Georg Thomas was freed, and moved to Frankfurt am Main but imprisonment had broken his health and he died on 29 December 1946.
15.
Georg Thomas was deeply involved in the making of Nazi policy for the occupied Soviet Union, which was to exploit the resources of the country for the benefit of Germany and the German armed forces, at the expense of the deaths by starvation of millions of people.
16.
Georg Thomas worked closely with Herbert Backe, the de facto chief of Nazi agriculture, in developing this plan.
17.
On 2 May 1941, Georg Thomas held a meeting to review the strategy.
18.
The historian, Christopher Browning, wrote that on 2 May 1941, the state secretaries of various ministries met with Georg Thomas and agreed to make it a priority to supply the army with food from Russia and to ship other essential agricultural products, including grain, to Germany.