I have now obtained a full copy of the relevant parts of Heydrich's speech of 4 February 1942, given in the "German Hall" in Prague.
It is in the book "Lesson From History: Documents Concerning Nazi Policies for Germanisation and Extermination in Czechoslovakia", complied by Dr Vaclav Kral and Dr Karel Fremund, Orbis, Prague, 1962, Document No. 22, pp. 135-138.
An Editorial Note states:
The documents have been translated from originals deposited in the Central State Archives in Prague. Most of them are in unabridged form. The style of the original German documents has been retained as afr as possible in translation, including in some cases ambiguous passages and stylistic shortcomings.
I will quote from the relvant part of the Document 22, which concerns plans for germanising the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.
Heydrich states that the "inner purpose" of the German Government is not to germanise the whole Czech people, but only those who are "fit" for germanisation, in his opinion 40-60% of the Czech population. They are to be identified by means of a national registration.
Heydrich states that by means of the national registration, it will be possible within one year to sift out the third unfit for germanisation, another third superficially deemed fit for germanisation, and a remaining third identified for further investigation.
He then says:
.......we have considered a later evacuation of those who cannot be germanised, possibly by establishing a labour corps the members of which will enjoy the advantage of having their families follow them, etc., so that today, proceeding in this manner, we can act as if we wanted to incorporate the entire space en bloc into the Reich. This on the whole I should like to lay down here as our secret and overt aim.
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It is primarily also in the political interest of the Reich to introduce compulsory labour service....After the Czech government has been obliged to introduce it, we shall be justified in saying: As you Czechs do not participate in the liberation struggle of the Reich, except through working in the armaments factories, just as the Germans in the Homeland, the Reich, do, it is only right and proper that you should call up a number of age groups for compulsory labour service, as no compulsory military service for Czechs exists. These will, as far as possible, be educated in the Reich under the leadership of outstanding, selected labour service leaders in an entirely different type of uniform, they will be divided into those that can be germanised and those that cannot, trained in different camps for a worker's profession and a trade. After spending two years in the camp they must qualify as journeymen or something else. For those that can be germanised work will be found in the Reich so that they would never come back. Those that cannot be germanised as yet will perhaps be sent as additional parts of the Arctic Ocean region are opened up - to areas where the concentration camps will be the ideal future homeland of the 11 million Jews from Europe. Perhaps we could use those Czechs who cannot be germanised, under the good augury of a pro-German task, as supervisors or foremen, etc., by giving them the chance to let their families follow them. This region, by the way, is not so desolate as the Arctic Ocean region is always considered to be. It just has a very long winter, but a markedly intensive and fine agriculture and an outstanding raw material basis. On the basis of the knowledge which we have obtained through our security-political operational groups in the East, we have arrived at amazing results. It is not true that these regions are fully dependent on the Ukraine in agriculture, for instance, but that on the contrary they have of alte been nearly self-supporting in food. We have quite terrific raw material bases. These are things which are still not entirely clear, but are essential and can be considered. Becaue we must not chase the Czech whom I consider fit for germanisation to the East as an enemy, but must use him in what is a good augury for the Reich, so that in the East, in the East which is not colonised by us (the proper region of colonisation will be settled by Germans), he will stand as a European advance guard. But these problems will still be discussed and clarified. The first is compulsory labour service. We shall consider whether half a year of the labour service term should not be served in camps in the Protectorate so as to free the Czech population from the thought of a forced deportation of its youth for labour service in the Reich. But also conversely. I am convinced that this youth which can be germanised and which alone we have in mind, will have received such an education after one to one and a half years that if it is brought here it can exert a positive influence later. These problems require to be thoroughly checked, they are problems which I should like merely to touch on.
Heydrich goes on to discuss plans for the future education of Czech youth, which involve less formal education in schools and more physical training and sports, a concept that reflects Heydrich's own preferences and anti-intellectual outlook (and probably the preferecnes of the vast majority of the world population of today).
Of interest to us is Heydrich's throw-away line about the concentration camps in the Arctic Ocean region forming the future homeland of the 11 million Jews of Europe.
The camps he refers to are the labour camps established in the far north of European Russia by the Bolshevik regime from 1918 onward. That complex of camps was officially designated SLON (Severnye Lageria Osobogo Naznacheniia = Northern Camps of Special Designation) by the Bolshevik regime; the word "slon" means "elephant" in Russian.
Heydrich's words show that the German Government was planning to imprison the Jews of Europe in the concentration camps originally set up by the Russian Bolshevik regime to imprison its opponents. In the eyes of the German Government, that constituted poetic justice, since according to National Socialist ideology the early Bolshevik regime constituted a Jewish tyranny over the Slavic peoples of Russia, and the persons sent to those camps in the 1920s were victims of that alleged Jewish tyranny.
It is noteworthy that Heydrich's speech was made only two weeks after the Wannsee Conference. It was a secret speech, made to a select audience of German officials, and Heydrich's own words show that what was being discussed was German Government policy that was to be kept hidden from the public; accordingly there is no reason to believe that Heydrich was using camouflaged language or codewords.
Therefore, it must be accepted that there was a genuine German Government plan to deport European Jews to camps in the Russian North, in the White Sea area. And since Heydrich's words were uttered only two weeks after the Wannsee Conference, they are further confirmation that what he revealed to the assembled State Secretaries of German Ministries at that conference was a plan to deport the Jews of Europe into the occupied Soviet Union, not a plan to kill them in extermination camps.
The figure of 11 million European Jews reflects the influence of the recent Wannsee Conference; that figure was the total European population of Europe and the Soviet Union according to the minutes of that meeting (in fact it is an exaggeration of at least two million).
However, that total was not the actual figure proposed for deportation to the White Sea region. It includes the estimated five million Jews of the Soviet Union, who did not need to be deported since they were alrerady in the East. In fact, the bulk of the Soviet Jewish population had already been evacuated by the Soviet Government to Central Asia, and the German Government was quite content to leave them there. Those that had fallen into German hands had been greatly decimated.
Eichmann's own planning notes show that he estimated the number of European Jews (ie those living west of the 1941 border of the Soviet Union) scheduled for deportation into the occupied Soviet territories totalled 5.8 million, itself a grossly exaggerated figure.
The fact that it was proposed to use the Czechs sent for labour service in the North Russian region as supervisors or foremen for the Jews imprisoned in the concentration camps in the region demonstrates that the Jews were to be used as a slave labour force there, ie the same fate as the early Boshevik rulers of Russia, considered by National Socialists (and many other conservative Europeans, including Churchill in 1920) to be Jewish) to be Jewish, had imposed on their enemies.
The "security-political operational groups in the East" referred to by Heydrich, the units that had gained the economic information used by him, were of course the famous Einsatzgruppen. And Heydrich's words show what one of the two major tasks of the Einsatzgruppen was; to collect intelligence to assist German domination and administarion of the conquered territories. (The second major task was to identify and eliminate defined groups that were the main support of the Communist system).
Document 17 in the same book, dated 30 November 1940, shows how Czechs capable of Germanisation were identified (p. 105):
Racially valuable are those inhabitants of the Protectorate with whom or with whose kinsfolk Slavonic racial characterisitcs do not predominate. In this connection it may be assumed in principle that as a consequnece of the historic penetration of this area with German blood those racially valuable elements are capable of a genuine national mutation as soon as they have become inwardly prepared to accept it. In this connection it should be noted that Slavonic racial characteristics, apart from Mongol types, are, for instance, a disorderly, careless family life with a complete lack of feeling for order, personal and domestic cleanliness, lack of any ambition to advance oneself [my emphasis].
It is obvious that the German authorities identified the Czechs to be rejected for germanisation not on the basis of physical characteristics such as head-shape or hair colour, but on the basis of personal character. The persons identified thereby as unsuitable for germanisation would be considered undesirable by any government of our own time.