There seems to be quite a contradiction between the laws used by the Ariernachweis (Aryan Certificate) and the later decrees used against the Poles. The Ahnenpass gave the definition of "Aryan" as all the European peoples and explicitly mentioned Poles as Aryan ("wherever they might live in the world" Aryans were "e.g. an Englishman or a Swede, a Frenchman or a Czech, a Pole or an Italian") and so a Polish man or Polish woman could be a possible marriage partner for a German. The "non-Aryans" were the people regarded as alien to the German Volk and were said to be the non-Europeans: Jews, Gypsies, Negroes and mixed-race peoples.
Yet, after the invasion of Poland the Poles were regarded as "racial foes" in propaganda and any relations between Germans and Poles was explicitly forbidden, despite Poles being in principle regarded as Aryans. During the war, thousands of Polish men lost their lives for "forbidden relations" with German women, the death penalty was the result of such a relation, unless Himmler deemed the Polish man capable of Germanization. German women were marched through their local town with a card around their neck with signs such as "Pole lover" and had their head shaved. German men and Polish women were placed into concentration camps for their "forbidden relations". Even sending a letter to a Pole could land you into a concentration camp.
Surely any friendly attitude towards the Poles even by the Wehrmacht was punished heavily? If it was punishable for just ordinary Germans who were not affiliated with any organisation then I'm sure it would have been just the same for the Wehrmacht soldiers.
In 1941 the Wehrmacht was given a pamphlet which said:
And from Wikipedia:The war against Russia is an important chapter in the German nation's struggle for existence. It is the old battle of the Germanic against the Slavic people, of the defence of European culture against Muscovite-Asiatic inundation and of the repulse of Jewish Bolshevism. The objective of this battle must be the demolition of present-day Russia and must therefore be conducted with unprecedented severity. Every military action must be guided in planning and execution by an iron resolution to exterminate the enemy remorselessly and totally. In particular, no adherents of the contemporary Russian Bolshevik system are to be spared.
Himmler's remark about Czechs and Russians as well as the collaborator Vlasov in his Posen speech sums it up really well:In accordance to these new racial laws issued by the Nazis; in November 1941, the commander of the 18th Panzer Division warned his soldiers not to have sex with "sub-human" Russian women, and ordered that any Russian women found having sex with a German soldier was to be handed over to the SS to be executed at once. A decree ordered on 20 February 1942 declared that sexual intercourse between a German woman and a Russian worker or prisoner of war would result in the Russian man being punished by the death penalty.
Even the collaborators in the Belarus, Russia and Ukraine and there were many upon many were still regarded as Untermenschen and were basically nothing more than cannon fodders.For the SS Man, one principle must apply absolutely: we must be honest, decent, loyal, and comradely to members of our own blood, and to no one else. What happens to the Russians, the Czechs, is totally indifferent to me. Whatever is available to us in good blood of our type, we will take for ourselves, that is, we will steal their children and bring them up with us, if necessary. Whether other races live well or die of hunger is only of interest to me insofar as we need them as slaves for our culture; otherwise that doesn't interest me. Whether 10,000 Russian women fall down from exhaustion in building a tank ditch is of interest to me only insofar as the tank ditches are finished for Germany.
The Vlasov ballyhoo
Then you hear the next prayer. This goes: "We were wrong about the Russians." This song is usually sung by men from some Eastern province, who were over there in their youth, some of whom have written very good books and had a Russian mother, too, and now they tell stories. It is also sung by the little political vagabonds whom we first came to know in the eastern struggle against Poland, whom we rejected at home, and who have now been drafted as soldiers, officers and majors, and are still peddling their intellectual poison under cover of the uniform of our decent German army. Goaded on by this propaganda tendency — I can't call it anything else — they tell you so many stories, or write them home by military post (and the stories then trickle down from top to bottom): "Yes, we were wrong about the Russians. The Russians are not at all the robot" (this is the expression used most frequently) "that we thought they were in 1941. Now that we're over here in the East, our eyes have been opened. The Russians are a noble people, and so on and so forth, a collection of all virtues. We just have to educate them as National Socialists, the best thing would be to create a NSRAP or something similar. Then they would" — this is the next bit — "form the army of liberation under General Vlasov". Then comes the following, which is a constant claim of General Vlasov: "Russia can only be freed by Russians. Germany has so far never been able to defeat the Russians". So give Vlasov 500,000 or 1,000,000 Russians, arm them well, train them insofar as possible according to German principles, and Vlasov is so noble, that he'll go off against the Russians and kill them for us.
People can blow off a great deal of stuff and nonsense; that wouldn't be so dangerous. But when a piece of nonsense like this has the end effect that a glorious army, looking back on hundreds of years of tradition like the German one, begins to doubt its own strength due to the gossip of politically untrained little officers of higher or lower service grades — the little bundle of proverbs who talks like this doesn't even notice how devastating it is when he says: "We cannot beat the Russians, they can only do that themselves" — then that is dangerous. Everybody you ask, "How's the Russian infantry?", will tell you, with pathetic thoughtlessness (since the two things don't go together logically, after all): "The Russian infantry is garbage. We are vastly superior to them." But: Russians can only be defeated by Russians.
I wouldn't have had any objections, if we had hired Mr. Vlasov and every other Slavic subject wearing a Russian general's uniform, to make propaganda against the Russians. I wouldn't have any objections at all. Wonderful.