Kaiser's Holocaust (51 page)

The purification by ordeal of the Aryan ‘master race’ would be only one effect of the Nazi’s
Lebensraum
policy. The other would be the displacement of the ‘lower’ races of the East. By the end of 1941 Germany had not only acquired a vast colonial
territory, she had also brought a subject population of anything from 40 to 65 million under her control; 11 million were Jews, the rest mainly Slavs. In Nazi ideology and in modern historical memory, the Nazis’ racial contempt for the Slavs is overshadowed by their more fanatical and obsessive hatred of the Jews. Nazi anti-Semitism had Darwinian elements but was deeper, more complex and multi-layered. The Slavs’ place in the Nazis’ racial world-view was more directly shaped by colonial thinking.

In preparing the army for the brutality of a ‘war of annihilation’, the Nazis found within the traditions, language and methodologies of European colonialism, pre-existing categories in which to reclassify the Slavs. By reducing the nationalities of the East to what Hitler was to call ‘colonial peoples’, the violence and excesses of both colonial war and colonial administration provided the regime with an inventory of military practices, terms and justifications. These practices, even within Germany’s own relatively modest colonial experience, included slavery, ethnic cleansing, concentration camps and genocide.

Even before the launch of Barbarossa, both Joseph Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry and the SS had waged campaigns specifically designed to reinforce the low racial status of the Slavic peoples. Propaganda onslaughts were directed at both the German public and the army. In 1942 the SS issued a pamphlet titled
Der Untermenschen
(The Subhumans) that stressed the racial differences between Slavs and Aryans.
Der Untermenschen
was designed to harden racial attitudes against the Slavs within the ranks of the army by setting photographs of supposed Aryan perfection alongside images of Slavic subhumanity. Four million copies were printed, helping to bring the phrase
Untermenschen
into the lexicon of wartime terminology. In the months before the invasion, the army command also encouraged its troops to make racial distinctions between the various ethnic minorities who filled the ranks of the Red Army. A directive of May 1941 on the behaviour of troops in the upcoming Russian campaign warned that ‘The Asiatic soldiers of the Red Army in particular are devious, cunning and without feeling.’
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Categorised as ‘colonial peoples’, the Slavs could not expect the protection of European law. The conventions of warfare that secured the rights of combatants and prisoners of war had never been fully applied to Africans, Asians or the Native Americans. The Nazis withdrew the same rights from the Slavs, in part, by denying their status as Europeans.

The re-categorising of the Slavic peoples was not only critical in encouraging the army to abandon the rules of ‘civilised warfare’, it was also a prerequisite for colonial rule. Unlike the Jews who were to be entirely removed from the German living space, between 14 and 15 million Slavs would remain under
General
Plan Ost
. They were to form a class of virtual slaves and their labour used to construct the farms and villages of the German East and work their fields under the watchful settlers.

To confirm the Slavs’ position, the Nazis, in both their own thinking and their propaganda, employed stereotypes inherited from the colonial tradition. Unable to point to external racial differences like skin colour, they fell back on some of the oldest racial characterisations. The Russians, like the Africans, were described as brutal monsters capable of terrible violence and as being ‘natural born slaves who feel the need of a master’.

They were viewed as Erich Koch described the Ukrainians: as ‘white niggers’.
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This caricature of servility and brutality came straight out of European colonial racism, and was exactly how Rudyard Kipling had described the Africans and Indians of the British Empire in verse forty years earlier: ‘Half Devil and half child’.

In taking up the white man’s burden in the East, the Nazis completely rejected the principle of using German
Kultur
to lead and uplift the people of the East, an idea promoted by various nationalists during the years of the Second Reich. The ‘civilising mission’ was one of the very few aspects of the nineteenth-and early twentieth-century colonial tradition that Hitler rejected
utterly. When railing against this outdated and discredited form of colonialism, Hitler claimed that the greatest mistakes had been made by the missionaries and colonialists of Germany’s pre-war colonies, who he was convinced had been overly concerned with the health, education and spiritual well-being of the native peoples. In one of his after-dinner rants, he explained to his guests that such impulses had been central to the failure of Germany’s pre-war colonies, ‘No sooner do we land in a colony than we install children’s crèches, hospitals for the natives. All that fills me with rage … Instead of making the natives love us, all that inappropriate care makes them hate us.’
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In another of his conversations Hitler assured his audience that there would be no attempt to ‘civilise’ the Slavs in the new German empire:

Hitler was especially adamant that ‘nobody must let loose the German schoolmaster on the eastern territories … The ideal solution would be to teach this people an elementary kind of mimicry. One asks less of them than one does of the deaf and dumb.’
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On another occasion he suggested that

In the Nazi East, there were to be no missionaries and no schools. Those Russians, Poles, Ukrainians and others permitted to remain would be slaves with no hope of manumission or education. The only technological advances made available to
them would be abortion and contraception, in an effort to keep their populations down to acceptable levels.

The Slavs were to be completely segregated. ‘The life of the German colonist’, Hitler warned, ‘must be kept as far separate from that of the local inhabitants as possible … the easiest way of preventing any fusion between the German and the native population is to encourage the latter to adhere to their own ways and discourage them from aping ours.’
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Plans for racial separation in the East clearly resemble the schemes and draft laws that were developed in the same years by the Nazis’ Colonial Policy Office for the administration of Germany’s future colonies in Africa. They also built on Nazi rule in occupied Poland where the imagined racial inferiority of the Poles was emphasised in almost every aspect of daily life. As with all truly racialised systems, Nazi colonialism placed racial status above the abilities and achievements of the individual. In September 1941 Hitler explained that, ‘The least of our stable-lads must be superior to any native.’
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The Slavic population of the Nazi East were to be kept submissive through the colonial policy of divide and rule. Every ethnic division and religious divide was to be magnified by their German overlords. Hitler’s enthusiasm for the policy is palpable in his private conversations. At dinner in April 1942, he delivered a long monologue on how Germany was to divide and then dominate the Slavs:

As in Apartheid South Africa and nineteenth-century colonial Africa, segregation was to be accompanied by a tightly controlled
system of economic exploitation. In 1915, the colonial writer Paul Rohrbach had argued that only by labouring in the service of the white race did the black peoples of South-West Africa earn any right to existence. In April 1942 Hitler expressed an almost identical conviction, but with the Russians in mind. ‘These people’, he raved, ‘have but one justification for existence – to be used by us economically.’
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The people of the fertile Ukraine were to justify their continued existence by becoming a class of serfs ruled over by German settlers:

In Hitler’s plans for the East, only a proportion of the Slavs were to be enslaved. The rest, along with the entire Jewish population, were to be removed – one way or another – from Germany’s
Lebensraum
. The details of this immense act of ethnic cleansing were at first left to the planners. In the months leading up to the invasion of the USSR, Nazi racial scientists, economists, geographers and agriculturalists began in earnest to grapple with the population problems of the East. Through its various drafts and revisions, the authors of
General Plan Ost
concluded that in order to make way for German settlers, around 30 million of the current inhabitants of European Russia would have to be pushed out. Other estimates suggested even higher figures: 45 million and more. In some proposed schemes, these tens of millions of people were to be ‘evacuated’ east over the Urals into Siberia. A directive issued in May 1941 showed that the planners had fully grasped what a colonial war in the East would mean for the populations of Poland and the USSR. It stated that ‘The population … especially the urban will have to look forward to the severest of famines. It will be essential to drive the population into Siberia. Efforts to save the population
from starving to death by bringing surplus food from the black soil region can be made only at the expense of feeding Europe.’
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Three months later Hitler told his entourage that the peoples of the East were to suffer the same fate as the ‘Red Indians’. They were to be exterminated and then simply forgotten. ‘We also eat Canadian wheat,’ he reminded his audience, ‘and don’t think about the Indians.’ Three months later Hermann Göring, the man tasked with the economic exploitation of the former Soviet territories, informed the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Count Galeazzo Ciano, that between 20 and 30 million Soviets would be confronted by famine in 1942. ‘Perhaps it is as well that it should be so,’ he added, ‘for certain nations must be decimated.’
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It was Göring who ordered Reinhardt Heydrich to begin work devising a ‘Final Solution’ to the Jewish problem, in July 1941. Sometime in the autumn of that year, as 2 million Soviet prisoners of war were being starved to death in holding pens and the death squads of the
Einzatzgruppen
were massacring thousands of Jews each week, the notion of a ‘territorial solution’ – the expulsion of the Jews from the German
Lebensraum
– was overtaken by plans for their complete extermination as a race.

At the start of the war in June 1941, no such plans were in place. Operation Barbarossa was launched as a war for
Lebensraum
. Hitler did not invade with Auschwitz in mind. While it is certainly true that Nazi plans for the East demanded that it be made a ‘Jew-free space’, few had imagined this could be achieved through the wholesale liquidation of the 11 million Jews within the zone under German occupation. The Jewish Holocaust, the ultimate expression of Nazi violence, emerged from the context of the Nazis’ racial colonial war.

While the decision to exterminate the Jews was taken sometime in late 1941, the methodology developed slowly, taking shape amid a maelstrom of accidental happenings and coincidences. At times it was driven by the personal sadism of a small number of relatively minor Nazi administrators. Although motivated above all by the fanatical anti-Semitism that lay at the
very heart of Nazism, the final nature of the Final Solution was partially determined by a wider process of radicalisation that impacted on almost every aspect of the Nazi project, and which began the moment the war was launched – accelerating perceptibly in the aftermath of German military defeat at the gates of Moscow in late 1941. In the summer of 1940, the regime had seriously investigated the possibility of deporting the Jews of Europe to Madagascar. The failure of Operation Barbarossa ended all possibility of a ‘territorial solution’, even in the East, although it must be remembered that the ‘territorial solutions’ proposed in documents like
General Plan Ost
would have proved genocidal to both Jews and Slavs.