Nazi Plans for Slavs

[fireofice]

We have all heard claims about Nazis considering Slavs to be "inferior" or "subhuman". More on these claims can be read about here:

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=12690

Some have claimed that the Nazis planned to exterminate all Slavs by killing the entire population. Needless to say, there is no evidence for such a plan. However, there are other accusations of Nazis wanting to do things like reducing the population of Slavs through means like contraception as well as deny access to education. And there does seem to be some evidence for this. One piece can be found here:

https://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic ... b2fa23129b

As a side note, this same piece of evidence says: "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."

Other similar pieces of evidence can be found in Léon Poliakov's book Harvest of Hate on page 272.

While not as bad as physical extermination, it still does not sound good. So what do we make of this?

One thing that must be taken into consideration is that, contrary to the 5 years the war took place in reality, the Nazis were expecting a long and drawn out conflict. There is a big difference between if the Allies win and if the Axis wins. Allies winning means the Axis powers get completely destroyed and vanquished. The Axis "winning" means they have temporarily held their own for the time being. They have no power to completely vanquish the governments of Britain and America and install their own, not to mention all the other allied countries involved. So even if they managed to vanquish the Soviet government, there is still a large Slavic population that they just engaged in brutal warfare with. The Slavs are not very likely to want to hop on board with the Nazis and help them fight the western powers. So the only thing left to do if Germany is to survive, is to keep their population under control in some way. This explains why the Nazis were thinking of these things ahead of time. None of it is pretty, but war isn't pretty.

[DissentingOpinions]

Oh Jesus, this again? Most, if not all Slavic countries before and during the war, had been occupied by the Soviet Union, mainly comprised of Jews in their ranks. You were only considered an enemy of the National Socialists if you supported the Communists, and Jews & Slavs who didn't were even allowed to serve for the National Socialists. To say that Hitler hated Slavs for being Slavs is as dumb as the claim that he wanted Germany to be a nation of "Aryan purity" - blonde hair with blue eyes, when he himself had brown hair.

[Otium]

Tough to say.

These documents cannot be taken in isolation, or treated as some sort of definitive policy. The National Socialists didn't ever consider policy in terms of "Slavs" and "non-Slavs", but rather as "Germans" and "non-Germans" (Slavs weren't even considered a "racial" group, but instead, as a linguistic one which further complicates matters). Who constituted a German, a person of good racial stock, wasn't simply a matter of biological race, but of spirit and soul. A German could be made out of any member of the Aryan race, even Slavs who were of "good racial stock". This wasn't a racial delineation, as people of poor racial stock could also be found among the German people. This is a nuance that people find hard to understand. Nothing so conveniently packaged for Allied propagandists exists that can neatly prove any sort of blanket "Nazi" belief in anything. The truth is that there was, like everything, differing opinions and nuanced views on a variety of factors whether it be classifications for desirable and undesirable segments of the population or who could constitute a reliable Reich citizen. It's also true that as the war dragged on, the kind of Germanism which initially consumed idealised population policy suggestions lessened into something more pan-European, but probably not entirely.

Also when it comes to documents like these, a proper investigation into their origin and composition should be conducted. Not only that, but an extensive search into other documents which would contextualise the documents we have, and perhaps give us a more holistic perspective should also be undertaken. But we cannot expect this from the current historical establishment. If you were to only read the establishments books on any given topic you could easily become subsumed by their insistent rhetoric and give in to their faulty preconceived interpretations. Anyone familiar with the Holocaust Handbooks will know how different conclusions can truly be even when considering the same documentation from a perspective that isn't born from establishment dogma.

A good example would be the history of how German policy towards Soviet POWs was presented initially as a plan to murder them from the outset, no doubt because the Russians were considered "subhuman", although no evidence for such a view exists. Nonetheless it was insisted by the establishment and yet very few people question the dogma. This view though has been disputed by some establishment historians who point out that there was never any evidence to substantiate any claims of pre-determined murder against Soviet POWs:

Christian Gerlach, in his large-scale study of German occupation policy in Belarus, attempted to explain the deaths of Soviet POWs as part of a comprehensive as well as systematic starvation plan, which, as it were, had formed the basis of the entire German occupation policy as a master plan. [...] Gerlach tries to prove his thesis with circumstantial evidence, but he is unable to present a corresponding German order which - uninfluenced by the constraints of war - would have ordered a murder of most of the prisoners of war planned from the outset.

Christian Hartmann, "Massensterben oder Massenvernichtung? Sowjetische Kriegsgefangene Im "Unternehmen Barbarossa": Aus dem Tagebuch eines deutschen Lagerkommandanten," Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte (VfZ), 49(1) (2001), p. 98.

Such efforts to construct this narrative are impossible due to the nature of the evidence, which, though brutal at the worst of times, really comes down to utilitarianism rather than ideology, and never approaches some sort of master "extermination" plan for any group(s). However this doesn't mean the efforts by historians to present a certain type of picture has been fruitless, clearly they have been taken quite seriously and never questioned in much detail.

In the case of Soviet POWs, much of the blame lies with Stalin rather than Hitler. Of course most historians are much less willing to accurately reconsider the role of the Soviet Union in any of these issues that the Germans had to try and face:

Stalin's orders meant, among other things, that not only the advancing German forces had to cope with serious rations problems that resulted in illness. It also affected the approximately three million Red Army soldiers who had fallen into German captivity by December 1941, many of whom died in the camps, weakened and ill. That during the German-Soviet war about 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war had been killed by the German side in a "war of extermination", as Christian Streit wrote in his 1978 book "Keine Kameraden. Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen 1941-1945" is a legend, which is meanwhile also confirmed by the Russian side, which assumes a total of 1,784,000 soldiers of the Red Army, who did not return from German captivity - or were missed.

Werner Maser, Fälschung, Dichtung und Wahrheit über Hitler und Stalin (München: Ozlog-Verlag, 2004), Pp. 106, note 22. See too: Nikolai Tolstoy, Stalin's Secret War (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982), Pp. 261ff.

It was actually Soviet policy to try and provoke the Germans into committing atrocities against Russian soldiers in order to make them more loyal to Stalin's regime. Otherwise they had little reason to fight. (Tolstoy, p. 261). Stalin himself insisted on the extermination of all Germans on Russian soil, a thread one can easily find throughout Soviet propaganda of the period. This, surely, was not to have any sort of tempering effect on German suspicions of Russian soldiers and civilians who could well be looking to kill them at any moment. The usual rules of law simply did not apply. This is to say that the perspective of Soviet ambitions and tactics needs to be considered, yet it never is. The Soviets undoubtedly played a part and are responsible for much of the atrocities, and even for civilian casualties. For every two civilians killed by the Germans, no less than five were killed either directly or indirectly due to Stalin's deliberate policies of murder and destruction. (Tolstoy, p. 281-284)

Hitler's population policy, at least as it stood on October 17, 1939 can be marked with a recognizable ambivalence towards the future rump Polish state that at such a time he still had in mind.

Hitler apparently told Keitel on this aforementioned date:

1. The armed forces should welcome the opportunity of avoiding having to deal with administrative questions in Poland. On principle there cannot be two administrations.

2. Poland is to be made autonomous. It will be neither a separate part of the German Reich nor an administrative district of the Reich.

3. It is not the task of the administration to turn Poland into a model province or a model state in accordance with the principles of German order; nor is it its task to put the country on a sound basis economically and financially. The Polish intelligentsia must be prevented from forming itself into a ruling class. The standard of living in the country is to remain low; it is of use to us only as a reservoir of labour. Poles too are to be used for the administration of the country. But the formation of national political groups will not be permitted.

4. The administration must work on its own responsibility and must not be dependent on Berlin. We do not want to do anything there which we do in the Reich. Responsibility does not rest with the Berlin ministries, since no German administrative unit is involved. The accomplishment of this task will involve a hard ethnic struggle [Volkstumskampf] which will not permit any legal restrictions. The methods will be incompatible with the principles which we otherwise adhere to....

5. Our interests are as follows: The territory is important to us from a military point of view as an advanced jumping-off point and can be used for the strategic concentration of troops. To that end, the railways, roads and lines of communications are to be kept in order and utilized for our purposes. Any tendencies toward stabilizing the situation in Poland are to be suppressed. ‘Polish muddle’ must be allowed to flourish. The fact that we are governing the territory should enable us to purify the Reich territory also of Jews and Polacks. Collaboration with the new Reichsgaue (Posen and West Prussia) only for resettlement purposes (compare Himmler mission). Purpose: Shrewdness and severity must be the maxims in this ethnic struggle in order to spare us from having to go into battle again on account of this country.

Jeremy Noakes & Geoffrey Pridham, Nazism 1919-1945 Volume 3: Foreign Policy, War and Racial Extermination (Liverpool University Press, 2014), Pp. 320.

We can see some of the ideas here which can also be found in the Himmler document, although Hitler's ideas here are really quite tame, and nothing here speaks of any sort of plan to genocide any Slavs, in-fact, Hitler says the opposite: "Polish muddle’ must be allowed to flourish." Such a view from Hitler should be incomprehensible, and cannot be dismissed lightly. Hitler after all, is portrayed in history as a man who held rigidly to his views, and would not easily change them. Therefore there seems to be little reason that Hitler would alter his views drastically, even once the possibility of a Polish rump state had been thwarted.

Hitler seems only to have cared about these potentially meddlesome populations (or rather, specific segments of the populations, eg. intellectuals) insofar as they might threaten German security. Otherwise he simply wanted to wash his hands of them, and leave them to their own devices, albeit not completely unchecked lest they attempt to promote aggression. Hitler didn't see it as the duty, nor business of Germany to educate these people. So you know, no German propaganda for them. Perhaps the establishment should be happy with that?

[fireofice]

Good point. The Nazis were never one mind on anything. From your quote about what Hitler said about the Polish muddle, it is clear that he had different opinions on what to do with Slavs at different times.

One thing I forgot to mention, mainly because I thought it would be obvious, is that if the war is going to continue for a long time, they would need more land for resources. That's why even if they defeated the Soviet Union, they couldn't just up and leave if the western powers are still a threat.

[Hektor]

Bear in mind that Slovakia and Croatia were even allied with Germany. The same view was taken of the Ukrainians although there were more problems with them.
Here is a summary on the NS-view on Eastern Europe:
https://archive.org/details/EuropasSchicksalImOsten