What did the Nazis think of Czechs?

[James Paul]

I have a few questions about the Nazi treatment of Czechs.

After the Nazis annexed the Sudetenland:

1) What happened to the Czechs living in either the Sudetenland territory or the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia?

2) Could Czechs marry Germans?

3) Were Czechs allowed to be Reich citizens?

[wm]

1) What happened to the Czechs living in either the Sudetenland territory or the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia?

Generally nothing...

2) Could Czechs marry Germans?

Yes, they could - although it was discouraged. Members of the German armed forces, members of the NSDAP and related Nazi organizations needed an authorization which was hard to get. German farmers who were members of the NSDAP were forbidden to marry Czechs.

3) Were Czechs allowed to be Reich citizens?

Yes, they were, if they were long established inhabitants of the Sudetenland.

[driz]

I recall the Father In Law mentioning how they mangled German soldiers that they managed to get their hands on. I got the impression it wasn't a good place to go wandering off alone or scrounging for something to drink without taking the whole squad along.

[wm]

Although It was in the last days of the war or later. During the occupation the Czech part of Czechoslovakia was considered the safest for the Germans, the most quiet part of all occupied territories.

[James Paul]

Yes, they could - although it was discouraged. Members of the German armed forces, members of the NSDAP and related Nazi organizations needed an authorization which was hard to get. German farmers who were members of the NSDAP were forbidden to marry Czechs.

Why was it discouraged?

I always thought Hitler considered Czechs, being Slavs, as racially inferior.

Yes, they were, if they were long established inhabitants of the Sudetenland.

I mean from an ethnic point of view. How were the Czechs regarded?

The Nazi 25-point Programme said as point 4: "Only a member of the race can be a citizen. A member of the race can only be one who is of German blood, without consideration of creed. Consequently, no Jew can be a member of the race."

And the Nuremberg Laws Reich Citizenship Law said "A Reich citizen is a subject of the state who is of German or related blood, and proves by his conduct that he is willing and fit to faithfully serve the German people and Reich."

I always read that the Nazis considered the Slavs to be non-Aryans like the Jews but all the text available on the Nuremberg Laws seems to suggest the laws only effected Jews and shortly afterwards "Gypsies, Negroes, and their bastards."

[James Paul]

Karl Frank in 1939 said:

"Whoever professes himself to be a member of the German nation is a member of the German nation," provided that this profession is confirmed by certain facts, such as language, upbringing, culture, etc. Persons of alien blood, particularly Jews, are never Germans. . . . Because professing to be a member of the German nation is of vital significance, even someone who is partly or completely of another race—Czech, Slovak, Ukrainian, Hungarian, or Polish, for example—can be considered a German. Any more precise elaboration of the term "German national" is not possible given current relationships."

Source: Jeremy King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848-1948, p. 179

[wm]

Why was it discouraged?
I always thought Hitler considered Czechs, being Slavs, as racially inferior.

Who was inferior and who wasn't was dictated by politics and propaganda needs. The Poles for example weren't subhumans before 1939 and after 1943.

The essence of Nazism was protection of the national community, and building a better future based on it.
The national community was defined as all the races (the Nazis were well aware the Germans were not a single race) which preserved German language, culture, and customs.
So in fact non-Germans were maybe not inferior but certainly undesirable.
They didn't want Czechs not because they were inferior but because they were non-Germans.

I mean from an ethnic point of view. How were the Czechs regarded?

The definition was "the long established inhabitants of the Sudetenland". It didn't matter they were Germans or Czechs. As long they were long established they were allowed to become German citizens.
Such a definition was dictated by political, not doctrinal considerations. Politically the Nazis could afford a mass ethnic cleansing in 1938.

I always read that the Nazis considered the Slavs to be non-Aryans like the Jews but all the text available on the Nuremberg Laws seems to suggest the laws only effected Jews and shortly afterwards "Gypsies, Negroes, and their bastards."

The Slavs were Aryans and actually everybody else except the Jews. But anyway the term Aryans was never truly defined, wasn't used legally in the Nazi Germany, and was rather quickly abandoned as unscientific.

[James Paul]

Who was inferior and who wasn't was dictated by politics and propaganda needs. The Poles for example weren't subhumans before 1939 and after 1943.

In 1942 Hitler remarked that "with firm direction it should be possible to force the Czech language back to the significance of a dialect twenty years from now."

In 1943 Hitler said "I've managed to get the Jews out of Vienna, now I also want to get the Czechs out of there."

The essence of Nazism was protection of the national community, and building a better future based on it.
The national community was defined as all the races (the Nazis were well aware the Germans were not a single race) which preserved German language, culture, and customs.
So in fact non-Germans were maybe not inferior but certainly undesirable.
They didn't want Czechs not because they were inferior but because they were non-Germans.

Czechs were regarded as inferior though.

"Hitler considered Lueger's system of "Germanizing" the Czechs via the language not resolute enough. Nationality or rather race does not happen to lie in language but in the blood. Hitler said that I remember how in my youth Germanization led to incredibly false conceptions .Even in Pan-German circles the opinion could then be heard that the Austrian-Germans, with the promotion and aid of the government, might well succeed in a Germanization of the Austrian Slavs; these circles never even began to realize that Germanization can only be applied to soil and never to people. For what was generally understood under this word was only the forced outward acceptance of the German language. Yet it was a scarcely conceivable fallacy of thought to believe that a Negro or a Chinese, let us say, will turn into a German because he learns German and is willing to speak the German language and perhaps even give his vote to a German political party .That was a de-Germanization and the beginning of a bastardization and a destruction of the Germanic element."

http://www.porges.net/CzechsInVienna/Cz ... enna5.html

In the unpublished Second Book Hitler said:

"The National Socialist Movement, on the contrary, will always let its foreign policy be determined by the necessity to secure the space necessary to the life of our Folk. It knows no Germanising or Teutonising, as in the case of the national bourgeoisie, but only the spread of its own Folk. It will never see in the subjugated, so called Germanised, Czechs or Poles a national, let alone Folkish, strengthening, but only the racial weakening of our Folk."

In 1942 he said:

"...Of all the Slavs, the Czech is the most dangerous one, because he is diligent. He has discipline, is orderly, he is more Mongoloid than Slavic. He knows how to hide his plans behind a certain loyalty. ...I don't despise them , it is a battle of destinies. An alien racial splinter has penetrated our folkdom, and one must yield, he or we. ...That's one of the reasons why the Hapsburgs perished. They believed they could solve the problem through kindness."

So yes, the Czechs were considered racially inferior by Hitler and the Nazis. The exact type of non-German that had no place in the Third Reich.

Himmler said:

"One basic principle must be the absolute rule for the SS men: We must be honest, decent, loyal and comradely to members of our own blood and to nobody else. What happens to a Russian, to a Czech, does not interest me in the slightest. What other nations can offer in the way of good blood of our type, we will take, if necessary, by kidnapping their children and raising them here with us. Whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death interests me only so far as we need them as slaves for our culture; otherwise, it is of no interest to me. Whether 10,000 Russian females fall down from exhaustion while digging an anti-tank ditch interests me only insofar as the anti-tank ditch for Germany is finished."

The Slavs were Aryans and actually everybody else except the Jews. But anyway the term Aryans was never truly defined, wasn't used legally in the Nazi Germany, and was rather quickly abandoned as unscientific.

Really???

"In the hierarchy of Nazi racism, the "Aryans" were the superior race, destined to rule the world after the destruction of their racial arch-foe, the Jews. The lesser races over whom the Germans would rule included the Slavs — Poles, Russians, Ukrainians. ... Hitler's racial policy with regard to the Slavs, to the extent that it was formulated, was "depopulation." The Slavs were to be prevented from procreating, except to provide the necessary continuing supply of slave laborers."

Lucy Dawidowicz, The Holocaust and the Historians, p.10

"The Nazi revolution was broader than just the Holocaust. Its second goal was to eliminate Slavs from central and eastern Europe and to create a Lebensraum for Aryans ... As Bartov (The Eastern Front; Hitler's Army) shows, it barbarised the German armies on the eastern front. Most of their three million men, from generals to ordinary soldiers, helped exterminate captured Slav soldiers and civilians. This was sometimes cold and deliberate murder of individuals (as with Jews), sometimes generalised brutality and neglect ... German soldiers' letters and memoirs reveal their terrible reasoning: Slavs were 'the Asiatic-Bolshevik' horde, an inferior but threatening race. Only a minority of officers and men were Nazi members."

Ian Kershaw, Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison, p.150

[wm]

It wasn't that simple:

Nonetheless, even the most radical race specialists among Party and administrative leaders were faced with the necessity of finding, at the very least, some sort of pseudo-scientific or technically acceptable judicial periphrasis for the racial principle, since the introduction of the wholly irrational principles of racial ideology into juridical practice would inevitably lead to considerable difficulties.
In particular, the fact that the German people "unfortunately no longer [rested] on a unified core," consisting rather of various "races," made for terminological difficulties that in turn would lead to numerous makeshift conclusions. It was for this reason that talk of the "German race" was officially prohibited by order of the Party leadership.

However, in order still to define the German people as a racial community, the concept of race was given a correspondingly broad interpretation by the leading Nazi jurists, and the unity of the Volksgemeinschaft was inferred, despite all racial differences, by declaring the various races (-Nordic, Dalo-Nordic, Dinaric, Alpine, East Baltic, Mediterranean races") to be similar to one another, so a scheme in which the noblest race, the Nordic, with (according to Hitler) its "master men" (Hermnmenschen) or "God-men" (Gottmenschen), stood supreme.

If it was at all possible, however, the concept of race was avoided altogether in administrative and legal language; one spoke instead of "equality of type," of people having the "same blood" or - in recollection of the Germanic idea of the Blutsgemeinschaft - of the "community of blood."

In practice, however, the first term to be widely employed was of Aryan descent; yet from 1935 on, the expressions German or related blood or German-bloodedness were substituted, as the term Aryan was purely linguistic in origin and not capable of even pseudo-scientific justifications.
But these terms were just as imprecise as the terms previously used, Aryan and non-Aryan, for they either exhausted themselves in purely negative definitions (non-Jewish, non-colored), or else they defined German blood as being the "blood of the various races" of which the German Volk was composed, as the blood of "peoples racially related" to it; but they never did define what race or racially related actually meant.

In constitutional law doctrine, the key concept of the Volk or the Volkisch (national or "folkish") was introduced in place of the idea of race (in contrast to Hitler, by the way, who consistently rejected the notion of the "Volkisch" principle in favor of "racial" terminology); and, unlike the Italian fascists (in whose doctrine the state was the all-important principle), this doctrine declared the Volk to be the supreme value in all matters of state.

The premise that one race - the Aryan - was superior to all others flattered the ego of the nation, precisely because it could not be proved but only believed and arbitrarily justified by means of the "eternal laws of nature," the "right of the stronger," the "heroic doctrine of the valuation of the blood ... and the personality,", the "will of the Almighty," "divine providence," "history," and so forth.
Even the Nazi leaders themselves were probably are from the outset that there was nothing to this racial theory but fabrications and insubstantial phrases.
Hitler himself rather early ceased to believe in his own racial ideas, using them merely as a political means, as a way to obfuscate his plans for foreign domination.
For the seductive code word that held the German people to be "chosen" permitted National Socialism's claim to power and its actual "substance" (namely, the "dynamism of the Movement" and the "will to power" per se). to be justified at any time and by any means.
Already abandoned internally, the racial idea, that is, the notion of the rise of a new human type defined by "blood," continued to multiply its outward effects without interruption, unleashing - as did the Fuhrer principle - previously unimagined destructive energies.

from: "Non-Germans" Under the Third Reich: The Nazi Judicial and Administrative System in Germany and Occupied Eastern Europe with Special Regard to Occupied Poland, 1939-1945 by Diemut Majer

[James Paul]

With all due respect, all that shows is how the Nazis found it difficult to define the words Aryan, Germanic, etc. None of it proves any sort of positive view of the Czechs. On the contrary, all of the evidence shows the Nazis viewed the Czechs as racially inferior and wanted to expel them from the Greater Germanic Reich. The only exceptions were of course those suitable to be Germanized.

[wm]

I didn't say the Nazis liked the Czechs. I said it didn't matter if they liked them or not, because their plans and actions were driven by politics, i.e. were you useful or not, were you an enemy or not.

The Czechs stood in the way of the Greater Germany so the had to go (despite their docile behavior and their collaborationist government), the Slovaks didn't so they could stay. But actually the difference between the Czechs and the Slovaks was and even today is superficial and cosmetic.

Generally all non-Germans weren't welcome in Germany, not matter if they were the Czechs or the British.
But still Heydrich believed that 45% of Czechs could be successfully Germanized, 40% were inferior "mongrels", and 15% were racially intolerable.

[James Paul]

I didn't say the Nazis liked the Czechs. I said it didn't matter if they liked them or not, because their plans and actions were driven by politics, i.e. were you useful or not, were you an enemy or not.

But a lot of their policies were based on race. The Czechs were considered to be racially inferior and had no place in the future plans of the Nazi New Order.

Generally all non-Germans weren't welcome in Germany, not matter if they were the Czechs or the British.
But still Heydrich believed that 45% of Czechs could be successfully Germanized, 40% were inferior "mongrels", and 15% were racially intolerable.

The Nazis viewed the Czechs and the British completely different. The former were considered racially inferior whilst the latter were considered fellow Germanic peoples and thus Aryans and were considered to be 'racially pure'. The Nazis often reflected on the British past as good examples e.g the British rule of India was what Russia was intended to be for the Germans. The Nazis had no problems with Germans and British people having sexual relations and marriages, that was not the case when it came to Germans and Czechs. There was never any talk of racial inferiority within the British people unlike the alleged Mongoloid element of the Czechs that the Nazis often believed. The Generalplan Ost targeted the Czechs, not the British.

Trying to compare Nazi policies against the Czechs and the British is really like comparing apples and oranges. What is true is that the Czechs were relatively treated better than some other Slavic ethnic groups e.g Poles and Russians.

Statements by top Nazis like Himmler in the Posen speech "What happens to a Russian, to a Czech, does not interest me in the slightest." is not found against the British as far as I'm aware.

[wm]

Of course, according to Hitler the British were a "good" race. He admired the way a relatively few British administrators ruled vast territories all around the world. In this, according to him, even the Germans themselves were inferior, much less skilled.
But he didn't try to avoid war with the British because they were a good race, but because of geopolitical considerations. The British had colonies and ruled the waves, Germany wanted to dominated Europe - so according to him both countries' goals were compatible, there was no need for war with the British at all.

Similarly the Russians weren't a particularly good race. The needed a German elite to govern them, and the elite was later replaced by the Jews. But an alliance with the Russians was rejected by him not because they weren't a particularly good race. It was rejected because geopolitically both countries were incompatible.

The Czechs weren't particularly good too, but at least 45% of them were sufficiently good to be assimilated by Germany. The Czechs had to be destroyed not because they weren't particularly good, but because Hitler wanted their territories.

So yes, there was name calling, there were good and not so good races, but the Nazis treated others not according the their racial qualities, but according the their own territorial, political, economic needs.
If the British lived in the Sudetenland they would be eventually destroyed too.

[James Paul]

So yes, there was name calling, there were good and not so good races, but the Nazis treated others not according the their racial qualities, but according the their own territorial, political, economic needs.
If the British lived in the Sudetenland they would be eventually destroyed too.

That's simply not true. The Nazis thought that race defined everything and alienated people simply because of their race. The majority of Jews who died in the Holocaust did so because they were Jews not because they were communists etc.

If the British people lived closer and were on territories that Hitler hoped to conquer, he would have incorporated them into the Greater Germanic Reich, similar to how the Nazis did so with the Dutch etc.

[wm]

The living closer, hypothetical British wouldn't be British then, but something else.
Hitler publicly stated that Germanization of well developed races was counterproductive and pointless, because only the weak and worthless people would submit easily (and he didn't want weak elements), and the rest would resist making the entire process extremely costly.
So only because of that it was not going to happen.

Additionally according to the Reich Citizenship Law of 1935 and later regulations a race was compromised of both biological and political elements - it was determined by ancestry and by political believes.
The German race was a race of German blooded-people (who were German-blooded because their ancestors were German-blooded), who proved by their conduct that they were willing to serve the German community and Germany in fidelity - in total existence obligation.

The second element was more important that the first. If a person was unwilling to serve it was regarded as a proof the person wasn't of German race.

So the British would probably failed the first test (their ancestors weren't German-blooded), and would failed the second (they would be unwilling to serve in fidelity).

If Heydrich believed some Czechs were ready to be assimilated it was because they were willing to serve their new fatherland faithfully and some of their ancestors were Germans, not because they racial qualities were good in general.

Nazism was all about protecting their own German community - the Volk. The Nazis weren't collectors of good races, there were many good races, they were only interested in valuable for them ones - those willing to serve in fidelity.

Even in Jews the second component could thwart the first sometimes. If a Jew/half-Jew proved to be valuable and willing to serve in total existence obligation he could have been declared to be non-Jew, or even of German blood. Hitler himself granted almost a thousand of such exceptions.