What did the Nazis aim to do with Poland's Polish population in the event of a Nazi/Axis WWII victory?

[Futurist]

Hi Futurist,

No, you didn't. My point was that you probably should have, for the reason given.

Cheers,

Sid.

Agreed.

[SloveneLiberal]

I would like to add something. Polish people were considered racially very low by the Nazis. Even Lithuanians did not get their SS division because they were considered to much polonized. Latvians and Estonians had such divisions, also muslims in Bosnia and some others. There were pools of German and Aryan blood between the people in the east Nazis believed. Such pools like existed because of German and Nordic conquests in the past and intermarriage with Slavs and others. The same was also true for the west. Such people partly Aryan could be used as SS soldiers. Nazi doctors were making tests on POWs also like proving this with their racial 'science'. It was even believed by SS leaders in some kind of racial-religious way that when such soldier dies his racial soul will go in to his fellow soldiers and make them more Aryan in their own soul.

More about this you can find in this book written by Christopher Hale:

https://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Foreign- ... 0752459740

[Futurist]

Interesting; thanks!

[gebhk]

Hi all

Two (albeit connected) issues.

1) German executive policy was the very opposite of joined up. We discussed this at length in Joseph Cloud's thread regarding contradictions in Nazi policy in occupied Poland. In other words, how things were done and how targets were achieved at the sharp end very much depended on who was in which post and what they had had for breakfast. Crudely put, one gauleiter might achieve his targets of reducing the Polish population by shooting them, another by expelling them to the moon and a third by making them all officially Germans. Or any combination of the above.

2) Winning/losing the war does not have an either/or impact. Rather there is a continuum between losing the war and winning it quickly and comprehensively. These variables need to be considered separately. If the Nazis won the war quickly, there would have been little need to consider the need for immediate manpower and there would have been little incentive to retain the Polish population. However, if the war had been long and drawn out, the need for mobilising all the available manpower regardless of its racial status would have become an ever increasing imperative.

Overall, there is little doubt AHs vision saw the Polish population ultimately vanishing out of Poland but how this would have been achieved (by murder, expulsion or simply renaming the Poles 'Germans') very much depended on who was appointed to implement the overall policy and on the vagaries of war. This makes it very difficult to predict what would have happened to the Polish population precisely (albeit we can probably agree that it would have been nothing good - absorption into Germany and cultural extinction over a few generations was the best likely outcome in my view) in the event of ultimate Axis victory.

[Futurist]

Renaming the Poles Germans would be difficult in the sense that the Poles are likely to maintain their language and cultural traditions for generations. For instance, I believe that it took centuries to fully eliminate Baltic Prussian culture.