Did Hitler consider Slavs / Eastern Europeans to be "Subhuman" or racially inferior?

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Did Hitler consider Slavs / Eastern Europeans to be "Subhuman" or racially inferior?

Postby Lamprecht » 3 years 9 months ago (Tue Aug 27, 2019 5:44 pm)

It is generally claimed that Hitler tried to exterminate Jews, but then also other ethnic groups such as Gypsies and Slavs.
The claim is that he believed these people to be racially inferior, "Sub-human" or "Untermensch" - but is there any evidence?

Slavs are Indo-European people who speak the various Slavic languages of the larger Balto-Slavic linguistic group. They are the largest ethno-linguistic group in Europe, but Slavs are also found in parts of Asia.

From the USHMM:
According to Nazi ideology, Slavs were useless subhumans. As such, their leaders, the Soviet elite, were to be killed and the remainder of the population enslaved or expelled further eastward. As a result of these racist fantasies, millions of Soviet civilians were deliberately killed, starved, or worked to death. Millions of others were deported for forced labor in Germany or enslaved in the occupied eastern territories. German planners called for the ruthless exploitation of Soviet resources, especially of agricultural produce. This was one of Germany's major war aims in the east.
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/ ... viet-union

Some maps showing where Slavs are in Europe, and also phenotype
ImageImageImageImage

I will come back and post some research I have done on this topic, after I do a bit more reading.



In the meantime, some related threads:

"Master Race" / Herrenrasse / Herrenvolk - a deliberate mistranslation
viewtopic.php?t=12400

Black people / Africans in the "Holocaust" / Rhineland Bastards
viewtopic.php?t=12342

Myths about Generalplan Ost and Lebensraum
viewtopic.php?t=12639

Were Americans more anti-Semitic than anti-German during WWII?
viewtopic.php?t=12464
"There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments, and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance -- that principle is contempt prior to investigation."
— Herbert Spencer


NOTE: I am taking a leave of absence from revisionism to focus on other things. At this point, the ball is in their court to show the alleged massive pits full of human remains at the so-called "extermination camps." After 8 decades they still refuse to do this. I wonder why...

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Re: Did Hitler consider Slavs / Eastern Europeans to be "Subhuman" or racially inferior?

Postby Lamprecht » 3 years 9 months ago (Wed Aug 28, 2019 8:00 pm)

"Aryan" used to be synonymous with 'Indo-European' and only after Hitler's use of the term was it considered something different. In contrast to Gypsies/Romani and Jews, who are Indian and Semitic respectively, virtually all Europeans are Indo-European or "Aryan". Obviously, some "racist" things were said against Slavic groups when Germany was at war with them, but Slavs were not considered an inferior race by the National Socialist Germans.

Indo-European, when not defined as a racial group, is defined as a language group. Virtually all White Europeans speak an Indo-European language. The Basque people of Spain speak a non-Indo European language isolate; Finns, Estonians and Hungarians speak Finno-Ugric languages. However, using genetic data (which Hitler did not have) we now know that Basque, Finns, Estonians and Hungarians are European or "Aryan" just like the Indo-European language speakers.

Now, on to the German views of European races:
Image
Depiction of German Races 1 and 2: Nordic, Phalian, Western (Mediterranean), East-Baltic, Eastern (Alpine), and Dinaric.

Richard Rein (1936) Rasse und Kultur unserer Urväter. page 16:
These six races [listed above] are called Aryan according to our legislation. Aryans, therefore, are the people of Deutchland who belong to one of these six breeds, or who carry the genetic resources of these races mixed. (Not Aryans, on the other hand, are the Orientals and the Near Eastern, or crosses of these two with other races, as represented by the Jewish people.)

"Diese sechs Rassen werden nach unserer Gesetzgebung als arisch bezeichnet. Arier find also die menschen in Deutchland, die einer dieser sechs Rassen angehören oder die Gigenschasten dieser Rassen gemischt in sich tragen. (Nicht arier sind dagegen die Orientalen und Vorderasiatischen oder Kreuzungen dieser beiden mit anderen Rassen, wie sie das Jüdische Volk darstellt.)"


According to German Ahnenpaß law:
Aryan descent (German blooded) is thus a person who is free of foreign blood, as seen by the German people. The blood of Jews and Gypsies also living in Europe, that of the Asian and African races and the Aborigines of Australia and America (Indians), are considered as foreign. For example, if a Englishman or a Swede, a Frenchman or a Czech, a Pole or an Italian, is free of such foreign blood, he must be regarded as Aryan, whether he lives in his native country or in East Asia or in America or he may be a US citizen or a South American Free State.

"Arischer Abstammung (deutschblütig) ist demnach derjenige Mensch, der frei von einem, vom deutschen Volke aus gesehen, fremdrassigen Blutseinschlage ist. Als fremd gilt hier vor allem das Blut der auch im europäischen Siedlungsraume lebenden Juden und Zigeuner, das der asiatischen und afrikanischen Rassen und der Ureinwohner Australiens und Amerikas (Indianer), während z.B. ein Engländer oder Schwede, ein Franzose oder Tscheche, ein Pole oder Italiener, wenn er selbst frei von solchen, auch ihm fremden Blutseinschlägen ist, als verwandt, also als arisch gelten muß, mag er nun in seiner Heimat oder in Ostasien oder in Amerika wohnen oder mag er Bürger der U.S.A. oder eines südamerikanischen Freistaates sein."


Robert Ley (1943) Organisationsbuch der NSDAP:
German blood does not form its own race. The German people are made up of representatives of different races. But all these races are characterized by the fact that their blood is mutually compatible and a mixture of these blood, unlike blood that is not related to them, does not create obstacles and strains.
To the German blood, you can, without a doubt, equate the blood of those peoples whose racial makeup is related to the German people. This applies to all people inhabiting the lands of Europe. Blood, related to German, is equally considered in all directions. Therefore, the citizens of the Empire can become representatives of minorities living in Germany, for example, Poles, Danes, etc.

Image
From: https://archive.org/details/Organisatio ... /page/n805


The following map was made by Ewald Banse based on the research from:
Hans F. K. Günther (1922) Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes
Image

As you can see, Europeans/White people are a mix of the six "Aryan" races, with Slavs mostly a mixture of East Baltic and Nordic.

Additionally, from Günther:

Image

Racial composition of the German people:
ImageImage


Stephanie Schoeman's interview with General Otto Ernst Remer, 1990:
Question: Is it true that the Germans referred to the Russians as "subhumans"?

Answer: Nonsense! The Russians are human beings just like everyone else.

Your question, whether we called the Russians "subhumans," is nonsense. We had a first-class relationship with the Russian people. The only exception, which was a problem we dealt with, was with the Soviet Commissars, who were all Jews. These people stood behind the lines with machine guns, pushing the Russian soldiers into battle. And anyway, we made quick work of them. That was according to order. This was during a war for basic existence, an ideological war, when such a policy is simply taken for granted.

There was sometimes talk about the so-called Asian hordes, and ordinary soldiers sometimes spoke about subhumans, but such language was never officially used.
An Interview With General Otto Ernst Remer
https://codoh.com/library/document/2278/


In his speech "World danger of Bolshevism" on 10 September 1936, Joseph Goebbels said that "subhumans exist in every people as a leavening agent" ("das Untermenschentum, das in jedem Volke als Hefe vorhanden ist")
Cited here: https://books.google.com/books?id=CJGoC ... 22&f=false


Image
The English translation of the famous pamphlet "Der Untermensch" (shown above) says in the description:
Far from being anti-Slavic, the reader will see that the SS Head Office publication portrayed Russians as victims of Communism—and then specifically blamed Jews as being behind Communism, and, ideologically speaking, inheritors of a far older, far eastern attack on Europe which had started with Genghis Khan and the Mongols. Nowhere in the SS book are the Slavic people denigrated, and in fact many of the traditional Slavic nations are mentioned in text and photograph as being part of the greater European family. [...] The suffering of ordinary Russian people under the Soviet system forms a large focus in this work, and at all times great sympathy is evoked for these victims of Communism: men, women and children alike. Special mention is made of their awful living conditions, inflicted by the Soviet economic collectivization system, and always condemned only as the result of Communism.
see: https://archive.is/DnJhT#selection-776.0-776.1


Also:
In his speech of 28 April 1939, Hitler spoke highly of the Czech people. As for the Untermenschen, here is what Hans Fritzsche stated at the IMT:

“German propaganda, and under that I understand official German propaganda, did not even preach racial hatred. It only spoke about racial distinctions, and that is something quite different; but I will admit that there was a certain type of German propaganda which went beyond that and which did preach the clear-cut and primitive racial hatred[…]”[20]

While the term Untermenschen was used, it was never officially sanctioned – Alfred Rosenberg confirmed this.
The latest effort to combat "denial", i.e., Holocaust revisionism (Part II)
https://codoh.com/library/document/4470/


Another good article on the topic:
Historically, Hitler’s view of the Slavic peoples was contentious and adversarial. It is not difficult to find hostile and aggressive remarks concerning the Slavs in both Hitler’s formal writings as well as in his informal discussions. In Mein Kampf, he ascribes his youthful awakening as a folkish nationalist to the ethnic struggles that he himself experienced between the Slavic Czechs and the Germans within the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Hitler’s attitude towards the Slavs, however, especially after 1938 or 1939, matured. He recognized, for example, that were large segments of the Czech and Slovenian Slavic peoples that were racially valuable and he eagerly anticipated incorporating them into his post-war Greater Germanic Reich. Words and theories are all very well and fine, and should by no means be undervalued. But in the world of facts, it is actions alone that count, not intentions.

James Murphy is responsible for a very bad translation of Mein Kampf, to which, ironically, he wrote a fine introduction. In it, he comments on the evolution of Hitler’s thought over the years:
“Why doesn’t Hitler revise Mein Kampf? The answer, as I think, which would immediately come into the mind of any impartial critic, is that Mein Kampf is a historical document which bears the imprint of its own time. To revise it would involve taking it out of its historical context. Moreover, Hitler has declared that his on-going acts and public statements constitute a partial revision of his book, and are to be accepted as such.” (p. 10). James Murphy, translator of Mein Kampf.

To understand Hitler’s thinking on the Slavs after it matured we need to look at the actions he took and the policies he enacted during Churchill and Roosevelt’s war against the Reich.

What emerges from such examination is that Hitler treated the Slavic nations in accordance with their attitude towards Germany; those that were friendly towards Germany, he treated as friends; those who were hostile to Germany, he treated as enemies. Is there anyone, anywhere who finds this policy unreasonable?
The Myth of Slav Inferiority
https://europeansworldwide.wordpress.co ... feriority/ or https://archive.is/BsiZn


So in conclusion, it is quite obvious that Hitler did not see Slavs as non-Aryan (except those with Mongoloid/Asian admixture, such as in parts of Russia) or racially inferior.
"There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments, and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance -- that principle is contempt prior to investigation."
— Herbert Spencer


NOTE: I am taking a leave of absence from revisionism to focus on other things. At this point, the ball is in their court to show the alleged massive pits full of human remains at the so-called "extermination camps." After 8 decades they still refuse to do this. I wonder why...

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Re: Did Hitler consider Slavs / Eastern Europeans to be "Subhuman" or racially inferior?

Postby Hannover » 3 years 9 months ago (Thu Aug 29, 2019 1:13 am)

Well done, Lamprecht.
The "sub-human" lie is used as a 'holocaust' narrative gateway.
It's a crude form of vote buying by "The Holocaust Industry".
It helps the naive to accept the fake claim of "6,000,000 Jews and 5,000,000 others" while it encourages eastern Europeans to make false claims which allows them to grab hold of the cherished 'woe is us' victim status.
And then, of course, there's always the money / 'reparation$'.

- Hannover

"Action makes propaganda's effect irreversible. He who acts in obedience to propaganda can never go back. He is now obliged to believe in that propaganda because of his past action. He is obliged to receive from it his justification and authority, without which his action will seem to him absurd or unjust, which would be intolerable. He is obliged to continue to advance in the direction indicated by propaganda, for action demands more action."

from: 'Propaganda', by French philosopher Jacques Ellul
If it can't happen as alleged, then it didn't.

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Re: Did Hitler consider Slavs / Eastern Europeans to be "Subhuman" or racially inferior?

Postby FJI » 3 years 9 months ago (Thu Aug 29, 2019 6:46 pm)

Fantastic, informative thread, thank you.

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Re: Did Hitler consider Slavs / Eastern Europeans to be "Subhuman" or racially inferior?

Postby Lamprecht » 3 years 9 months ago (Mon Sep 02, 2019 8:21 pm)

Various Slavs and other ethnicities in volunteer units:
Image

14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician) - World War II German military formation made up predominantly of military volunteers with a Ukrainian ethnic background, later also with Czechs and Slovaks.
"There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments, and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance -- that principle is contempt prior to investigation."
— Herbert Spencer


NOTE: I am taking a leave of absence from revisionism to focus on other things. At this point, the ball is in their court to show the alleged massive pits full of human remains at the so-called "extermination camps." After 8 decades they still refuse to do this. I wonder why...

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Re: Did Hitler consider Slavs / Eastern Europeans to be "Subhuman" or racially inferior?

Postby Otium » 2 years 7 months ago (Thu Oct 29, 2020 6:34 am)

The question about whether or not Hitler or the "Nazis" believed Slavs to be "Subhuman" is certainly a contentious issue, particularly because it helps to lend non-Jewish European sympathy to the Holocaust narrative. The claim is false, the National Socialists considered the Slavs to be a linguistic group as opposed to a racial group.

There was no uniformity of thought on racial questions - to expect that there was some single "National Socialist" conception of race is to gloss over the debates that raged on within Germany during the Third Reich as to various definitions of race as the concept evolved. Much of the racial thinking in Germany was no different to anywhere else, the same authors that elucidated the Nazi thoughts on race were widely popular around the world and in Germany before the National Socialists came to power.

Names like Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Arthur de Gobineau, Eugene Fischer, Hans F.K. Gunther, Madison Grant, Charles Darwin etc. were known around the world.

For example, Madison Grant was an American author, and he had an important influence on Hitler as he did many Americans:

I found a translation of Madison Grant’s 1916 classic racist tract, The Passing of the Great Race; or, The Racial Basis of European History. Hitler’s copy, a fourth edition published in 1925...

Timothy W. Ryback, Hitler's Private Library: The Books that Shaped his life (Vintage Books Paperback, 2010), Pp. 110


Apart from just owning books by Grant, Hitler also sent a letter to him, and corresponded with many other American Eugenicists:

In 1934, one of Hitler's staff members wrote to Leon Whitney of the American Eugenics Society and asked in the name of the Führer for a copy of Whitney's recently published book, The Case for Sterilization. Whitney complied immediately, and shortly thereafter received a personal letter of thanks from Adolf Hitler. In his unpublished autobiography, Whitney reported a conversation he had with Madison Grant about the letter from the Führer. Because he thought that Grant might be interested in Hitler's letter he showed it to him during their next meeting. Grant only smiled, reached for a folder on his desk, and gave Whitney a letter from Hitler to read. In this, Hitler thanked Grant for writing The Passing of the Great Race and said that "the book was his Bible." Whitney concluded that, following Hitler's actions, one could believe it.

Hitler's personal correspondence with American eugenicists reveals both the influence that American eugenicists had on the highest figures of the Nazi regime and the crucial importance that National Socialists placed on garnering support for their policies among foreign scientists. The Nazi government consistently relied on the support of scientists to propagate their race policies both at home and abroad.

Stefan Kühl, Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism (Oxford University Press, 2002), Pp. 85-86


Hitler seems to have been mostly influenced by Hans F.K. Gunter, who was popular in Germany before Hitler ever came to power:

Along with Grant’s Passing of the Great Race, the most notable books are those by Hans F. K. Günther, whose works Hitler included among his recommended readings for Nazi Party members. The former literary scholar turned social anthropologist produced a series of infamous studies on racial typology that veritably defined the Nazi discipline of racial anthropology and laid the groundwork for its racial laws and eugenics programs. Günther’s efforts earned him the sobriquet “Racial Günther” (Rassengünther), and the personal attendance of Adolf Hitler at his appointment ceremony as a professor at the University of Jena.

Four of Hitler’s six Günther volumes are copies of Racial Typology of the German People, a dense five-hundred-page tome that provides a compendium of Aryan identity. The earliest volume, a third edition published in 1923, is inscribed by Lehmann to “the successful champion of German racial thinking,” and is followed by a 1928 edition sent as a “Christmas greeting,” a fourteenth edition in 1930, and a copy of the sixteenth edition in 1933 with a handwritten inscription that hails Hitler as “the trailblazer of racial thinking.”

This latter volume, bound in simple gray linen with the author and title imprinted in old German script on the cover and an extended appendix of European Jews, shows signs of frequent or sustained study. It opens effortlessly to reveal worn pages and a ragged tear along the inside cover where the spine has begun to come apart.

With this cache of Lehmann books we are in possession of a core collection within the Hitler library and the primary building blocks not only for Hitler’s intellectual world but for the ideological foundations of his Third Reich.

Timothy W. Ryback, Hitler's Private Library: The Books that Shaped his life (Vintage Books Paperback, 2010), Pp. 110-111


If anyone wants to best try and grasp what Hitler thought about race, then he should probably read Hans Gunther's 'Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes' (Racial Typology of the German People). I would even say that Gunther probably had more of an affect on Hitler than Grant did, but according to Gunther himself, the Americans played a large part in the foundations of German attitudes towards race at that point in time:

In February 1934, Hans F. K. Giinther, race anthropologist and a special protege of the Nazis, explained to his audience in a crowded hall at the University of Munich that it was remarkable that "American immigration laws were accepted by the overwhelming majority, although the United States appeared the most liberal country of the world." He referred to Grant and Stoddard as the "spiritual fathers" of immigration legislation and proposed that the laws serve as a model for Germany.9 Nazi racial hygienists were especially impressed by the way in which American immigration policy combined eugenic and ethnic selection.10

Stefan Kühl, Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism (Oxford University Press, 2002), Pp. 38-39


For the race deniers among the left today, this proves that the Americans are guilty of inspiring Hitler and can now feel justified in berating their own nation for yet "another" historical misdeed. To white nationalists that aren't willing National Socialists, this is something they'd like to deny or mitigate, because they do not want to believe that their historical institutions of race science were interacting let alone inspiring Hitler and National Socialism whom they'd rather depict as "weird" fanatics who didn't follow conventional notions of race at that time.

Robert Gellately tells us in a review of Michael Burleigh's "The Racial State":

the Nazis' plans for establishing a "racial new order," these, too, are modern notions. The scientists who formulated and propagated the ideas on which the future society was to be based were generally not marginal quacks or ideologically blinded Nazi fanatics, much less simpleminded "reactionaries." These people were to be found in the newly emerging racial science and in certain branches of medicine, and many were firmly rooted in the academic establishment. They were considered to be farsighted "reformers" before 1933 as well as in the Nazi era, when it became possible to attempt to implement their ideas.

The authors are distressed because, as they see it, "if the modernising theory is correct, then not only do the crimes of Nazi Germany cease to be singular, but they become comparable with the crimes of other regimes" (p. 304).

Robert Gellately, The Racial State: Germany, 1933-1945. Michael Burleigh , Wolfgang Wippermann,
Book Review in The Journal of Modern History, Volume 66, No. 4.
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1086/244995
robert gellately review 1.JPG


The point I wish to impress upon the reader of this post, is that Hitler and the National Socialists really weren't that bizarre or weird in their way of thinking about race than any other European populated country. The Germans simply had other racial problems that they needed to solve. The Americans had their blacks, and Germany had their Jews. The Slavic question is harder to discern because of the amount of conflation that exists and the presumption of what the German attitude was in regards to foreign policy, racial policy, allied policy, friendship policy, and whatever else.

No people of Europe is racially homogeneous, also Germany is not. According to the latest research, we accept five races all of which reveal perceptibly different types. But it is beyond question that the true culture bearer for Europe has been in the first place the Nordic race. Great heroes, artists and founders of states have grown from this blood. [...] "…nothing would be more superficial than to measure a man's worth by his physical appearance (with a centimetre rule and cephalic indices). A far more accurate measure of worth is conduct.

Alfred Rosenberg, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (Hoheneichen Verlag, 1930), Pp. 576, 596


Rosenberg's 'Myth of the 20th Century' is probably the second most infamous book to come out of the National Socialist era besides 'Mein Kampf'. Yet there is more nuance here than anyone is willing to give the National Socialists credit for. I cannot claim though, that Rosenberg's views were accepted by all National Socialists, I would be a hypocrite to suggest such a thing. But I am saying that Rosenberg's admissions here, in this work that is still a key piece of National Socialist philosophy does a lot to discredit many malicious myths.

One could argue that Rosenberg's views were only one set of views out of many, but this would require the hostile academic establishment to stop applying fallacious holistic descriptions to the alleged "Nazi" views on race or anything else. They would have to admit that there wasn't some uniform "Nazi view" of things, but wide varieties of views to varying degrees. Rosenberg, lest we forget, was minister in the Eastern Occupied territories and attempted to push for a more pro-Slavic policy:

Rumors of these atrocities distressed Rosenberg, ordered by Hitler to draw up a blueprint for occupation of the conquered Eastern territories. He had envisaged a far different program with a degree of self-rule. Since the Führer had earlier agreed to establish “weak socialist states” in the conquered lands of Russia, Rosenberg optimistically assumed that Hitler approved his own plan in principle and that it would be accepted at a special conference on the subject to be held at the Wolfsschanze on July 16. “It is essential,” said Hitler (according to Bormann’s notes of the meeting), “that we do not proclaim our views before the whole world. There is no need for that but the main thing is that we ourselves know what we want.” If this did not reveal to Rosenberg that Hitler had changed his mind about establishing “weak socialist states,"

[...]

Although Rosenberg left the meeting with the title of Reich Minister of the East, it was a hollow one, for he realized his own dream of the East now had little chance to materialize. What a tragedy, he thought, that Hitler still maintained the false conception of Slavs, born during his youthful days in Vienna out of inflammatory pamphlets which described the Slavs as lazy primitives, a hopelessly second-class race. Equally disastrous was Hitler’s complete misunderstanding of the structure of the Soviet Union. The Ukrainians and other tribes under the yoke of the Great Russians were potential allies of the Third Reich and could be a bulwark of defense against Bolshevism if treated properly and given a measure of self-rule. But the Führer had been persuaded by Bormann and Göring that they were enemies to be controlled by the whip. The struggle to turn Hitler from this path seemed hopeless but Rosenberg resolved to keep trying.

John Toland, Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography (Doubleday, 1976), Pp. 677


Hitler had indeed intended at one state to allow the Slavic populations to live autonomously in Weak Socialist States, Shirer also confirms this intention:

Hitler also declared in this order that as soon as military operations were concluded Russia would be ”divided up into individual states with governments of their own.

William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), Pp. 832


When Hitler offered peace to Britain he offered to grant the Poles their own rump state, initially having no intention to occupy the entire country. Only later did this occur due to British obstinance and Polish disobedience:

That said, Hitler kept his options open in Poland for at least six weeks after the invasion began, partly in the residual hope of securing its assistance against the Soviet Union, but mainly in order to facilitate an agreement with London. In his remarks to Halder shortly after the British declaration of war, he held out the possibility that ‘rump Poland’ would be ‘recognized’, adding that while Germany would control the Narew and the Warsaw industrial area, ‘Krakau, Polen’ and ‘Ukraine’ [sic] would be ‘independent’.50 A month into the invasion, Hitler was still considering options for Poland, one of which was a ‘rump state’.51 This suggests that Hitler had not given up his idea of a modus vivendi with Poland based on joint expansion eastwards. A certain residual respect for Poland, even after the invasion, was evident in the fact that Hitler praised Marshal Piłsudski as ‘a man of indisputable realist understanding and energy’ in his Danzig speech of 19 September, blaming his death for the renewed hostility between Germany and Poland.52 The Führer also ordered an honour guard to be placed outside Marshal Piłsudski’s final resting place in Cracow, where it remained throughout the entire German occupation.53

These moves culminated in a dramatic Reichstag address on 6 October 1939, in which Hitler announced victory in Poland and offered Britain a peace settlement which would include an ill-defined rump Polish statehood.54 This offer was not merely tactically motivated but–by his own lights–sincerely meant.55 Failure to accept the proffered hand, he warned, would lead to the destruction of the British Empire. ‘This annihilatory struggle,’ Hitler proclaimed, ‘will not be limited to the mainland [of Europe]. No. It will spread far across the sea. There are no more islands today.’56

Brendan Simms, Hitler: Only the World Was Enough (Penguin, Allen Lane, 2019), Pp. 355-356


This has been confirmed many times, most notably and controversially by David Irving:

hitler’s territorial plans for Poland were still indeterminate. In a secret speech to his generals on August 22 he had set as his goal ‘the annihilation of the Polish forces’ rather than any particular line on the map. But on September 7 he also mentioned to his army Commander in Chief, General von Brauchitsch, the possibility of founding an independent Ukraine. Hitler’s notion was to mark the ultimate frontier between Asia and the West by gathering together the racial German remnants scattered about the Balkans, Russia, and the Baltic states to populate an eastern frontier strip along either the River Bug or the Vistula. Warsaw would become a centre of German culture; or alternatively it would be razed and replaced by green fields on either side of the Vistula. Between the Reich and the ‘Asian’ frontier, some form of Polish national state would exist, to house the ethnic Poles – a lesser species of some ten million in all. To stifle the growth of new chauvinistic centres, the Polish intelligentsia would be ‘extracted and accommodated elsewhere.’ With this independent rump Poland, Hitler planned to negotiate a peace settlement that had some semblance of legality and thereby spike the guns of Britain and France. If however this rump Poland fell apart, the Vilna area could be offered to Lithuania, and the Galician and Polish Ukraine could be granted independence – in which case, as Canaris noted, Keitel’s instructions were that his Abwehr-controlled Ukrainians ‘are to provoke an uprising in the Galician Ukraine with the destruction of the Polish and Jewish element as its aim.’

David Irving, Hitler's War and the War Path (Millennium Edition, Focal Point Publications, 2002), Pp. 225-226


The infamous conference of August 22nd 1939 was heavily quoted at Nuremberg to support the Allied contention that Hitler planned an aggressive war. This was utterly untrue, but it didn't stop them from using the line, allegedly spoken by Hitler that it "wasn't about reaching any line on a map" which was taken to mean that Hitler was planning the destruction of Poland and unceasing Imperial aggression in Eastern Europe. Irving refutes this ridiculous claim in a footnote, putting this phrase into its proper context:

The reference to crushing ‘the living daylights’ – die lebendigen Kräfte – out of Poland was misinterpreted by the Allied prosecutors at Nuremberg. In fact Hitler was just stating the basic military fact that the strategic objective was to destroy the enemy, not attain some line on a map. The professional soldiers present understood this perfectly (see, e.g., Bock’s diary). Note that Hitler used precisely the same turn of phrase in his harangue to the generals before the Battle of the Ardennes, on Dec 12, 1944 (Heiber, op. cit., 721).

Ibid., p. 861


Of course Hitler is right. In the case of war with Poland, it wasn't about reaching some line, all of Poland needed to be destroyed if that's what it took to win against them. Hitler's attitude towards the Poles evolved over time, initially prior to the war with Poland, Hitler really had no problem with the Poles as a group, it was only after that he took a particularly harsh line with them in particular and decided against creating a Rump state when the British showed how adamant they were to continue the war:

Hitler’s hope for a peaceful solution with Britain drove his policy towards Poland. To be sure, his attitude towards that country had hardened considerably since the spring of 1939 and it deteriorated further in the course of the campaign. His visits to the front had left him with a highly unfavourable impression. The Poles had only a ‘thin Germanic layer’ below which the ‘material’ was ‘terrible’, he told Rosenberg in late September 1939, adding that the ‘Jews’ were the ‘most awful thing one could image’ and that the ‘cities were bristling with dirt’.47 This was not just rhetoric. Shortly after the fighting started, Hitler instructed the army not to interfere with the murderous activities of the SS. So while the Wehrmacht fought the Poles largely according to the rules of war, the treatment meted out to them by the SS and other formations was extraordinarily brutal from the start.48 When all is said and done, however, it is possible that it was the approach of war, and the conflict itself, which irrevocably turned Hitler into an extreme anti-Polish racist rather than the other way around.49 In his mind, the Poles had forced him to treat them badly, and he never forgave them for it.

Brendan Simms, Hitler: Only the World Was Enough (Penguin, Allen Lane, 2019), Pp. 355


and:

An indirect result of the British snub of his peace overture was a further hardening in Hitler’s attitude to the future of Poland. He did not renew his offer to set up a rump Polish state. The Poland of 1939 would be subdivided, dismembered, and repopulated in such a way that it would never again rise to embarrass Germany or the Soviet Union

David Irving, Hitler's War and the War Path (Millennium Edition, Focal Point Publications, 2002), Pp. 245-246


The fact that Hitler was never preoccupied by hatred of the Poles, or Slavs in general is confirmed here too:

From the outset, Hitler’s particular hatred, and that of the Nazi leadership, was reserved for the so-called Slavic peoples, who were considered inferior and intended for the future slave class of Europe. From a purely racial standpoint, however, this was incapable of satisfactory proof, since even according to German ethnology it was impossible to speak of a Slavic race.223 According to National Socialist doctrine ,justification for discrimination against the Slavs lay rather in the “ethnic threat” presented by their fecundity. This is why Hitler quite early sketched precise outlines for the future “depopulation policy” in the East, which foresaw the annihilation of these peoples224 and which was later carried out virtually to the letter by the civil administration and the police forces. Such arguments already imply that the treatment of the “non-Germans” under special law was actually justifiable only from the standpoint of (population) policy; nevertheless, the National Socialist leadership clung fast to the concept of racial value or lack thereof, in an attempt to concoct their policy on the basis of absolutely untenable racial arguments.

Where members of neutral or allied nations in (southern) Europe were concerned, of course, it was not possible to speak of inferiority; therefore, these peoples were either classified as “Southern Slavs,” as “Dinarians” and thus as racially related;225 or else they were simply not counted among the Slavs at all.226 Members of enemy states, by contrast, were turned into “racial foes” as a means of justifying their classification under special law. Thus Hitler simply insinuated that the Czechs were (racially) inferior (descended from “Mongoloid tribes”), since he desired to rid himself of them in order to incorporate “Bohemia and Moravia” into the Reich; also “inferior” were Ukrainians, east-European Jews, Soviet Russians, Bulgarians,227 Lithuanians, and members of other Eastern European peoples. Of course, this was nothing more than sloganeering and from a racial perspective not acceptable as justification even in the Nazi sense of the word. More imprecise than anything else was the position of the Soviet Russians in the Nazi racial scheme. Since they were declared to be political mortal enemies (as Bolshevists) while simultaneously being considered the incarnation of the racial foe (Jewry), Bolshevism and Jewry were flatly equated with one another, referred to as the “Jewish-Bolshevist threat,” and made out to be the very quintessence of all types of inferiority.228

Analogously, no convincing race-theoretical explanation could be found to justify the discrimination against Poles. According to National Socialist racial doctrine, all European peoples belonged to the family of the Aryans and were thus fundamentally “racially equivalent,” that is, recognized as equal before the law. 229 Discrimination against Poles was justified, however, because, like all Slavs, they represented a major völkisch and racial threat to Germany. Yet here, too, such reasoning was merely pretext. In his early statements on the Slavs, Hitler did not even mention the Poles, because at that time Poland was signatory to the Non-Aggression Treaty of 1934, and its position in the National Socialist scheme of conquest was not yet settled. The “ethnic threat” posed by the Poles was not discovered until the invasion of Poland. The placement of the Poles under rule of special law was done from fundamentally political motives, which were considerably intensified by the antipathy toward the Poles that, for reasons both political (voting disputes [Abstimmungskampf] in East and West Prussia, fighting in West Prussia and Upper Silesia, and the activities of the Freikorps) and religious, had been present in the eastern part of Germany in a particularly intense form since 1918. The main reason, however, was that the Nazi leadership considered the Poles to be the most dangerous of all peoples in Eastern Europe on account of their staunch insistence upon their national rights and identity as a people.230 The race-political grounds for hatred of the Poles were merely the ideological mask justifying the National Socialist policy of violent force.231

The political basis for the systematically fomented hatred of and malice against Poles reveals itself in the thesis, invented ex post facto, of their “threat to the community,” which then became the dominant argument in both theory and practice. According to this, the Poles had to be excluded from the European community of rights on account of their “Germanophobia” and their political incompetence and “lack of culture.”232 In contrast with this political argument, neither the racial window dressing of Nazi propaganda that commenced in 1939, according to which the Poles were “racial foes”233 with regard to whom legal restraints were not to be observed, nor the elaborate attempts of the Race Policy Office to set up a racial classification of the Poles achieved much of an echo.234 Finally, the political basis for the unequal treatment of the peoples of Eastern Europe is seen in the about-face of the Nazi leadership when the fortunes of war were reversed and the labor of the “non-Germans” was required ever more urgently. On instructions from the Central Office of Propaganda of the NSDAP dated February 15, 1943, all chiefs of propaganda of the Reich Gaue were obliged, “within the framework of the war against Russia, for which the energies of all the peoples of Europe are required,” to cease insulting the “Eastern nations” either directly or indirectly, and no longer characterize them as “beasts,” “subhumans,” and so forth, in order to gain their aid “in the struggle against Bolshevism.”235

Diemut Majer, "Non-Germans" Under the Third Reich: The Nazi Judicial and Administrative System in Germany and Occupied Eastern Europe with Special Regard to Occupied Poland, 1939-1945 (John Hopkins University Press, 2003), Pp. 62-64


This long quotation might be very confusing, because, as Majer points out, the National Socialists recognised the Slavs to be Aryans, but when they constituted a threat they needed to be othered in order to protect the German people. Whether they actually believed the negative things Majer claims they did doesn't seem likely, even through the particularly hostile portrait Majer paints.

The source for note 224 where he says "annihilation of these peoples" is Hermann Rauschning's "Gespräche mit Hitler" the well known forgery. We can ignore this rubbish quite safely and ignore his comment about the alleged "annihilation" of the Slavs. For the sake of displaying how truly malicious this alleged quotation is, I would like to quote it, because simply calling it a "forgery, which it is, doesn't hammer the point home enough as to how ridiculous the Rauschning books are:

an asocial, inferior section of the population is gradually edging its way into the position of a leading social class…. This is a source of great danger for the German people…. I admit that the danger will not be reduced by the forthcoming occupation of mixed Slav areas, where there will be no quick way of ridding ourselves of the Slav population…. We have a duty to depopulate such areas, just as we have a corresponding duty to take care of the German population. A systematic method of depopulation will have to be developed. What, you may ask, does depopulation mean? Do I propose to eliminate whole population groups? Yes, indeed, something like that will have to be done…. Nature is cruel; that is why we can permit ourselves to be cruel, as well. If I am to send the flower of German manhood into the pitiless storm of the coming war, should I not have the right to eliminate millions of members of an inferior race who multiply like vermin, not by exterminating them but by systematically preventing their marked natural fertility from taking its course. For example, by ensuring that the men are separated from the women for years…. We declare our faith in such a methodical control of population movement.

Hermann Rauschning, Gespräche mit Hitler, p. 128f.


What's funny, is that even in this fake quotation, not even Rauschning has Hitler claim he wants to murder all the Slavs. In any case, his wording is much too vulgar to be taken seriously, Hitler only ever met Rauschning on a few occasions and never spent time alone with him. Nor would we expect Hitler to have relayed his most intimate thoughts to this man. This has been emphasised by others before:

Lothar Kettenacker is the first of the contributors to this volume to make use of Hermann Rauschning’s Hitler Speaks (Gesprache mit Hitler), a source about whose original value some other historians have already expressed reservations. Ernst Nolte, for instance, once remarked that in no document, neither in Mein Kampf nor in his speeches nor in his table talk was Hitler as literate as in Rauschning’s conversations with him. In 1983 the Swiss historian Wolfgang Hanel in a piece of highly detailed research concluded that Rauschning’s work was a collaboration with a British and French journalists, backed by an American publishing house in 1939. Rauschning, by then a poor emigre in Paris, got to work and by using his own ‘The Revolution of Nihilism’ plus ample quotations from Ernst Junger as well as from Nietzsche turned this amalgam into Hitler’s own words. Rauschning met Hitler on five occasions at most, and then always in the company of others.”


H.W. Koch ed. Aspects of the Third Reich (Macmillan, 1985), Pp. 13-14


Irving confirms:

Hermann Rauschning’s Conversations with Hitler (Zürich, 1940) has bedevilled analysis of Hitler’s policies ever since it was published by the evil propagandist Emery Reves (Imre Revész) along with a host of other fables. Rauschning, a former Nazi Danzig politician, met Hitler on only a couple of formal occasions. It was being republished in Vienna as recently as 1973, although even the otherwise uncritical West German historian Professor Eberhard Jäckel – who carelessly included 78 forgeries in a serious volume of Hitler’s manuscripts, and then dismissed this poisonous injection as making up less than 5 percent of the total volume! – emphasised in a learned article in Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht (No. 11, 1977) that Rauschning’s volume has no claim to credibility at all. Reves was also publisher of that other famous ‘source’ on early Nazi history, Fritz Thyssen’s ‘memoirs,’ I Paid Hitler (London, 1943). Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., has pointed out in a paper in Vierteljahrsheft für Zeitgeschichte (No. 3, 1971) that the luckless Thyssen never even saw eight of the book’s nineteen chapters, while the rest were drafted in French! The list of such spurious volumes is endless.

David Irving, Hitler's War and the War Path (Millennium Edition, Focal Point Publications, 2002), Pp. xiv,xv


In the long wall of text I posted from Majers book, he claims that the Hitler thought the Bulgarians were "inferior". This is utterly untrue. He cites for this claim (footnote 227) the Table Talks, specifically a conversation that took place on January 22nd, 1942, (See: Hitler’s Table Talk 1941-1944: His Private Conversations (Enigma Books, New York City, 2000), Pp. 228-230) I will refrain from posting any excerpt from this part of the Table Talks, as there is nothing worthy of quoting. Hitler doesn't mention any of the groups Majer cites, nor does he make any statements about inferiority. Hitler does talk about how Austria used to rule over the Czechs, but nothing of their intrinsic worth as a people. The only comment that comes close to such a statement is when Hitler said that the Czechs "were better than the Hungarians, Rumanians and Poles" (p. 229), praising them, rather than admonishing them. And he doesn't mean that the Czechs are better than the latter three groups racially, he says it in the context that the Czechs "There had grown up amongst them a hard-working and conscientious small bourgeoisie, quite aware of its limitations." (Ibid.).

Majer was using the Henry Picker German Edition (Picker, Hitlers Tischgespräche, 1968) so perhaps that edition contains some phrase not in the English version? Who knows? if that were the case it would definitely cast poor light on the Table Talks which aren't the most trustworthy source to begin with.

In any case, the claim made by Majer is contradicted by another source also from 1942. In Der Untermensch many Slavs and Southern Europeans are described as "Aryan", but not only that, they're antithesis of what it means to be "Subhuman" and inferior. The Bulgarians, are one of these groups that are singled out as such:

The Subhuman
Subhuman.jpg
And in the front lines as radcial feminist, as partisan, and as harlot all in one person, stands the Jewess. Along with her like-minded beasts, she forms up and leads the attack to make all the women of Europe like her.

Der Untermensch/The Underman: in German and English SS-Hauptamt - Schulungsamt / Jupp Darhler (Ostara Publications.)
The Aryan
Aryan.jpg
The healthy craftsmanship of the Bulgarian farmers, the noble grace of the Spaniards, the nobility and grance of Italian women, the faith and beauty of German Girls - all this they want to erase, to destroy from the earth

Der Untermensch/The Underman: in German and English SS-Hauptamt - Schulungsamt / Jupp Darhler (Ostara Publications.)


You can read 'Der Untermensch' in full here: https://archive.vn/lrGBs, https://archive.vn/BTLJ6, https://archive.vn/di6lr. The translation of this online version you will see is a bit different, but not too different. I would still recommend you read the Ostara edition.

Subhuman Picture.PNG

On the foremost line next to Jews stood Jewesses, the armed heroines – gangsters, partisans and prostitutes all rolled up into one person. They are trained and tasked to turn European women into subhuman beasts just like them!
-------------------------------

In contrast to European women! We see the healthy energetic peasant woman of Bulgaria, the noble women of Spain, majesty and charm of Italian women! The honesty, decency and beauty of German girls all this was intended to be destroyed and to erased from the face of the earth.

Source: https://archive.vn/BTLJ6


The European woman was comprised of those women from nations all over Europe that weren't Subhuman Communists. And in fact the line "They are trained and tasked to turn European women into subhuman beasts just like them!" refutes the idea that being a "Subhuman" was some kind of tenant of Nazi "scientific racism", it wasn't a biological category. The fact that Bolshevism could turn European women into Subhumans having not been Subhuman before means that it was a designation intended to shame those who succumbed to a feeble ideology, steeped in selfishness, poverty, and materialism. That being Subhuman was environmental, a state of mind, an ideological label that fully falls in line with how many National Socialists used the term.

Does the question still need to be answered? How do you turn a European into a "subhuman" if subhuman is supposed to be some biological designation? It ultimately doesn't make sense. The "National Socialist" terminology and definitions certainly suffer from age, misinterpretation, and prejudice. The nuanced positions are often ignored. The 'Der Untermensch' pamphlet doesn't say that any race is Subhuman, only that from many races emerges Subhumans. Which I would agree with. Never have I seen more Subhumans these days who are emerging from the white race.

For Majer's part, he displays a pervasive misunderstanding of what "inferior" and "superior" means in the National Socialist worldview. To Hitler, all Europeans were Aryans, but not all Aryans were "superior" beings, many of them were "subhumans":

Even if somebody’s appearance is Nordic he might be a bastard inside. That somebody is blond and blue-eyed does not mean that he is racially pure. He might even be a degenerate coward. Bastardization shows in different aspects. We have to be on our guard against racial arrogance. Racial arrogance would be as devastating as hatred among classes.

Robert Ley, Tatsachen – Die Leipziger DAF-Tagung 2.-6 Dez. 1935, Published by the German Labour Front, Printed by Buch- und Tiefdruck DmbH, 1935 Dr. Robert Ley: Fatherland, Race, Discipline and Love of Life.


In all the utterances of Hitler using the word "Subhuman" it was always in the context of ideology, attitudes and aptitudes. You could, theoretically, consider the Slavs to be Subhumans, because they readily embraced Communism. This doesn't mean Hitler is saying they're not biologically human.

There was no National Socialist ‘subhuman’ policy or program metered out ideologically. And to claim it literally meant ‘not human’ would just be absurd. To reiterate, ‘subhuman’ applied to a temperament, or adherent to particular ideology. ‘Subhuman’ is essentially the old fashioned way of how we would call a paedophile ‘subhuman’ or that he committed an act that’s ‘not human’. It isn’t literal, nor scientific.

Himmler once stated:

“We must assume that this struggle will last for generations, for it’s the age-old struggle between humans and subhumans in its current new phase of the struggle between the Aryan peoples and Jewry and the organizational form Jewry has adopted of Bolshevism.”

– Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, Speech on taking office as Chief of the German Police, Prussian Interior Ministry 18 June 1936 [Peter Longerich ‘Heinrich Himmler’ p.204]


This quote was once presented to me as "proof" that the Nazis considered Jews to be "subhuman". I will say what I told the person who showed me this. Himmler from this quote is very clearly talk about the people who hold ‘human’ ideals over those who espouse Jewish Bolsheviks ‘subhuman’ ideals. There's no indication that he's talking about Race. He says "Jewry", no doubt racially analogous to the Jewish people, but also to a general set of political ideals that manifested as "Bolshevism". This is what Himmler is characterizing as "Subhuman" and I would agree with him.

Another good example, is when Hitler called Otto Strasser a ‘white Jew’. No doubt Strasser would be considered ‘subhuman’. Not racially, but for holding ‘subhuman’ views which Hitler deemed to be ‘pure Marxism’ (Hitler, Volker Ullrich, p. 228)

In Note 228, Majer states:

The extent to which this hatred of the Russians was racially founded cannot be determined conclusively. There are strong arguments for the equal importance of political motivations: for example, the fact that the non-Communist White Russians received better treatment than the Soviet Russians and that, in 1939, Hitler united with the Soviet Russians in the nonaggression pact and spoke in praise of Stalin and his policy (quoted in Picker, Hitlers Tischgespräche, 133, 242: “Behind Stalin there are the Jews”; 245: “In front of Stalin one should have unconditional respect … he knows his role models such as Ghengis Khan intimately”).


What we learn from this is that the Third Reich clearly differentiated between groups of Russians and Poles, not painting them all with the same brush and acting accordingly. Many Slavic ethnicities were treated better by Hitler than others. The Czechs and Slovaks are two examples:

This dire fate. however, faced the Poles in particular rather than the Slavs as a whole. Despite the Nazis' rhetoric, in theory, and increasingly in practice, racial scientists and policy advisors distinguished between groups of Slavs. The Slovaks were allowed to govern themselves, and even in the protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia the Germans ruled through a Czech bureaucracy and a figurehead Czech president - something denied to the Poles. The principles applied to the Bohemian-Moravian space could not be apllied to the Polish space owing to the unbridled Polish character, which was sharply revealed during the Polish campaign as an element which requires a different method of domination,' explained a German journalist in Poland later on [...] Nevertheless, in Prague, Von Neurath Retained the Fuhrer's ear while hewing a more moderate course. He was an old-fashioned conservative, not a Nazi, and Hitler was happy to allow him to do whatever kept the peace politically and the factories working. The Government managed to continue to fund the Czech Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Czech rations remained as high as if not higher than those in the Reich itself

Mark Mazower, Hitler's Empire Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe (Penguin Books, 2008), Pp. 74-75


The attitude Hitler had was a "German attitude" - all Europeans, including Slavs were considered Aryan, but not all were considered German. This is a key difference that is perhaps easy to overlook. The contradictory nature of Hitler's attitudes towards eastern people must be seen as a multi-pronged policy of separating the hostile elements and integrating the positive elements. Hence why Hitler also allowed Poles to be assimilated into the Reich:

Facing the prospect that the whole resettlement programme would end up depopulating the Reich's new eastern borderlands by getting rid of Poles before enough Germans had been found to come in, the local authorities in the Warthegau moved back towards an assimilation policy and sought to introduce new citizenship guidlines in order to work out whom to give German ID papers to. Less dogmatic than Himmler, Hitler himself understood the problem and once he clarified that he tolerate some degree of assimilation the guidlines were finalized

Mazower, Ibid., p. 194


Mazower points out that by 1944 30 percent of Western Poland were eligible for German citizenship (p. 196) and that in the General Government itself, Hans Frank thought the Poles could be assimilated because they were biologically compatible:

I speak openly of Germanization. How often have we not seen with astonishment some blond, blue-eyed child speaking Polish. To which I say: ‘If this child learned German, it would be a pretty German girl’

Mazower, Ibid., p. 193


German racial policy at this time was dealing with a number of questions regarding who could be assimilated, and who couldn't. None of it was easy to decipher on a biological basis:

Prewar Germany funded racial science well - as it did the sciences in general - and the Third Reich was a particularly generous sponsor. After 1939, the Third Reich's racial experts were no longer consulted merely on the health of Germany's own population but helped to make decisions affecting the continent as a whole. Men in white coats ran classification panels and training programmes to decide which of the Slavs of ethnic Germans they stripped and measured were 're-Germanizable". -- Yet allowing them to pronounce on policy had unexpected results. The discipline of racial science itself was in turmoil, and many German scolars had already become aware of the difficulties. Old -Fashioned racial determinism seemed hard to square with new findings in genetics, and it was not particularly helpful either when explaining the characteristics of a people or Volk. -- But knowing how to distunguish a German from a non-German the key concern for those running the new empire - was not something upon which it was possible to get expert consensus. 'Every German had his own idea of race,' comments a recent historian. The subject was certainly in flux. The breslau school believed in tracking blue eyes and blond hair, but Otto Reche abd Fritz Lenz - two luminaries of academic racism - thought physical characteristics were crude markers since most individuals were themselves mixed racially. For Hans Gunther, a popularizer of Nazi science, even Germany contained strains of all the major European races - the Nordic, East Baltic, Alpine and Dinaric as well as forunately small quantaties of Mediterranean and Inner Asian blood. A few heretics solved the problem of matching up the catergories of race and Volk by talking about a 'German Race', but this simple solution was critisized by most of the academics as unscientific. There were similar doubts about the usefullness of talking about 'Slavs', whom experts thought were made up of a variety of much smaller sub-groups of differing racial 'value'. The value question itself was divisive - some believing in racial hierarachies, others insisting that difference carries no connotation of worth

Mazower, Ibid., p. 182-183


It must be emphasised again, that Hitler's treatment of the Poles was not the kind of treatment he metered out to all Slavic groups. It mustn't be deemphasized either that Hitler's attitude towards Poland was definitely harsh, but this isn't unexpected. The German-Polish conflict had existed for centuries, the war in 1939 was merely the bloody eruption of this mutual hatred and distrust that couldn't be solved even though Hitler tried to do so:

Everyone knew how, after 1918, their [ethnic Germans’] land had been confiscated or surrounded with subsidized clusters of new settlements. Hostile officials had discouraged them from speaking German or declaring themselves as Germans in censuses and even the landscape itself had been de-Germanized through changes to the names of families, streets and entire towns. In many areas Germans had been deliberately expelled; in others they had sold up and left, or bowed to the pressure to change their nationality. The Nazi regime saw reversing the effect of these decades as a priority. “Make this land German for me again!” Hitler had ordered an official after the conquest of northern Yugoslavia in 1941. His message to those he appointed to the Reich’s other borderlands was basically the same.

Mazower, Ibid., p. 180


Is it then any wonder that the brutal actions in Poland by the Germans occured?

The Poles’ treatment of the ethnic Germans played an important part in fueling ‘the war of the peoples’. Worried about Nazi-funded underground organizations and ‘self-defence’ militias, they had closed down many German cultural and religious institutions after the invasion of Poland began, police arrested 10-15,000 members of the minority on the basis of prepared lists and marched them away from the front lines. Attacked by Polish bystandards and soldiers, between 1,778 and 2,200 Germans died, some of exhaustion and maltreatment, others through mass shootings.

When they uncovered evidence of these deaths, the invading Germans were provoked into an even more violent response. In Bydgoszcz – the most notorious case – hundreds of local Germans had been killed because of rumours that snipers were firing on Polish troops. The death toll amounted to 700-1,000 people, and some of the bodies were horrifically mutilated

Mazower, Ibid., p. 68


and:

Nazi intentions toward the Poles and other Slavic groups in Eastern and Southeastern Europe were relatively open. If the Polish state had
been willing to collaborate with Hitler in 1939, it might have survived as a satellite similar to Slovakia, that is, a land to the south of the corridor
leading to Lebensraum.101 It was by blocking that path that the Poles became the sort of "Slavs" destined for destruction. Thus it was not longstanding Nazi plans to destroy the Poles which engendered Polish resistance in 1939 and thereafter, but rather Polish resistance which brought forth such plans.

John Connelly, Nazis and Slavs: From Racial Theory to Racist Practice (Central European History, Vol. 32, no. 1), Pp. 22


While the Germans and the Czechs got on much better:

Neither Czechs nor Germans had an incentive to upset the relative calm; the Germans valued the steady production of war materials from Czech industry, and the Czechs the significant spaces that remained for pursuit of economic and cultural interests. So powerful was the dynamic of mutual accommodation that even the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in 1942 could not upset it.

[size=85]Connelly, Ibid.


In his recent Hitler biography Brendan Simms writes this about Hitler's views on race:

Hitler did not depart from his view that Germany was racially fragmented, and the German people themselves of decidedly mixed quality. He seemed at this point to include Germans, Romans, Celts and even Slavs among the Aryans. They were subdivided into families of nations. The Italians, Spaniards and southern Frenchmen were part of the Romance family; the Danes, Swedes, Germans and Anglo-Saxons formed the Germanic family; and the Ukrainians, White Russians, Bulgarians and Yugoslavs were part of the Slavic family. Far from believing in existing racial purity, it seems, Hitler was clear that patterns of migrations over the past millennium had led to displacements and admixtures, rather than pure races, generally speaking. The only people, Hitler claimed, who had managed to maintain their blood completely pure and unadulterated, thanks to their marriage laws and other factors, were the Jews. Everybody else, and particularly the fragmented Germans, were racially a melange.

This presented a problem for Hitler. On the one hand, he wanted German racial purity to overcome the divisions of the past; that was a central part of his programme. On the other hand, the public diagnosis of current German racial inferiority could only deepen divisions and damage the NSDAP at the polls. The German Volk, he remarked privately, would be only more splintered, set against one another, and atomized by stirring up the racial problems. This would render it insignificant as far as foreign policy goes. Racial theories could be discussed among the inner circle, Hitler explained, but for the public at large they were poison. Such discussion would only rouse superiority and inferiority complexes.37 For all the candour in Mein Kampf and his various speeches, Hitler could not level with the German people on this matter. The Second Book remained safely locked in a drawer.

For this reason, Hitler was careful to avoid public rhetoric which would divide Germans racially. References on his part to blond hair and blue eyes were relatively rare, not just because Hitler possessed neither. The only known remark he made at this time was with reference to his American prisoners of July 1918, supposedly descended from German emigrants. He remarked in private conversation that one should not harbour the narrow belief that every teacher must be a blond Germanic type. This he considered complete nonsense. For this reason, Hitler expressly and repeatedly forbade any talk of dividing the German people into two racial halves: the Germanic and the non-Germanic people, even though this was very much his own view. Instead, Hitler laid down that the Germans in particular must avoid anything that tended to create even more divisiveness in the religious, political and ideological spheres. If people were told that they were racially different, then the result would be not the unification of all Germans, but the bringing about of the final separation and dissolution of the concept of Germany.38

Instead, Hitler planned a more gradual and comprehensive racial reformation of the Germans over the longer term. One should accept the mixing of blood as it was, Hitler argued privately, and not call one [German] blood worse than the other, one mixture better than another. Rather, one should employ other means to breed a higher form from what he rather unflatteringly described as the existing grey mass. Here Hitler had not so much medical eugenics in mind as a much broader range of social and cultural instruments. One must try to bring to the surface the valuable traits of the people living in Germany, Hitler argued, in order to cultivate and to develop them. This required ways and means to prevent the propagation of all the bad, inferior, criminal, decadent tendencies and congenital diseases likely to damage the people. Central to this project, Hitler explained, would be educating young people in the beauty of movement, the beauty of the body and the beauty of the spirit, through athletics, personal grooming, physical training, public performances of competitive games and contests and the revival of the performing arts along the old Greek models. This selective breeding would be furthered by the encounter of Germans of all backgrounds in kindergarten, primary school, the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls. Then, when these children grew up, they would be able to leave all party considerations behind and elect the man, the only one, who represented them and went to the Reichstag on their behalf. Only then, Hitler claimed, would they see true democracy in Germany. 39

Brendan Simms, Hitler: Only the World Was Enough (Penguin, Allen Lane, 2019), Pp. 146-148


Hitler's view of race wasn't purely biological, it encompassed many aspects of cultural life and inner life reflected in the Soul. This attitude towards the Germans was also displayed to the non-German Aryans of Europe too, hence why Hitler could be so hostile to certain Aryan Slavic groups, and deem them to be of lesser worth, purely because of their character, not of their race. When these groups showed their worth, he was quick to praise them:

When one examines the early writings of Adolf Hitler and other Nazi leaders, however, one finds few signs of intentions toward Slavs. Especially noticeable in Hitler's writing is an absence of hostility toward Poles. If any Slavic people provoked Hitler's ill will it was the Czechs, about whom he had formed opinions as a young man in Austria.9 Yet as will be shown, the Czechs survived the war in relative peace.

John Connelly, Nazis and Slavs: From Racial Theory to Racist Practice (Central European History, Vol. 32, no. 1), Pp. 3


While many decry the brutal treatment of Ukranians, what hardly gets mentioned is what good the Germans did for Ukraine between 1939-1945:

As is well known, many Ukrainians had looked upon the Nazis as potential liberators, and leading Nazis toyed with the idea of permitting a Ukrainian state to emerge.29 [...] In 1939 the Germans tolerated the foundation of a Ukrainian Relief Committee (renamed in 1940 Ukrainian Central Committee) which oversaw a strengthening of Ukrainian social, cultural, educational, and economic organization within the General-gouvernement. Before the war there had been 2,510 Ukrainian language schools in this region; by 1942/43 the number had increased to 4,173,
including several secondary schools. The German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) offered scholarships for study in Germany to Ukrainian students. Furthermore, the economic position of many Ukrainians improved as the Germans permitted an expansion from 161 cooperatives in 1939 to 1,990 in 1941.35 In April 1943 the Germans recruited a Ukrainian SS division (Galicia) and attracted 80,000 volunteers, of whom some 12,000 received training.36

Connelly, Ibid., p. 7-8


There was no policy towards Poles prior to 1939, as we know, all of German policy in 1939 was largely made up as they went along:

Similarly, when one looks for the prewar sources of Nazi anti-Polonism, one finds little of substance. Despite the apparently well-planned and thorough policies of wartime destruction, there was no set National Socialist policy toward Poland before 1939. Poland appears marginally in Hitler's writings and speeches. Hitler clearly thought of Poles as "racially foreign elements,"51 yet according to Martin Broszat, the Polish victory over the Soviet Union in 1920 had made it difficult for him to conceive of Polish racial inferiority.52 For him Poland was above all a "border state" to be courted for alliance against "enemy No. 1": the Soviet Union.53 [...] Nazi leaders respected Polish counterparts: Hermann Goering, who visited Poland repeatedly on hunting excursions, even wrote the introduction to the German edition of Pitsudski's collected works.54

Connelly, Ibid., p. 11


Connely claims that prior to 1939, the National Socialist leaders weren't overly fond of Slavs, but still considered them European Brothers, Aryans:

Before 1939, a vague notion thus seems to have existed in leading Nazis' minds that Slavs constituted an inferior group, but just how inferior was an issue to be decided later. In the meantime it was possible to think of them not only as potential allies, but also as Europeans. A brochure was issued for the 1938 Nuremberg rally proclaiming Slavs part of the "Indogermanic peoples."

Central and Northern Europe are the homeland of the Nordic race. At the beginning of the most recent Ice Age, around 5,000 BC, a Nordic-
Indogermanic Urvolk of the Nordic race [artgleicher nordrassischer Menschen] existed, with the same language and unified mode of behavior [Gesittung], which divided into smaller and larger groups as it expanded. From these went forth Germans, Celts, Romans, Greeks, Slavs, Persians, and Aryan Indians . . . The original racial unity and common ownership of the most important cultural artifacts remained for thousands of years the cement holding together the Western peoples.58


Connelly, Ibid., p. 12


However, the racial uncertainty about Slavs still presented a problem to the Germans:

59 Yet these words were not written in stone; a certain range of views on Slavs existed among those writing on the subject within Nazi Germany. Early the following year a prehistory of Eastern Europe admitted that the "racial history of the Slavs" was still an "open question." Major racial theoreticians Hans F. K. Giinther, Otto Reche, and Egon von Eickstedt had determined that the oldest Slavic remains were "mostly Nordic," yet it seemed that later Slavic populations were by no means racially uniform; according to the work of von Eickstedt and Polish anthropologist J. Czekanowski they exhibited "eastern Baltic and dark forms."60 These unsettled questions on Slavs' racial attributes invited opportunistic wartime practice.

Connelly, Ibid., p. 12-13


But again, Connelly makes the point that Hitler's aversion to Poles only came about after 1939:

Hitler's views on Poland changed radically in the course of 1939. After the Munich crisis of the previous year, the Germans had made three
demands of Poland: the surrender of Danzig, the construction of an extraterritorial rail- and highway through the Polish Corridor, and Polish collaboration in the Anti-Comintern Pact. In return, they offered to guarantee Poland's borders, and dangled a share of the spoils of war with the Soviet Union. Poland decisively refused these proposals, and to Hitler's outrage, received promises of support from Great Britain in late March 1939 [...] With the ruins of Warsaw still smoldering, leading Eastern expert and historian Albert Brackmann of the University of Berlin hurried a booklet into print relegating the Poles and other Slavs to non-European status:

"The German people were the only bearers of culture in the East and in their role as the main power of Europe protected Western culture and carried it into uncultivated regions. For centuries they constituted a barrier in the East against lack of culture (Unkultur) and protected the West against barbarity. They protected the borders from Slavs, Avars, and Magyars.62"

Connelly, Ibid., p. 13


Nowhere in the quoted section does Brackmann "relegate" the Poles and other Slavs to "non-European" status. That Connelly suggests that the Nazis just decided to make the Slavs into Europeans whenever they wanted, as if being European was a question of culture is laughable. They never questioned the biological nature of Slavs as European (Aryans), only that they were culturally backward and "Asiatic" people who were culturally inferior to the Germans:

Later that fall Joseph Goebbels noted after a visit that Poland was already "Asia."63 Hitler and Rosenberg too learned from new experiences. The latter noted in his diary in late September:

The Poles: a thin Germanic layer, underneath frightful material. The Jews, the most appalling people one can imagine. The towns thick with dirt. He's [Hitler] learnt a lot in these past few weeks. Above all, if Poland had gone on ruling the old German parts for a few more decades everything would have become lice-ridden and decayed.64

Two years later, while German troops were advancing deep into the Soviet Union, Hitler would proclaim that the border between Europe and Asia ran between the Germanic and Slavic peoples. The issue was to "place it where we wish."65 He and Goebbels routinely referred to Russians as "beasts" and "animals."

Connelly, Ibid., p. 14


Goebbels referred to Russians as "beasts" and "animals" is vague, the Russians said the same and worse about the Germans. Yet we do not accuse them of believing the Germans weren't European or something. Nor would we do this if we characterized an individual as a "beast" or "animal". This point by Connelly is irrelevant.

Connelly also points out that Hitler criticised the Russian view of what they considered to be "Slavic", where to draw the line was a matter of debate and it's hard to know what definition of a Slav he was using. It's vague and not very helpful for us to get an understanding about what Hitler was talking about, and it's an outright contradiction of his later actions where various Slavic groups were being assimilated despite the fact that they were derived from nations of low-cultural worth in the German opinion. What Brackman said about the Poles is quite simple, after experiencing conditions in Poland the conclusion that was arrived at by many leaders in Germany was that it was a backward nation with little culture to offer. Is it any surprise that they thought this way?

Hitler’s tours of these Polish battlefields were his first real contact with ‘the east.’ They reinforced his unhealthy fantasies about the ‘sub-humans’ and the Jews. Was this still Europe? Indiscriminately scattered about the untended acres were wretched wooden hutlike dwellings with thatched roofs. At the roadsides, knots of submissive Polish civilians stood in the swirling dust of Hitler’s motorcade. Among them he glimpsed Jews in highcrowned hats and caftans, their hair in ritual ringlets; they looked for all the world like figures out of mediæval antisemitic drawings. Time had stood still here for centuries.

David Irving, Hitler's War and the War Path (Millennium Edition, Focal Point Publications, 2002), Pp. 228


Connelly goes on to say:

As the learning process continued, Nazi leaders began to recognize that certain Slavs could be useful. Hitler, though harboring the strongest suspicions of germanizing foreign populations, ruled in September 1940 that the assimilation of the greater part of the Czech people is possible for historical and racial reasons."67 In March of the following year he praised to Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels the "hard work and inventiveness of the Czechs" and in 1942 he told his dinner companions that the Czechs were "industrious and intelligent workers."68 Nazi racial experts estimated that up to half of the Czechs were of Nordic origin, and Hitler agreed.69 He also came to view the Croats as fully assimilable, though he never wavered in antipathy toward Serbs.70

Even the Ukrainians were gradually seen in a more favorable light. Though he continued to oppose plans for Ukrainian statehood, visual impressions gained in the Ukraine softened Hitler's views on Ukrainians' racial character.71 In September 1941 Hitler approved the use of women from the East as domestic servants in Germany, and he instructed aids to revise "school knowledge about the great migration of peoples," for the many blond, blue-eyed Ukrainians might be "peasant descendants of German tribes who never migrated."72

[...]

In August 1942 Hitler came out in support of assimilating Ukrainian women, who would help foster a "healthy balance" among the Germans. A "ludicrous hundred million Slavs" would either be absorbed or displaced.74 Though perhaps the most determined racist in the upper leadership of the Nazi movement, Heinrich Himmler likewise wavered under the pressures of war. Ukrainians were seen fit to join the SS, and were also used as police and camp guards. Those who doubted the racial logic of such moves were accused of lacking an understanding for the "revolutionary idea of National Socialism, which transcended the boundaries of national states." According to a training brochure for ideological schooling of the SS and police (ca. 1943), the force of the war had caused the "common roots of the European family of peoples to come to the surface."

John Connelly, Nazis and Slavs: From Racial Theory to Racist Practice (Central European History, Vol. 32, no. 1), Pp. 14-15


As we can see, despite the hesitancy and contradictory policy decisions that are quite complicated and hard to follow, the National Socialists had no problem adopting position positions towards Slavic groups. They were considered Aryan but judged on an individual basis:

Hitler said that nothing in general could be said about the germanizability of the Slavs, because the word "Slavs" had been propagated by Tsarist Russia in the wake of its Pan-Slavic policy as a collective description for peoples that are completely different racially. For example it is complete nonsense to call the Bulgarians Slavs, because they are of Turkic origin. And you only need to let a Czech grow a mustache and you will see by the way it grows downward that he is a descendent of Mongoloid tribes. The so-called Southern Slavs are almost entirely Dinarian. For that reason the germanization of the Croats would be welcome from the racial [volkstumsmdssigen] point of view, but from the political point of view it is out of the question. In any attempted germanization one may not act on the basis of abstract collective concepts, but has to ask in each individual case whether the person to be germanized belongs to a race which would improve our own people [Volkstum], or whether the person exhibits qualities of a race which, like the Jewish, would have a negative effect of mixing with German blood.82

Connelly, Ibid., p. 16-17


Ultimately:

Policies adopted by Nazi Germany toward Slavic peoples cannot be fully explained by Nazi racial ideology. This is evident both in the contradictory and opportunistic nature of policies pursued during the war, and in the absence of any coordinated thinking on this issue in the prewar period. Hitler in particular had at best a vague notion of what "Slavs" were, and precise connections between his supposed "anti-Slavism" before 1939, and the policies adopted toward Slavic peoples after 1939, defy attempts at documentation.93

[...]

policies toward Slavs appear as constant improvisation, in which opportunity and ideology shaped one another.148

Connelly, Ibid., p. 20, 33


Policies towards Slavs were not consistent, thus it isn't easy to make widespread judgements. It's more difficult to come to the truth because of how pervasive the Holocaust narrative is, and that the Slavs are thoroughly caught up in it.

The Russian historian Vladimir Avdeyev also disputes the myth that the Slavs were considered Subhumans:

Respected reader, turn your attention to the fact that the above book [Editor note: Schattenfroh, Franz; Will and Race (1943)] was published, with the approval of the ideological high management of the Third Reich, even though Stalingrad and the Battle of the Kursk Salient had already concluded, and the situation at the fronts did not lend itself to good sentiments in the address of the Slavs. However, no Slavophobia is shown; supposedly it had a place in German political propaganda, but there was no [such] talk. That was a much later fabrication by the forgers of communist and liberal myth. The Third Reich did not struggle with Slavdom, but with the threat Bolshevism [posed] to the foundations of European Civilization. Incidentally, to this day, not one official German document from that time has been published, in which the Slavs are called a “race of sub-humans,” something which devoted warriors of antifascism like to broadcast. By “sub-humans,” in the anthropological sense of the word, Himmler’s department was referring to Bolshevik commissars, like Lev Mekhlis, and open racists like Ilya Ehrenburg, an instigator who hid behind the backs of Russian soldiers, shouting “Kill the Germans!”

Vladimir Avdeyev, Raciology: The Science of the Hereditary Traits of Peoples (2nd edition, 2007), Pp.77
See: http://anoccasionalcomment.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-third-reich-and-hitler-on-slavs.html Archive: https://archive.vn/yjWdY


The final person I want to quote is Walter Gross, who was the head of the German Office of Racial Policy (Rassenpolitisches Amt) until 1945. He was the authority on National Socialist Racial "ideology". And like Rosenberg, he espoused a similarly cordial view of race that wasn't antagonistic, nor viscerally bigoted and filled with irrational hatred:

We appreciate the fact that those of another race are different from us… Whether that other race is 'better' or 'worse' is not possible for us to judge. For this would demand that we transcend our own racial limitations for the duration of the verdict and take on a superhuman, even divine, attitude from which alone an 'impersonal' verdict could be formed on the value or lack of such of the many living forms of inexhaustible Nature.

Walter Gross, Der deutsche Rassengedanke und die Welt (Junker und Dünnhaupt / Berlin, 1939), Pp. 24-28.


Gross also commented on the criticism of outside groups whom felt attacked by race theory of National Socialism:

A serious situation arose through the fact that other people and States, because of German race laws… felt themselves attacked and defamed … For example the whole world of the Far East remained for a long time under the impression that the Germans… had designated them as non-Aryan, and as non-Aryans inferior rabble - (that the) Germans had designated (them) unworthy, second class humanity and that the Germans imagined themselves as the sole bearers of culture… What could we say to those who saw in German racism a fundamental defamation of men of other races? We could do nothing other than, with patience and conviction, repeat that German racism does not evaluate or deprecate other racial groups… It only recognizes, scientifically, that differences exist… We have often been disturbed by the indiscretion or even stupidity in our own land when, just after we had carefully made clear to some people or other that we respected and honoured… their racial qualities, some wild fool manufactured his own ideas about race and declared that these same people were racially inferior and stood somewhere below the cow or the ass, and that their characteristics were degrading or impure and lord knows what else! By such idiotic assertions were repelled and offended not only alien peoples in distant parts of the world but even our own neighbours in Europe, many times even friends of National Socialist Germany bound to us historically and in destiny.

Walter Gross, cited in 'National Socialism and Race' by A. James Gregor, see: http://home.alphalink.com.au/~radnat/gregor.html Archive: https://archive.vn/e82g6
Unfortunately the footnote for this quotation was missing. Although it surely exists.


I don't think I really have a point with this post, other than to bring together a variety of sources and quotes I've collected about Slavs and information about National Socialist views on race generally. I've not had much commentary and just preferred to let the quotations speak for themselves. It took me a very long time to put this together today, and I fear it's not perfect. Hopefully this post provided some useful information that can help illuminate this situation for others.

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Re: Did Hitler consider Slavs / Eastern Europeans to be "Subhuman" or racially inferior?

Postby Lamprecht » 2 years 7 months ago (Thu Oct 29, 2020 9:02 am)

Good stuff HMS. Indeed, it is an important issue because exterminationists want to make their "Holocaust" inclusive -- unless you forget to explicilty mention "Jews" when talking about Hitler's alleged victims -- even going so far as to say that Hitler wanted to kill everyone that wasn't blond with blue eyes. We are expected to believe that his ultimate goal was to spread around the earth, shoving everyone who wasn't a 100% pure "Aryan" into a gas chamber. He wouldn't stop until the last igloo-bound Inuit or Kalahari desert Bushman was gassed in a fake shower room with pellets of pesticide, and you and I were speaking German only. The jury is out on whether the primary motive for this was pure hatred of the skin or a desire for a vast array of furniture, clothing, and cleaning products made from non-Aryan body parts :lol:

The truth of the matter is that Slavs generally were considered to be "Aryan" by the anthropologists of the era, save maybe for some in Eastern Europe with [visible] Mongoloid admixture. You bring up Hans F. K. Günther and I posted a few maps and charts of his in my other post, showing quite clearly that there is no demarcation between Slavic and Germanic areas with regards to racial composition.

One can scour the literature for random statements made by individuals against Slavs or particular ethnic groups. You can do the same in the USA for Irish or Italians but under US law these groups were always declared "White" (and so were Jews for the record). Obviously once the war started and German troops were fighting certain Slav-dominated nations there would be insults and accusations made against them. That should be expected.

In Carleton Coon's 1939 work "The Races of Europe" he states in chapter XII:
"Poland was largely a Nordic country, as it remained until after the rise and spread of the Slavs, when the old Danubian peasant stock broke through its Corded and Nordic chrysalis and reemerged"
And also:
"the Slavs, the last of the great Indo-European-speaking peoples to expand, were, like all of the others who had preceded them, primarily Nordic in race."

And quite clearly Hitler did not declare that the "Nordic race" was the only example of Aryans. Nordic was one of 6 races in Germany that fell under the banner as shown in my second post. There's a pie chart from Günther claimng that the racial composition of the German people is 50% Nordic.

Racially, Hitler himself would have been classified as an Alpine-Dinaric-Nordic mix, possibly with some Baltic influence (Norid is a racial type described as a Dinaricized Nordic). Carleton Coon probably would have called him some sort of "Keltic-Nordic" if unbiased although in his autobiography he stated that Hitler was not Nordic. Coon theorized that Nordics were depigmented Mediterraneans and that Norids did not necessarily have Dinarid admixture, but rather a depigmented Mediterranean population went through a "dinaricization" process (supposed adaptation to life in mountainous regions, allegedly correlated with herding populations) possibly through interbreeding wth Alpinid types.

This is overcomplicating the issue though. One can quite plainly see that Germany is in the center of Europe and therefore would be home to many mixes from the various wars and migrations of European history.
"There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments, and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance -- that principle is contempt prior to investigation."
— Herbert Spencer


NOTE: I am taking a leave of absence from revisionism to focus on other things. At this point, the ball is in their court to show the alleged massive pits full of human remains at the so-called "extermination camps." After 8 decades they still refuse to do this. I wonder why...

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Re: Did Hitler consider Slavs / Eastern Europeans to be "Subhuman" or racially inferior?

Postby Hektor » 2 years 7 months ago (Mon Nov 02, 2020 7:32 am)

Lamprecht wrote:"Aryan" used to be synonymous with 'Indo-European' and only after Hitler's use of the term was it considered something different. In contrast to Gypsies/Romani and Jews, who are Indian and Semitic respectively, virtually all Europeans are Indo-European or "Aryan". Obviously, some "racist" things were said against Slavic groups when Germany was at war with them, but Slavs were not considered an inferior race by the National Socialist Germans.
.....

Indo-Germanic was term used for an extended family of languages from Island towards the Indian Subcontinent. This was discovered with the explorations of the modern era. Most European languages are indeed Indo-Germanic and subdivide into the Romanic, Celtic, Germanic, Slavic languages for example.
As for European ancestors the total content of Proto-Europeans should also be considered. It may be higher in Southern Europe than in Northern Europe for historical reasons and the way Europe has been settled by the ancestors of the modern-day European nations.
As for Jews, I presume their non-Semitic gene content may be higher than most presume. They mixed with Turkic, Mediterranean and European people over time, despite their strong ethnic awareness.

The use of Aryan by NS was obviously an oversimplification, which is to be expected for both the (pre-)historical reasons mentioned as well as the bureaucratic purpose it was used for. While being slightly tolerant of other Europeans. NS wanted a Germany by the Germans for the Germans. That's a fact now used against German patriots/nationalists by playing the Holocaust card either directly or by implication. It's used against White ethno-nationalists outside of Germany as well. In fact the open-borders folks and diversity-advocats go nuts with this. The present racestyria is a sign of this.

Slavic people migrated West during the time of the people's migration and invasions of the Huns. They did not completely displace the Baltic or Germanic people that mostly resided in this areas, but took over leadership positions there. Especially the Western Slavs may have a high degree of Germanic ancestry, which is why many of them are virtually indistinguishable from Germans, except for some mannerisms and of course the languages. However I noticed some Mongoloid traits with even Poles or Tchechs at times, which I'd attribute to earlier admixture during the invasions of the Huns (themselves a mixed bunch) and the Mongols during the Middle-Ages.

The Poles most Germans may have known at the time were mostly unskilled migrant laborers that worked for Germans, since they offered better working conditions than in Poland, which was also far less industrialised than Germany at the time. Max Weber also wrote about this problem extensively. The Poles had the reputation of being less self-disciplined and reliable than German workers, but still adoptive to German culture to some extent. Educated Poles generally had some knowledge of German, since this gave them access to the bigger body of scientific and philosophical literature. I think class gaps may have been bigger in Poland than in Germany at that time, too.

Adolf Hitler respected Pilsudski very much as a champion of the Poles against Bolshevism. Germany had Slavic Allies like the Slovaks and Croats. Many Ukrainians joined the Wehrmacht as volunteers as well.

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Re: Did Hitler consider Slavs / Eastern Europeans to be "Subhuman" or racially inferior?

Postby Lamprecht » 2 years 7 months ago (Mon Nov 02, 2020 8:40 am)

Hektor wrote:As for European ancestors the total content of Proto-Europeans should also be considered.

Yamnaya are associated with proto-Indo European ancestry

Image
From Lazaridis et al 2014: http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2013/12/eu ... ithic.html

Europe was initially hunter-gatherer, then the first major migration was of Levantine farmers (Sardinians retain the highest % component of this ancestry) followed by the Yamnaya (proto-Indo-European). There are other, less significant components though, such as Uralic.

The "Aryan" component is associated with Y-DNA haplogroup R1a, which is most common in Eastern Europe.
Image
It is closely linked to R1b which is predominant in Western Europe. Y-DNA haplogroup I indicates paternal ancestry from the paleo- and mesolithic.

Image

From famous Italian geneticist Cavalli-Sforza (1997):
ImageImageImageImageImage

Hektor wrote:The use of Aryan by NS was obviously an oversimplification, which is to be expected for both the (pre-)historical reasons mentioned as well as the bureaucratic purpose it was used for. While being slightly tolerant of other Europeans. NS wanted a Germany by the Germans for the Germans.

It certainly was. I sometimes wonder if Hitler noted the strong ethnic identity of Jews and reasoned that it was the source of their success and decided to adapt it for the German people. There was a German-centric map that I found before, claiming that "Aryans" (or Nordics) migrated out of Germany throughout the earth. I guess it was supposed to be used in German school books of the period, it was obviously made up completely. It was different from this map but I can't find the one I am thinking of:
Image
Ths sort of propaganda is tantamount to cheerleading in sports games. Saying your team is better, even if it is not doing so well, increases the likelihood of success. A lot of so-called "Racism" is nothing more than "cheerleading" - boosting the morale and cohesiveness of one's own racial/ethnic group, a practice that is adaptive if it is not unrealistic. The Purim story, still celebarated as a Jewish holiday is an example of this. Even Rabbinical scholars admit that the story has no historical basis. (On ethnic identity: viewtopic.php?p=94778#p94778)

The Germans had just lost WW1 and were trying to regain their national pride. A strong racial/ethnic identity was seen as a Bulwark against creeping Bolshevism. The post-WW1 "Peace treaties" specifically declared that Austria could not all itself "German-Austria" or unify with Germany, why would they have to do that?

The "Holocaust" storyline is completley incoherent so it is difficult to squeeze out a straight answer "Why did Hitler want to exterminate the Jews" - but you can find allegations that Hitler believed that Jews were some sort of "inferior race." It's incoherent because it's based on a hoax.
"There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments, and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance -- that principle is contempt prior to investigation."
— Herbert Spencer


NOTE: I am taking a leave of absence from revisionism to focus on other things. At this point, the ball is in their court to show the alleged massive pits full of human remains at the so-called "extermination camps." After 8 decades they still refuse to do this. I wonder why...

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Re: Did Hitler consider Slavs / Eastern Europeans to be "Subhuman" or racially inferior?

Postby Otium » 2 years 7 months ago (Mon Nov 02, 2020 10:29 am)

Lamprecht wrote:It certainly was. I sometimes wonder if Hitler noted the strong ethnic identity of Jews and reasoned that it was the source of their success and decided to adapt it for the German people.


Yes, Hitler definitely did. I recall a while ago in some mainstream biographies reading about Hitler praising the Jews for this very thing. Although he still detested them, he was the first to admit that Jews were a very ethnocentric group, that their ability to maintain that strong bond of ethnocentrism was impressive and the Germans/other Europeans in general should also recognise how important this is. And that was part of the reason the Aryan is losing in competition with these people.

I read this again in the last week, however I'm sorry to say that I cannot remember where. It was something I glossed over not bothering to think much of it.

As for "Aryan", see these comments from a paper by Christopher Hutton:

This paper argues that popular and academic discussion of Nazi race theory has been in general highly misleading, and vitiated by a failure to differentiate between: (1) popular, propagandistic and aesthetic stereotypes of race; (2) racial policies; (3) academic race theory as expounded within scholarly publications in the Third Reich. Since these have not been clearly distinguished, discussion of the relationships between them has of necessity been confused. The case of the “Aryan race” is clear evidence of this confusion, since academic race theorists consistently rejected the notion as unscientific, as did policy makers after 1935. This widespread preconception that Nazism promoted the idea of an Aryan race is based on the popular use of the “Arisch” in the public culture of Nazi Germany. Textbooks on race published in Nazi Germany however routinely rejected the use of “Aryan” as a racial term, pointing out that it derived from the discipline of linguistics. There has been an almost complete lack of communication between scientists, historians and linguists overthese key questions, and this has produced a profoundly entrenched set of misunderstandings over such as issues as the relationship between Darwinism and Nazism, ideas about racial purity, hybridity, racial determinism and the ideological contribution of linguistics to Nazism.

[...]

Yet Nazi race theorists, along with their international colleagues, rejected the notion of an Aryan race as unscientific. It is important to be clear about this, because this presupposition about belief in an “Aryan race” in turn supports a comforting and highly distorted caricature of Nazi academia. Nazi scholarship and scientific research is frequently presented as wholly given over to pseudo-science, fantasies of a superior “master race”, and mystic Germanophilia. The reality is a lot more complex

[...]

While one can find exemplars of arische Rasse in various historical contexts, no academically trained race theorist in the 1920s and 30s would have used the term. This was equally true after the National Socialist seizure of power in 1933. The widespread preconception that Nazism promoted the idea of an Aryan race is based on the popular use of the arisch in the public culture of Nazi Germany, including its use as an identifier of race as in the pairing of “Aryan” and “Semite”. Textbooks on race published in Nazi Germany, however, routinely rejected the use of Aryan as a racial term, pointing out that it derived from the discipline of linguistics. Academic race theorists and linguists were concerned about popular understandings of “Aryan” as a racial term, and the confusion engendered by official use of arisch and Arier in the early days of the regime. In deference to their views, policy makers abandoned use of the term in official contexts after 1935. To speak of an Aryan race was a complete nonsense for Nazi race theorists, and thus any notion of the “purity” of the Aryan race would likewise have been completely meaningless.

[...]

If we use the terms “Aryan race” and “race hygiene” in discussions of Nazi science, we are ignoring boundaries which were the very stuff of intellectual debate and controversy, both in Nazi Germany and internationally.

This problem of terminology is compounded by an insistence on treating Nazi thought as a static system. Developments after 1933 were highly complex, but there is a clearly discernible movement from relative intellectual diversity to an increasingly focused technocratic and applied science model.

[...]

By the late 1930sthese “Aryan” or “Germanocentric” initiatives hadfloundered, including attempts to promote a holistic-intuitive Goethean science, in the context of hostility to Western rationalism and Darwinism. The promotion of “Aryan physics” and völkisch (Germanocentric) mathematics was marginalized from 1936 onwards (Segal 2003). The division between humanities and science was reasserted, in line with accepted international standards, and the regime took a technocratic turn, strongly favoring applied science (Sieg 2001: 258). Nazism actually moved closer towards international norms in science as the regime became more radical (indeed genocidal) in its policies.

The interaction between ideas of people or Volk, race, and genetic inheritance was both intellectually complex and politically sensitive.From the point of view of racial anthropology, the racial identity of the German Volk was hybrid or mixed (even leaving aside the Jewish and African elements). The dominant model was elaborated by H. F. K. Günther’s (1891- 1968). It diagnosed combinations of the following elements in the German Volk: Nordic (nordisch); Mediterranean (westisch, mediterran, mitelländisch); Dinaric (dinarisch); Alpine
(ostisch, alpin); East Baltic (ostbaltisch); Phalian (fälisch, dalisch). [...] The framework promoted by racial anthropology highlighted the fuzzy racial identity of the German Volk and the uncertainty of its boundaries. Further, after 1933 the idealization of the Nordic race became politically problematic, as many Germans feared that Nazism was a form of Nordic colonialism, and that non-Nordics would be treated assecond-class citizens, above only the Africans, Jews, and Slavs.

Orthodox racial anthropology on one level offered at best ambivalentsupport for the unity of the German Volk, and could be read as suggesting that the primary links were across different peoples rather than within them. Nordic ideology, an off-shoot of racial anthropology, was a form of elite racist internationalism, and hostile to European nationalism. The European nation states were viewed by Nordicists as constructs of language and territorial politics. There were Nordic elements in the populations of many countries, including obviously the Scandinavian nations, Britain and the UnitedStates, but also among theSlavs. Racial anthropology in its Nordicist guise was therefore politically problematic, since it presented the concept of Volk as a secondary grouping, and suggested a potential bond between the elites of a wide variety of politically antagonistic nations (Holler 1934).

There is no doubt that any racial anthropologist or other scholar promoting the notion of an “Aryan race” in Nazi Germany would have been instantly dismissed.

[...]

A further complex set of problems arose from the interaction between race and genetics. The genetic revolution, and the application of a Mendelian model of heredity to the transmission of racial features, had been applied to the study of human race (Fischer 1913). The conclusion was that race was not an indivisible attribute, and different aspects of racial identity could be inherited separately. Race was in effect a construct, in that no single member of the contemporary German (or any other) Volk was racially pure. There were racial traits, but no races operating as autonomous communities. To put the matter at its simplest, the logical conclusion from this model was that there was no necessary link between a Nordic appearance and a Nordic mentality or soul. The “phenotype” (Erscheinungsbild, Phänotypus) was essentially distinct from “genotype” (Erbbild, Genotypus): the measurement of the appearance and physical form of an individual did not give the observer access to essential hereditary make-up. Evolutionary biologists and geneticists argued that there was no way to purify the German Volk by selective breeding. A superficial Nordification would not necessarily mean that Nordic character traits were also present (Baur 1936), since one could be Nordic in appearance yet be psychologically Jewish.

[...]

The idea that the German Volk was somehow determined in its nature by the Nordic race soul would have been laughable to the geneticists who were being promoted within theSSfrom 1937 onwards (Heberer 1943). By the late 1930s the regime was marginalizing racial science in favour of neo-Darwinian evolutionary genetics.

[...]

However overall, racial anthropology played two crucial roles. It identified Jews and Africans and others as racially foreign, and this gave intellectual authority to the political actions which sought to purify the Volk. Secondly, it played an instrumental role in producing certificates of racial identity and carrying out other acts of racial classification. Racial anthropology ultimately provided intellectual justification for policies such as forced sterilization, loss of civic rights and genocide, even if genocidal rhetoric was not a feature of published academic race theory.

Any understanding of Nazi race theory as “pseudo-scientific” fails to do justice to the historical phenomenon. In Nazi Germany discussions of race made constant reference to the criterion of “scientific standards”.


Christopher M. Hutton, Nazi Race Theory and Belief in an “Aryan Race”: A Profound Failure of Interdisciplinary Communication, The International Journal of Science in Society, 2010, v. 1 n. 4, p. 149-156, (http://hub.hku.hk/handle/10722/138815)


A friend of mine is very knowledgeable on Genetics, he used to read Lazaridis all the time and would constantly tell me how much of a hack he is. Frankly I believe him, the man, from what my friend told me, had significantly changed his data all the time in order to manipulate Europeans, particularly Italians, into looking as if there was significant non-white admixture. The pins were set up in order to diffuse any kind of pro-white racial sentiment. The political goals of these studies cannot be ignored.

I'm also sceptical of using Haplogroups to determine anything race related. From observations I've seen and heard, it seems to be a whole lot of indeterminate bunk.

https://www.theapricity.com/forum/showthread.php?107088-Actual-Importance-of-Haplogroups

This is a public service announcement. If you are a user of direct-to-consumer personal genomics services, please do not pay any attention to your mtDNA and Y chromosomal haplogroups. Why? Because they hardly tell you anything about your individual ancestry. What do I mean by this? Your mtDNA comes down from your mother’s-mother’s-mother’s-mother… and similarly for your Y chromosomal lineage if you are a male. These few individuals are not any more likely to contribute to your ancestry than all those multitudes and multitudes who do not contribute to your mtDNA or Y lineages; also known as almost all your ancestors! What you should pay attention to are your autosomal results. Inferences made from most of your genome. These results may be more difficult to parse, but difficulty is no sin, and elegant ease is no virtue, in this case. That’s because you are interested in your ancestry, not a convenient interpretable story.

Of course I am not saying that mtDNA and Y chromosomal haplogroups are useless. They are useful for population scale phylogeography. But please don’t make inferences about yourself from one data point. At least in most cases.

Source: https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/please-ignore-mtdna-and-y-chromosomal-haplogroups

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Re: Did Hitler consider Slavs / Eastern Europeans to be "Subhuman" or racially inferior?

Postby Lamprecht » 2 years 7 months ago (Mon Nov 02, 2020 12:47 pm)

HMS:
I'm also sceptical of using Haplogroups to determine anything race related

The Y-DNA and mtDNA haplogroups are not useful for determining racial or ethnic affiliation, they are used to track population movements. That is because there is a consistent theme for human migrations that reflects itself in the DNA. The mtDNA (passed maternally) strongly indicates the indigenous source of the population, and the Y-DNA (passed paternally) reflects invasions. Likely the reason for that is because the men would be killed during an invasion and the women spared. That is why your Discover Magazine page is telling people to not pay attenton to these markers when trying to find out one's individual ethnic makeup. They don't tell you anything about that but aren't intended to. These markers tell us about ancient migration patterns.
"There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments, and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance -- that principle is contempt prior to investigation."
— Herbert Spencer


NOTE: I am taking a leave of absence from revisionism to focus on other things. At this point, the ball is in their court to show the alleged massive pits full of human remains at the so-called "extermination camps." After 8 decades they still refuse to do this. I wonder why...

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Re: Did Hitler consider Slavs / Eastern Europeans to be "Subhuman" or racially inferior?

Postby Madonna 39 » 2 years 6 months ago (Mon Nov 16, 2020 11:03 am)

Whilst the Nazis did consider the Slavs to be of "related blood" and therefore "Aryans", they did consider the Slavs to be racially inferior to the Germans. This view was quite popular in Austria and Germany in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Adolf Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that "the organization of a Russian state formation was not the result of the political abilities of the Slavs in Russia, but only a wonderful example of the state-forming efficacity of the German element in an inferior race."

He also wrote:

During the last century it was lamentable for those who had to witness it, to notice how in these circles I have just mentioned the word 'Germanize' was frivolously played with, though the practice was often well intended. I well remember how in the days of my youth this very term used to give rise to notions which were false to an incredible degree. Even in Pan-German circles one heard the opinion expressed that the Austrian Germans might very well succeed in Germanizing the Austrian Slavs, if only the Government would be ready to co-operate. Those people did not understand that a policy of Germanization can be carried out only as regards human beings. What they mostly meant by Germanization was a process of forcing other people to speak the German language. But it is almost inconceivable how such a mistake could be made as to think that a Negro or a Chinaman will become a German because he has learned the German language and is willing to speak German for the future, and even to cast his vote for a German political party. Our bourgeois nationalists could never clearly see that such a process of Germanization is in reality de-Germanization; for even if all the outstanding and visible differences between the various peoples could be bridged over and finally wiped out by the use of a common language, that would produce a process of bastardization which in this case would not signify Germanization but the annihilation of the German element. In the course of history it has happened only too often that a conquering race succeeded by external force in compelling the people whom they subjected to speak the tongue of the conqueror and that after a thousand years their language was spoken by another people and that thus the conqueror finally turned out to be the conquered.

What makes a people or, to be more correct, a race, is not language but blood. Therefore it would be justifiable to speak of Germanization only if that process could change the blood of the people who would be subjected to it, which is obviously impossible. A change would be possible only by a mixture of blood, but in this case the quality of the superior race would be debased. The final result of such a mixture would be that precisely those qualities would be destroyed which had enabled the conquering race to achieve victory over an inferior people. It is especially the cultural creativeness which disappears when a superior race intermixes with an inferior one, even though the resultant mongrel race should excel a thousandfold in speaking the language of the race that once had been superior. For a certain time there will be a conflict between the different mentalities, and it may be that a nation which is in a state of progressive degeneration will at the last moment rally its cultural creative power and once again produce striking examples of that power. But these results are due only to the activity of elements that have remained over from the superior race or hybrids of the first crossing in whom the superior blood has remained dominant and seeks to assert itself. But this will never happen with the final descendants of such hybrids. These are always in a state of cultural retrogression.

We must consider it as fortunate that a Germanization of Austria according to the plan of Joseph II did not succeed. Probably the result would have been that the Austrian State would have been able to survive, but at the same time participation in the use of a common language would have debased the racial quality of the German element. In the course of centuries a certain herd instinct might have been developed but the herd itself would have deteriorated in quality. A national State might have arisen, but a people who had been culturally creative would have disappeared.

For the German nation it was better that this process of intermixture did not take place, although it was not renounced for any high-minded reasons but simply through the short-sighted pettiness of the Habsburgs. If it had taken place the German people could not now be looked upon as a cultural factor.

Not only in Austria, however, but also in the Reich, these so-called national circles were, and still are, under the influence of similar erroneous ideas. Unfortunately, a policy towards Poland, whereby the East was to be Germanized, was demanded by many and was based on the same false reasoning. Here again it was believed that the Polish people could be Germanized by being compelled to use the German language. The result would have been fatal. A people of foreign race would have had to use the German language to express modes of thought that were foreign to the German, thus compromising by its own inferiority the dignity and nobility of our nation.


In his Second Book he wrote:

The National Socialist Movement, on the contrary, will always let its foreign policy be determined by the necessity to secure the space necessary to the life of our Folk. It knows no Germanising or Teutonising, as in the case of the national bourgeoisie, but only the spread of its own Folk. It will never see in the subjugated, so called Germanised, Czechs or Poles a national, let alone Folkish, strengthening, but only the racial weakening of our Folk.


and:

The völkisch State, conversely, must under no conditions annex Poles with the intention of wanting to make Germans out of them some day. On the contrary, it must muster the determination either to seal off these alien racial elements, so that the blood of its own Folk will not be corrupted again, or it must, without further ado, remove them and hand over the vacated territory to its own National Comrades. The völkisch State, conversely, must under no conditions annex Poles with the intention of wanting to make Germans out of them some day. On the contrary, it must muster the determination either to seal off these alien racial elements, so that the blood of its own Folk will not be corrupted again, or it must, without further ado, remove them and hand over the vacated territory to its own National Comrades.


Heinrich Himmler became influenced by the blood and soil concept and wrote in the early 1920s about the necessity of the:

Increase [of] our peasant population is the only effective defense against the influx of the Slav working-class masses from the East. As six hundred years ago, the German peasant's destiny must be to preserve and increase the German people's patrimony in their holy mother earth battle against the Slav race.


During the formation of the SS, he said during a speech:

An SSF [SS leader] will never keep someone with a typical Slav face in his unit for very long because so long as that person is in the troop or storm (Sturm), he will never get the troop or storm into a proper order. He will soon notice there is no community of blood with the other comrades, who are of more Nordic descent. The passport photos that have to be submitted together with the application forms ensure that Reich headquarters can suspect the heads of the SS candidates. One only needs to try the experiment of admitting a Mongol to the SS; it's certain that he will be thrown out during the trial period. But so long as this Mongol is in the SS it will be impossible to create the spirit which is essential for the SS. The breaking-point will come when the racially pure person will stay the course whereas the racially impure will fall by the wayside.


The Nazis were worried about the birth rate of Slavs and in 1938 Otto Helmut wrote "Fruchtbarkeit und Rasse. Das Anwachsen der Slawen in Europa":

Image

Bernhard Kummer wrote a short book titled "Der Kampf der nordischen Rassenseele gegen Süden und Osten" (The struggle of the Nordic race soul against South and East).

Things only got worse during WW2. The racial inferiority of Poles were made legal by the Polish Decrees in 1940. Similar degrees were issued against the other Eastern workers.

In October 1939, Julius Streicher spoke at Nuremberg and said during a speech:

The Poles did not get to fight near Berlin. They were destroyed, man, beast, and wagon, in their own land. Today we can say that the Poles were never a people that had the moral right to rule other peoples. The Poles were physically and spiritually like Jews and Gypsies. Those who were in Poland know that the Polish people, seen as a whole, is a bastard people, a mixed race people. A people in which Jews in such numbers and such types live for centuries — we have had opportunity to see these types in the newsreels — such a people never develops in a good direction, but always heads toward ruin. As is blood, so is the soul. We found captured German soldiers stabbed in the eyes, they were slaughtered like Jews slaughter animals because their blood was ruined over the centuries by the Jews. Because the blood was ruined, the character, the soul, was also ruined.


On 25 November 1939, Himmler was sent a 40-page document titled (in English translation) "The issue of the treatment of population in former Polish territories from a racial-political view." The last chapter of the document concerns "racially valuable" Polish children and plans to forcefully acquire them for German plans and purposes:

we should exclude from deportations racially valuable children and raise them in old Reich in proper educational facilities or in German family care. The children must not be older than eight or ten years, because only till this age we can truly change their national identification, that is "final Germanization". A condition for this is complete separation from any Polish relatives. Children will be given German names, their ancestry will be led by special office.


Himmler in 1940 wrote a secret memorandum titled "Reflections on the Treatment of Peoples of Alien Races in the East" and wrote the following:

What I want to say is that we are not only most interested in not unifying the population of the East, but, on the contrary, in splitting them up into as many parts and fragments as possible.

But even within the ethnic groups themselves we have one interest in leading these to unity and greatness, or perhaps arouse in them gradually a national consciousness and national culture, but we want to dissolve them into innumerable small fragments and particles.

[...]

A basic issue in the solution of all these problems is the question of schooling and thus the question of sifting and selecting the young. For the non-German population of the East there must be no higher school than the four-grade elementary school. The sole goal of this school is to be--

Simply arithmetic up to 500 at the most; writing of one's name; the doctrine that it is a divine law to obey the Germans and to be honest, industrious, and good. I don't think that reading is necessary.

Apart from this school there are to be no schools at all in the East. Parents, who from the beginning want to give their children better schooling in the elementary school as well as later on in a higher school, must take an application to the Higher SS and Police Leaders. The first consideration in dealing with this application will be whether the child is racially perfect and conforming to our conditions. If we acknowledge such a child to be as of our blood, the parents will be notified that the child will be sent to a school in Germany and that it will permanently remain in Germany.

Cruel and tragic as every individual case may be, this method is still the mildest and best one if, out of inner conviction, one rejects as un-German and impossible the Bolshevist method of physical extermination of a people.

The parents of such children of good blood will be given the choice to either give away their child; they will then probably produce no more children so that the danger of this subhuman people of the East [Untermenschenvolk des Ostens] obtaining class of leaders which, since it would be equal to us, would also be dangerous for us, will disappear--or else the parents pledge themselves to go to Germany and to become loyal citizens there. The love toward their child, whose future and education depends on the loyalty of the parents, will be a strong weapon in dealing with them.


Slavs were considered to be "subhumans" by the Nazis during WW2. Poles, Russians, Ukrainians and others were hanged for having sexual relations with Germans.

During WW2, General Erich Hoepner of the Panzer Group 4 said:

The war against Russia is an important chapter in the German nation's struggle for existence. It is the old battle of the Germanic against the Slavic people, of the defence of European culture against Muscovite-Asiatic inundation and of the repulse of Jewish Bolshevism. The objective of this battle must be the demolition of present-day Russia and must therefore be conducted with unprecedented severity. Every military action must be guided in planning and execution by an iron resolution to exterminate the enemy remorselessly and totally. In particular, no adherents of the contemporary Russian Bolshevik system are to be spared.


Himmler said during a speech:

It is a war of ideologies and struggle races. On one side stands National Socialism: ideology, founded on the values of our Germanic, Nordic blood. It is worth the world as we want to see: beautiful, orderly, fair, socially, a world that may be, still suffers some flaws, but overall a happy, beautiful world filled with culture, which is precisely Germany. On the other side stands the 180 millionth people, a mixture of races and peoples, whose names are unpronounceable, and whose physical nature is such that the only thing that they can do - is to shoot without pity or mercy. These animals, which are subjected to torture and ill-treatment of each prisoner from our side, which do not have medical care they captured our wounded, as do the decent men, you will see them for yourself. These people have joined a Jewish religion, one ideology, called Bolshevism, with the task of: having now Russian, half [located] in Asia, parts of Europe, crush Germany and the world. When you, my friends, are fighting in the East, you keep that same fight against the same subhumans, against the same inferior races that once appeared under the name of Huns, and later - 1,000 years ago during the time of King Henry and Otto I, - the name of the Hungarians, and later under the name of Tatars, and then they came again under the name of Genghis Khan and the Mongols. Today they are called Russian under the political banner of Bolshevism.


The only 'Slavs' who were exempt from such draconian measures were those the Nazis regarded as actually being of Germanic blood. Hitler himself was shocked at how many Nordic Slavs there were in the East and suspected that they were descended from the Goths, an ancient Germanic tribe.

Even when some Slavs decided to fight on the German side during WW2, there was still hostility towards the Slavs and Himmler was strict about what names the divisions were to be called, etc. They didn't allow Slavs to fight on the German side because of some sort of U-turn, it was simply down to loss of manpower so they decided to use them.

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Re: Did Hitler consider Slavs / Eastern Europeans to be "Subhuman" or racially inferior?

Postby Hannover » 2 years 6 months ago (Mon Nov 16, 2020 1:55 pm)

Madonna:

You posted a lot of English text, some of which is not even from German government officials, which I assume is supposed to be translations from the German originals.

Please present the German originals for us to compare.

I also notice that you failed to address the information that was presented earlier in this thread.

As we all know, anti-German propaganda was massive, including endless examples of false, contrived "translations".
You need to do better.
Please show us the originals.

Thanks, Hannover
If it can't happen as alleged, then it didn't.

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Re: Did Hitler consider Slavs / Eastern Europeans to be "Subhuman" or racially inferior?

Postby Otium » 2 years 6 months ago (Tue Nov 17, 2020 4:28 am)

Madonna. There are a number of problems with your post that would've been answered had you bothered to read this thread in it's entirety.

You've given no citations, nor backgrounds of sources.

All of what you have quoted in fact proves nothing of the meaning which you ascribed to it.

First of all, you "cite" Mein Kampf and the Second Book, obsolete sources that have no bearing on what later occurred. Hitler's predications of future events were entirely theoretical and based in whatever current day political matters he was dealing with while imprisoned in 1923. Not only that, but Hitler had no idea that it would be he himself determining events. He even stated that his rectification of Mein Kampf would be shown in deed and not through words:

“I am not a writer, but a statesman. I shall write the revision of Mein Kampf into the book of History,

Adolf Hitler, cited in: Udo Walendy, Who Started World War II? (Castle Hill Publishers, 2014), Pp. 446


In any case, none of that which you quoted says anything beyond simply distinguishing certain characteristics observed between the German people and some Slavic people. That these were very accurately assessed needs to be considered. Poland in comparison with Germany had never been as industrious or advanced, even today. Nor was the rest of the east.

Claiming Hitler didn't want to Annex Poles is perhaps true, but later something he cared just less about because he in fact was fine with doing just that. You would know this if you read my previous post. That Hitler was Pan-German is not surprise to anyone.

Next you cite Himmler and various non-comments that you haven't cited. Without context. Whether context would change much is of course not guaranteed, but still necessary.

You seem to have this habit of equating what one German said as something ALL Germans, or National Socialists thought. This is manifestly untrue. It would do you a whole lot of good to recognise nuance. Hitler and Himmler differed on their thinking about race.

Why do we call the whole world's attention to the fact that we have no past? It isn't enough that the Romans were erecting great buildings when our forefathers were still living in mud huts; now Himmler is starting to dig up these villages of mud huts and enthusing over every potsherd and stone axe he finds. All we prove by that is that we were still throwing stone hatchets and crouching around open fires when Greece and Rome had already reached the highest stage of culture. We really should do our best to keep quiet about this past. Instead Himmler makes a great fuss about it all. The present-day Romans must be having a laugh at these relegations.

Adolf Hitler cited in: Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich (Macmillan, 1970), Pp. 94-95


And

"Facing the prospect that the whole resettlement programme would end up depopulating the Reich's new eastern borderlands by getting rid of Poles before enough Germans had been found to come in, the local authorities in the Warthegau moved back towards an assimilation policy and sought to introduce new citizenship guidlines in order to work out whom to give German ID papers to. Less dogmatic than Himmler, Hitler himself understood the problem and once he clarified that he tolerate some degree of assimilation the guidlines were finalized. "

[...]

Hitler humself thought Himmler's race mysticism was impractical, and while hostile to serbs and Russians in general, he felt differently about other groups of Slavs. He praised the Czechs as "industrious and intelligent workers' and speculated that blue eyed Ukranians might be peasant descendants of German tribes who never migrated'. In fact, he came round to the view - common among German anthropologists - that there was, racially speaking, no such catergory as 'Slavs': it was a linguistic term, nothing more. That did not stop it contunuting to be used. But it helps explain why the Fuhrer allowed Himmler and Forster each to define Germanness in his own way.

Mark Mazower, Hitler's Empire Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe (Penguin Books, 2008), Pp. 194, 198


Citing Himmler, as if you're citing what all National Socialists thought, or even what Hitler thought is utterly nonsensical. Nor does it accord with the changing dynamism and opportunism that propaganda thrived on especially during the war. Anti-Slavic sentiment was to be expected, as was typical in war against all side. Slavic antagonism in the Third Reich was purely the result of wartime chauvinism - to misunderstand this and take what was said all the time as some kind of policy decision or deeply held belief is to misunderstand, whether out of ignorance or malice, how human beings functioned.

It's easy to disassociate yourself from the complexity of human behaviour when evaluating historical figures because you see them as more like characters, or in the case of the National Socialists, as caricatures of what you expect them to be. Then, when you go out and try to do research on the topic you try to find whatever will fit into that inhuman mould you have for these real people in your head. This is something that occurs to an alarming degree. Hence you've cited many examples that really are ineffectual in explaining anything about what National Socialists really thought.

The bit about the Slav-Working classes you "cited" has no source, or context. It's hard to make any deductions or draw conclusions from it. You say the early 1920s, and if this is true rather unsurprising. Obviously Slavs are NOT Germans historically. So why does this comment by Himmler strike you at all with any relevance? Purely because you've found post-hoc meaning in it where little meaning actually exists. Do you honestly think Himmler was holding this thought in his mind for over 20 years and acting in some way based on it? I find that hard to believe.

But even if he was, let's evaluate what he actually says. For one, he uses "Slav" as a a simple descriptor of these "working-class masses" initially, only after does he describe a "battle against the Slav race" yet we do not know in what context he says this. All he's done is distinguish between the German working class and the Slavic working class whom were in conflict for centuries. Hardly a novel piece of trivia. So what meaning do you possibly derive from this? There's nothing to derive from it, it's a description of some historical event in a context we have no idea about. Germans had no interest in becoming Slavic, and thus should have prevented any such cultural subversion, this is also hardly damning. The Poles and other Slavic groups acted in the exact same way. We see this in how the Poles attempted to ethnically cleanse Western "Poland" of its German inhabitants.

From the SS Mate Selection and Race pamphlet we actually read something similar:

The great colonial activity through settlement of Nordic-Germanic farmers in the East will form a wall against the advance of East Baltic people of Slavic language.

Source: https://www.jrbooksonline.com/PDF_Books/ssracetheory.pdf p. 27.


Yet there is no mention of race. In this booklet also, you will also find that "Nordic" means "Northern" so the different ethnicities are distinguished by their geography. I will come back to this booklet in a moment.

-------------------------------------------------------


Next. You say "during the formation of the SS" and "said during a speech". Do you mean to say Himmler said this in a speech inaugurating the creation of the SS? If not, why mention the "formation of the SS"? You just said "during a speech", so WHAT speech is he supposed to have said this?

I will admit though, this speech isn't too "kind". Although he clearing distinguishes the Slav from a Mongol, which is to say that the Slavs aren't dissimilar from Germans, hence "of more Nordic descent" implying the Slavs are partially Nordic, albeit they're not as "pure" racially. This is perhaps what Himmler thought, but the intricacies of this thinking are unknown to us. However, it is also a fact that all non-Germans were barred from joining the SS. So should we complain about other European ethnic groups being excluded? Or perhaps extrapolate from this that "the Nazis" thought everyone who couldn't join the SS, including other Germans unfit for the SS were "subhuman" and "racially inferior"? No. That's absurd.

It's a fact that whatever Himmler said here was abrogated in no time at all:

Ukrainians were seen fit to join the SS, and were also used as police and camp guards. Those who doubted the racial logic of such moves were accused of lacking an understanding for the "revolutionary idea of National Socialism, which transcended the boundaries of national states." According to a training brochure for ideological schooling of the SS and police (ca. 1943), the force of the war had caused the "common roots of the European family of peoples to come to the surface."

John Connelly, Nazis and Slavs: From Racial Theory to Racist Practice (Central European History, Vol. 32, no. 1), Pp. 14-15.


It's important to understand that as the National Socialists saw it, at least, those who followed the works of Hans Gunther, the Nordic race made up 50% of the German people:

In the description of all races we have continually drawn a comparison with the Nordic race, both as to bodily characteristics as well as to soul and mind. We do that for a definite reason. It is not because we wish to have merely some point of comparison. We draw this very comparison repeatedly because the Nordic is the race most strongly represented in Germany. Gunther in his study of German races attempts to estimate the proportion of the different races in the composition of our people.

The Nazi Primer: Official Handbook for Schooling the Hitler Youth (Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1938), Pp. 33


So to emphasise the Nordic element is hardly surprising.

In the previous SS mate selection booklet I cited, we read:

We find the Nordic race represented outside of Germany, in the Scandinavian lands, England and Holland and even in Russia, Italy, France, Spain and so on. We also find, however, East Baltic man in the various European countries. The overall racial evaluation of a folk does not come down to that. It is a matter of the STRENGTH OF THE PORTIONS OF THE INDIVIDUAL RACES in the respective folk. And there we determine: already just numerically the Reich marches far ahead of all other folks in respect to the Nordic portion.

p. 7-8


What we understand by this, is that the Nordic element was found in all European peoples, however it was strongest in Germany. This meant Germany had a duty to safeguard and improve the birthrate of the Nordic race. However, the German people were comprised of other races as well, including the "East Baltic" race which you claim Madonna, they considered "subhuman" or "inferior" which is obviously utter nonsense:

Despite the often heavy mixture and meshing of races in the various provinces of the Reich we find individual races more pronounced in the various parts of Germany:

[...]

Finally, conspicuous in certain parts of the Reich are short, round-headed people with
wide faces, brown eyes, brown to black hair and dark skin color (physical appearance of
the EAST BALTIC race).

Ibid. p. 6,


You are correct that they were particularly afraid of certain birth-rate patterns. The Nazi Primer and SS Mate Selection Guidelines also discuss this fear to varying degrees, but this can be attributed to the fact that again, they saw the German people as primarily Nordic and understandably didn't wish to see their ethnicity dwarfed by anyone else. Even if they were other Europeans.

birthrates.PNG


That Germany at this time was worried about its birth-rate is true. Other sources I've quoted corroborate this fear, however this might seem incongruent with the claim of "Lebensraum", that Germany was becoming overpopulated and needed more "Living Space" to expand her population.

The Nordic race was also competing with the Latin people whom nobody accuses the Nazis of wanting to kill, or think were "subhuman" and "inferior". Such ideas were nonsense, although the Slavs could reasonably be considered "Subhuman" but not in the biological sense that was invented after WW2 by the Allies. As I explained in my previous post, "Subhuman" was a designation of cultural character, whether a people was more or less meek and subservient in their history. Nietzsche might've called this "slave morality" or a "slave mindset". The Germans throughout history have always been more of a "master race", again, not a biological term, but a cultural designation for a people who weren't often RULED over like the various Slavs were at any given point in history. Perhaps you find this distasteful, but it is nevertheless based on reality. Then again, neither terms were used by the National Socialists very often or at all.

You can also see this 1943 SS pamphlet from 1943 that was distributed to educate SS men on racial policy: https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/rassenpo.htm Archive: https://archive.vn/DMKyv which made no distinction between Slavs in the same way it did Jews, Negros or Asians. If anything it was the opposite.

You mention some "book" by Helmut Otto, but give the wrong title. I think "Fruchtbarkeit und Rasse. Das Anwachsen der Slawen in Europa" was a chapter in a book entitled "Volk in Gefahr. Der Geburtenrückgang und seine Folgen für Deutschlands Zukunft" (People in danger. The decline in the birth rate and its consequences for Germany's future) which was published in 1933, and contains the image you have attached in your post. Your incorrect citing of this title shows me you have done next to no research on this and have merely taken a variety of alleged quotes from various forums with little thought as to the veracity. The titled you posted is misleading, but probably not incorrect. Although it would be wrong to just ascribe importance to a random piece of literature published in the Third Reich, even more so as you're passing it off as the conventional opinion of National Socialists - an assertion with no evidence. The same goes with the book by this "Bernhard Kummer" person.

In the 1943 pamphlet I cited, the Germans enthuse over the recognition of race by the Italians:

Even in other parts of the Germanic world where the influence of Liberalism has been the strongest and most persistent (Sweden!), people are realizing the historical significance and value of common Nordic blood and the importance of keeping it pure. They recognize that even today the North Germanic peoples are endangered.

The other peoples of Europe too, above all our allies, are recognizing the importance of racial thinking. A racial manifesto of leading Italian scientists in Fascist Italy on 14 July 1938 affirmed racial thinking clearly. The seventh of ten points is:

“It is time for Italians to openly affirm racial thinking. Italian racial policy must be Italian in nature, and follow the Aryan-Nordic model.”


Point 8 said:

“It is necessary to make a clear distinction between the Mediterranean peoples of Europe on the one side and the Oriental and African peoples on the other.”


Point 9 said:

“The Jews are of non-Italian blood.”


Point 10 added:

“The pure European physical and spiritual traits of the Italians may not be altered. The pure European character of the Italians will be changed by mixing with any other non-European race, which is the carrier of a culture other than the ancient Aryan culture.”


This racial manifesto clearly recognizes the biological differences between the human races, and draws the necessary conclusions from that scientific knowledge. It is not a mere imitation of National Socialist thinking. Its significance is that a second great power, building on its own scientific foundations, recognizes the significance of racial thinking and sees maintaining the purity of its good blood as its most important task.

Source: https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/rassenpo.htm Archive: https://archive.vn/DMKyv


Far from considering the "southern" Italian people to be a "threat" the Germans are obviously very pleased about this development, as they are in many other European countries, citing multiple Slavic countries as "European" examples of those who have followed suit in defending Europe from foreign racial elements:

Each of Europe’s peoples must return to the source of its existence and affirm its racial uniqueness if it is to be renewed in the way the German people has been under National Socialism. In recent years, most European peoples have found the will to protect their racial purity against mixing. The Jews are increasingly excluded from economic life, and marriages with Jews are forbidden. Examples are Slovakia, Rumania, Hungary, Croatia, and Bulgaria. Halfway solutions always prove useless. When any kind of back door is left open, the Jew gets around the intentions of the lawmakers. European nations are increasingly coming to the realization that the Jewish question can be solved only as a racial question, and that only racial thinking consistent with natural laws can guarantee the life and characteristics of the individual peoples. Adolf Hitler introduced a new era in the history of Europe and the world. A new world is rising. The barriers of centuries are falling. Empires are declining and a new order under the leadership of the young peoples is rising. The spiritual revolution of our age is just as significant. The spiritual and political boundaries have probably never been clearer than they are today. The lines are clear everywhere. The Second World War is a struggle between two worldviews and two ways of life. Our enemy hates us because we have recognized that the single raw material that cannot be replaced is the raw material that the German people have more of than any other people on earth, our good blood, which is our Nordic inheritance. They hate us because they know that we hold the key to victory, to our future, and to the eternal Reich of all Germans.

Source: https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/rassenpo.htm Archive: https://archive.vn/DMKyv


The Germans, in the books by Otto and Kummar, were concerned simply with the preservation of the German people. As this 1943 pamphlet shows us, the National Socialists made a distinction between who was German and who was of another European ethnicity. They were not racially depredating these people, however you could be damned sure that if any other European ethnic group threatened the German people and thus their nation, then Germany would defend itself in an ethnically chauvinistic way. And yes, they did consider the Nordic race to be the most valuable but this Nordicist view desisted over time.

The definitions of what/who was a hotly debated topic, and not a consistent liner belief:

Providing an affirmative definition of Aryan posed additional theoretical and political problems, both of which could also be construed as undermining the asserted scientific basis for racial policy. In July 1933, for example, Hans Seel, an Interior Ministry official, asked Achim Gercke (1902–1997), then the ministry’s racial expert, how he would reconcile the “Aryan paragraph” in the Civil Service Law with the following definition of Aryan by Albert Gorter, another prominent ministry official:

“The Aryans (also Indo-Germans, Japhetiten) are one of the three branches of the Caucasian (white race); they are divided into the western (European), that is the German, Roman, Greek, Slav, Lett, Celt [and] Albanesen, and the eastern (Asiatic) Aryans, that is the Indian (Hindu) and Iranian (Persian, Afghan, Armenian, Georgian, Kurd). Non-Aryans are therefore: 1. the members of the two other races, namely the Mongolian (yellow) and the Negroid (black) races; 2. the members of the other two branches of the Caucasian race, namely the Semites (Jews, Arabs) and Hamites (Berbers). The Finns and Hungarians belong to the Mongolian race; but it is hardly the intention of the law to treat them as non-Aryans. Thus . . . the non-Jewish members of all European Volk are Aryans. . . .“


This definition of Aryan was clearly unacceptable. Not only did it include large numbers of non-European peoples such as Kurds and Afghans, but it also made the racial laws seem to be based on political expedience rather than science. Gercke replied that he would use the definition of Aryan established by the Expert Advisor for Population and Racial Policy (Sachverständigenbeirats für Bevölkerungs- und Rassenpolitik):

“An Aryan is one who is tribally related (stammverwandte) to German blood. An Aryan is the descendant of a Volk domiciled in Europe in a closed tribal settlement (Volkstumssiedlung) since recorded history.”


This definition managed to include Finns and Hungarians, and exclude Kurds and Afghans. —– In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws established a new term for racially acceptable origin: German or related blood. This remained the standard wording in legal documents until the end of World War II. Nevertheless, even experts continued to use the term Aryan well after 1935.

Eric Ehrenreich, The Nazi Ancestral Proof: Genealogy, Racial Science, and the Final Solution (Indiana University Press, 2007), Pp. 209-210


The term Aryan, as we see, was specifically constructed to include Slavic groups, NOT exclude them. "Aryan" and "Nordic" were terms used interchangeably.

You said:
Madonna 39 wrote:Things only got worse during WW2. The racial inferiority of Poles were made legal by the Polish Decrees in 1940. Similar degrees were issued against the other Eastern workers.


The view of the Poles as "inferior" is something not said or emphasised by any National Socialist policy or widely held opinion. If you read my last post you would know that the attitude taken towards Poles was varied, contradictory and not drawn from some previous view of "inferiority" or malice. They were a people, to different degrees, criticized and looked down upon, perhaps not held in a very high regard - due to their duplicitous actions against Germany. Particularly by provoking the Second World War, which definitely helped change Hitler's opinion of them.

Hitler’s own anti-Polish feelings were comparatively new ; born of his frustrated plan in the fall of 1938 for an alliance with Poland against Stalin, they were now reinforced by events in this campaign. There is no trace of his crueller plans for Poland among the documents predating the outbreak of the war. In Poland, however, Hitler and his generals were confronted by what they saw as still warm evidence that Asia did indeed begin just beyond the old Reich frontier in the east. In the western Polish town of Bydgoszcz (Bromberg) the local Polish commander had ordered the massacre of several thousand German residents on the charge that some of them had taken part in the hostilities. G–ring’s paratroopers were being shot on the spot when captured by the Poles. It was also charged that the Poles had used poisonous blister-gases in manufacturing booby traps. Hitler was particularly angered by a report that a Polish prisoner who had jabbed out the eyes of a wounded German soldier had been routinely sent to the rear through regular army channels. (Hitler said he should have been tried and executed on the spot by a drumhead court-martial.)

Source: http://www.fpp.co.uk/books/Hitler/1977/html_chapter/01.html Archive: https://archive.vn/NZgDD


The hard line Germany took with Poland was a result of the war. Not prejudice, which is the act of "prejudging" someone or something. The Poles were cruel to the Germans, and so the Germans were cruel to the Poles. Again, I go into this in my previous post somewhat. The explanation is less to do with believing the Poles were an "inferior race"- and more to do with the fact that they were constantly Germany's historical adversaries, and treated the ethnic Germans in a way that was cruel and inhuman. Hitler was obviously receptive to this, and took no short measures in dealing out his own cruelty on the Poles whom had scorned his niceties. Perhaps this was right, or not. It was at the very least understandable.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Polish state was bent on the elimination of most of the German minority in Western Poland---by forced assimilation where possible, but mainly by coerced emigration. Moreover, this goal was well on the way to being achieved in 1939; the Pozanian wojewode reportedly assured his supporters that within three years there would no longer be any Germans in Poland. A study of the minority's actual political, cultural, and economic situation merely reinforces the pessimistic assessments of contemporaries cited above. The fact that Hitler took up the minority's case several months before he launched World War II was perhaps the overriding consideration at the time, but it does not make the fact of the minority's plight less compelling. Of course, any country faced with such an adversary might be justified in relegating consideration for a difficult minority to a back burner; even today, some will respond to this account of the minority's travails with a "So What?" in view of the larger issues at stake in 1939. The point, however, is that only a small proportion of the innumerable measures directed at the German minority in Poland, essentially those dating from after April 1939, can be attributed directly to Poland's anticipation of war with Germany. The bulk of the policies and attitudes that determined the living conditions of the minority in interwar Poland antedated 1939 (and 1933 too) and were unconnected to any immediate external threat. It hardly needs to be added that they did nothing to make Poland more secure when the mortal threat materialized. The fact is that Polish nationalism, motivated by the irrational but powerful compulsion to creation a nationally homogeneous society in it's western provinces, created a situation well before 1939 which was bad even by the unenlightened standards of interwar Eastern Europe. Moreover, it is hard to see how this situation would have been different had there never been a Hitler. The "plight" of the German minority in Poland, in other words, was real; it was not merely alleged or fabricated in the interest of Nazi propaganda. ----Apart from the macro political situation in 1939, however, the evidence above makes clear that Germans in Poland had ample justification for their complaints; their prospects for even medium-term survival were bleak; and no German government more principled than Hitler's would have been able to ignore their plight over the long run. Though it was not politic to make these points at the time, there is no reason why they cannot be accepted half a century later.

Richard Blanke, Orphans of Versailles: The Germans in Western Poland 1918-1939 (The University Press of Kentucky, 1993), Pp. 236-237


-------------------------------------------------------


What Streicher thought is irrelevant. He made no determinations on National Socialist racial policy, nor was he that important in the structure of the Third Reich. He IIRC also lost favour with Hitler. Reading this quote you don't cite, we can gather some context. He is singling out the Poles, and he is talking about abuses against Germans. It is no wonder that he would then target the Poles and degrade them for their violence against Germans. The years in which he said this clearly was some point after the Polish campaign, and also a result of the bad feelings that naturally existed between the Germans and Poles - not as another race but as two ethnicities who were engaged in a bitter conflict. The Poles lost that conflict due to their various shortcomings inherent within their nation, which wasn't helped by the racial character of their people. Because they didn't develop properly. We can see that he also insults them "spiritually", for they were too weak to defend themselves as a people against the Jews, so why should they ever think they could rule over Germans who had already by this point, rid themselves of the Jewish problem?

His quote is more about Jews than it is about Poles anyway. He might not be kinds to the Poles, but he is primarily describing the conditions in which the Jews manifest and cling on to a nation and destroy it. That to prevent this you need to "develop in a good direction" as he says, to recognize the importance of blood (race).

He obviously had a low opinion of them. But that's just his own opinion, and it did not correlate with others who held different opinions in the Third Reich, see those of:

Robert Ley
Even if somebody’s appearance is Nordic he might be a bastard inside. That somebody is blond and blue-eyed does not mean that he is racially pure. He might even be a degenerate coward. Bastardization shows in different aspects. We have to be on our guard against racial arrogance. Racial arrogance would be as devastating as hatred among classes.

Robert Ley, Tatsachen – Die Leipziger DAF-Tagung 2.-6 Dez. 1935, Published by the German Labour Front, Printed by Buch- und Tiefdruck DmbH, 1935 Dr. Robert Ley: Fatherland, Race, Discipline and Love of Life.


Alfred Rosenberg
No people of Europe is racially homogeneous, also Germany is not. According to the latest research, we accept five races all of which reveal perceptibly different types. But it is beyond question that the true culture bearer for Europe has been in the first place the Nordic race. Great heroes, artists and founders of states have grown from this blood. [...] "…nothing would be more superficial than to measure a man's worth by his physical appearance (with a centimetre rule and cephalic indices). A far more accurate measure of worth is conduct.

Alfred Rosenberg, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (Hoheneichen Verlag, 1930), Pp. 576, 596


Walter Gross (who was the head of the German Office of Racial Policy, the "Rassenpolitisches Amt", a more authoritative source that Streicher)
We appreciate the fact that those of another race are different from us… Whether that other race is 'better' or 'worse' is not possible for us to judge. For this would demand that we transcend our own racial limitations for the duration of the verdict and take on a superhuman, even divine, attitude from which alone an 'impersonal' verdict could be formed on the value or lack of such of the many living forms of inexhaustible Nature.

Walter Gross, Der deutsche Rassengedanke und die Welt (Junker und Dünnhaupt / Berlin, 1939), Pp. 24-28. Also see: https://archive.org/details/nationalsocialistracism


All of this and more you would've seen if you read the previous posts in this thread.

-------------------------------------------------------


In this supposed "memo" written by Himmler, even he outright denies intent as exterminating any Slavs: "Cruel and tragic as every individual case may be, this method is still the mildest and best one if, out of inner conviction, one rejects as un-German and impossible the Bolshevist method of physical extermination of a people.". He doesn't think highly of these people no doubt, after all these people of the East had allowed themselves to be subservient to Communism. Thus they were "subhuman", although you incorrectly interpret this as a biological designation. Again, see my previous post. They were very obviously a "subhuman" (slave people), as they were quite quick to submit themselves to Stalin's system of terror and slavery. Even this highly unfavourable section is not proof of any "Nazi" anti-slavic policy more than it is a memo, written by Himmler, of little historical importance seeing as if surely wasn't implemented. Nothing close to a plan but another opinion.

The nuance here is simple when you understand the context of the time period. Stalin ordered partisan activity behind German lines and Germany had a deep distrust of these eastern people because they were overrun by Jewish subhuman Bolshevism. They were at war and if they won, still had little reason to trust these people. It would've been best to just distance themselves from these people as it wasn't any of their own concern how these people lived. Himmler's memo is laden with assimilationist messages. If these Slavs were inherently not-German, there's no way Himmler would be saying: "The first consideration in dealing with this application will be whether the child is racially perfect and conforming to our conditions. If we acknowledge such a child to be as of our blood, the parents will be notified that the child will be sent to a school in Germany and that it will permanently remain in Germany.".

The low opinion of these people is less to do with their "race", but more to do with their temperament.

-------------------------------------------------------


What some General said is of little importance too. General Otto Ernst Remer (an intimate of Hitler's) held a completely different view:

Q: Is it true that the Germans referred to the Russians as "subhumans"?

A: Nonsense! The Russians are human beings just like everyone else.

Your question, whether we called the Russians "subhumans," is nonsense. We had a first-class relationship with the Russian people. The only exception, which was a problem we dealt with, was with the Soviet Commissars, who were all Jews. These people stood behind the lines with machine guns, pushing the Russian soldiers into battle. And anyway, we made quick work of them. That was according to order. This was during a war for basic existence, an ideological war, when such a policy is simply taken for granted.

There was sometimes talk about the so-called Asian hordes, and ordinary soldiers sometimes spoke about subhumans, but such language was never officially used.

Source: http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v10/v10p108_Schoeman.html Archive: https://archive.vn/n3jVD


As did General Leon Degrelle (another intimate of Hitler's):

degrelle.jpg


So you see, I can show you quotes from Generals too.

The quote you posted is of little importance anyway. It doesn't distinguish the Slavs as a separate race, but points out the trend of German and Slavic historical confrontation. A lazy quote that doesn't really mean or prove anything.

-------------------------------------------------------


For this last Himmler quote we don't see an original German source, nor do we know what the source even is. Himmler very poignantly says: "These people have joined a Jewish religion, one ideology, called Bolshevism,". Which goes to show you what I said earlier about the view of these Eastern people from the German perspective being negative due to their association with Bolshevism, not their racial makeup. "Subhuman" reflected this.

Himmler does apparently say "inferior races", but who could disagree with him? A Bolshevist Slav is certainly inferior to a National Socialist German. He describes a mixture of races, and hordes of different tribes invading Europe from the East. Hence his examples of Tartars, Huns, Mongels, Hungarians and finally, the most recent Eastern threat, the Bolsheviks. I guess you could consider these "races" because they are indeed a "mixture" of different peoples who had invaded Europe at one time or another, but Himmler doesn't tell us which are actually inferior. He uses the plural "races" so that would tell us it's all of them. But in modern terms of his own time, he doesn't tell us what these races are, and we already know he cannot be talking about Slavs as a whole. This comment, made in a speech, is no doubt just another way of rousing the troops to continue fighting the Communists. Attaching more importance to it than Himmler probably did writing it doesn't answer any questions definitely.

Discussing individual statements is little evidence for anything. What needs to be understood is that there was no singular opinion on Slavs or anyone else. And nothing so comprehensive as a singular plan either. Circumstances dictated actions, and ideas/views progressed over time among various peoples who were more, or less favourable to their adversaries. And Slavic populations happened to be the biggest adversaries facing Germany, and had been historically also. It's little wonder that various Germans were more than a little sceptical of them.

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Re: Did Hitler consider Slavs / Eastern Europeans to be "Subhuman" or racially inferior?

Postby Moderator » 2 years 6 months ago (Tue Nov 17, 2020 10:19 am)

Madonna:
You've have been challenged to present the German originals for someone's text that you posted. You have not. Instead you posted more of the same sort of unverified text which also included topics not part of this thread. That post was removed due to your lack of responsiveness.
Please review our simple guidelines that you agreed to when you registered, viewforum.php?f=4

Please present those originals, if you can, and stay on topic. BTW, you are welcomed to start new threads on any "H" related topic you wish.
We also have a WWII Forum.

I remind you that this forum has a higher standard of debate than what you typically see elsewhere. Here, when challenged, as in formal debates, it is incumbent upon those being challenged to respond or leave the thread / the discussion underway. That prevents a lot of unverified, false claims, etc. I'm sure you can appreciate that.
Thanks, M1
Only lies need to be shielded from debate, truth welcomes it.


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