Fate of the Slavs and Poles if the Nazis won?
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Re: Fate of the Slavs and Poles if the Nazis won?
Perhaps excise the off-topic posts and start a new thread with them, in an appropriate part of the forum.
Re: Fate of the Slavs and Poles if the Nazis won?
In one of the Black Books of Poland series there was a report of a ethnic German who was killed by a ethnic Pole--because the ethnic German had a POLISH SURNAME and the ethnic Pole had a GERMAN SURNAME!
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Re: Fate of the Slavs and Poles if the Nazis won?
Hi Peter K.,
I would suggest that you are not describing nationalism but state continuity.
England, Portugal, Poland, Hungary, Denmark, etc., can certainly trace their political continuity back to the middle ages. However, none were nationalist in the modern sense. England was ruled by a French-speaking military elite descended from the Normans who also ruled up to half of France at times. Portugal was not easily distinguishable from the rest of Iberia by any clear cut linguistic or ethnic boundary (and in Galicia still isn't). Medieval Poland grew into an empire including Saxons, Lithuanians, etc,. Hungary ruled Slovaks, Romanians, Germans, , etc., etc. Denmark ruled Norway at times and southern Sweden. In none of these cases was there a concerted attempt to create a monoglot population until the 19th Century when the spread of universal education made this both possible and desireable to improve national cohesion in the face neighbours attempting the same thing. Before that, multi-ethnic, multilingual and multicultural states were much the norm. I would suggest that before then only in religion was there a similar intolerance of difference.
Cheers,
Sid.
P.S. What is "politically correct" about all this, anyway?
I would suggest that you are not describing nationalism but state continuity.
England, Portugal, Poland, Hungary, Denmark, etc., can certainly trace their political continuity back to the middle ages. However, none were nationalist in the modern sense. England was ruled by a French-speaking military elite descended from the Normans who also ruled up to half of France at times. Portugal was not easily distinguishable from the rest of Iberia by any clear cut linguistic or ethnic boundary (and in Galicia still isn't). Medieval Poland grew into an empire including Saxons, Lithuanians, etc,. Hungary ruled Slovaks, Romanians, Germans, , etc., etc. Denmark ruled Norway at times and southern Sweden. In none of these cases was there a concerted attempt to create a monoglot population until the 19th Century when the spread of universal education made this both possible and desireable to improve national cohesion in the face neighbours attempting the same thing. Before that, multi-ethnic, multilingual and multicultural states were much the norm. I would suggest that before then only in religion was there a similar intolerance of difference.
Cheers,
Sid.
P.S. What is "politically correct" about all this, anyway?
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Re: Fate of the Slavs and Poles if the Nazis won?
Re: Fate of the Slavs and Poles if the Nazis won?
The Nazis did not win so speculation on the fate of the Slavs and Poles under a victorious Nazi regime has nothing to do with the history of the Holocaust & 20th Century War Crimes. The entire thread is off-topic and should be in the "What if" forum.
The Nazis did not win so speculation on the fate of the Slavs and Poles under a victorious Nazi regime has nothing to do with the history of the Holocaust & 20th Century War Crimes. The entire thread is off-topic and should be in the "What if" forum.
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Re: Fate of the Slavs and Poles if the Nazis won?
Sure. But in the 12th century, Poland was still an ethnically homogeneous country (as Helmold of Bosau noted in "Chronica Slavorum").Sid Guttridge wrote:Medieval Poland grew into an empire including Saxons, Lithuanians, etc.
But that situation was specific to England. Poland was ruled by a native Polish-speaking elite, even when it had a multi-ethnic society.Sid Guttridge wrote:England was ruled by a French-speaking military elite descended from the Normans
And before the Norman conquest of 1066, England was as well ruled by a native English-speaking Anglo-Saxon elite. And after 1066, supposedly Edward III was the first king whose native language was English (but already Edward I spoke English as his secondary language).
French language totally disappeared from English court during the reigns of Henry IV, V and VI - being replaced entirely by English. Later at some point English national historiography was written, which described the 100 Years' War as "English-French" (not "French-French").
In Poland the situation was less complicated - the nobility and the elites always spoke Polish. Kings too, even if they were foreigners by descent (such as for example in times when nobility was electing Polish kings - and they often elected foreigners, as everybody knows).
Well, for example in Medieval Poland, there were definitely circles which stressed the importance of ethnic and linguistic unity of the country - represented by such individuals as Duke Konrad the Curly (12th-13th century), Duke Ziemomysł of Kuyavia (13th century), Archbishop Jakub Świnka (13th-14th centuries), King Władysław Łokietek (13th-14th centuries), Voivode Jan Ostroróg (15th century), etc.Sid Guttridge wrote:In none of these cases was there a concerted attempt to create a monoglot population until the 19th Century
Similar tendencies could be observed also among Medieval Czechs, for example in writings of such individuals as Dalimil (13th-14th centuries) or King Ottokar II (13th century), who wrote a letter-manifesto to the Poles, in which he emphasized cultural and linguistic closeness of Czechs and Poles, contrasting the two groups with Germans. A letter of congratulations to the Poles was later written by Jan Hus (14th-15th centuries), after the battle of Grunwald. In that letter Hus for example underlined the "Slavic solidarity" of Poles and Czechs.
There are also over 200 interesting witness testimonies from Polish-Teutonic court trials (14th-15th centuries):
https://www.academia.edu/2579308/Memori ... _centuries
They show, that ethnic consciousness also existed among people of the Middle Ages, just like it is does today.
And this is what I called the politically correct agenda. It was definitely not the case, that only religion caused conflicts.Sid Guttridge wrote:I would suggest that before then only in religion was there a similar intolerance of difference.
Ethnic conflicts were - just like today - frequent in the Middle Ages. On the other hand, there were also - just like today - people promoting multi-culturalism and coexistence of ethnic groups. For example the author of the Greater Polish Chronicle (from the 13th century) was apparently a proponent of friendship between Slavs and Germans. He put the following anecdote in his chronicle:
"Germo is a type of vehicle in which two oxen are yoked together to draw a plough or pull a cart, and so the Germans and the Slavs, having common borders, pull together; there is no people in the world so familiar and friendly to one another as Slavs and Germans."
Source: "Chronica Poloniae Maioris" (Kronika Wielkopolska / Greater Polish Chronicle)
But this anecdote must be seen in historical context. He wrote that before relations between Poles and Germans deteriorated.
There are words which carry the presage of defeat. Defence is such a word. What is the result of an even victorious defence? The next attempt of imposing it to that weaker, defender. The attacker, despite temporary setback, feels the master of situation.
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Re: Fate of the Slavs and Poles if the Nazis won?
Let's get back on topic: the "Fate of the Slavs and Poles if the Nazis won."
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Re: Fate of the Slavs and Poles if the Nazis won?
An assortment of off-topic posts on the subject of the family of a contemporary German politician were removed. The subject for discussion here is the NS-regime policy towards Slavic and Polish peoples, not something else.
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Re: Fate of the Slavs and Poles if the Nazis won?
I have found an interesting book (which describes also - among other things - Anti-Slavic racism in Nazi Germany):
Richard McMahon, "The Races of Europe: Anthropological Race Classification of Europeans 1839-1939" (LINK to PDF)
Apparently Nazi racial ideology led some of the more extreme SS men to claim that 90-95% of Germans were also, like Slavs, subhumans:
Because only 6 up to 8 percent of Germans could be classified as being of pure Nordic anthropological type (according to Günther):
Some of them even started claiming that every population which once lived in Germany, was becoming racially Nordic Aryans... :
Richard McMahon, "The Races of Europe: Anthropological Race Classification of Europeans 1839-1939" (LINK to PDF)
Apparently Nazi racial ideology led some of the more extreme SS men to claim that 90-95% of Germans were also, like Slavs, subhumans:
Because only 6 up to 8 percent of Germans could be classified as being of pure Nordic anthropological type (according to Günther):
Others, however, preferred to ignore biological-racial reality, and claimed that everyone who identified as a German was superior:(...) The German nationalist Günther found the overwhelming majority of Germans racially mixed, just 6-8% pure Nordic and the Easteuropean race, which he despised, common in the east and north due to medieval Germanisation of Slavs (Proctor 1988: 151; Günther 1933: 57 & 112). (...)
(...) Ackermann claims the more extreme SS men began to take Nordic supremacy to its logical conclusion that non-Nordic Germans were inferior, and that five to ten percent of the population, its best selection would ultimately rule the rest (1970: 174). (...)
Source (page 274 and 278 out of 532): http://www.friendsofsabbath.org/Further ... cMahon.pdf(...) Unlike scientific anthroposociological elitism, mystical, cultural Germanicism made almost all Germans into superior Aryans, even if as blond as Hitler, as dolichocephalic as Rosenberg, as tall as Goebbels, as slender as Göring, and as manly as Streicher , as an anti-Nazi joke put it (Huxley & Haddon 1935: 26). While Lenz criticised the mythical, irrational excesses of Nazi race propaganda, and Günther declared the Nordic movement will always ruthlessly reject Germanicist enthusiasm , his Nordicist rival Clauß advocated a less biological and more culturally defined northern supremacism, while Kaup led a more populist campaign for an inclusive German national race (Wiercinski 1962: 12; Lutzhöft 1971: 17 & 22-23; Graham 1977: 1159). (...)
Some of them even started claiming that every population which once lived in Germany, was becoming racially Nordic Aryans... :
... Unless that population was Jewish:Himmler equated former inclusion in the Holy Roman Empire with possession of the same blood as Germans (Ackermann 1970: 110).
Source (page 278 out of 532): http://www.friendsofsabbath.org/Further ... cMahon.pdfNazis strained to be Nordicists, but within limits:
(...) Himmler, watching Jews going to the gas chamber, picked out a blond, blue-eyed boy and asked him if he were a Jew and if both his parents were Jews. When the boy answered in the affirmative, Himmler replied: What a pity, then I cannot save you. (Mosse 1978: 221). (...)
There are words which carry the presage of defeat. Defence is such a word. What is the result of an even victorious defence? The next attempt of imposing it to that weaker, defender. The attacker, despite temporary setback, feels the master of situation.
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Re: Fate of the Slavs and Poles if the Nazis won?
Interview with prof. Figlerowicz, the leading geneticist of the "Piast dynasty and society" interdisciplinary research project:michael mills wrote:Would it be true to say that the modern Polish people is the product of the merging of originally different Slavic peoples, in the same way that the Germans are the product of the merging of different Germanic peoples such as Bavarians, Saxons, Franks, Hessians etc.
Original in Polish: http://www.naukaonline.pl/nasze-teksty/ ... ach-skryte
Google translation: http://translate.google.com/translate?s ... ach-skryte
More about this project (in English): https://www.ncn.gov.pl/finansowanie-nau ... anguage=en
What actually are they testing?: http://s4.postimg.org/cnzq9ygcd/Piast_realm.png
Anthrogenica discussion: http://www.anthrogenica.com/showthread. ... post194287
Figlerowicz and his team from the Poznań Center of Archaeogenomics are testing for population continuity and genetic origins of Poland's population, whether there was a replacement of population during the so called "Migration Period" (between the Iron Age and the Middle Ages), or not. They have already tested some amount of genomes from the Bronze Age (including the Trzciniec culture), around 100 full-genome sequences from the Iron Age and around 100 sequences from Early Medieval Poland. Also DNA of the Piasts will be tested.
And it seems that the preliminary results suggest that there has been a population continuity among non-elites since the Early Bronze Age, but with some replacements of the ruling elites (one replacement of elites in the Iron Age, another one after the Iron Age).
It seems that it was also the case during the Migration Period, with pre-MP elite (elites of Wielbark and Przeworsk cultures) being genetically different than the post-MP elite (Early Piast state elite), but the general population ("peasantry") remaining the same.
Perhaps therefore modern Poles are descended from East Germanic speaking - Vandalic and Gothic - peasants.
However, those Gothic and Vandalic peasants had been descended from Bronze Age peasants, whose language is unknown.
Here is one of comments from Anthrogenica (posted by someone who already knows some of these unpublished results):
It turns out that Bronze Age population of what is now Poland was most genetically similar to modern Poles and Lusatian Sorbs:
This sounds like partial confirmation of Kostrzewski's "autochthonistic" view in his famous confrontation against Kossinna:The reason Figlerowicz is saying that the general population hasn't changed much in Poland is probably because Bronze Age genomes from Poland are very similar to modern Poles, and just about more similar to Poles and Sorbs than to anyone else.
It's plausible then, that they represent in main part the ancestors of modern Poles, even if people buried in elite graves differed from them at various times, like the [Late] Iron Age.
Of course, even this has to be tested precisely with high resolution uniparental markers, because genome-wide similarity and mixture models can be deceptive at this sort of fine scale. And he basically says that too.
From what I know, and it isn't much yet, it looks like the modern Polish population is the result of many migration waves from both the west and east, washing over each other, rather than totally erasing each time what was there before. Luckily lots of samples have been taken, so the chance of a few odd results skewing the conclusions are slim.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B3zef_Kostrzewski
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustaf_Kossinna
Kossinna's theories were used by the German Nazis as one of their justifications to ethnically cleanse Poland of Poles.
Kostrzewski discovered a Late Bronze Age settlement at Biskupin and Kossinna argued that it was "Proto-Germanic":
There are words which carry the presage of defeat. Defence is such a word. What is the result of an even victorious defence? The next attempt of imposing it to that weaker, defender. The attacker, despite temporary setback, feels the master of situation.
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Re: Fate of the Slavs and Poles if the Nazis won?
Interesting information. So it would appear that the proto-historic Vandals and Goths were largely descended from Bronze Age populations rather than being immigrants from Scandinavia, and that they did not all emigrate during the later Roman period, but many stayed in place and were absorbed by incoming Slavic-speakers.
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Re: Fate of the Slavs and Poles if the Nazis won?
I found two American articles from 1917, which discuss Slavic and possible Gothic ancestry of the Poles:michael mills wrote:Interesting information. So it would appear that the proto-historic Vandals and Goths were largely descended from Bronze Age populations rather than being immigrants from Scandinavia, and that they did not all emigrate during the later Roman period, but many stayed in place and were absorbed by incoming Slavic-speakers.
http://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/cgi/viewcon ... ontext=ocj
http://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/cgi/viewcon ... ontext=ocj
We might even find some similarities between Gothic history and the turbulent recent history of Poland:
Goths also used to be persecuted at one point of their history. I find this fragment especially disturbing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcuVJUKZvx4#t=9m45s
There are words which carry the presage of defeat. Defence is such a word. What is the result of an even victorious defence? The next attempt of imposing it to that weaker, defender. The attacker, despite temporary setback, feels the master of situation.
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Re: Fate of the Slavs and Poles if the Nazis won?
When you read about the incredible, horrible attrocities german occupation troops did especially in Poland/Generalgouvernement (Nazi barbarians killed millions and millions of civilians, children, women, men, babies.) and if you take into consideration what people like Hans Frank said, its certain that the Nazis wanted to exterminate the poles. I read that one of Hans Frank goales was to replace the 12 mio poles by 5 mio german settlers in the Generalgouvernement.
Re: Fate of the Slavs and Poles if the Nazis won?
There is simply no evidence that General plan Ost would not have been implemented, and based strictly on the historical actions of the Nazi High Command, the decadent, petulant and verbose actions of those officers, the previous examples set at Dunkirk and elsewhere, plus the following examples in the Jewish Holocaust leaves absolutely no room for imagination of what their fate could have been.
Nazism REQUIRED that these people be eradicated.
Nazism REQUIRED that these people be eradicated.
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Re: Fate of the Slavs and Poles if the Nazis won?
I agree with you. However, not all Nazis were anti-Slavic and Nazis such as Goebbels and Rosenberg favoured friendly relations with for example the Ukrainians and Russians.Aphotic wrote:There is simply no evidence that General plan Ost would not have been implemented, and based strictly on the historical actions of the Nazi High Command, the decadent, petulant and verbose actions of those officers, the previous examples set at Dunkirk and elsewhere, plus the following examples in the Jewish Holocaust leaves absolutely no room for imagination of what their fate could have been.
I don't think that this statement is necessarily completely accurate. Not all Germans or Nazis during the Third Reich were anti-Slavic or had any prejudices against Slavs (many even had Slavic ancestry themselves). There's nothing in the ideology of Nazism that strictly speaking calls for the eradication of Slavs.Nazism REQUIRED that these people be eradicated.
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Re: Fate of the Slavs and Poles if the Nazis won?
What of it? There was nothing in the Generalplan-Ost that called for the killing of anybody.There is simply no evidence that General plan Ost would not have been implemented....
What was proposed in the Generalplan-Ost was the removal of some 30 million people, over a period of 25 years, from specific Polish and Soviet territories selected for ethnic German colonisation, and their resettlement in other parts of European Russia or in Western Siberia. Nowhere in the relevant documentation is there any hint of physical extermination, either explicit or implicit.
The removal of large numbers of people from one place to another does not necessarily imply the death of those people. After the end of the Second World War, over 10 million ethnic Germans living all over eastern Europe were expelled from their places of residence and transported west of the Oder-Neisse Line into rump Germany. Although some of the expellees did die in the process, the overwhelming majority of them survived and settled in Germany.
The post-war expulsion of ethnic Germans occurred at a much faster rate than that proposed in the Generalplan-Ost (30 million over 25 years, or an average of 0.83 million per year), so there is no reason to assume that implementation of that plan would have resulted in a substantially greater mortality rate than that of the expelled Germans, given that that implementation could have occurred only in the hypothetical situation of a German victory, when wartime conditions such as blockade would no longer have applied.