In 1999 John Connelly published a short issue (33 pages) about the contradictions between what the Nazis believed and what the Nazis actually did to the Slavs:
Like contemporary linguists and ethnographers, leading Nazis initially understood "Slavs" to be the speakers of Slavic languages. There were three major groups: the eastern Slavs (Russians, White Russians, Ukrainians), western Slavs (Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Lusatian Sorbs), and the
southern Slavs (Bulgarians, Serbs, Croats, Macedonians, Slovenes). Enjoying perhaps the highest preference both before and after 1939 were the Bulgarians, whom Joseph Goebbels referred to as "friends." The Germans did not impose a military occupation regime upon Bulgaria, and
the Bulgarian government even managed to pursue an independent policy with regard to Bulgarian Jews. It retained greater control over domestic and foreign policy during the war than any other country in Southeastern Europe, and kept diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union until September 1944, when that country declared war.
Two other Slavic peoples were permitted to have their own puppet states: the Slovaks and the Croats. Within these states there were full native governments, police forces, education systems (including universities, and elite military units modeled on the SA and SS, alleging Slovak and Croatian racial superiority. Both states voluntarily instituted anti-Semitic legislation?including the "aryanization" of property deportations, and in the Croat case, killing camps. Croatian borders were extended to include Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the fascist Ustasha regime implemented policies of racist extermination against another Slavic people: the Serbs. Within Germany, travel guides and picture books appeared during the war purporting to display the lives of the Slovaks and Croats, complete with smiling peasants dressed in native costumes.
The Czechs fared worse under Nazi rule. In March 1939 post-Munich Czechoslovakia was divided, and the Czech/Moravian/Silesian part made into the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia. The Protectorate had to endure six years of German occupation, and the Czech intelligentsia, as the putative national leadership, suffered severe repression. Yet for the overwhelming majority of Czechs life went on in relatively normal fashion: businessmen continued making profits, the working class increased earnings due to wartime demand, and the birthrate edged upward. The rations allotted to Czech workers were on a par with those of German workers. Czech administration was kept intact to a degree that was unparalleled in Nazi-occupied Europe with the possible exception of Denmark. Though universities were closed, substantial publishing and education in the Czech language continued. The Czech Academy of Arts and Sciences continued its meetings throughout the war, and received a budget for research from the Czech officials at the Protectorate Ministry of Education. The journal of the Prague linguistic circle, Slovo a Slovesnost (Word and Literature), appeared until 1943, and the Czech sociological society continued meetings and publishing until 1945. Likewise, the major philosophical journal Ceska Mysl (The Czech Mind) received a budget and continued publishing throughout the war.
Slavic groups living in the Soviet Union?Russians, White Russians, and Ukrainians were subjected to policies of annihilation from the moment German troops crossed the Soviet boundaries in 1941. Among the earliest victims of conquest were Bolshevik commissars, who were summarily executed, and millions of captured troops, who were starved to death. The goal of occupation was short-term exploitation, both of foodstuffs and labor, and preparation for German settlement. Millions of Soviet citizens were transported to the Reich as slave laborers. The population that remained behind lived under conditions of semistarvation. The brutality of the German occupation called forth almost immediate resistance, and in the words of Omer Bartov a "vicious cycle of violence and murder" evolved, with the Germans eradicating villages suspected of aiding partisans or withholding grain, and thereby further decreasing productivity, and driving more people into the underground. These were territories which the Germans held for a shorter time than areas further west, but they made up in devastation what they lacked in duration of occupation: as the army withdrew, it evacuated inhabitants, and destroyed practically everything, from crops, to industrial equipment, to private dwellings.
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. Hitler would have none of such plans, however, and placed most of Ukraine under the direction of East Prussian Gauleiter Erich Koch, who publicly emphasized his contempt for Ukrainians as "racial inferiors," and forbade his subordinates any social contact with them. As in other areas of occupied Eastern Europe, these subordinates were often former SA men with no training in administration, who saw their new posts as opportunities for self-enrichment. One letter the Nazis confiscated lamented a situation "one hundred times worse" than under the Bolsheviks, yet such sentiments did not concern Koch, who vowed to "pump every last thing out of this country." Considering the local inhabitants no better than animals, he literally hunted them in special reserves. Despite the effect of fully alienating a potentially pro-German population, these policies were maintained to the end. Yet the situation of Ukrainians in the former Polish eastern territories (Galicia) differed significantly. 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. Ukrainians in the Generalgouvernement enjoyed these relative "privileges" because the Germans hoped to play them off against the Poles.
Poland endured a Nazi regime of unsurpassed destruction longer than any other area in Europe. Soon after crossing the Polish border in 1939 the Nazis began mass executions of Polish intellectuals and others considered potentially hostile to Germany. The difference from policies toward the Czechs was so striking as to elicit the following boastful remark of the top German administrator in Poland, Hans Frank, who visited Prague early in 1940:
There were large red posters in Prague announcing that today seven Czechs had been shot. I said to myself: if I wanted to hang a poster for
every seven Poles that were shot, then all the forests in Poland would not suffice in order to produce the paper necessary for such posters.
Throughout the war there was no Polish government or even administration above the level of municipality, and the Nazis imposed forced labor even for teenagers, starvation rations, and permitted practically no autonomous Polish cultural life. As in the Czech lands, the occupiers closed universities, but they also closed secondary schools. To keep "order" they instituted a random, yet pervasive terror. On any given day of the occupation, a Pole might be apprehended in a mass street arrest (lapanka) as the Nazis without notice routinely cordoned off sections of streets and arrested anyone who happened to be there. Those arrested might be held hostage and shot, or sent to a camp or forced labor. The situation was even worse for the Poles who lived in western areas attached directly to Germany: the age for taking forced labor was lower, the educational opportunities close to nil, and the system of terror more pervasive. As in the occupied Soviet Union, Nazi brutality called forth vigorous partisan activity, culminating in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 which left over 250,000 civilian dead.
Several factors which have little to do with racial policy account for much of these differing approaches toward Slavic peoples. Southeastern Europe had not figured in Hitler's schemes for attaining living space (Lebensraum), and until 1943 much of it belonged to the Italian sphere of influence. In Slovakia, the Germans had set up a "showcase" which was intended to reveal to the countries of Southeastern Europe the supposed advantages of collaboration. The need for war materials dictated a more balanced policy toward the Czech lands with their advanced armaments industries. Russia, by contrast, was central to the Nazi strategy of attaining living space, a need articulated in Hitler's earliest writings. There cities and industry were to be destroyed, to make way for German rural settlements. The simple imperial design?rooted in Hitler's racist understanding of human events necessitated conflict with Russia.
Yet the question of racial ideology remains, for Poles and Russians were discriminated against in ways not dictated by the logic of wartime strategy, or the ultimate goals of living space. Why did the Nazis place these two groups near the bottom of the hierarchy of foreign workers within Germany? Why did they hardly bother to seek collaborators in Poland, and exclude Poles from all but the lowest ranks of administration? Attempts were not made to field a Polish SS division, though there was a White Russian division. Why were Polish industrial laborers in Silesia treated worse than their Czech counterparts in Pilsen? Both areas were arguably of similar value to the war effort. Why were only Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians punished by death for sleeping with Germans? There was also a distinct racial discrimination against the Poles built into the Nazis' postwar plan for Eastern Europe, the Generalplan Ost, which stipulated deportations to Siberia from areas of Eastern Europe to make way for German settlers: 80-85 percent of the Poles, 75 percent of the White Russians, and 64 percent of "western" Ukrainians. Those not deported would either be "eliminated" or germanized.
One is tempted to conclude that a racial hierarchy existed among the One is tempted to conclude that a racial hierarchy existed among the Slavs in the Nazi mind: at the bottom the Russians, Poles, and Ukrainians, above them the Serbs, further up the Czechs, and at the top the Croats, Bulgarians, and Slovaks. Yet when one looks at the writings of major Nazi officials from the prewar period one finds no hints of such a hierarchy; "Slavs" were thought of as a vague and undifferentiated generality. Thus Adolf Hitler referred in Mein Kampf to the "Austrian Slavs" presumably including Czechs, Poles, Croats, and Slovenes?and lectured Hermann Rauschning on the "danger of too great an infusion of Slav blood into the German people," promising measures to limit "the further increase of the Slav races." As mentioned above, Hitler reserved his contempt for the Czechs.
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," 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. For him Poland was above all a "border state" to be courted for alliance against "enemy No. 1": the Soviet Union. In January 1934 Germany and Poland concluded a nonaggression pact, and the Nazis reversed the pointedly anti-Polish policies of Weimar. The German-Polish trade war came to an end, and Warsaw and Berlin took pains to consult one another in matters of mutual concern. Berlin for example gave its blessing to Polish pressures on Lithuania and Czechoslovakia in 1938. 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.
Because they figured so centrally in his plans for the future, Hitler had a more distinctly racist conception of the Russians, or as he called them, "Slavs of the Russian nationality." In his view, cooperation with Russia had been possible for Bismarck's Germany because at that time Russia was no "typically Slavic state," but rather a state ruled by an upper class and intelligentsia which were of Germanic origin. Without this Russianized Germanic leadership, no "Great Russia" would have emerged in the first place, for Slavs were supposedly not capable of forming their own state. In the late nineteenth century the Germanic stratum had supposedly diminished under attacks of Pan-Slavists, and during the First World War it was almost entirely eliminated. For Hitler, the October Revolution represented the ascendance to power of a new race in Russia: the Jews.
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 ofthe most recent Ice Age, around 5,000 BC, a Nordic Indogermanic Utvolk 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.
Russia was presented as a "Land between Europe and Asia" where the "World War and Bolshevism have, for the time being, fully eradicated
the European elements." 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." These unsettled questions on Slavs' racial attributes invited opportunistic wartime practice.
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, should its sovereignty be "clearly threatened." The following month, Hitler renounced the pact of 1934, and began planning Poland's destruction; if he could not immediately have the space he desired in Russia, he would seize what he could in Poland.
Soon after launching war against Poland in September 1939, the Nazi leadership and the supporting scientific community convinced themselves of Polish racial inferiority. 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.
Later that fall Joseph Goebbels noted after a visit that Poland was already "Asia." 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."6^ He and Goebbels routinely referred to Russians as "beasts" and "animals."
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. 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." Nazi racial experts estimated that up to half of the Czechs were of Nordic origin, and Hitler agreed. He also came to view the Croats as fully assimilable, though he never wavered in antipathy toward Serbs.
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 Ger? man tribes who never migrated." In a June 1942 visit to Poltava, Hitler had seen so many blue-eyed and blond women that, when he thought of the photographs of Norwegian and Dutch women submitted with marriage applications [by German soldiers JC], he prefers to speak of the need to introduce southern elements [Aufsuden] into our European northern states, rather than northern elements into the south [Aufnorden].
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.
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 ofthe war had caused the "common roots ofthe European family of peoples to come to the surface." Indeed, the "blood ties [blutmassige Verwandtschaft] of Europe were based . . . upon the ancient [einstmalig] Germanic settlements between the Baltic and Black Seas, extending to the Atlantic Ocean and North Africa." When entire regiments of Cossacks went over to the German side, the SS determined that they were remnants of the Germanic "Chatten" once described by Tacitus. The undeniable fact that the Soviet Union remained organized and under the hand of a strong leader caused Himmler to revise ideas about the loss of the Germanic leadership stratum in the East: like Attila, Genghis Khan, and Tamerlane, Stalin was a "lost Nordic-Germanic-Aryan blood type."
The crudeness of Nazi racial science made such opportunism all but inevitable. The only "scientific" tools the Nazis possessed to discover "valuable blood" among the Slavs were eye color, hair color, physical dimensions (e.g., skull), and various measures of intelligence. Casual observation caused the leading Nazi officials of the occupied Czech lands and of Poland to enthuse about the potentials of the people under their rule. Konstantin von Neurath, the Reich Protector in Bohemia and Moravia, when judging the racial qualities of the population there, wrote that the "high number of fair-haired people with intelligent faces and well-shaped bodies, would not stand out unfavorably even in central and southern Germany." In an attempt to recover "German blood" among the Gorales and other mountain peoples in Southern Poland, Himmler gave directions to note how many "blond and blue-eyed students there were in relation to the total number of students." Hans Frank told his police chiefs in May 1940: "Frequently, we are surprised to find a blond and blue-eyed child speaking Polish and I say to myself: If we were to educate this child as a German then it would be a pretty German girl." Only in the Czech lands did Nazis actually get around to "measuring" Germanic blood, and discovered to their surprise that the Czechs were actually of higher racial value, i.e., more Germanic, than the Sudeten Germans."
Nothing seems to have shaken Hitler's or Himmler's views of the weakness of Germanic blood among Poles and Russians, however, and gradually the former subscribed to the view that was universal among anthropologists: namely that in the racial sense, there was no such thing as "Slavs":
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 com? plete 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.
Thus in Hitler's mind small doses of German blood could dominate other sorts of blood?except in the case of the Jews, where the opposite was the case. Hitler imagined that even tiny amounts of Jewish blood could assert themselves after many generations.
From the belief that there were no "Slavs" in the racial sense, it was a short step to the recognition that there were no Russians, Ukrainians, or Poles in the racial sense, that is, to a belief that these groups were not real. Thus Martin Bormann spoke of "so-called Ukrainians" and racial expert Reche tried to sow doubts as to the existence of "Russians."
Officials in the Generalgouvernement, in collaboration with other "ex? perts" on race, began to break down the Poles as a group.86 The director of the department of internal administration in the Generalgouvernement, Dr. W. Fohl, expained that he and his colleagues had gone through a learning process:
During the World War we used to think that the Polish people be? longed to the great "Slavic family of peoples" . . . The postwar period has opened our eyes to the profound differences among the Slavic family of peoples, and thanks to the rapid progress of the field of racial science we have learned to identify the structural differences within the individual peoples. During the present ethnic cleansing [in vollem Gange befindlichen vblkischen "Flurbereinigung"] of East Central Europe, we have started to use ever more precise methods of ethnography and racial science [Volks- und Rassenkunde] to take apart the notion of the Pole . . .
Partly using and citing the work of Polish scholars Oskar Kolberg, Eugenia and Kazimierz Stolyhwo, Jan Czekanowski, Jan Mydlarski, and Stanislaw Srokowski, the Germans had divided central Poland into five racial zones, with varying concentrations of "Nordic, Subnordic, Dinarian, Praeslavic, and Eastern" types. Correlations were made between racial mixture and inborn characteristics of the peoples of these regions. The Masovian (the singular was invariably used in these depictions) was "carefree and so daring as to be foolhardy; lively; even gay and adventurous, but also stubborn and dogged . . . loves drink, play, and dance"; the Krakovian was "belligerent and hot-blooded . . . but also hospitable, helpful, and generous . . . dexterous in his work, but not systematic or persistent. His favorite motto [Merkspruch] is three days work then three days loafing." On the basis of the work of Polish scholars Studencki and Rosinski the Germans had determined that the population of central Poland (mostly Praeslavic) was "impulsive, of low intelligence, and emotionally unstable ..." Further Polish groups identified were the "Kurpier, Podlachier, Lubliner, Lasowiaker, Lachen, and Sieradzaner."
More positive judgments were made of the mountain people of southern Poland the Gorales and of the Western Ukrainians. The latter were found to be akin to the South Slavs, "especially the Bulgarians, Croats, and Slovenes."90 Again, the work of Studencki and Rosinski was used to determine dominant characteristics, but since Polish ethnographers had not devoted much time to the study of Ukrainians, it was not until 1942/ 43 that Fohl could fully categorize the West Ukrainians, who supposedly consisted of "Dolynianer, Buzaner, Pidhirianer, Batken, Batiuken, Opolaner, and Podolianer." Despite the lack of "dependable studies" of Ukrainian racial characteristics, Fohl cited the works of a Ukrainian (Rudnyckyj), Pole (Sawicki), and Austrian German (Sacher-Masoch) on the "Ukrainian national character." The last, as chief of police in Lwow, had in 1863 described "the Ruthenian [as] the born democrat in the noblest sense of the word."
This racial "science" corresponded to and reinforced the logic of politics. In May 1940 SS chief Heinrich Himmler wrote his "Thoughts on the Treatment of the Alien Population in the East":
In our treatment of the foreign ethnic groups in the east we must endeavor to recognize and foster as many such individual groups as possible, i.e., apart from the Poles and the Jews, the Ukrainians, White Russians, Gorales, Lemkes, and Kaschubians. If there are any more ethnic splinter groups to be found, then these too. I mean to say that we not only have a major interest in not uniting the population in the east, but, on the contrary, we need to divide them up into as many parts and splinter groups as possible.
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 pe? riod. Hitler in particular had at best a vague notion of what "Slavs" were, and precise connections between his supposed "anti-Slavism" be? fore 1939, and the policies adopted toward Slavic peoples after 1939, defy attempts at documentation.
How then can one explain the actual practice of racism toward Poles, Russians, White Russians, Ukrainians, and Czechs? Historians who have studied Nazi wartime policies have almost entirely neglected the question of the prewar origins.94 With the exception of the peoples of the Soviet Union, no clear connection has been drawn between the policies adopted after 1939, and statements of intention before that period. Since the So? viet Union played a central role in Hitler's plans to achieve Lebensraum, he had not been able to avoid thoughts about these territories: they would be emptied of a population largely contaminated by "Judeo-Bolshevism." But Hitler did not say precisely how this would take place, and seems to have envisioned some combination of killing, transfer, and sterilization.
One response to the difficulty of tracing ideological origins of wartime policy has been to portray such policy as a function of "modernity." One influential school has emerged which traces the origins of the Generalplan Ost and indeed the Holocaust of the Jews?to the concerns of economists in the 1930s about Eastern Europe's "surplus population" (Ubervolkerung): "they wanted to solve the supposed surplus population problem that they had analyzed and modernize the structure of Europe in the German interest" This scheme leaves central questions unanswered.
Ethnic hatred was widespread in the Europe of the 1930s as it is to day but why did it develop as it did in Germany? Causal links remain symptomatically weak in work that attempts to explain Nazi wartime policy via "modernity," and that is not surprising, since the Nazi concern during World War II was not that Eastern Europe was "overpopulated," but that it was populated by the wrong kind of people. Furthermore, in Hitler's mind these regions were underpopulated. That is part of the reason that he saw them as fit for colonization.
How then can one account for the development of policies of annihilation against some groups of Slavs and not others? This question awaits detailed case studies, but the discussion above highlights the importance of Lebensraum, itself a thoroughly racist concept, according to which the German people had to grow if it was to survive, and could grow only toward the "East." A precise definition of what was the "East," and therefore which "Slavs" had to be assimilated, destroyed, or displaced, could emerge only in the practice of war. All that seemed certain beforehand was that the race war would involve the peoples of the Soviet Union.
But 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.m It was by blocking that path that the Poles be? came 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. To make the point absolutely clear: this Polish defiance triggered Nazi violence, it did not produce it, for, as Jonathan Steinberg has written, a "will to destroy" lay at the center of the Nazi enterprise.
In the Czech lands there was no initial spark of defiance; German troops moved unopposed into border areas in the fall of 1938, and completed their occupation without a shot in March of the following year. 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. After the Germans had obliterated two villages and executed hundreds of suspected and actual opposition members, both sides returned to a strained coexistence which lasted until shortly before Russian and American troops liberated the Czech lands in the spring of 1945.
As mentioned, Slovakia became a model of "cooperation" for the lands of Southeastern Europe, and German interference in the domestic affairs of the Slovak state was minimal. One can, however, well imagine a different fate for the Slovak lands if a united Czechoslovakia had opposed Hitler: either complete annexation to Hungary, or some sort of occupation re? gime similar to the Protectorate or Poland. If the Slovaks showed the benefits of cooperation, the Serbs demonstrated the price of defiance. The vengeance taken upon Belgrade and other Serb towns had nothing to do with "anti-Slavic" ideology, but, similar to Poland, with Hitler's rage that a small country would dare stand in his way.103 Continued Serb resistance exacted withering punishment, so that the sort of cycle of murder and violence that Omer Bartov has spoken of in the Soviet case could emerge in German-occupied Yugoslavia as well. Slavic states willing to cooperate like Bulgaria and Croatia shared in the spoils.
These patterns of resistance and accomodation between Germans and Slavs were not entirely new. For their part, Czechs had learned to survive and even prosper under German-Austrian rule; and the German world was a place where the older generation, if not completely at home, was also not entirely foreign. Many Poles of the older generation by contrast knew traditions of conspiratorial resistance to attempted denationalization.
This included armed uprisings, but also such things as "flying universities," that is, networks of underground education. Such networks reemerged throughout Poland after 1940, with the same structures and idioms (nauka w tajnych kompletach) as in the pre-World War I period. They were weakest in Galicia, the former Austrian part of Poland, whose Polish elites? like Czech counterparts?had developed strategies of accomodation. Though universities were closed in the Czech lands as well, no networks of conspiratorial education emerged there.
The Germans also drew upon tradition. Images of inferior and hostile Slavs above all Russians and Poles had been nurtured in certain quarters for centuries, and served as justification for aggressive designs upon the East.105 Colloquial German speech was suffused with negative references to the Pole: polenvoll, polnischer Reichstag, polnische Wirtschaft}06 Anti-Polish sentiments were exploited by aggressively chauvinistic organizations of the late nineteenth century, like the Pan-German League or the Eastern Marches Society, but were by no means limited to the far Right. Max Weber had argued that only a "systematic colonization of German peasants on German soil" could hold back the "Slavic flood." Both Poles and Czechs were feared for their propensity to demographically overwhelm German settlements: the former through fecundity, the latter through trickery. The racial hierarchy that emerged during the war in occupied territories reflected Nazi interests?for example for living space in western Poland?but also matched and reinforced age-old prejudices.
For his part, Hitler served to combine and radicalize the diffuse anti- Slavic sentiments of Austrian and Prussian Germany. On the one hand there could be no binding agreements with Russia, supposedly the originator of the Pan-Slavism that had destroyed the Habsburg Empire, and on the other hand German policy would focus on the colonization of the East. What was "shockingly new and original" in Hitler's eastern policy, writes Jerzy W. Borejsza, were the methods. Hitler found plenty of willing accomplices for his ideas, in the form of underappreciated and underqualified administrators from the Reich, anxious to be recognized as a "master race," and in the form of a young and ambitious technocratic elite which Karl Heinz Roth has called a "Nazi intelligentsia" eager to make careers as agronomists, anthropologists, economists, architects, and development planners. These people shared the ethnic stereotypes ofthe older generation, but gave them a new racist edge: no longer would the people of the East be "civilized," they would be either germanized or swept away.
The ultimate trajectory of this wartime anti-Slavic crusade, in the opinion of a number of historians in Central Europe, was the complete elimination of the Slavs. Concluding his study of Nazi anti-Slavism Jerzy W. Borejsza writes that
in accordance with the theories of race of the Third Reich, the fate of the Jews also awaited the Poles . . . After the complete extermination of the Jews the Third Reich would have to organize total hatred against the next mythologized enemies: the Russians, and then the Poles. Was this degree of total hatred against the Russians not realized? The plans of Adolf Hitler were not precise, but they assumed destruction, and did not exclude complete extermination.
The Holocaust of the Jews is therefore not seen as some special event, qualitatively different from policies toward other East European peoples, but rather as the first event in a sequence. Eugeniusz Duraczynski de? scribes "the Nazi extermination of the Polish Jews [as] a monstrous component of a large plan to destroy the peoples living in the territories of Poland, Ukraine, and White Russia."
Comparison makes other aspects of Nazi policies toward Jews seem less singular. Charles S. Maier has identified a unique sort of "moral threshold" that the Nazis crossed in dehumanizing the Jews, which meant that abandoning the Madagascar plan and moving to "poison gas hardly seemed a step different in kind." Yet in the view of Polish historian Tomasz Szarota, this barrier was also crossed in the case of Poles: "the stereotype of the Jew a parasitical insect, did not differ in the least from similar stereotypes of the Pole." Likewise the method of killing did not differ: many thousands of Poles were also gassed at Auschwitz.
Yet an important distinction does remain, and it derives from a distinction in ideology. Only in the case of the Jews did Nazi racial ideology overpower every other consideration, whether of the economy, of mili? tary strategy, or of racial science. In the case of the Slavs Nazi ideology gradually adapted to the contours of conventional racial theory, though it was never officially codified. The sources of Nazi racial thinking on Slavs were not entirely German; among the unwitting contributors to the belief in Polish inferiority were Polish anthropologists. In the case of the Jews, however, the relationship was the opposite: racial theorists adapted to the Nazi understanding of Jews as a race.
Before the seizure of power in 1933, Hitler and other Nazis repeatedly referred to the Jews as a race, much in contrast to leading racial expert Prof. Hans F. K. Giinther, who argued that the Jews could not be con? sidered a "race" but rather a "racial mixture." For racial theorists, the characteristics of Jews differed according to the components present in any particular group for example the Jews in Central Europe were thought to be superior to those of Eastern Europe. Thus for Giinther there was no general "scientific" basis for speaking of Jewish "inferiority," though he strongly favored the segregation of Jews and Aryans. After the Nazi seizure of power, leading race experts revised such views in favor of the monolithic Nazi anti-Semitism, however. In 1938 director of the Kaiser- Wilhelm-Institut for Anthropology, Prof. Eugen Fischer, spoke of the Jews as an "oriental-near eastern amalgamated race." And in an attempt to synthesize "anthropological science" with the newer ideological dictums, Fischer's sucessor, Prof. Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer of Frankfurt, imagined that "the Jews have 'bred' their own race."
These differing logics of racial ideology had decisive implications for Nazi practice in Eastern Europe during the war. Because the Nazis did not understand the Poles or the Russians?let alone the Slavs as a race, there could be no policy of complete eradication. Any proponent of complete destruction of Poles or Russians would have first stumbled upon the difficulty of defming who a Pole or Russian was in the racial sense; there was no equivalent of the Nuremberg laws for this purpose. In practice, every level of the Nazi hierarchy, whether the top leadership and its most inveterate Slavophobes, racial "scientists," or the army and SS, constantly made distinctions within various Slavic groups. There was not a region in Poland where some "Nordic" elements were not imagined; in the western and northern areas it was thought to be more than half.123 Entire groups of speakers of Slavic languages within Poland, like the Gorales, or the Lemkos, were thought of as essentially Germanic.
The practical consequence was compromise with the Slavs, refusal to compromise with the Jews. The German occupiers began yielding ideo? logical ground to the non-Jewish "racially mixed" population in Soviet territories soon after entering them. The cases of Ukrainian and Cossack SS units have been mentioned. In 1941 Hitler had given strict orders that Russians were not to be used as soldiers, yet by the end of the war tens of thousands were fighting on the German side. The breakdown of his injunction was gradual and opportunistic: first German troops (esp. NCO's) began using Russian POW's as helpers and servants of all kinds, for cooking, carrying ammunition, clearing mines. They learned that if one gave them proper rations they worked better. As early as 1941 these Hilfswillige were used for guard and police functions, then as soldiers. Beginning in 1943, the Nazis had begun offering grants of Lebensraum to "eastern soldiers"? many of them Russian?who had distinguished themselves in service. These compromises were necessitated by the thinness of the German military and administrative presence, which hardly permitted contact with the local population, let alone governance. The use of supposed "subhumans" as soldiers increased as the situation on Germany's many fronts became more desperate, and the killing of Jews accelerated.
What if the Nazis had won the war? All available evidence suggests that massive use of Slavic peoples, as labor of all sorts, would have con? tinued, precisely because of the assumption that Slavs were potentially "useful." In 1940 a confident Himmler had predicted that Slavs would become a "leaderless work force . . . and be called upon, under the strict, consistent, and fair direction of the German people, to help in the con? struction of its eternal cultural deeds and monuments, and perhaps, in view of the amount of unskilled labor required, make these things possi- 124. On the racially based differences in the treatment of Jews and Slavic populations, see Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's WillingE xecutioners3, 12-15, 469-71. 125. Dallin, German Rule, 533-44. Omer Bartov has detailed the escalating compromises in the operations ofthe German 18th Panzer Division, which began using local " Hilfskrdfte" in May 1942, within two months had established armed "volunteer" units to guard lines of communication, and in August set up "self-defence" units in villages it controlled. By December two companies of over 300 Russians were invloved in "security" operations. In August of 1943 the division numbered 7,415 German soldiers and 1,053 Hiwis. Bartov, Eastern Front, 138-39. In 1942 a self-administering area behind the front was created near Lokot, with no German occupying forces, which organized the local economy, deliveries to the Germans, and also antipartisan forces. By the end of 1942 these forces totaled over 10,000 men, and were the beginning ofthe so-called Russian Popular Army of Liberation. Schulte, The German Army, 172-79. 126. Between 21 April and 20 May 1943, 172 Russians serving in police military units, or with the civil administration, received land grants of one to seven hectares. Alarmed at this report, Himmler stipulated that the number of Eastern nationals in German service receiving land would not be greater than 2 percent (about 24,000) of their number each year. Mulligan, The Politics of Illusion, 154. 127. Chiari, "Deutsche Zivilverwaltung." JOHN CONNELLY 29 ble in the first place."128 Millions of foreign workers were planned for yearly planting and harvests.129 In October 1943 the SS leader said in a secret speech in Poznari in reference to the Russian area: "If we treat it properly, we can mine endless quantities of value and energy from the human mass of this Slavic people." A future was imagined in which the Germans would "understand how to govern foreign peoples numbering a hundred million at least as well as the English do today."130 Hitler too had referred to the future regime in Eastern Europe as approximating that of the English in India.
When attempting to imagine a Nazi victory, historians tend to think of the Nazi state as all-powerful, somehow relieved of its endemic confusion of competences, and a hostile surrounding world. But Nazi planners anticipated many challenges in realizing their projects for a postwar world. The greatest difficulty would simply be to find colonists: not only for Bohemia and Moravia, but for all of Poland, the Baltic states, much of Ukraine and Russia, and the Crimea. Experiences during the war did not inspire confidence in the practicability of settling many tens of millions in an area inhabited by over 100 million people: only a few hundred thou? sand "Germans" were found for the rather limited task of settling western Poland?and most of these had been taken from Ukraine and Russia to begin with! They continued a decades-old tradition of German migration to economically more developed western areas, for example from Silesia to Berlin and the Ruhr.
Precisely because West Germans were imbued with stereotypes of a culturally inferior East, German authorities in the East would need to attract settlers there, and they knew this. The Nazi leadership counted on the additional "Germanic people" from Norway, Holland, and England, but also the descendants of Germans who had once migrated to Africa and America. Still, the most optimistic projection (ca. 1942) of a situation decades in the future left SS planners millions of settlers behind plan, even when they imagined that the fourteen million "germanizable" Eastern Europeans would be left in the East, and not moved to central Germany, as a strict adherence to racial guidelines would have required.
The pressures for plan fulfillment necessitated compromise. Because relatively few Germans could be spared for the vast territories Germany was to control, administrators would be procured from elsewhere: from the peoples judged to lie racially between the Germans and the Russians (Mittelschicht): Latvians, Estonians, and even Czechs.134 Because of its high level of socioeconomic development, Germany's birthrate was in decline; and in order to forestall "national suicide," it would have to develop industry in the lands further east that were not scheduled for German settlement, for example in the Baltic area and parts of the Ukraine, in order to drive down birthrates there as well.135 But most importantly, there would have to be a reassessment of how much Germanic blood resided in the East. Director of the Advisory Board (Beratungsstelle) of the Office of Racial Politics of the NSDAP, Dr. Erhard Wetzel, complained of racial standards for judging Slavs that were so strict that even populations in Germany would not meet them, and suggested a more liberal applica? tion, as well as attempts to attract people to "Germandom," for example by giving members of the intelligentsias positions of responsibility in the Reich?like state officials and university teachers. If not treated properly, these "valuable" elements woud remain hostile to Germany.
Final judgments, even on Russian racial "value," had yet to be made. Professor at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institute for Anthropology in Berlin, Wilhelm Abel, "discovered" in 1942 that Russians consisted of Nordic types to a higher degree than previously thought, and Wetzel suggested transferring these several million Russians directly into the Reich, where they could replace "unwanted workers from the south and southeast of Europe," and gradually mix with the Germans. In the case of the Poles, policies were determined not so much by racial considerations, as by the recognition that this was the people "most hostile" to Germany. They would have to be dispersed over regions of Siberia, and encouraged to emigrate to South America, perhaps in exchange for Germans living there. Neither in the case of Poles nor Russians could the leading Nazi planners advocate "liquidation." The reasons were of a practical nature. Wetzel wrote in his "thoughts" on the Generalplan Ost of 27 April 1942:
It should be obvious that the Polish question cannot be solved by liquidating the Poles in the way the Jews are being liquidated. Such a resolution of the Polish question would weigh upon the German people deep into the future, and cost us sympathies everywhere, because neighboring peoples would have to figure on being dealt with the same way, when their time came.
Dr. Hans Ehlich, expert on Volkstum at the RSHA, wrote in December 1942 that the fate of 70 million people in the East could not be decided by "total physical destruction . . . because we would never have enough people to even come close to replacing these 70 million."
During the war the Nazis did not approach the complete destruction of those parts of Slavic populations supposedly slated for immediate de? struction: the intelligentsia. Hitler had said in the fall of 1940 that "all members of the Polish intelligentsia must be killed," but the wartime losses of members of the Polish intelligentsia?including Jews amounted to 57 percent of all lawyers, 39 percent of all physicians, 29.5 percent of all university teachers; and in general 37.5 percent of all Polish citizens with higher education.139 Many of the 20,000 Polish officers captured by the Germans in 1939 belonged to the intelligentsia, but the Nazis did not attempt to kill them off, though they remained in POW camps throughout the war.
The central difference to the Jewish case is obvious: the Nazis could imagine the Slavs as useful. The case of the Gypsies, or Sinti and Roma, falls somewhere between these two. As in the case of the Slavs, Sinti and Roma had played a marginal role in Nazi thinking, and are not men? tioned at all in Mein Kampf or the records of Hitler's conversations with close aids. Like Slavs, Gypsies were differentiated. Certain Gypsies (fullblooded) were thought racially valuable, because of their supposed derivation from "Aryan stock." Unlike Jews, the Nazis never precisely defined what a "Gypsy"?or the true target of persecution, a "Gypsy half-breed" (Zigeunermischling)?was.141 The difference in thought was reflected in action: there was no Europe-wide manhunt for every last Gypsy:
For the Nazis, the Jews were not a race among races. They were the race that destroyed (zersetzen) race, the very substance of human exist? ence.142 There was a uniquely metaphysical dimension in the Nazi hatred of Jews: Jews were the anti-race; or, as Hitler is supposed to have said to Hermann Rauschning, "the Jew is the anti-man, the creature of another god ... He is a creature outside nature and alien to nature."143 Even after the Jewish question in Europe had been "solved," thoughts of Jews continued to vex Hitler: in February 1945 he told Martin Bormann that there was no such thing as a Jewish race "from the genetic point of view," but that Jews were "a spiritual race." Indeed, discussions of Jews had always transcended the categories of racial "science." It was beside the point to attempt to measure the amount of Indo-European or Near Eastern blood present in Jews; and to imagine "blond and blueeyed" Jews becoming German was simply absurd. The dangers emanating from Jews defied the evidence of the* senses. Dr. Walter Gross, head of the Nazi Party's Office of Racial Politics, justified the exclusion of Jewish children from schools because of their "invisible influence" on the "soul" of German children.
Unlike policies toward the Slavs, or toward any other identifiable hu? man group, policies toward the Jews were an end in themselves. Read backward, the fmal solution to the "Jewish question" appears as the logi? cal culmination of an essential ideological predisposition, whereas policies toward Slavs appear as constant improvisation, in which opportunity and ideology shaped one another.148 The absolute dominance of ideological considerations?whether or not Nazi leaders knew from the beginning precisely where they would lead?accounts for the total and uncompromising nature of the final solution of the Jewish question. There was but one attempt to destroy the whole of a people, there was but one Holocaust.