Polish-Jewish Relations: 1,300 Keyword-Phrase-Indexed Book Reviews (by Jan Peczkis)

Racial Science in Hitler’s New Europe, 1938-1945, by Anton Weiss-Wendt and Rory Yeomans (eds.) 2013

Polokaust Long Term: The Ubiquity and Sophistication of Nazi Racial Concepts and Practices. The Polokaust: Slav-Exterminatory Implications of GENERALPLAN OST

This work is an anthology of scholarly articles dealing with the practical, rather than theoretical, aspects of Nazi racial science. This is especially applied not only to the Germans, but also the Dutch, Norwegians, Danes, and, of course, the Slavs and the Jews.

THE GERMANS TOOK THEIR RACISM MORE SERIOUSLY THAN DID JUST ABOUT ANYONE ELSE

The ideas of Charles Darwin played a major role in the development of the idea of the innate and immutable inequality of peoples.(e. g., Isabel Heinemann, p. 38). Many nations at the time believed in scientific racism, and practiced eugenics. However, this should not be relativized. Editors Weiss-Wendt and Rory Yeomans write of the preeminence of Nazi Germany in the field of racial science.(p. 14).

A perusal of this book is more than sufficient to indicate, to the reader, just how seriously the Germans took their racism and how ardently they tried to make it a practical reality in all their policies. It also becomes obvious that Nazi racism was not something left to ideologues or propagandists. Instead, it was widely developed by German anthropologists and other scientists. The Germanization of eastern territories, involving racial selection and resettlement, was widely held by mainstream German academia, and not just its fringes, as has been argued after 1945. (Heinemann, p. 42).

GERMANIZATION OF “POLES” IN PROPER UNDERSTANDING

A little clarification of terms is in order. When the Nazi spoke of the Germanization of a territory, they were not referring to the transformation of locals into adherents of German language and culture. They were talking about a replacement of locals with ethnic Germans.

It has not rarely been alleged that, whereas Jews were unilaterally condemned by the Nazis, there were Poles who could redeem themselves, in the eyes of the Nazis, by undergoing Germanization. While technically and slightly correct, this “Germanization” was recognized for only some 4% of the Polish population. (Heinemann, p. 44). Nor was even that, strictly, speaking, a Germanization. It was a re-Germanization of Polonized Germans. Clearly, this “Germanization” was not some kind of act of mercy to even a few Poles. It was an outworking of Nazi racial ideology, intended to “recover lost German blood”.

LITTLE DIFFERENCE: SHORT-TERM GENOCIDE (JEWS) AND LONG-TERM GENOCIDE (POLES). POLOKAUST LONG TERM

Although the Nazi treatment of Jews as a whole, and of Slavs as a whole, was different, especially given the increasing military reverses of the Third Reich, the intended outcome was similar. This fact was brought out by Isabel Heinemann, whom I now quote:

(Quote) Rather, tellingly, during the so-called RuSHA Trial (1947-48)—which put RFK officials and SS racial experts in the dock–the prosecution declared the forced population transfers and “Germanization”, as experienced by Josef Rembacz from Zamosc and millions of other individuals, “techniques of genocide [that were] neither so quick nor perhaps so simple as outright mass extermination…[yet] far more cruel and equally effective.” (unquote)(p. 51).

The items in brackets are in Heinemann’s quoted statement.

POLOKAUST LONG-TERM: NAZI PLANS FOR THE EXTERMINATION OF SLAVS

What if Nazi Germany had won the war? Heinemann discusses the December 1942 Master Settlement Plan (GENERALSIEDLUNGSPLAN), which was an expanded version of Master Plan East (GENERALPLAN OST). Although the fate of tens of millions of people (mainly Poles and other Slavs) was not elaborated, Heinemann points out that their physical extermination was an unambiguous implication of the plan. She comments, “Although none of the plans made it explicit, it is evident that for the racial experts mass death posed a necessary condition for the entire Germanization process.” (p. 49).