Introduction
We are ceasing the perpetual German movement toward Southern and Western Europe and leveling our gaze at the land in the East.
ADOLF HITLER, Mein Kampf1
When someone asked noted historian Robert Citino what would have happened if Hitler had decided not to invade the Soviet Union, he replied, “He wouldn’t have been Hitler.” This succinctly describes, in part, the importance of Eastern Europe to Hitler, to the Nazis, and, historically, to the Germans. Hitler drew upon much older Germanic dreams when he leveled his gaze at the East, a subject he covered extensively in Mein Kampf. After all, the invasion of the Soviet Union was code-named Operation Barbarossa, after a medieval emperor who, legend had it, would one day rise from his deep sleep to return Germany to greatness. It is impossible to truly understand the nature of the Holocaust and the Nazi genocidal project in the East without examining long-held German obsessions with Eastern Europe as the natural source of its lebensraum; an obsession that long predated the Nazis. Eastern Europe was not simply a geographical location in Nazi and German minds. It was much, much more. Indeed, it was fundamentally different spatially from the rest of Europe. For Germans, the East beckoned as a land of untapped wealth begging for “civilization” in much the same way that the West did for Americans. These visions did not remain abstractions. However, there are fundamental differences in how Germans treated Eastern peoples over the years, especially when comparing occupation during World War I and World War II. We do not draw a straight line from German views of the East to the eventual Holocaust and genocidal projects there, but the Nazi colonization of the East and the Holocaust deeply influenced one another. Even within the Nazi leadership, opinions differed on the manner of colonization and “Germanization” to be carried out in the East.2 What is so important about German mindsets about the East is that they became very real policies that spilled large amounts of very real blood.
The Nazi built their gaze toward the east upon centuries of myth and revisionist history placing Eastern Europe at the center of both a German past and a Nazi future. Fundamental revisions of history and not-so-subtle racial prejudices provided a framework for a colonial and imperial attitude toward Eastern Europe that was never directed at the West. Understanding this explains why Nazi policy and the Holocaust were executed so fundamentally differently in the East. These attitudes also situate the relationship between Nazi authorities and their non-Jewish partners and collaborators in the East, as well as the extremity and brutality of their behavior there. This chapter, then, seeks to answer the question “Why Eastern Europe (in the context of the Holocaust and the Nazi genocidal project)?” It will also help us to understand the concrete and incredibly lethal plans developed by scholars and bureaucrats within the Nazi state to depopulate and then colonize the East.
Selective Memory: Historical Germandom in the East
To the East Land we want to ride, we want to come along to East Land—
Well over the green heath, fresh over the heath, there is a better place for us.
“Song of the East Land,” traditional German folksong3
While the above folksong hearkens back to some much earlier and idyllic time when Germans ruled the east, some readers might be surprised to learn that there were, indeed, Germans living in Eastern Europe, some for centuries. These people were distinguished from Germans living within the political boundaries of Germany by the term Volksdeutsche, or “ethnic Germans.” Citizens of Germany proper were called Reichsdeutsche. Beneath centuries of myth and misrepresentation lies the real history of ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe. One must be careful even with the term “German,” for no German state as such existed until 1871—when Otto von Bismarck united a vast and disparate group of smaller Germanic territories into the modern state of Germany; some came willingly, others much less so.
Before that time, there were, of course, groups of people called Germans (or who were called Germans by later scholars). One of the earliest and most famous discussions of Germans comes from the Roman historian Tacitus in his work, Germania, written in 98 CE. Indeed, the Romans were first to use the term “Germans.” Having never been to Germanic lands, Tacitus nevertheless sought to describe them for his Roman audience. This “peculiar people,” Tacitus wrote, fought in kinship groups and were fearless on the battlefield.4 Later German historians could be proud of both these descriptions, though Tacitus is certainly not full of glowing praise throughout his work. His work was “an artful mosaic, mostly composed of stereotypes, casting the Germanic warrior as simple, moral, honest, and brave.”5 Himmler himself read Germania on a train in 1924 and “the glorious image of the loftiness, purity, and nobleness of our ancestors” inspired him.6 The ancient history of the “Germans,” in descriptions by Tacitus and events such as the annihilation of three Roman legions by Germanic tribes in 9 CE formed the basis for a belief in the continuity (and superiority) of German race and culture.
For German nationalist historians, one piece of evidence of this superiority was the spread of “Germanic” peoples throughout Eastern Europe, where they supposedly brought Kultur (German culture) and improvements to eastern lands and peoples. Here, it is important to separate fact from later backward-looking invention. In the medieval period, German settlers did move east, many at the invitation of Slavic rulers. Often, they established their own towns; one historian has estimated that between 1200 and 1400 CE, over 1,500 new Germanic settlements arose east of the Elbe River.7 Thus, new Germanic settlers brought with them trade and economic opportunity. These migrations took ethnic Germans across Eastern Europe, to modern-day Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and as far as the Volga in Russia.
One element in this German relationship in the east was the Teutonic Order of Knights, founded in 1202 CE. In addition to its crusading duties in the Holy Land, the Order actively fought in northern and Eastern Europe.8 These battles were not so much a defense of the West as they would later be painted. Rather, they were often more temporary protection missions for various kingdoms, as well as a form of colonialism. Yet, they formed the basis for a myth of a German right to the East. One ultra-nationalist historian in the nineteenth century would see them as “in all things presaging the German Great Power of Prussia.”9
In 1721, when Russia took control of the modern-day region of the Baltic States (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia), the German nobility in the region was guaranteed their traditional powers and land; ironically for later historians of German history, these “Baltic Barons” became known for their loyalty to the Tsar, which “would become legendary in the following centuries.”10 Tsarina Catherine the Great, the same monarch who confined Jews to the Pale of Settlement, also extended an invitation to German settlers in 1763. Around 30,000 arrived, settling mainly in southern Russia. These came to be known as the Volga Germans.11 Russia gave these colonists special privileges and the task of bringing modern agricultural techniques.12
The last major German migration of consequence was markedly different from the rest. During World War I, contrary to plans, the Germans were militarily far more successful in the East than in the West. While soldiers were dying by the hundreds of thousands in the trenches of France and Belgium, the German army made massive gains in the East, transforming large swathes of land into German occupied territory. The German military government, named the Ober Ost, administered it. Ironically, the Germans conquered their Lebensraum in World War I only to lose it. Ober Ost was more a kingdom than a military area; its overlords, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, ruled absolutely and carried out both a population and “civilizing” policy. Yet this occupation, paternalistic and harsh as it was, particularly in its economics, was not simply a precursor to the Nazis. For example, it did not seek to completely destroy the state of Poland. The general in charge of the Government General (occupied Poland) wrote to his wife in 1915 that Poland was
Beautiful beyond all expectations and favoured by nature but also lacking good government and the superior intelligence of an intellectually distinguished people . . . they don’t know what they want and the cleavage amongst the inhabitants, especially as well the unfortunate Jews, hinder the growth of progress. It’s a pity about this land, but about its people too, who are certainly gifted . . . What will one day become of all this is still completely unclear.13
This letter encapsulates much of the Ober Ost mentality toward its new fiefdom: anticipation of natural resources, latent antisemitism, and a paternalistic but somewhat optimistic approach that hoped to “improve” the Polish people. This extended to Jews as well, with attempts to give them a “fair [political] representation” in Warsaw elections.14 Ludendorff, an early supporter of Hitler, later reflected on his “German Work” in the East, saying, “The work has not been in vain. It had at least been useful to the homeland, army, and the land itself during the war. Whether seeds remain in the ground and later will bear fruit, that is a question of our hard fate, which only the future can answer.”15 The migration of Germans east, of course, never materialized, but it lived on among academics and the population alike. It also proved a bitter reminder of the lost opportunities of World War I, as large parts of Ober Ost would be awarded to the newly reconstituted state of Poland. As one analysis notes, “thus, when German armies crossed the Polish border in September 1939, they brought with them legacies of the nineteenth century, but also animosities of a far more recent historical vintage.”16
Yet, historically, the issue of ethnic German settlement of the East remains somewhat unresolved. Multiple generations of skewed scholarship obscured the scope and nature of German migration to the East. Some scholars have suggested that the numbers of German settlers were neither particularly large nor particularly German. One wrote, “Germans were drawn to Poland virtually uninterruptedly for a thousand years, and in general succumbed rather quickly to Polish cultural influences.”17 This highlights the dilemma of modern historians as well as that of the occupying Nazis in attempting to identify who was “still” ethnically German among a diverse and mixed population in Eastern Europe.
In the nineteenth century, as nation states began fully developing, formerly “German” settlers often found themselves living in countries that were foreign and nationalistic in different ways. This facilitated Hitler’s later claims that he was simply seeking to bring Germans back into their home country. The important point in this discussion of German settlement in Eastern Europe is that there were, indeed, groups of people who exhibited varying levels of “Germanness” throughout the region. This was also common for other ethnic groups. Eastern Europe was, after all, a massive mix of ethnicities and religions; it was not uncommon for five or more languages to be spoken in one country. Poland, for example, contained Poles, Ukrainians, Germans, Russians, and Lithuanians who were Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and Orthodox. Later German historians, however, would stray from the historical truth and embrace a much more romanticized and more dangerous view of the German past in the East.
German Conceptions of the East
The Slav himself doesn’t understand how to seize and exploit the easily accessible resources of their land. He merely uses nothing other than the forest, the meadow, beekeeping, fishing, and hunting like the crude nomads in Asia or the Indians in America.
MORITZ HEFFTER, The World War of Germans and Slavs, 184718
German “histories” of the East were consciously racist—as in the case of the Slavs above—but also cognizant of very real comparisons to colonial endeavors such as those in the United States, as we see above. Indeed, German scholars, particularly from the nineteenth century on, sought to rewrite the history of “Germandom” in the East. A new discipline of Ostforschung or Eastern Research endeavored to nominally uncover the roots of the German past there but, in reality, served only to supply “detailed evidence to substantiate the political claims.”19 Among both among German scholars and the public, there were different ideas of what a German conquest of the East could and should look like. However, a relative consensus began to emerge—in which Ostforschung played fast and loose with the facts and only bolstered an already mythical history. We have already mentioned the avid appeal of Tacitus’s work as expressing some true ideal of Germanness. German historians envisioned a united German culture and realm from a distant past that simply did not exist. This, then, fueled the theory that this land had been lost to Slavic peoples now living in the East. That a later German settler would be called a Rückkehrer, or “one who returns to his lands after a long absence,” captures perfectly the German view of a lost land, rightfully theirs.20
Historically, Germans, particularly academics, but also the public, viewed the East as a primitive, backward place inhabited by inferior populations. One historian has argued that such views represent the “complement” to the Enlightenment concept of civilization in “shadowed lands of backwardness, even barbarism.”21 This view of the East as a land without culture, without civilization, and populated by primitive peoples permeated German thinking and decisively influenced later policies there. However, Nazis did not create these stereotypical visions of the East. Already in the late eighteenth century, a German travel writer described the “filthiness in the moral and physical sense” of Lithuania while referring to Poles as “millions of cattle in human form.”22 This view was endemic: “filth was emblematic of eastern lands and peoples.”23 Yet paradoxically, it was the very rich, black earth of the East that was so attractive to potential settlers.
A new academic discipline added another layer to German ideology of the East. In the nineteenth century, as professional academia grew, Germans became some of the leading thinkers in the field of geography. Friedrich Ratzel, a famous geographer, coined the phrase Lebensraum or “living space” in 1901.24 By this, he meant territory required for national self-sufficiency. The new work of Charles Darwin deeply influenced Ratzel and others; however, they erroneously applied his theory of natural selection to nation states, contending that countries were like the species Darwin studied, struggling over resources in a war for survival that only the fittest would win. Naturally, then, the East was wasted on the Slavic people who lived there. As one German publication stated in 1916, “we Germanic people build up – create – the Slav broods and dreams – like his earth.”25
As a result, many Germans initially adopted a paternalistic but not entirely hostile attitude to the people. They believed in a mission to bring Kultur, to Eastern peoples; a German form of the White Man’s Burden. This attitude dovetailed perfectly with a darker vision of eastern ethnicities as people without culture and, later, as threats to German Kultur. In the ancient and medieval context, revisionist historians argued that whatever culture and civilization existed in Eastern Europe remained from the days of Teutonic knights and the Germanic settlers. The best example in the modern period was Ober Ost itself, which, while domineering, also worked very hard on Kulturarbeit or “cultural work.” This entailed educating local peoples, putting on shows, and publishing newspapers in local languages. The command even went so far as cataloguing and attempting to preserve historic landmarks, even wooden synagogues in Lithuania.26
Yet, racist beliefs also deeply permeated German thought on the East. In 1901, the Chancellor warned of a “Slavic flood” overtaking Germany due to a high Polish birth rate.27 Increasingly, Eastern Europe began to be seen as a region populated by an inferior species of human. This racial bias included antisemitism as well. A cholera epidemic that ravaged Hamburg in 1892 was blamed on Eastern European Jewish immigrants.28 Ostjuden—or Eastern European Jews—with their traditional clothing, stood out compared to assimilated, less observant German Jews. Even renowned Jewish diarist, Viktor Klemperer, reacted with revulsion to Eastern Jews, writing, “I thanked my Creator I was German.”29 When Jews later became associated with Bolshevism, antisemitic fervor among those yearning for the East only increased.
The end of World War I, and the accompanying loss of the massive new area conquered in the East, was painful to Eastern theorists and Germans as a whole. After all, Germany lost a seventh of its pre-war territory and ten percent of its population.30 The fact that graves of German soldiers now lay in foreign lands was also unacceptable. One poem summed up this attitude, saying “The earth, consecrated by German blood / be German forever.”31 The German colonial experiment did not end peacefully, however. Thousands of World War I veterans and those too young for the war joined the Freikorps (volunteer troops) to fight Bolshevists, seeking to maintain the German Empire in the East. The deep sense of loss over having the German dream of the East slip through their fingers intensified German thought and plans for the East as the Nazis came to power—they would take these older perspectives to new extremes.
Nazi Conceptions of the East
The Poles: a thin Germanic layer, underneath frightful material. The Jews, the most appalling people one can imagine. The towns thick with dirt . . . Above all, if Poland had gone on ruling the old German parts for few more decades everything would have become lice-ridden and decayed.
JOSEPH GOEBBELS, 193932
In many ways, the Nazis—both theorists and general party members—brought forward the stereotypes mentioned above, intensifying some and adding others. These mindsets critically led to real behavior and policies that would have a devastating effect on Eastern peoples, Jew and non-Jew alike. What follows is a brief summary of some of the primary lenses through which Nazi theorists and leaders—but also many lower level individuals—viewed the East. The Nazis fed on a mythologized past. They defined a German nation defined by blood. They gazed enviously at the resources and land available in the East, and they viewed with fear the rise of Bolshevism and, with it (in their eyes), Jewish power.
Even more perhaps than their predecessors, the Nazis adhered to a myth of the East where it had always historically belonged to Germany. Indeed, foundational to this was the idea that there was such a thing as a German community in earlier times. An SS magazine claimed Goths as early Germans and argued that there had been a “Germanic Reich” in the steppe, “a first bulwark of Europe against the racially foreign eastern areas.”33 SS-Chief Heinrich Himmler viewed himself as the reincarnation of Henry the Fowler, theoretically the founder of the German state. He claimed in a speech that King Heinrich “has never forgotten that the strength of the German Volk lay in its blood.”34 Himmler was so fixated that he directed his lackey archaeologists to find Henry’s lost burial site—which, not so surprisingly, they did—at least, they found some bones. “Himmler has dug up the bones of Henry I,” Propaganda Minister Goebbels sardonically wrote in his diary, with more than a little derision.35 When a Catholic Cardinal sermonized that there had been no civilization among the Germans of the pre-Christian era, Nazi party members roared in outrage that he had “dared to ‘attack our Germanic forebears and thus also our Germanic race and culture.’”36 The SS, above all, imbibed an idealized view of the German past. However, they were not alone. The military High Command published a booklet titled “The East: A Special Course of Instruction” in 1941 and issued to common soldiers. Romantic (and mostly heavily modified) notions of a past German colonization of the East and its attempt at civilization there filled its pages.37 Perhaps more interestingly, in 1943, renowned and prolific travel writer Baedeker published Baedeker’s Generalgouvernment, a travel guide for the intrepid German tourist wishing to visit the former Poland (and current center of the Final Solution.) This guide, a kind of Lonely Planet for the first half of the twentieth century, routinely credited any positive elements to Germanic influence, down to the “typically German “square in Żółkiew.38
Building on the racial science of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Nazi theorists defined Germandom genetically: the Blutgemeinschaft or “community of blood.” With this definition, Nazis saw German populations throughout Eastern Europe living isolated in the midst of oppressive and inferior nations. A 1939 text summed up this idea, saying that “The German Volk is not defined by the borders of the Reich, but a Volks- und Schicksalsgemeinschaft [community of the people and of destiny] spread out over the whole earth, but bound together by blood and race.”39 This feeling of belonging was so strong that it drove German émigré populations in Nebraska and Mexico to “prove to our German fatherland that it can always rely on its brothers abroad.”40 A racial definition, of course, also served as a useful excuse for Hitler’s earlier acquisitions of territory lost at Versailles but populated by Germans. He himself wrote in his second, unpublished, book, “I see before me no class or rank, but rather a community of people who are connected by blood, united by language, and subject to the same collective fate.”41 When the Nazis advanced into the Soviet Union, they sought to “recover” Germans from the local population, often to their own deep frustration. The assumed racial inferiority of Slavs justified the harsh treatment accorded them and the planned enslavement of such people. As for Eastern European Jews, they suffered under doubly strong antisemitism, being both Jewish and Eastern.
Many Germans viewed Eastern Europe as an untapped resource required for German self-sufficiency. Hitler and many other Germans remembered all too clearly the hundreds of thousands of their compatriots who had died of starvation due to the British blockade during World War I. The Nazis intended to ensure such a thing would never again be possible. Hitler wrote, “The German people is today even less in a position than in the years of peace to feed itself from its own land and territory.”42 In 1936, he said, “If the Urals with their incalculable raw materials, Siberia with its rich forests, and the Ukraine with its incalculable farmlands lay in Germany, it would under Nazi leadership swim in surplus . . . every single German would have more than enough to live.”43 Later, in 1941, Hitler would speak of the “wonderful soil, which, however, owing to the primitive cultivation to date has yielded less than would have been possible under German management.”44 Such beliefs were not limited to the elites; ordinary soldiers, too, felt a deep connection to the East. In a collection published by the Nazis of real letters from German soldiers, one lieutenant wrote, “No one felt himself responsible for the soil, no one felt the love we Germans have for our homeland, for soil that is ours.”45
Eastern resources were more than physical; Himmler intended to harness the very labor of its inhabitants. In October 1943, he told an audience that “we can mine endless quantities of value and energy from the human mass of this Slavic people.”46 The harvesting of resources would thus fall upon a new German population overseeing a helot class of Slavic slave labor. For the new Nazi state controlling all of Europe, the East would supply enough food and resources to render Germany immune from the maritime blockades it had suffered during World War I while providing it with an inexhaustible amount of raw materials to support its military goals. Here, too, the Jew was seen as a threat. A pamphlet written by a Volksdeutsche for the Nazis was titled The Jew is the Parasite of Farming Culture. After a history of this supposed Jewish threat to agriculture dating back to the Middle Ages, the document ends by declaring that “this terrifying example of the unfortunate Russian agriculture shows clearly that Jewry is and will be the worst enemy of agriculture in all countries of the world.”47
For the Nazis, the prospect of Ratzel’s Lebenraum in the East became an essential element in their conception of the territory. Himmler wrote in a 1943 SS pamphlet, “for this global Germanic Volk, we will have a space in the East, where we will have at least some air to breathe and a place to live, a space prepared to become the German Germanic land of settlement.”48 Hitler wrote that Germany should “[concentrate] all of its strength on marking out a way of life for our people through the allocation of adequate Lebensraum for the next one hundred years.”49 This desire for space was, of course, dependent on the resources there and their potential cultivation. Thus, we see racial and economic planning coming together in the desire for Lebensraum.
One of the most compelling images marshaled by the Nazis was that of the “Soviet Paradise,” a desolate, dirty place of oppression and misery that threatened all things German. One soldier wrote in 1941 that “we all thank the Führer that he let us see the Bolshevist ‘paradise.’ We swear to extirpate this plague root and branch.”50 The rise of Bolshevism aroused great fear across Europe, but especially in Germany, which had already seen extremist violence during the Weimar period.
The Soviet Union served admirably as a pan-European existential threat that promised to literally dismantle and alter every aspect of traditional life. Thus, many Nazis and Germans viewed the East as a land of danger that must be defeated (in addition to being a source of resources.) In September 1939, a German historian wrote that the German people had protected Western culture and “for centuries . . . constituted a barrier in the East against the lack of culture (Unkultur) and protected the West against barbarity.”51 Such thoughts were echoed in pamphlets such as Germany: Europe’s Bulwark in the East—Germanic Achievements for European Security, published by the Nazis in 1939.52 A German soldier wrote in July 1941, “I always think how fortunate we are that this scourge of humanity never made it to our country.”53
Such sentiments express the feelings of many that Bolshevism transcended ideology as a kind of biological contaminant that could not be cleansed. This would justify the mistreatment of Soviet POWs who Hitler said were “no comrades”—meaning not equal to the German soldiers or deserving of proper care. Indeed, the racist worldview of the Nazis extended beyond Jews to include Slavs as an inferior race who would have to be dealt with at some point in the colonization of the East. Even during the Nuremburg trials, one prominent SS official said “I am of the opinion that when, for years, for decades, the doctrine is preached that the Slav race is an inferior race and Jews not even human, then such an outcome [genocide] is inevitable.”54 The broad range of racist perspectives like this is another reason that the Holocaust must be seen as part of a more comprehensive Nazi genocidal project.
Alfred Rosenberg, the top Nazi theorist on Eastern issues, was himself a Baltic Volksdeutsche. Rosenberg had been lobbying for a crusade against “Judeo-Bolshevism” since the 1920s. He played an influential role in articulating Nazi eastern policy and later served as Reich Minister for Occupied Territories, where he would have a chance to realize his theories. Rosenberg wrote of the supposed corrosive power of Bolshevism, saying, “Bolshevism has brutalized and deadened the minds of the people in the East, and therefore their conduct cannot be compared with that of Europeans, who place value on the unfolding and development of the individual personality.”55 He went on to note that not just Communists should be punished, “But it is not Bolshevism alone, rather [it is] the Russian people that must be held responsible for Stalin’s course of action.”56
This almost racialized view of Bolshevism became even deadlier when paired with antisemitism and the age-old myth of Judeo-Bolshevism. Nazi thinkers viewed Eastern Europe, and particularly the Soviet Union, as a land controlled by Jews . . . and they went to great lengths to cement the two groups together. Himmler summed up many of these ideas in 1936, when he said, “We are a country in the heart of Europe surrounded by open borders, surrounded by a world that is becoming more and more Bolshevized, and increasingly taken over by the Jew in his worst form, namely the tyranny of a totally destructive Bolshevism.”57 In this one sentence, we can identify the Bolshevik threat to western society, the horrors of the Soviet state, and the Jewish responsibility for the ideology.
Propaganda instructions from Rosenberg’s office in 1941 highlighted that Germans must be seen as “liberators from the Jewish-Bolshevist government” and that the “clique in the Kremlin is nothing but a group of Jewish criminal despots.”58 Nazi official educational materials supported this false connection between Jews and Communism. One need only look at the table of contents for the manual Jewry and Bolshevism for a taste of the Judeo-Bolshevik myth: The Jew as instigator of the Bolshevik Revolution, Jewish attempts at settlement, and the Jews in leading positions in the Soviet Union.59 What is significant here is the conjunction of anti-Bolshevik and antisemitic thought. This concept of Judeo-Bolshevism, highlighted by the Nazis, would have important repercussions in broadening the appeal for Nazi policies to a larger audience, for whom raw antisemitism may not have been sufficient.
The Nazi thinkers and leaders brought few new concepts or ideas to their conceptions of Eastern Europe. What they did do was highlight and radicalize existing ideas, officially incorporating them into state policy; whereas before, they had remained in academia or on the fringes of German culture. These intellectual origins formed the ideological underpinnings for policies that resulted in the murder of millions and the planned murder of millions more.
The settlement of the North American continent was similarly a consequence not of any higher claim in a democratic or international sense, but rather a consciousness of what is right . . . which has its sole roots in the conviction of the white race . . . to organize the rest of the world.
ADOLF HITLER to the Industry Club in Düsseldorf, January 27, 193260
Nazi expansion plans for Eastern Europe may have originated from a “primordial German Drang Nach Osten, a drive to the East” but their execution would be much more modern.61 Indeed, Nazi plans for the settlement and administration of the East should be seen through the lens of imperialism and colonialism. This, too, was not a new concept. After all, Hitler consciously referred to the colonization of America as a model—as we see above. However, the scale and cruelty with which the Nazis conquered was unparalleled.
Germany came much later to the imperial game than its rivals throughout Europe. As such, opportunities for colonies were limited. One important expansionist wrote in 1885 that Germany should seek colonies “not in distant parts of the world, but in our immediate proximity.”62 Bismarck reluctantly did get in the colonial game in distant places, most importantly, German East Africa and German Southwest Africa (where the Germans committed the first genocide of the twentieth century.) Neither of these territories were financially or strategically viable concerns, and all were lost with the defeat in World War I.
Partially due to Germany’s almost utter colonial failure, expansionists focused even more strongly on the East. As early as 1938, Himmler presented the concept of a “greater Germanic Reich, the greatest empire that has ever been achieved by human beings and that the earth has ever seen.”63 This empire in the East would, indeed, be massive and ordered by racial hierarchy. Here, the Nazis drew on the models of other European powers and America. Rosenberg told a gathering of civil administrators, “It took the British Empire three centuries to shape India. But I believe that just 10 years from now we will be able to look back full of pride at the achievement in the East.”64 Himmler, too, referenced the British Empire, confident that Germans “understand how to govern foreign peoples numbering a hundred million at least as well as the English do today.”65 Hitler himself noted in 1941: “What India was for England, the territories of the Russia will be for us.”66 The Nazi leadership also knew that it could never reasonably challenge Britain on the ocean, yet another reason for the Germans to focus on the landlocked East.
Perhaps most influential, however, as a model for German empire and colonization in the East was the United States. A nineteenth-century German scholar compared the Slavs to “‘the Indians in America’ in their incapacity to cultivate the environment and shape it by their own efforts.”67 Another proclaimed, “We have our backwoods as well as the Americans, the lands of the Lower Danube and the Black Sea, all of Turkey, the entire Southeast beyond Hungary is our hinterland.”68 The image of the “Wild West” depicted by people like popular novelist Karl May influenced the worldviews of many Nazis, high- and low-ranking. His sales of books on a mythologized American west reached into the hundreds of millions.69 We know that Hitler avidly read them. He called the Volga “our Mississippi,” referencing the American expulsion of Native Americans to the western side of that river.70
Germany’s “Manifest Destiny” lay in the East, and their “Indians” were the Slavic peoples and Jews that lived there. As Hitler himself said, “[I]n the East a similar process will repeat itself for a second time as in the conquest of America.”71 The American influence was clear. Inferior races would be destroyed, driven out, or used as slave labor. Hitler was very explicit: “the American ‘Nordics’ had colonized ‘the West’ after they had ‘shot down the millions of redskins to a few hundred thousand.’”72 It is no mistake that initial plans for dealing with Jews called for “reservations,” with the expectation of a large loss of life. Hitler compared his genocidal plans with American history. During one of his “table talks,” he ranted, “there’s only one duty: to Germanize this country [Russia] by the immigration of Germans and to look upon the natives as Redskins.”73 He further noted the apparent lack of concern among imperial powers for genocidal acts by saying, “When we eat wheat from Canada, we don’t think about the despoiled Indians.”74 In his second book, Hitler noted with envy that “the American union itself, motivated by the theories of its own racial researchers, established specific criteria for immigration.”75
The Nazis justified and to some extent modeled their imperial project in the East on those already conducted elsewhere by the great powers. It is no coincidence that Hitler thought Slavs should be treated as “Redskins” or that local auxiliaries were called “Askaris,” as they had been in German African colonies or that these colonies had seen the first German concentration camps.76 Göring’s father, Heinrich, had been an abject failure as the first Governor General of the German colony of German Southwest Africa (present-day Namibia). Franz Ritter von Epp, an early supporter and advisor to Hitler, had served as an Army officer in the same colony. Indeed, the Nazi administrator of the General Government, Hans Frank, explicitly drew the comparison, saying, “The imperialism we are developing here is beyond all comparison with the miserable efforts undertaken by former weak German governments in Africa.”77
Hitler lamented in 1943 that “one thing the Americans have, and which we lack, is the sense of the vast open spaces.”78 The Nazis planned to remedy this in their God-given Lebenraum in the East by populating the region with German colonists of good racial stock. Preferably, these would be former soldiers settling down on orderly fortified farms. The Nazis even subscribed to their own version of the famous American “Turner thesis,” in which historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the crucible of the frontier had made democracy (and Americans) great.79 For Hitler and the Nazis, their frontier would be the border between European Russia (once colonized) and central Asia. This border between civilization and the barbarians would blood German colonists, who would defend it and then settle: “The new territories would be colonized by soldier-farmers, their settlements and spacious farms forming a living wall in the East.”80 Himmler told his leadership in 1943 that “I have asked the Führer today that the SS have the honor of holding the extreme eastern German frontier as a defensive border.” He then suggested that Germany’s military-aged men should fight on this border and that SS divisions should spend a year there so that “we will never grow soft.”81 Hitler himself believed that the “black earth” of the East “could be a paradise, a California of Europe.”82
Where would these colonists come from? The Nazis hoped that they would be Reichsdeutsche and that an emphasis on increasing birthrates would help create this new class of settlers. In actuality, many of them would be Volksdeutsche. One group of a dozen former German settlers from East Africa began farming in occupied Poland, a phenomenon further illustrating the historical continuity between other imperialist policies and the Nazi Eastern project.83 So, too, a bizarre 1940 Hitler Youth letter-writing campaign targeting 15,000 Russian-German farmers in South Dakota, asking that they return to settle in newly conquered territory; one doubts if there were many takers.84 The rather larger problem, however, was the vast population already living in these lands, which would have to be “removed.”
We should recognize that the German colonial past in Africa did not differ significantly in its methods and aims from that of other European nations. Indeed, the above comparisons between America/Britain and Germany emphasize similarities in colonial thought rather than differences. However, a fundamental difference between Nazi plans for the East and previous German ideas was that there would be no civilizing mission, however paternalistic. For the Nazis, no amount of German Kultur could change the racial inferiority of the peoples of the East. Hitler viewed earlier German attempts at colonization as failures precisely because “wherever [the German] showed himself, he began to play the teacher.”85 He continued, “[I]t is not our mission to lead the local inhabitants to a higher standard of life.”86 Himmler made this even clearer. He wrote to Hitler that the only goal of any education in the East should be “Simply arithmetic up to 500 at the most; writing of one’s name; the doctrine that it is a divine law to obey the Germans and to be honest, industrious, and good. I don’t think that reading is necessary.”87 In fact, most inhabitants would not be alive to receive this meager education in the Germanized East. Indeed, another major difference between the German colonization of Africa and the Nazi colonization of Eastern Europe was that there would be no civilian government or left-leaning political parties to successfully lobby for an end to murderous practices there (as had happened in Africa).
Many tens of millions of people in this territory will become superfluous and will have to die or migrate to Siberia . . . With regard to this, absolute clarity must reign.
Economic Policy Guidelines for Economic Organization East, May 23, 194188
Nazis planned a massive demographic engineering project in the East whose death toll would dwarf that of the Holocaust, but in which the Holocaust was a critical component. They boldly put this in writing in the memo above. As in the American West, “indigenous peoples” would have to be cleared out to make way for German settlers. As time progressed, the more abstract visions discussed above coalesced into explicit plans for the Nazi reorganization of the East. These designs show us the lethal combination of ideology, racism, misused history, and war, as well as the frankness with which Nazi leaders recognized the genocidal impact of their actions.
Two related plans encapsulated the grand Nazi future in the East: the Generalplan Ost (General Plan East) and the so-called “Green Folder.” The first dealt primarily with the movement of populations in German occupied territories and the second laid out a Hungerpolitik or “hunger policy,” which would rob local people of their food. Both plans merit discussions in some depth, as they were key components of the Nazi genocidal project in the East.
Hitler had decided already in 1940—in spite of his newly signed alliance with Stalin—that he would invade the Soviet Union. As soon as he expressed his wishes, Nazi officials began drawing up plans to manage the land and people of soon-to-be-occupied eastern territories of the Soviet Union (the Baltic States, Soviet Poland/Belarus, Ukraine). This Generalplan Ost had two architects: Dr. Konrad Meyer (a professor of agriculture and geographer) and Dr. Hans Ehlich (a physician). Together, they crafted a plan for the movement and removal of millions of people; the authors also represent the depth to which Nazism had penetrated the scholarly and intellectual life of Germany. The two men were assigned to the SS Planning Office of the Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of Germandom, which itself was part of the Reischssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) under Heinrich Himmler. Their task was not easy: prepare the massive territory in the East for settlement. This meant two things: removing undesirable populations like Jews, Sinti/Roma, and Slavs, and moving in racially acceptable Germans.
The Generalplan Ost was very much a work in progress, going through multiple iterations as situations and opinions of key leaders changed. No copy of the actual plan exists; the Nazis seem to have been successful in destroying all original copies. However, we can reconstruct much of it through existing documents that discuss it. One scholar has suggested that there are at least 14,000–15,000 documents relating to Generalplan Ost, only a small fraction of which have been analyzed by scholars.89 Planning began in 1940 and continued through May 1942, when the most detailed version was completed.
This plan revolved around the creation of thirty-six German settlements, which would also serve as bases for security forces and centers for larger agricultural communities.90 As mentioned earlier, the Ural Mountains would function as an active, defended border between Eurasian Russia and the new Germanized East. Eight million German settlers would be required to adequately settle the new territory. However, the plan also calculated that 45 million foreign peoples existed, of whom 31 million would have to be “resettled.”91 Some of these resettlements reflected the fickle personal preferences of high Nazi leaders and their callous contempt for life. Hermann Göring ordered the Białowieża Forest (in modern-day Belarus and Poland) be cleared of all population to become his private hunting preserve.92 Likewise, Hitler ordered the deportation of the entire population of the Yalta coast to create a “German Riviera” there. As for where these people should go, Hitler remarked, “I couldn’t care less. Russia is big enough.”93 These two examples demonstrate clearly the contempt the Nazi leadership held for the peoples of the East and the intersection of this attitude with actual planning.
In an earlier meeting, it had been determined that “racially undesirables must be evacuated from the East while racially desirable people in Germany or Germanized peoples should be employed [as settlers.]” Another official at the meeting “advocated in the harshest way this position in which he advised that the undesirables must be evacuated to west Siberia.”94 Among these were to be 20 million “racially undesirable” Poles.95 Some of these would serve as slave labor for German estates to be established in the East. Himmler planned that the remaining “inferior population . . . will, as a people of laborers without leaders, be at our disposal and will furnish Germany annually with migrant workers and with workers for special tasks.”96
How would this massive demographic project be accomplished? An integral part of Generalplan Ost was the intentional deaths of local populations. Himmler told a group of senior SS leaders in mid-June 1941 that the purpose of the invasion of Russia was “the decimation of the Slavic population by thirty million.”97 In the written documents mentioned here, planners anticipated the deaths of “tens of millions.” This was acceptable because “racial-biological considerations will be of decisive importance for future German policies.”98 In a memo dated June 12, 1942, Heinrich Himmler himself wrote, “I have looked over the Generalplan Ost which has very much pleased me. I would like to give this plan to the Führer at some point in time.”99
Where did Meyer hope to find eight million settlers for the newly opened East? One of the most utopian elements of the Generalplan Ost was perhaps the expectation that millions of ordinary Germans would abandon comfortable lives in Germany to settle in what, to them, must have seemed like a wild Third World country. The planners, however, had other sources of manpower. First, they relied heavily on the Volksdeutsche or ethnic Germans already living there. By the end of 1942, officials could report that 629,000 Volksdeutsche settlers had been mustered from the Baltic States, Belarus, Romania, Yugoslavia, and South Tyrol, with another 400,000 coming from South Tyrol and Ukraine.100 Of course, not all of these settlers chose to move of their own free will exactly. A second source for settlers would be those inhabitants of the east who could be Germanized, that is, who possessed enough German racial characteristics that they could be reincorporated into the Volksgemeinschaft. Teams of Nazi “experts” would fan out across the East seeking these remnants of German kultur. Even this process was described in agricultural terms. Alfred Rosenberg told officials that “The cultivating of certain völkisch sprouts and the restraining of other sprouts, that is history in the making” [emphasis mine].101 A particularly cruel element of this process was the search for children “capable of Germanization” who were forcibly taken from their parents in German occupied territories and sent to be raised by German families via the Nazi Welfare Organization; a Polish estimate puts the number of children abducted for this reason at between 150,000 and 200,000.102 Himmler laid out his plan for harvesting children in 1940:
The parents of such children of good blood will be given the choice of either giving their child away—in which case, they will not likely produce any more children so that the danger of this subhuman people of the east obtaining a class of leaders that, since it would be equal to us, would also be dangerous for us, will disappear—or the parents pledge themselves to go to Germany and to become loyal citizens there.103
Himmler was also concerned that 10,000–12,000 children fathered by German soldiers with local women may be racially pure enough to also be sent back to Germany.104 Lastly, Meyer also hoped to bring back Germans who had left Germany to serve as settlers. Recall the letter-writing campaign to German immigrants in Nebraska. Indeed, the German immigrant community in Mexico expressed its support. It reported that “by means of our unity in Mexico, we want to prove to our German fatherland that it always can rely on its brothers abroad.”105
In summary, German academics and scholars like Meyer, Ehrlich, and Wetzlich drew up plans for a massive project of demographic engineering that required the displacement of literally millions of people as lands were cleared of indigenous populations and replaced by German settlers of one kind or another. This was not a process expected to take place overnight, but one that planners envisioned happening over twenty to thirty years. Even so, the logistics required and the death toll involved in this utopian vision are almost impossible to grasp.
Yet, the Generalplan Ost was not the only plan with far-reaching and lethal consequences being developed for the German-occupied East. As we know, Hitler and the Nazis were incredibly concerned about the economic self-sufficiency of the Reich, which was expected to last for a thousand years. Hitler had already stated before the invasion of Poland that Germany needed “the Ukraine in order that no one is able to starve us again as in the last war.”106 The resulting plan for the economic exploitation of Eastern Europe came to be known as the “Green Folder” or the “Hunger Plan.”
In reality, the plan was a moving target, evolving and changing over time as the course of the war and development of the Nazi genocidal project dictated. The Nazi bureaucrat responsible for the Green Folder was Herbert Backe. Like Nazi eastern theorist, Alfred Rosenberg, Backe was a Volksdeutsche from the Caucasus in Russia, where he spent the first twenty years of his life before fleeing to Germany during World War I.107 His experiences as a prisoner of the Czar may well have colored his attitudes toward Russians and Slavs. Backe attempted a PhD in agronomy and wrote a dissertation on the Russian grain market, which was rejected—likely because it was too politically radical. Backe became a dedicated Nazi, writing his wife in March 1933 that he “saw Hitler’s gaze on him and knew that ‘this man would force me to fight until the end.’”108 He joined the SS and found employment in the Ministry of Food and Agriculture in Göring’s Office of the Four-Year Plan, an organization established in 1936 to prepare Germany economically for war. As was common in Hitler’s government, Herbert Backe politically outmaneuvered his boss, Walther Darré, the Minister of Food and Agriculture, and worked around him with senior Nazi leadership. In this way, he became the Nazi food expert with the ability to greatly influence policy and implementation.
By November 1940, Backe had been informed of plans to invade the Soviet Union and began to work up a plan for the economic exploitation of the territories to be conquered.109 On April 12, 1941, a secret order from Hitler gave additional powers to Backe for the implementation of a “special task” regarding the invasion of the Soviet Union.110 Presumably, this was his authorization to go forward with ever more extreme planning. This plan had several important elements. First, it divided the occupied Soviet territories into two sections. The first was Ukraine, a “surplus territory.” By this, he simply recognized a fact of Russian geography: Ukraine was the breadbasket of Eastern Europe and produced the vast majority of food for the rest of European Russia. This latter area (the Baltic States, Belarus, and Russia proper) Backe categorized as “deficit territories,” meaning that they took from the surplus created in Ukraine.111 Backe’s Green Folder plans were as simple as they were horrifying. First, the Nazis would cease distributing food to the “deficit territories.” Second, they would supply Germany with food produced in Ukraine through forcible extraction. Backe is said to have noted wryly that the “Germans would have had to introduce the collective farm if the Soviets had not already arranged it.”112 This would ensure that Germany remained fully fed and unaffected by any blockade. Third, more food from the “surplus” zones would be used to supply the Wehrmacht, which planners recognized would have to live off the land. Backe reminded the military leadership of this in May 1941, emphasizing that the Army should plan on the “complete feeding of the army from [the] occupied territories.”113 Finally, shipments of food to most large cities were to be cut off.
Of course, “surplus” food grown in Ukraine was not really surplus at all; rather, it fed the rest of the Soviet Union in the same way that agricultural regions everywhere feed non-agricultural regions. Thus, the outcome of the Green Folder plans was entirely predictable: mass starvation of local populations cut off from their usual source of food. This was not a concern for Backe or the rest of the leadership. In fact, the Nazis explicitly acknowledged this many times. On May 23, 1941, the Economic Policy Guidelines for Economic Organization East were published. They noted that “the population of the cities, will have to face the most terrible famine . . . Many tens of millions of people in this territory will become superfluous and will have to die or migrate to Siberia . . . With regard to this, absolute clarity must reign.”114 The commander of an Einsatzgruppe mobile killing unit commented in July 1941 that Hitler “intended to decimate the around thirty million Russians living in this strip through starvation, by removing all foodstuffs from this enormous territory.”115 Backe’s fingerprints were everywhere. Thus, in the Generalplan Ost and the Green Folder, the Nazis plotted a course of forced population movement and planned starvation that would result in the deaths of millions of Eastern Europeans; an outcome fully acceptable and in agreement with their ideological views of the East.
What about Western Europe? If the Nazis seemed to have devoted most of their intellectual capital to the East, it is because that territory was by far the most important—and the one where they planned to exercise a murderous plan of colonization and demographic engineering. Different racial and political considerations tempered their attitudes and plans with regard to Western Europe. As early as 1922, Himmler had written: “The east is the most important thing for us. The west is liable to die. In the east we must fight and settle.”116 A Nazi administrator transferred from Poland to the Netherlands remarked that “In the east we have a National Socialist mission; over there in the west we have a function. Therein lies something of a difference!”117 There were, indeed, several differences requiring a different policy toward Western Europe. First, while the German race was (in the Nazi mind) certainly superior to other Western European peoples, the distinction was not nearly as stark as in the east. Western Europeans were, in the eyes of the Nazis, civilized peoples who could function in concert with Nazi wishes and manage their own countries, which had some legitimacy in Nazi eyes. The Nazis had no desire to colonize or fundamentally reorganize the West. Instead, they were content to install puppet states that would be cooperative with Nazi political and economic demands. Such relationships did not require the decimation of local populations. Indeed, the Nazis envisioned a sort of forced European Union with Germany as continental hegemon. Western European countries would be bound to Germany in this union and obliged to comply with its desires. Nazi occupation of Western European lands could be relatively benign, insofar as they behaved.
It should be clear at this point why both German and Nazi conceptions of their “manifest destiny” are crucial to understanding both the larger Nazi genocidal project and the Holocaust in the East. The Nazis built upon a long and rich history of idealized German pasts in the East, and employed anti-Slavic, antisemitic stereotypes as they viewed the East. These prejudices and imagined histories combined with a strategic requirement for an economically self-sufficient Germany and complete dominance of the European continent; a goal that would only be possible with German (re)settlement in the East and “proper” exploitation of the land and resources. This included a demographic expansion of the German people in order to provide soldiers to defend the Reich.
Yet while older Volkisch yearnings for the past remained in a more abstract, romantic sphere, Nazis translated these desires into organized, bureaucratically (and “scientifically”) created plans for how such massive population change would be executed, with the Generalplan Ost and the Green Folder or “Hunger Plan” being most prominent. This radical step by the Nazi state illustrates the dangerous combination of ideology and bureaucracy that would have lethal effects on the ground.
The Holocaust was certainly an important part of the Nazi genocidal and demographic projects in the East. After all, Jews constituted one of many “undesirable” elements to be eliminated there to make way for German settlers. However, one should not mistake this convergence in goals with an equality of emphasis. Jews (and their extermination) became a central goal of the Nazi state separate from colonization of the East. While there were parallels, those planning the settlement of East themselves recognized the differences. Eberhard Wetzel, from the Eastern Ministry, and from whom we know much about Generalplan Ost, admitted that “one cannot solve the Polish question in the sense that one can liquidate the Poles like the Jews is obvious.”118 Indeed, as we shall see shortly, the eventual plans to murder the Jews of Europe would be far more successful in the end than any attempt at German colonization.
Selected Readings
Burleigh, Michael. Germany Turns Eastwards: A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Kakel, Carroll P. The American West and the Nazi East: A Comparative and Interpretive Perspective. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Liulevicius, Vejas G. The German Myth of the East: 1800 to the Present. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Matthäus, Jürgen, and Frank Bajohr, eds. The Political Diary of Alfred Rosenberg and the Onset of the Holocaust. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.
Mineau, Andre. SS Thinking and the Holocaust. Amsterdam: Rodopi B.V., 2012.