Quotes from Mein Kampf (Chapters 4 and 14):
Therefore the only possibility that Germany had to conduct a sound territorial policy was to acquire new territory in Europe itself. Colonies cannot serve this purpose, since they aren’t suited for large-scale European settlement. From the 19th century on, it was no longer possible to peacefully acquire such colonies. Therefore any attempt at such a colonial expansion would have meant an enormous military struggle. Thus it was more practical to undertake that military struggle for new territory in Europe, rather than to wage war for foreign acquisition.
Such a decision naturally demands the nation’s undivided attention. A policy like this requires all available energy on the part of everyone concerned, and cannot be carried out by half- measures or hesitatingly. The political leadership of the German Reich should have been exclusively devoted to this goal. No step should have been taken other than one that served as a means to this end. It should have been clear that such a goal could only be reached by war; and this prospect should have been faced with calm and collected determination.
All alliances should have been envisioned and judged only from this standpoint. If new territory were to be acquired in Europe, it should have been mainly at Russia’s expense. Once again, the new German Reich should have set out on the same road as was formerly traveled by the Teutonic Knights-this time to acquire soil for the German plow by means of the German sword, and thus provide the nation with its daily bread. Such a policy, however, could have only one possible European ally: England. Only by alliance with England was it possible to safeguard the rear of the new German crusade. And the justification for undertaking such an expedition was stronger than that of our forefathers. Not one of our pacifists refuses to eat the bread made from grain grown in the East; and yet the first plow here was “the sword’!
Hitler outlines the foreign policy
It is these very circles that are beginning today to divert our foreign policy toward most disastrous directions and tum it away from any real defense of the folkish interests of our people. Instead they serve their own fantastic ideologies, and I thus feel myself obliged to offer to my own colleagues a clear exposition of the most important problem in foreign policy, namely, our relation to Russia.
… Moreover, as National Socialists, we must lay down the following principle regarding the nature of the foreign policy of a folkish State: A folkish State’s foreign policy must first of all bear in mind the duty of securing the existence of the race on this planet, which is embodied in this State. And this is done by establishing a healthy and natural relation between the number and growth of the population on the one hand, and the quantity and quality of the soil on the other.
The only healthy condition is one that assures a people’s sustenance on their own soil. Any other situation is unhealthy even though it may endure for centuries or even thousands of years. Sooner or later, this will lead to the decline or even destruction of the people concerned. Only a sufficiently large space on this Earth can assure a peoples’ free existence. The necessary extent of territorial expansion for settlement must not be estimated by present requirements nor even by the magnitude of its agricultural productivity in relation to the population.
…In the first volume, under the heading “Germany’s Alliance Policy before the War,” I have already explained that a state’s land area is of importance, not only as the source of the nation’s food, but also militarily and politically. Once a people is assured of its sustenance by the amount of soil, it must consider how to defend it. …Thus the German nation can assure its own future only as a world power.
Hitler says Germany needs more land space to become a world power again
…Germany today is no world power. Even if our present military weakness could be overcome, we still would have no claim to this title. What importance does a State have on this planet in which the relation of population to area is so miserable as in the present German Reich? In an era in which the world is being gradually divided among states–many of whom almost embrace whole continents–one cannot speak of a world power in the case of a structure whose political Motherland is confined to the laughable area of barely 500,000 square kilometers.
From a purely territorial point of view, the area of the German Reich is vanishingly small compared with the other so-called world powers. England mustn’t be cited as a proof to the contrary, for the English Motherland is in reality the great capital of the British world empire, which owns almost a fourth of the Earth’s surface. Furthermore we must consider the American Union as foremost among the colossal states, also Russia and China. Some of these spatial areas are more than ten times greater than the present German Reich.
…Thus the world today has not only a number of states that are much greater than our German nation in population, but they also have a land area that is, above all, the basis of their political power. Never has the relation between area and population in the German Reich been as unfavorable relative to other world states as at the beginning of our history 2,000 years ago, and again today. Formerly we were a young people, storming into a world of crumbling great states, whose last giant, Rome, we helped to bring down. Today we find ourselves in a world of great power-states, in which our own Reich is constantly sinking into insignificance.
… If the National Socialist movement wants to be recognized by history as having a great mission for our people, it will have to painfully recognize the real truth of our situation in the world. It must courageously fight against the aimlessness and incompetence that has hitherto guided our German nation in foreign policy. Then, without respect for ‘tradition’ or preconceptions, it must find the courage to organize our national forces and set them on a path that will lead them away from the present restricted living space and toward new land and soil. Thus will the movement save us from the danger of perishing from this Earth or of serving others as a slave nation.
… In this connection, if we examine the political experiences of our people during more than a thousand years, recalling the innumerable wars and struggles, and scrutinizing it all in light of present results, we must confess that this sea of blood has produced only three phenomena that we may consider as lasting fruits of specific actions in foreign policy and overall politics: (1) The colonization of the Ostmark, mostly by the Bavarians; (2) The conquest and settlement of the territory east of the Elbe; and (3) The organization of the Brandenburg-Prussian state by the Hohenzollerns, which became the model for the crystallization of a new Reich. …These were the first, and unfortunately the only, successful attempts to establish a harmony between our increasing population and the quantity of land and soil.
… We National Socialists must never join in the common hurrahpatriotism of the contemporary bourgeois world. It would be a mortal danger for us to look upon immediate pre-war developments as constituting even the slightest obligation in our path forward. From the entire historical period of the 19th century, we do not accept a single obligation that was based in that period itself. In contrast to the policy of those who represented that period, we must take our stand on the highest viewpoint regarding all foreign policy, namely: to bring the land into harmony with our population. Indeed, from the past we can only learn that the aim of our political conduct must lie in two directions: (1) land and soil as the objective of our foreign policy, and (2) a new, philosophically-established, uniform foundation as the goal of domestic political activity.
Hitler says the 1914 borders are not sufficient
… I still want to briefly take a stand on the question of how far our territorial aims are ethically and morally justified. This is necessary because, unfortunately in our so-called folkish circles, there are all kinds of plausible big-mouths who try to persuade the German people that the aim of their foreign policy ought to be to right the wrongs of 1918, while at the same time they find it necessary to assure the whole world of folkish brotherhood and sympathy.
In regard to this point I want to make the following statement: To demand the restoration of the 1914 borders is a political absurdity that’s fraught with such consequences as to appear criminal. The 1914 Reich borders were anything but logical. They were not really complete, in the sense of including all the members of the German nation, nor were they reasonable, in light of military-geographical effectiveness. …By setting up the restoration of the 1914 borders as the aim of Germany’s political program, each member of the enemy coalition, who otherwise might be inclined to withdraw from the league, fears that he might be attacked by us if isolated, thus losing support of his allies. Each individual state feels itself targeted and threatened by this slogan. This is absurd, for the following two reasons: (1) The means of power are lacking to draw it from the evening air into reality, and (2) Even if it could be really carried out, the result would be so miserable that, by God, it wouldn’t be worthwhile to risk our people’s blood for it.
There can scarcely be any doubt whatsoever that only through bloodshed could we restore the 1914 borders. Only a child-like mind believes that the Versailles Treaty can be corrected by indirect means or begging. …Times have changed since the Congress of Vienna: It’s no longer princes or their courtesans who contend and bargain about state borders, but rather the inexorable world-Jew who fights for his dominion over nations. No nation can remove this fist from its throat except by the sword. Only an organized and concentrated national sentiment, turned into an effective force, can defy the international enslavement of peoples. This path is, and remains, a bloody one.
If we are convinced that the German future calls for the highest sacrifice, in one way or another, then we must set aside considerations of political expediency, establish a worthy goal, and fight for it.
… The 1914 borders are of no significance for the German future. They neither served to protect us in the past, nor do they offer any strength for the future. With these borders, the German people cannot attain an inner unity, nor can they assure their sustenance, nor, from a military viewpoint, are they advantageous, nor can they improve our relations with the other world powers–or better, with the real world powers. We won’t narrow the gap with England, and we won’t achieve the size of the American Union; indeed, not even France would be diminished in terms of worldpolitical importance.
Only one thing is certain: The attempt to restore the 1914 borders, even if successful, would demand so much of our people’s blood that no further sacrifice would be possible for such measures needed to really secure the life and future of the nation. On the contrary, intoxicated by such a superficial success, further aims would be renounced–all the more so because the ‘national honor’ would seem to be repaired and new doors would be opened, at least for the moment, to commercial development.
Hitler says the goal is to expand the living space East by force & war is necessary to accomplish this goal
… Against all this, we National Socialists must stick firmly to our foreign policy goal, namely, that the German people must be assured of the land and soil entitled to it on this Earth. And only this action, before God and our German posterity, would justify any sacrifice of blood: Before God, because we are sent into this world with the mission to struggle for our daily bread, as creatures to whom nothing is given, and who must be able to win and defend their position as lords of the Earth only through their own intelligence and courage; and before German posterity insofar as that, for each one who has shed his blood, a thousand others will be bequeathed to posterity. The land on which our German peasants will one day be able to bring forth their sturdy sons justifies the investment of our sons today. And even though the responsible statesmen may be persecuted by their contemporaries, posterity will absolve them from all blood-guilt for this sacrifice of their people.
…Here I must offer the sharpest protest against those folkish pencil-pushers who pretend that such territorial extension would be a ‘violation of sacred human rights,’ and attack it as such. One never knows who stands behind such persons. But it’s certain that the confusion they provoke is desirable and convenient for the enemies of our nation. By taking such an attitude, they help to internally weaken and destroy the will of our people to promote, in the only effective way, their own vital interests. No nation on Earth possesses even a square meter of land by decree of a higher Will or a higher Right. Just as Germany’s borders are the outcome of chance, and are only temporary ones that were established by political struggles at various times, so too are the borders of other nations’ living space. And just as only an imbecile could look upon the Earth’s geography as unchangeable as granite–which, in reality, represents a definite stage in a given development, created by the mighty forces of Nature, and which may be altered tomorrow by greater forces of destruction and change–so too the borders of living spaces in the lives of nations.
State borders are made by man, and can be changed by man. The fact that a nation has acquired an enormous area is no reason why it should hold it forever. At most, it proves the strength of the conqueror and the weakness of the defeated. And in this strength alone lies the right. If the German people are imprisoned within an impossible area, and face a miserable future, this is not by the command of Fate, anymore than to oppose such affairs is to disobey it. Just as no higher power has promised more territory to other nations than to the German, so it cannot be blamed for an unjust distribution of soil. Just as the soil on which we now live was not bestowed by Heaven on our forefathers–but had to be conquered by mortal risk–so too in the future our people will not obtain territory, and thus life, as a favor from above, but must win it by the power of a triumphant sword.
Today we’re all convinced of the need to reckon with France, but this would be broadly ineffective if it were the sole aim of our foreign policy. It can and will have significance only if it serves as a rear cover in the struggle for an enlargement of our peoples’ living space in Europe. Colonial acquisitions won’t solve that problem. This will happen only by the winning of settlement territory for our people, such as will extend the area of the Motherland and thereby not only keep the new settlers in the closest communion with the land of their origin, but will guarantee to this region the advantages that arise from a unified expanse.
The folkish movement mustn’t be an advocate for other nations, but rather a protagonist for itself. Otherwise it would be superfluous and, above all, would have no right to clamor about the past. For then it would be acting the same as before. The old German policy was unjustly determined by dynastic considerations, and future policy mustn’t follow the sentimentality of cosmopolitan folkishness. We must especially not be security police for the well-known ‘poor, small nations,’ but rather soldiers of ourselves.
We National Socialists must go still further: The right to land and soil becomes a duty when a great nation seems destined to go under, unless its land is extended. And that’s particularly true when the nation at hand is not some little group of Negroes but the Germanic mother of all life, which has given cultural shape to the modem world. Germany will either be a world power, or not at all. But in order to become a world power, it needs that size which gives it the necessary importance today, and gives life to its citizens.
Therefore we National Socialists have purposely drawn a line through our pre-war conduct of foreign policy. We resume where we left off, six centuries ago. We put an end to the perpetual Germanic march towards the south and west of Europe, and tum our eyes towards the land of the East. We finally shut off the colonial–and trade-policy of pre-war times, and pass over to the land-policy of the future.
But when we speak of new land and soil in Europe today, we must principally think of Russia and its subject border states. Destiny itself seems to wish to point the way for us here. In delivering Russia over to Bolshevism, it robbed the Russian people of that intelligentsia that had once created and secured the Russian state. The organization of the Russian state-structure was not a result of Russian Slavic political ability, but rather was a marvelous example of the state-building capacity of the Germanic element amidst an inferior race.
Many powerful empires were created on the Earth in this way. More than once, lesser peoples with Germanic organizers and leaders became formidable states, and endured as long as the racial nucleus of the state-creating race survived. For centuries, Russia owed its sustenance to the Germanic nucleus of its ruling upper class.Today this class has been almost completely rooted out and extinguished. The Jew has taken its place. As impossible as it is for the Russian himself to shake off the Jewish yoke, so too is it impossible for the Jew to keep this mighty empire forever. He himself is no organizing element, but rather a ferment of decomposition.203 This colossal Eastern Empire is ripe for dissolution. And the end of Jewish rule in Russia will also be the end of Russia as a state. We are chosen by Fate to be witnesses of a catastrophe that will afford the strongest confirmation of the folkish race-theory.
Our task, and the mission of the National Socialist movement, is to develop the political insight in our people that will enable them to realize that their future aim is not the fulfillment of some new and wildly adventurous March of Alexander, but rather as the industrious labor of the German plow, for which the sword will provide the soil.
…It’s impossible for a coalition of cripples to attack a powerful state, if it’s determined to shed the last drop of its blood for its existence. As a folkish man who appraises the value of humanity by their race, I must recognize the racial inferiority of the so-called ‘oppressed nations,’ and this prevents me from linking my own peoples’ destiny with theirs.
Today we must adopt the same position towards Russia. Present-day Russia, deprived of its Germanic ruling class, is not a possible ally in the struggle for German freedom, even setting aside the inner intentions of its new rulers. From a purely military viewpoint, a Russo-German coalition waging war against Western Europe, and probably against the whole world, would be catastrophic.
… In its dealings with the outside world, the political testament of the German nation should, and must always be, the following:
…Never permit two continental powers to arise in Europe! Any attempt to organize a second military power on the German border by the creation of a state capable of military strength, will be viewed as an attack against Germany. Such a situation confers not only the right but the duty to use every means, including armed force, to prevent it from happening-and to crush such a state, if it has already arisen.
See to it that our nation’s strength is grounded not on colonial foundations but on the soil of our European homeland! Never consider the Reich secure unless, for centuries to come, it can give every descendant of our people his own piece of land and soil! Never forget that the most sacred right in the world is man’s right to the Earth that he tills himself; and that the holiest of all sacrifices is the blood that one sheds for the Earth!
Hitler made similar statements in a 1930 discussion with Otto Strasser:
“Your errors in the domain of foreign policy are explained by your ignorance of racial factors. For example, you are enthusiastic about the Hindu independence movement … you know the Anglo-Saxons have the mission to govern the people they have subdued, precisely in the name of their superiority. The Nordic race is called to dominate the world, and this right must guide our foreign policy. It’s why we cannot envision any rapprochement with Russia, which is a Slavic-Tatar body surmounted by a Jewish head. I knew Slavs from my home country. In the era where a Germanic head ruled the Slavic body, entente was possible, Bismarck outlined this rapprochement before. But today, it would be a crime.”
“Mister Hitler agreed with me on the primacy of Germany’s interests in the matter of foreign policy. In his eyes, an entente with England corresponded with this imperative, the goal was the Nordic domination of Europe, and through America Nordic-Germanic domination of the world.“
“National Socialism would mean little if it was limited to Germany alone and did not seal the domination of the world by the white race for 1000 or 2000 years. That doesn’t mean the exploitation of other races. To put it simply, the inferior races are called to realize other destinies than the superior races. We want to assure the domination of the world in concert with the Anglo-Saxons.“
Nazi settlement policy in Ukraine (from “Hitler’s Garden of Eden in Ukraine” by Wendy Lower):
The “New Order,” as the Nazis conceived it, entailed a racial classification and “cleansing” of Europe. Although Nazi population policies were aimed at all peoples who fell into German hands, Nazi leaders focused their resettlement and colonization programs on Eastern Europe, which was designated the ideal German “living space.” They were not only extremely exclusionary in their taxonomies of people but also narrowly selective in their view of “fertile” geographic spaces where Germans would thrive. As historian Gerhard Weinberg and others have stressed, the joining of race and space was central to the Nazi Weltanschauung.’ During World War II, the Germans implemented experimental colonial schemes in Poland and Ukraine. In Ukraine they concentrated their efforts in the central region of Zhytomyr at the Hegewald colony and in the south- ern regions of Dnepropetrovsk and Nikoleav at the Halbstadt and Nikopol colonies. The Hegewald colony was situated strategically in the “backyard” of Himmler and Hitler’s secret field headquarters at Vinnytsia and Zhytomyr.
The Halbstadt and Nikopol colonies stretched across German civilian- and military-administered territories in southeastern Ukraine; additional SS-controlled German colonies dotted the Romanian-occupied area of former Soviet Ukraine, which was named Transnistria. In the latter half of 1941 and early 1942 these colonies were “ethnically cleansed” of their Jewish populations. Nearly all of the Jews who resided there for generations were massacred; the Ukrainians who were not retained as forced laborers on the Volksdeutsche (ethnic German) and SS-police colonies were deported to labor camps in eastern Ukraine or to the Reich. Prima facie, the logic of this destruction seems quite clear and consistent with a European pattern of imperial conquest, mass migration, forced deportations, and a genocidal “displacement” of the “native” population. However, the ideological and causal links between Nazi resettlement programs and the Holocaust were more tenuous even in the colonial context of Ukraine.
… Thus one finds in the speeches and writings about Lebensraum by Hitler, the leader of the SS Heinrich Himmler, and Reich Minister for the Eastern Territories Alfred Rosenberg references to the North American frontier, the British Empire in India, and the European exploitation of Africa’s resources in the late nineteenth century. …Heinrich Himmler and his coterie of General Plan East planners described Eastern Europe as Germany’s Californian paradise. Alfred Rosenberg encouraged his regional commissars in Ukraine to read colonial travelogues such as Nazi supporter Kurt Freber’s With My Backpack to India (1927) and Schulz’s In the African Jungle alongside antisemitic tracts such as Esser’s The Jewish World Plague (1939). In 1942, children in Hitler’s Germany played a board game in which armed farmers competed for the fertile “black earth” of Ukraine.
… In 1942/43 Nazi economic developers established the Togo Ost Society in Zhytomyr, Ukraine, bringing state-controlled agricultural models from Africa to Eastern Europe. In addition to frontier fantasies, economic models, and ideas of race, the Nazis also transferred German Africans to Eastern Europe. In September 1943, as the Red Army advanced toward Poland, Nazi colonial enthusiasts “imported” German settlers from eastern Africa to the Warthegau. According to an account in the Litzmannstadter Zeitung, the German Africanists were happy to leave behind the monoculture farming of Africa and enjoy the rich soil and diverse crops of Polish farms. As model pioneers they were supposed to inspire European Germans who were reluctant to relocate to Poland.
In the coveted breadbasket of Ukraine the Nazis found territory ripe for German agricultural settlements. Already in the early 1920s, Hitler and his cohorts argued for a new German foreign policy, which they described as a “soil policy of the future” rooted in Germany’s medieval history of migration to the east. In Mein Kampf Hitler wrote,
“We National Socialists consciously draw a line beneath the foreign policy of our pre-War period. We take up where we broke off six hundred years ago. We stop the endless German movement to the south and west, and turn our gaze to the east. At long last we break off the colonial and commercial policy of the pre-War period and shift to the soil policy of the future.”
… Combining atavistic “blood and soil” notions of utopia with modern state structures and methods, Hitler, Darré, and other Nazi ideologues played down overseas colonialism and concentrated instead on contiguous German settlements in Eastern Europe and especially Ukraine where the Aryan “soldier-peasant” tilled the soil with a weapon at his side, ready to defend the farm from the “Asian hordes.” As for the Ukrainians whom the Nazis pejoratively branded “Negroes,” Hitler remarked that the Germans would supply them “with scarves, glass beads and everything that colonial peoples like.” After the Germans defeated Poland in autumn of 1939, the newly appointed Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of Germandom, Heinrich Himmler, was instructed “to give shape to the new German areas of colonization” by “eliminating harmful, alien elements from the German Volk and its living space,” and “to carry out the settlement of the Volksdeutsche on the designated lands.””*
The concept and process of Germanization as Himmler described it was “not in the old sense of bringing the German languages and German laws to the people dwelling in that area, but to ensure that in the east only people of genuinely German, Teutonic blood shall live.” As Germany and its allies unleashed the “war of destruction” against the Soviet Union, Hitler asserted in October 1941, “Ukraine will be a home for twenty million inhabitants besides the natives. In three hundred years, the country will be one of the loveliest gardens in the world. As for the natives, we’ll have to screen them carefully. The Jew, that destroyer, we shall drive out . . . our colonizing penetration must be constantly progressive, until it reaches the stage where our own colonists far outnumber the local inhabitants.”
… Ukraine has been largely left out of the postwar studies of SS-police resettlement plans for the East. The omission is odd because it was precisely in Ukraine where Himmler left his individual mark as a colonizer and where Europe’s largest Jewish population, after Poland, resided and was destroyed in the Holocaust. According to Himmler’s schemes, Ukraine was not to be 100 percent Germanized like the annexed territories of the Reich in the Polish Warthegau. Instead, Himmler’s planners conceived of Ukraine as a land of Siedlungsmarken und Stiitzpunkte, or patches of German settlements. They aimed to consolidate the scattered communities of Volhynian Germans located in west-central Ukraine and residing in the Zhytomyr Commissariat, and the so-called Black Sea Germans located in southern Ukraine, including in Crimea (which Hitler dreamed of as a Nazi Riviera). The ethnic German settlements and farms were to be placed along the new autobahns and railway lines running east-west and north-south. On the eve of the Nazi invasion most ethnic Germans who were left in Soviet Ukraine lived in the poorest rural areas and not in the major towns.”
They set up offices to oversee the expansion policies:
In addition to the now well-known Einsatzgruppen that invaded the Soviet territories under Reinhard Heydrich’s command in the summer of 1941, on 11 July Himmler activated secret task forces, also labeled Einsatzgruppen, as part of a special mission code-named “Sonderkommando Russ-land.” The “special commando Russia” was tasked with secret colonization activities that began with the registration of the Volksdeutsche. The commando carried out their work with the assistance of personnel from Einsatz- gruppe C and Einsatzgruppe D. According to historian Isabel Heinemann’s latest research, there were 277 SS-policemen assigned to Sonderkommando Russland, and they represented a conglomeration of SS and police agencies— the Reich Commission for the Strengthening of Germandom (RKF), the Race and Settlement Main Office (RuSHA), the Economic and Administrative Main Office (WVHA), the Ethnic German Liaison Office (VoMi), and the Security Service (SD). Many had worked the previous two years in Poland on resettlement programs. They established headquarters first in Zhytomyr then Odessa, Nikoleav, Crimea, and Kiev. Thus, while the Sipo-SD Einsatzgruppen (C and D) focused on security and intelligence operations, above all anti-Jewish measures, these other SS colonization task forces concentrated on three activities: (1) determination of valuable German blood; (2) survey and registration of the land for later SS colonization; and (3) co-ordination of colonization work with other Himmler agencies in order to secure SS-police strongholds in Ukraine.
… Before Himmler announced his plans to form a Volksdeutsche colony at Hegewald in September 1942, the district German leaders in and around Zhytomyr had concentrated the region’s forty-five thousand ethnic Germans into small communities. They supplied the ethnic Germans with food, clothing, and housing, as well as German history and language books. While Rosenberg’s ethnographers and commissars went from village to village compiling population surveys and local histories, Himmler’s men tried to turn the Volksdeutsche men into productive, armed farmers who could defend the SS estates and collective farms.
… At his Zhytomyr headquarters Himmler convened his top SS officials (including Dr. Konrad Meyer) to introduce the scheme and initiate implementation plans. Under the direction of the RKF chief Ulrich Greifelt, Ukraine’s senior SS-police leader Hans Adolf Pruetzmann, and the SS regional chief of resettlement actions in Zhytomyr, Theo Henschel, local gendarme and VoMi officials rounded up eighteen thousand Ukrainians who lived in the designated space for resettlement. They crammed them onto freight cars and dumped them in labor camps in southern Russia and neighboring regions. Meanwhile, treks of ethnic Germans totaling more than ten thousand persons were moved under police guard by foot and in carriages to the designated colony. At the rest areas along the journey’s path, the SS-police forces had cleared the villages of their Ukrainian inhabitants and left many of them in transit camps destined to go to the Reich as forced laborers.*”
The ethnic Germans who arrived at Hegewald were organized into, as Hitler and Himmler described them, “settlement pearls,” which were stretched along the Zhytomyr-Vinnytsia autobahn like a Kette or string of pearls. To start, the Volksdeutsche who were assigned to the SS-run collective farms were given private plots of land, about one hectare per family. If they proved their diligence they could receive up to twenty-five hectares. The ethnic German farms were subjected to high SS quotas and random confiscations of milk and other produce. Ukrainian and Byelorussian prisoners and forced laborers tilled the reserve farmland not allotted to the German and SS farmers. The entire Hegewald district of two hundred square miles, consisting of twenty-eight villages and collective farms, was administered by ethnic German mayors, SS-policemen, agricultural specialists, and Nazi Party welfare workers and not by Rosenberg’s commissars. Thus, on paper Rosenberg’s administration provided the administrative framework for governing the eastern territories, yet in reality population policies and the future of colonization experiments lay in the hands of Himmler’s SS-police agencies and the Nazi Party.
Photo spreads and articles in the official newspaper of the RKU, the Deutsche Ukraine Zeitung, celebrated the Hegewald settlement, proclaim- ing it a success. However, the reality was quite different. When viewed from the ground, the entire campaign was, as one local official described it, “eine Schweinerei” (an awful mess). The Nazis could not fulfill the propagandized promises to the Volksdeutsche, who represented a dislocated population with few skills and resources. …
But these plundered goods, which the Nazis presented as Christmas gifts to the Volksdeutsche, were not enough to make Nazi colonization schemes successful. About six hundred “racially valuable” children, who had been kidnapped according to Himmler’s instructions, could not be adequately cared for in the crowded orphanages in and around Zhytomyr. For one community of 3,500 Volksdeutsche, SS-police officials established one produce shop. Rations were not available, and when items did arrive they were not distributed with the kind of efficiency that one normally attributes to the Nazi system of destruction. Nazi forced labor raiders swept through the villages and grabbed Volksdeutsche who were not supposed to be included among the deportees to the Reich. Soviet partisans targeted the settlements, ransacked the farms, and killed their inhabitants. In the wake of such attacks the ethnic German Selbstschutz units at Hegewald took revenge on neighboring Ukrainian villages.**
In Ukraine the military setbacks of 1943 compelled Nazi leaders to reduce Volksdeutsche programs to regional initiatives and then to abandon them altogether. The evacuation of the Hegewald settlement was hastily carried out a few weeks before the Red Army arrived in November 1943. The Ukrainians and ethnic Germans who were assigned to escort the treks of evacuees heading west were prone to, as the SS-police reported, “plundering and other offensive excesses.” Also, Soviet forces overtook and massacred hundreds of ethnic Germans who were trudging westward. By the end of November 1943, Volksdeutsche from the settlements in Ukraine were arriving in western Ukraine and Poland where they remained in camps run by the VoMi. When the Red Army uncovered these camps in early 1945, thousands of these Volksdeutsche were branded collaborators and deported to Soviet camps in the trans-Ural region.*’
The formation of Hegewald (as well as other resettlement actions in Dnepro- petrovsk and Nikoleav) did not go as smoothly as Nazi leaders had expected. The Nazis were unable to construct colonies based on the pseudo-scientific and mythic notions of race. Many of the contradictions and tensions that lay beneath Hitler and Himmler’s fantasies of an Aryan living space in the East revealed themselves at the local level of praxis.
The same regional commissars, SS-policemen who rarely questioned the morality or rationality of eradicating those deemed inferior, remained uncertain, skeptical, and less enthusiastic about their role and the general aim of creating utopian colonies out of ethnic German settlements. Nazi leaders tried to inspire their underlings with pep talks about the unlimited opportunities in the East and praised them as “pioneers of Germandom in the East.” They compared them to frontiersmen who settled the American West. However, in reality the German colonizer had no choice about where he settled, which farm he received, or what he could do with it. This was decided by Himmler’s proliferating agencies of race and space planning. The German pioneer in the East was racially selected by the state and placed into an artificial society that had been ethnically “cleansed” by Himmler’s SS-police killing units.
Besides demonstrating that Nazi racial policy was a devastating failure, the history of Himmler’s creation of an experimental colony at Hegewald shows that once under way, resettlement actions in Ukraine were not directly linked to the unfolding of anti-Jewish policy there. The Volksdeutsche actions caused the mass deportations of Ukrainian farmers and their families, not of Jews, because by the time these Volksdeutsche resettlement actions began, most Jews who resided on the designated colonial spaces were already dead or in camps. Moreover, the earlier anti-Jewish massacres do not seem to have been motivated by widespread empathy for the Volks-deutsche or committed as acts of revenge on behalf of the Volksdeutsche.
In Chapter Two of Mein Kampf Hitler declares the Poles an inferior alien race and says it was a mistake for past regimes to try to Germanize them. More confirmation he hated the Slavs.
“Not only in Austria, however, but also in Germany, these so-called national circles were, and still are, influenced by similarly false ideas. A Polish policy, involving a Germanization of the East, was demanded by many and was unfortunately based on the same false reasoning. Here again it was believed that a Germanization of the Polish element could occur by a purely linguistic union. The result would have been catastrophic: A foreign people expressing their foreign thoughts in the German language, thus compromising the dignity and nobility of our own nation by their inferiority.“
In “Hitler’s War and the War Path,” David Irving quotes Hitler at a meeting with generals stressing the same point:
A few days later, on May 23, Hitler delivered a four-hour speech to his Commanders in Chief in his cavernous study. He stood at a lectern and addressed altogether a dozen officers seated in three rows: Raeder, Milch, Brauchitsch, and Keitel formed the front row (Goring was away), and their chiefs of staff and adjutants the two other rows. Hitler stated once again that Danzig was not his ultimate objective — that would be to secure Lebensraum in the east to feed Germany’s eighty million inhabitants. ‘If fate forces us to fight in the west,’ Hitler told them, ‘it will be just as well if first we possess more in the east.’ This was why he had decided to ‘take on Poland at the first suitable opportunity.’
That refutes the usual pro-Nazi claim that Hitler’s war aims were limited to taking back “lost territories” from World War I: “Danzig was not his ultimate objective-that would be to secure Lebensraum in the east to feed Germany’s eighty million inhabitants.” Hitler also says explicitly in Chapter 14 of Mein Kampf that Germany’s 1914 borders were not sufficient living space, that fighting to reclaim those borders alone was not worth the blood and effort, and that expansion towards Russia was required to make Germany a “great power” once again. Irving reveals another damning statement from Hitler that he wanted short, quick wars in the West to be followed by a larger one in the East:
Only the existing Reichswehr with its professional officers could satisfy his main need; according to another general, Maximilian von Weichs, who took shorthand notes of the speech, Hitler added: ‘The new army must be capable of all manner of defence within five years; and of all manner of attack within eight.’ Since the western powers would probably not permit Germany to win Lebensraum, short sharp wars might be necessary in the west, ‘and after them, wars in the east.’
Danzig, like the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, was merely a token issue he wielded tactically to kickstart the broader war aim of Eastern conquest. In the same book Irving says Hitler was planning a “United States of Europe” under German domination and planned to carve out territory in the East that would “last a hundred years”. He was readying the German economy for war during these years:
contemplating Germany’s economic position in 1936, Hitler chafed that so little had been accomplished to make the country self-sufficient – a basic prerequisite for war. In April he put Hermann Goring in charge of raw materials and foreign currency questions. Aboard his yacht Grille at Kiel he told Goebbels in May of his vision of a United States of Europe under German leadership.
‘The Fuhrer,’ wrote Goebbels, sees a conflict coming in the Far East. Japan will thrash Russia. And then our great hour will come. Then we shall have to carve off enough territory to last us a hundred years.’ Hitler announced that he had to resolve once and for all Germany’s economic problems by enlarging her Lebensraum and thus her sources of raw materials and food. In detail, Hitler stated these two demands: ‘First: in four years the German army must be ready for action; and second, in four years the German economy must be ready for war.’
David Irving reports on Hitler’s plans for colonizing the East:
“By mid-October 1941, despite the foul weather, Hitler was still bred widi optimism. On the thirteenth he began laying the foundations for a Nazi version of a united Europe. Hewel wrote, ‘Reich foreign minister visits the Fuhrer; first thoughts on a European manifesto. Probably in the economic sphere first of all, and probably at the beginning of the winter. Fuhrer is in very best and relaxed mood.’ Over dinner he revealed that he had been thinking of calling together the economic experts of Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, Sweden, and Finland. ‘All those who have a feeling for Europe can join in this work,’ he said, meaning the colonization of the east. When Todt and Gauleiter Fritz Sauckel dined with Hitler on October 17, they were brimming with everything they had just seen in the east.”
“Again Hitler dreamed aloud of the vast construction projects whereby he would open up the east. ‘Above all we must lay roads,’ Koeppen wrote that night, describing the dinner conversation: He told Dr. Todt he must expand his original projects considerably. For this purpose he will be able to make use of the three million prisoners for the next twenty years. The major roads — the Fuhrer spoke today not only of the highway to the Crimea but also of one to the Caucasus and of two or three through the more northern territories — must be laid across the areas of greatest scenic beauty. Where the big rivers are crossed, German cities must arise, as centers of the Wehrmacht, police, administration, and Party authorities.”
“Along these roads will lie the German farmsteads, and soon the monotonous steppe, with its Asiatic appearance, will look very different indeed. In ten years four million Germans will have settled there, and in twenty years at least ten million. They will come not only from the Reich but above all from America, and from Scandinavia, Holland, and Flanders too. And the rest of Europe shall play its part in this opening up of the Russian wastes as well. . . The Fuhrer then reverted to the theme that ‘contrary to what some people think’ no education or welfare is to be laid on for the native population. Knowledge of the road signs will suffice, there will be no call for German schoolmasters there.“
“By ‘freedom’ the Ukrainians understood that instead of twice they now had to wash only once a month — the Germans with their scrubbing brushes would soon make themselves unpopular there. He as Fuhrer would set up his new administration there after ice cool calculations: what the Slavs might think about it would not put him out one bit. Nobody who ate German bread today got worked up about the fact that in the twelfth century the granaries east of the Elbe were regained by the sword. Here in the east we were repeating a process for a second time not unlike the conquest of America. For climatic reasons alone we could not venture further south than the Crimea — he did not mention the Caucasus at this point — even now hundreds of our mountain troops on Crete had malaria! The Fuhrer kept repeating that he wished he was ten or fifteen years younger so he could live through the rest of this process.”
The Nazis merely used the Ukrainian nationalists as cannon fodder to help them fight the Soviets and then discarded them in the trash when their usefulness expired. Hitler intended to colonize Ukrainian land for Lebensraum:
“Bandera was in occupied Poland when on June 30, 1941, his comrades proclaimed an independent Ukrainian state in Nazi-occupied Lviv — and the Germans banned him from traveling to Ukraine. Adolf Hitler rejected the idea of Ukrainian independence, and Bandera was arrested and imprisoned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp until 1944. The OUN-B continued to fight for independence in Ukraine with the help of its military arm, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. The Nazis and the Soviets persecuted and killed OUN-B fighters. After the war, Bandera lived in Munich until he was killed in 1959 by a KGB agent using cyanide.” – Source
“Eight days after Germany’s invasion of the USSR, on 30 June 1941, the OUN-B proclaimed the establishment of Ukrainian State in Lviv, with Yaroslav Stetsko as premier. In response to the declaration, OUN-B leaders and associates were arrested and imprisoned by the Gestapo (ca.1500 persons).[79] Many OUN-B members were killed outright or perished in jails and concentration camps (both of Bandera’s brothers were eventually murdered at Auschwitz). On 18 September 1941 Bandera and Stetsko were sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp in “Zellenbau Bunker”, where they were kept until September 1944.” – Source
Volker Ullrich reported in his book Hitler’s Downfall that Hitler planned to invade Russia all along:
In a 1936 memorandum, he again talks about the expansion of the living space as the solution to all the problems. In 1939 August while talking to Carl Jacob Burckhardt he again says the same: “Within his inner circle, however, Hitler made it clear that the pact with Stalin was but a temporary tactical measure and that he had by no means given up his goal of conquering ‘living space’ in the east. ‘Everything I undertake is directed against Russia,’ he is supposed to have told Carl Jacob Burckhardt on 11 August. ‘If the West is too stupid and blind to realise this, I will be compelled to reach an understanding with the Russians to defeat the West, in order to turn, after it has been beaten, all my strength against the Soviet Union.’ And a few days after the signing of the pact, he explicitly spoke out against those critics who had mistaken his manoeuvres for a fundamental ideological volte-face. In reality, Hitler explained, the deal was ‘a pact with Satan to drive out the devil’.
From the book The Law of Blood by Johann Chapoutot:
The Nazis focused all their longing on the dark, fertile, fecund soil of the East, colonized so long ago by the Varingians. Produce, nourish, procreate, Goebbels noted in his Journals, for The Führer sees the East as our future India. This is the colonial territory we must occupy. This is where farms for our farmers and the veterans of the Wehrmacht must be created…. The goal of our war is the expansion of our Lebensraum in the broadest sense. We have set ourselves a goal that will require several centuries. This goal will require great sacrifice for some time, but it is worthwhile for the generations to come. Only for this can we justify such a bloodletting to ourselves and to history: it will give life to millions of German children…. The East is our space.
We must pierce through to it, it is there we must invest everything to develop the Lebensraum we will need in COLONIZATION OF THE EUROPEAN EAST the future. There we shall find everything we need to give life to our people, starting with the marvelous dark earth, whose fertility is unmatched. It is there that we must build, organize, and mobilize everything for the life of our nation. The reference to India and the British Empire was no accident. In the past, Germanic migrations had left behind nothing but biological isolates, haphazardly planted only to be overwhelmed and swept away. The Reich now wished to create something solid and enduring…
In Hitler: Ascent, Volker Ullrich explains:
Still, Hitler clung to his preferred foreign-policy constellation. After Joachim von Ribbentrop became German ambassador in August 1936 following the death of Leopold von Hoesch, Hitler told him: “Ribbentrop, bring me an alliance with England!” The problem was that there was hardly anyone less suitable to achieving this aim than the vain diplomatic amateur, who was soon nicknamed “von Brickendrop.” In October 1936, having barely arrived in London, Ribbentrop made a most undiplomatic speech in which he laid his cards on the table. “How about…just giving Germany a free hand in the east?” he said. “Bolshevism is a global plague that must be eradicated anyway, and Germany’s eye is trained on Russia. In return for a free hand in the east, Hitler would be prepared to conclude every sort of alliance with England.” No British government would have been willing to give Hitler a free hand in eastern Europe, which would have essentially meant German hegemony over the entire Continent.
Hitler planned the Soviet invasion as early as 1936:
On 24 October [1936] Hitler received Ciano at the Berghof, where, if Ciano’s record is to be believed, Hitler opened up to his guest much broader possibilities of German–Italian cooperation. Their future alliance was to be at the heart of a European front against Bolshevism. In addition, Hitler told Ciano, Germany would be ready for war in three to five years’ time and he sketched out the two powers’ spheres of interest: GERMANY WAS TO EXPAND INTO EASTERN EUROPE and Italy in the Mediterranean. The invitation to join forces in a large-scale war of aggression could hardly have been framed more clearly. – Peter Longerich, Hitler: A Biography
Peter Longerich in Hitler: A Biography tells us as early as 1936 Hitler had been dreaming up a future conflict with Russia:
During the autumn of 1936 he spoke on numerous occasions to Goebbels of the ‘fight against Bolshevism’ as the regime’s coming great challenge, reprising in other words the topic that he had emphasized so strongly at the Party Rally and which since then had been used heavily in propaganda.
In 1937 Germany, Italy and Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact:
The Anti-Comintern Pact, officially the Agreement against the Communist International was an anti-Communist pact concluded between Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan on 25 November 1936 and was directed against the Communist International (Comintern). It was signed by German ambassador-at-large Joachim von Ribbentrop and Japanese ambassador to Germany Kintomo Mushanokōji. Italy joined in 1937, but it was legally recognised as an original signatory by the terms of its entry. Spain and Hungary joined in 1939. Other countries joined during World War II. The Japanese signatories had hoped that the Anti-Comintern Pact would effectively be an alliance against the Soviet Union, which is certainly how the Soviets perceived it. There was also a secret additional protocol which specified a joint German-Japanese policy specifically aimed against the Soviet Union. However, after the accession of Fascist Italy to the pact and especially the German-Soviet rapprochement after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, it gained an increasingly anti-Western and anti-British identity as well.
Alexander Dallin, in German Rule In Russia 1941-1945, tells us this:
‘The initial outlook on the Soviet ‘Asiatics’ was decisively influenced by the insistent Untermensch campaign which sought to inculcate in the German soldier and civilian the conviction that the Russians were degenerate because they had been heavily permeated with Tatar and Mongol blood. . . The sequences of pictures of Soviet prisoners with ‘Mongol’ features; the prompt liquidation of all ‘Asiatic’ civilians apprehended in the occupied areas; and frequent articles in the German press stressing the ‘Mongol bestiality’ of the Russians — all created an unmistakable climate of opinion in which the Reich was portrayed as the Western defender against the ‘Asiatic menace’. Indeed, Hitler himself viewed the future German settlement in Russia as a form of break water against the Oriental tide.’
German propaganda found in the masses of Soviet captives a welcome illustration of Eastern inferiority. Almost immediately after the invasion, German newspapers began publishing photographs of Red Army men, pointing out the ‘degenerate-looking orientals.’ ‘This is how the Soviet soldier looks’, a typical caption read: ‘Asiatic, Mongol physiognomies from the prisoner of war camps’. It is in connection with these photographs that the term, Untermensch [The Subhuman], appeared for the first time. The prisoners — and by implication all Soviet men — were ‘a mixture of low and lowest humanity, truly subhumans.’ ‘He fights when all struggle is senseless. He fails to fight, or fights quite wrongly, where there is still a chance of success.’ The theme was easy and rewarding. Hitler had called the Easterners Mongolensturm ; the SS echoed, Untermensch. ‘Whether under the Tatars, or Peter, or Stalin, this people is born for the yoke.’
This view is confirmed by Goebbels’ diaries. In his diaries, Goebbels quotes Hitler saying Poles are less than animals:
“The Führer’s verdict on the Poles is scathing. More animals than men, completely dull and amorphous. Next to them a slaughtering class, which is at least the product of the lower classes mixed with an Aryan master class. The filth of the Poles is unimaginable. Their judgment is also nil. Even Lipski believed that a nervous crisis would break out in our country in 8 days during the war. Poor madman! The Führer does not want assimilation with the Poles. They are to be squeezed into their reduced state and left entirely to themselves.” – Joseph Goebbels Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, diary entry October 10, 1939
Also in his diaries, Goebbels labels the Russians primitive and racially inferior animals:
The incidents that Sepp Dietrich related to me about the Russian people in the occupied areas are simply hair-raising. They are not a people, but a conglomeration of animals. The greatest danger threatening us in the East is the stolid dullness of this mass. That applies both to the civilian population and to the soldiers. The soldiers won’t surrender, as is the fashion in western Europe, when completely surrounded, but continue to fight until they are beaten to death. Bolshevism has merely accentuated this racial propensity of the Russian people. In other words, we are facing an adversary about whom we must be careful. The human mind cannot possibly imagine what it would mean if this opponent were to pour into western Europe like a flood. … Stalin issued [a program of] thirty points to his army. These points are about as naive as ean be imagined. But I suppose he knows how to treat his Russian people. They are as primitive as the language he uses to talk to them.
David Irving reports in his book Hitler’s War the following:
Throughout the spring of 1943 a squabble raged between Alfred Rosenberg, the endlessly verbose minister for the eastern territories, and Gauleiter Erich Koch, Reich Commissar in the Ukraine. Rosenberg – supported by Ribbentrop, Zeitzler, and Goebbels – wanted to win the subject peoples’ support in the fight against Stalin, and he complained that Koch’s brutal methods and pasha lifestyle were incompatible with this. At Christmas, he had sent a special plane to Rostov to collect two hundred pounds of caviar. Yet Hitler, Bormann, and – more circumspectly – Himmler, DEFENDED KOCH. Rosenberg might theorise about the future cultural life of the Ukraine, but Koch’s harsh duty was to squeeze every ton of grain and every slave labourer he could out of the region. The idea of harnessing Russians voluntarily to the war against Stalin WAS A CHIMERA, SAID HITLER. ‘I have always felt there are only a handful of men who can really keep their heads in a major crisis, without being waylaid by some phantom hope or other. The saying that drowning men clutch at straws is only too true.’ When Ribbentrop identified himself with General Vlasov’s idea for a Russian army of liberation, Hitler rapped his knuckles. ‘There will be no such political operations. They will only result in our people fraternising with the Russians.’ Field Marshals Kluge and Küchler were also rebuffed when they supported the Vlasov project. Millions of leaflets dropped over enemy lines announced that the Wehrmacht was fighting only Stalin and not the Russian people, and they spoke of a ‘National Committee’ in Smolensk as though it were the Russian government being groomed for the post-Stalin era. TO HITLER THIS IDEA WAS MADNESS; AS HE ANGRILY TOLD ZEITZLER, TO LET THE UKRAINIANS SET UP THEIR OWN GOVERNMENT WOULD BE TANTAMOUNT TO THROWING AWAY THE NAZIS’ ENTIRE WAR AIM. The Russians would start off as a satellite state such as Poland had been in World War I, and Germany would end up confronting an entirely independent state all over again. On May 19 Hitler brought Rosenberg and Koch face to face. Rosenberg firmly repeated that Koch’s policies were supplying the enemy with thousands of partisans. Koch justified his methods. Hitler adjudged that both were right, THOUGH KOCH WAS RIGHTER. As for the partisan argument, if Rosenberg were right, there would be fewest partisans where the ‘particularly crafty generals’ spoke in the most honeyed tones; this was not the case. Nor could slave labour be procured except by Koch’s methods. ‘Only feebleminded generals imagine we can win any manpower by blandishments.’ As for Koch’s executions in the Ukraine, challenged Hitler: ‘How many of our compatriots are losing their lives in air raids here at home?’
The German invaders had been driven out BY THE DISAPPOINTED, DECEIVED, AND ANGRY UKRAINIANS THEMSELVES. ‘If the rest of this war and its victorious conclusion should ever see these territories vouchsafed to us again,’ a gauleiter wrote, ‘then there must be a radical change in our attitude to and treatment of the native population. Erich Koch had achieved the seemingly impossible: he had converted the forty million Ukrainians who had greeted the German invaders as their liberators into a sullen, seething people, and driven them as partisans into the forests and swamplands of the north Ukraine. The same gauleiter – Alfred Frauenfeld, governor of the Crimea – pointed out that Hitler should have found the moral courage to replace Koch. Koch had proclaimed the inferiority of the Slavs with such raucous insistence that ‘even a disaster policy deliberately planned and paid for by the enemy could hardly have done more harm.’ Koch had stormed, for example: ‘If I find a Ukrainian fit to sit at my table, I must shoot him!’ He had dispensed with Ukrainian doctors – without reflecting that epidemics were no respecters of the German occupation forces – and had deported the able-bodied to Germany in a manner reminiscent of ‘Arab slave traders.’ When Hitler had instituted medals for bravery and hard work, Koch had waited nearly a year before unwillingly issuing any to the Ukrainians.» — «he [Hitler] admired such Party faithfuls as [Erich] Koch, Sauckel, and Ley – gauleiters who had in their time converted Communist Gaue into Nazi Party strongholds.
So the clear “war aim” was the colonization of the East, especially Ukraine, for German resettlement…. not “liberating” Slavs from Communism, which the Nazis kept in place with the collective farms in Ukraine.
Thus far the Germans have introduced only minor changes, for the sake of efficiency, in the agricultural system. Contrary to expectations, the collective farms have not been abolished, but their managers have been replaced with German commissars or former Ukrainian émigrés. In practice, however, many collectives have ceased to function because of the lack of essential machinery and of able-bodied men. Requisitioning of a large part of the current harvest was announced by the Deutsche Ukraine Zeitung late last August. All collectives and individual farms were obliged to deliver to the authorities fixed quantities of grain, the amount being determined by locality, size of farm and other factors. It was announced that stern punishment would be meted out, individually and collectively, to persons, farms and even whole villages that failed to fill their quotas.
Nazis kept the Soviet collective farm system in place in Ukraine and merely replaced the managers with imported Germans. From Hitler’s Garden of Eden:
Before Himmler announced his plans to form a Volksdeutsche colony at Hegewald in September 1942, the district German leaders in and around Zhytomyr had concentrated the region’s forty-five thousand ethnic Germans into small communities. They supplied the ethnic Germans with food, clothing, and housing, as well as German history and language books.** While Rosenberg’s ethnographers and commissars went from village to village com- piling population surveys and local histories, Himmler’s men tried to turn the Volksdeutsche men into productive, armed farmers who could defend the SS estates and collective farms. …
The ethnic Germans who arrived at Hegewald were organized into, as Hitler and Himmler described them, “settlement pearls,” which were stretched along the Zhytomyr-Vinnytsia autobahn like a Kette or string of pearls. To start, the Volksdeutsche who were assigned to the SS-run collective farms were given private plots of land, about one hectare per family. If they proved their diligence they could receive up to twenty-five hectares. The ethnic German farms were subjected to high SS quotas and random confiscations of milk and other produce. Ukrainian and Byelorussian prisoners and forced laborers tilled the reserve farmland not allotted to the German and SS farmers. The entire Hegewald district of two hundred square miles, consisting of twenty-eight villages and collective farms, was administered by ethnic German mayors, SS-policemen, agricultural specialists, and Nazi Party welfare workers and not by Rosenberg’s commissars. Thus, on paper Rosenberg’s administration provided the administrative framework for governing the eastern territories, yet in reality population policies and the future of colonization experiments lay in the hands of Himmler’s SS-police agencies and the Nazi Party.
From William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich:
The day after the signing of the Pact of Steel, on May 23, Hitler summoned his military chiefs to the study in the Chancellery in Berlin and told them bluntly that further successes could not be won without the shedding of blood and that war therefore was inevitable.
This was a somewhat larger gathering than a similar one on November 5, 1937, when the Fuehrer had first imparted his decision to go to war to the commanders in chief of the three armed services.∗ Altogether fourteen officers were present, including Field Marshal Goering, Grand Admiral Raeder (as he now was), General von Brauchitsch, General Haider, General Keitel, General Erhard Milch, Inspector General of the Luftwaffe, and Rear Admiral Otto Schniewind, naval Chief of Staff. The Fuehrer’s adjutant, Lieutenant Colonel Rudolf Schmundt, was also present and, luckily for history, took notes. His minutes of the meeting are among the captured German documents.
Apparently Hitler’s words on this occasion were regarded as such a top secret that no copies of the minutes were made; the one we have is in Schmundt’s own handwriting. It is one of the most revealing and important of the secret papers which depict Hitler’s road to war. Here, before the handful of men who will have to direct the military forces in an armed conflict, Hitler cuts through his own propaganda and diplomatic deceit and utters the truth about why he must attack Poland and, if necessary, take on Great Britain and France as well.
He predicts with uncanny accuracy the course the war will take – at least in its first year. And yet for all its bluntness his discourse – for the dictator did all the talking – discloses more uncertainty and confusion of mind than he has shown up to this point. Above all, Britain and the British continue to baffle him, as they did to the end of his life.
But about the coming of war and his aims in launching it he is clear and precise, and no general or admiral could have left the Chancellery on May 23 without knowing exactly what was coming at the summer’s end. Germany’s economic problems, he began, could only be solved by obtaining more Lebensraum in Europe, and ”this is impossible without invading other countries or attacking other people’s possessions.”
“Further successes can no longer be attained without the shedding of blood . . . Danzig is not the subject of the dispute at all. It is a question of expanding our living space in the East, of securing our food supplies and also of solving the problem of the Baltic States. . . . There is no other possibility in Europe . . . If fate forces us into a showdown with the West it is invaluable to possess a large area in the East, In wartime we shall be even less able to rely on record harvests than in peacetime.”
Besides, Hitler adds, the population of non-German territories in the East will be available as a source of labor – an early hint of the slave labor program he was later to put into effect. The choice of the first victim was obvious.
“There is no question of sparing Poland and we are left with the decision: To attack Poland at the first suitable opportunity. We cannot expect a repetition of the Czech affair. There will be war. Our task is to isolate Poland. Success in isolating her will be decisive.”
So there will be war. With an ”isolated” Poland alone? Here the Fuehrer is not so clear. In fact, he becomes confused and contradictory. He must reserve to himself, he says, the final order to strike.
“It must not come to a simultaneous showdown with the West – France and England. If it is not certain that a German-Polish conflict will not lead to war with the West, then the fight must be primarily against England and France. Fundamentally therefore: Conflict with Poland – beginning with an attack on Poland – will only be successful if the West keeps out of it. If that is not possible it is better to fall upon the West and to finish off Poland at the same time.”
In the face of such rapid-fire contradictions the generals must have winced, perhaps prying their monocles loose, though there is no evidence in the Schmundt minutes that this happened or that anyone in the select audience even dared to ask a question to straighten matters out.
Hitler next turned to Russia. ”It is not ruled out,” he said, ”that Russia might disinterest herself in the destruction of Poland.” On the other hand, if the Soviet Union allied herself to Britain and France, that ”would lead me to attack England and France with a few devastating blows.” That would mean committing the same mistake Wilhelm II made in 1914, but though in this lecture Hitler drew several lessons from the World War he did not draw this one. His thoughts now turned toward Great Britain.
“The Fuehrer doubts the possibility of a peaceful settlement with England. It is necessary to be prepared for the showdown. England sees in our development the establishment of a hegemony which would weaken England. Therefore England is our enemy, and the conflict with England is a matter of life and death. What will this conflict be like? England cannot finish off Germany with a few powerful blows and force us down. It is of decisive importance for England to carry the war as near as possible to the Ruhr. French blood will not be spared. (West Wall!) The duration of our existence is dependent on possession of the Ruhr.”
Having decided to follow the Kaiser in one mistake – attacking France and England if they lined up with Russia – Hitler now announced that he would follow the Emperor in another matter which eventually had proved disastrous to Germany.
“The Dutch and Belgian air bases must be militarily occupied. Declarations of neutrality can be ignored. If England wants to intervene in the Polish war, we must make a lightning attack on Holland. We must aim at establishing a new line of defense on Dutch territory as far as the Zuyder Zee. The war with England and France will be a war of life and death. The idea that we can get off cheaply is dangerous; there is no such possibility. We must then burn our boats and it will no longer be a question of right or wrong but of to be or not to be for eighty million people.”
Though he had just announced that Germany would attack Poland ”at the first suitable opportunity” and though his listeners knew that almost all of Germany’s military strength was being concentrated on that objective, Hitler, as he rambled on, could not keep his thoughts off Great Britain.
Martin Bormann, head of the Nazi Party Chancellery, allegedly said this in a letter when justifying the Third Reich’s Eastern Policy:
The Slavs are to work for us [Germans]. Insofar as we do not need them, they may die. Therefore, compulsory vaccination and German health service are superfluous. THE FERTILITY OF THE SLAVS IS UNDESIRABLE. THEY MAY USE CONTRACEPTIVES OR PRACTICE… ABORTION, THE MORE THE BETTER. Education is dangerous. It is enough if they can count up to 100. At best an education which produces useful coolies for us is admissible. Every educated person is a future enemy. Religion we leave to them as a means of diversion. As for food, they will not get any more than is necessary. We are the masters; we come first.
Alfred Rosenberg testified at Nuremberg that he received this Bormann letter and wrote a letter back to Hitler agreeing with the spirit of it. Here it is:
Now, you remember this memorandum that you received through your assistant, Leibbrandt, from your subordinate, Markull? You can answer that “yes” or “no,” by the way; that is all I want to know right now-whether or not you remember it. Will you wait just a minute?
ROSENBERG: Yes, I received this report from Dr. Leibbrandt, and I would like to make the following explanation.
MR. DODD: Just before you do that-you will have an opportunity; I won’t shut you up on any explanations or even attempt to-I have one or two things I would like to ask you about it, and then if you feel the need to explain them or anything else I feel sure the Tribunal will permit you to do so.
You had written a letter in answer to the Bormann letter, hadn’t you?
ROSENBERG: Yes, that is correct.
A continuation of that discussion at Nuremberg in reference to Ukraine policy quotes another German official Kreisleiter Knuth:
Then, in the next paragraph, he says that every visitor and every member of the local civil administration can confirm this from his own observations, and they show particularly clearly how well the soil is prepared for the Bormann letter. Then he goes on to quote statements that have been made by saying, “To be exact, we are here among negroes; the population is just dirty and lazy,” and so on.
And then, passing on, he says:
“I may add that Kreisleiter Knuth, whom the Gauleiter still retains in spite of the gravest accusations against his professional integrity, declared, in conversations on the Kiev question, that Kiev ought to be depopulated through epidemics. Altogether it would be best if the superfluous part of the population starved to death.”
Himmler allegedly said this in a speech:
From Himmler’s speech at a meeting of SS gruppenfuhrers in Poznan on October 4, 1943. the Nuremberg trials, a collection of documents. [Document PS-1919, USA-170]
Only one principle must surely exist for an SS member: we must be honest, decent, and loyal to members of our own race and to no one else.
I am not in the least interested in the fate of a Russian or a Czech. We will take from other Nations the blood of our type that they can give us. If necessary, we will take their children away from them and bring them up in our environment. Whether other peoples live in contentment or starve to death is of interest to me only in so far as we need them as slaves for our culture; otherwise, it does not interest me.
If ten thousand Russian women fall from exhaustion while digging anti-tank ditches, it will only interest me to the extent that this anti-tank ditch is ready for Germany.
Himmler’s policy of kidnapping Ukrainian children deemed racially superior to other Ukrainians was confirmed in a recorded speech:
From Hitler’s Garden of Eden:
But these plundered goods, which the Nazis presented as Christmas gifts to the Volksdeutsche, were not enough to make Nazi colonization schemes successful. About six hundred “racially valuable” children, who had been kidnapped according to Himmler’s instructions, could not be adequately cared for in the crowded orphanages in and around Zhytomyr.
At the Nuremberg trials, American prosecutor Dodd questions Rosenberg about a memorandum he authored in which he affirms the need for a “clever German policy” of not agitating the conquered peoples with public declarations of their inferiority but that the aim was ultimately the acquisition of their land for German resettlement and exploitation of their labour.
MR. DODD: All right, I accept your interpretation; we won’t have any trouble about that. Now, will you please look at this document? This is a memorandum found in your files, for your information.
ROSENBERG: Yes.
MR. DODD: You set out there, in the second paragraph, what you call the aim of German politics, notably in the Ukraine, as having been laid down by the Fuehrer. They are, you say, exploitation and mobilization of raw materials, a German settlement in certain regions, no artificial education of the population towards intellectualism, but the preservation of their labor strength; apart from that, an extensive unconcern with the interior affairs.
Then, moving down a little bit-because I don’t think it is necessary to read all of it, much of it has been referred to in another document-we come down to the 12th line from the bottom of that paragraph. Beginning at the 14th line:
“After continuous observation of the state of affairs in the Occupied Eastern Territories, I am convinced that German politics may have their own, possibly contemptuous opinion of the qualities of the conquered peoples, but that it is not the mission of German political representatives to proclaim measures and opinions which could eventually reduce the conquered peoples to dull despair instead of promoting the desired utilization of manpower to capacity.”
Then, in the next paragraph, you say:
“If at home we had to announce our aims to the whole nation most openly and aggressively, in contrast to the others, the political leaders in the East must remain silent where German policy calls for necessary harshness. They must remain silent as to any derogatory opinions which they may form about the conquered peoples. Yes, a clever German policy may in certain circumstances do more in the German interest through alleviations which do not affect policy and certain humane concessions, than through open, inconsiderate brutality.”
Were you honestly expressing your views when you wrote that memorandum on the 16th of March 1942?
ROSENBERG: This document is correct.
Rosenberg had held to these ideas for a long time.
Hitler put Alfred Rosenberg, chief Nazi ideologist, in charge of Eastern policy. Rosenberg was a big proponent of Lebensraum too and pursued that end in the East:
On 8 May 1941, instructions were prepared for all Reich Commissars in the Occupied Eastern Territories (1030-PS). The last paragraph of these instructions reads as follows:
“From the point of view of cultural policy, the German Reich is in a position to promote and direct national culture and science in many fields. It will be necessary that in some territories an uprooting and resettlement of various racial stocks [Voelkerschaften] will have to be effected.” (1030-PS)
In his “Instructions for a Reich Commissar in the Baltic Countries and White Russia” (officially referred to together as the “Ostland”), Rosenberg directs that the Ostland be transformed into a part of the Greater German Reich by Germanizing racially possible elements, colonizing Germanic races, and banishing undesirable elements. (1029-PS)
In a speech delivered by Rosenberg on 20 June 1941 he stated that the job of feeding Germans was the top of Germany’s claim on the East; that there was no obligation to feed also the Russian peoples; that this was a harsh necessity bare of any feeling; that a very extensive evacuation would be necessary; and that the future would hold many hard years in store for the Russians. (1058-PS)
In his journal, the “National Socialist Monatshefte” for May 1932, he wrote:
“The understanding that the German nation, if it is not to perish in the truest sense of the word, needs ground and soil for itself and its future generations, and the second sober perception that this soil can no more be conquered in Africa, but in Europe and first of all in the East-these organically determine the German foreign policy for centuries.” (2777-PS)
