Holocaust Specialness Muted. German anti-Slavism

Holocaust Specialness Muted. Long-Term German anti-Slavism

War in the Wild East: The German Army and Soviet Partisans, by Ben Shepherd. 2004. Harvard University Press, Cambridge and London

Holocaust Specialness Muted: Getting a Bit Closer to the Equality of Victimhood

Author Ben Shepherd is a British Historian. What is most interesting about this book is the fact that he eschews overt Holocaust supremacism, and comes closer to recognizing the essential equality of Jewish and Slavic victimhood at the hands of Nazi Germany. Heresy!

Shepherd points out that German anti-Slavism has deep roots, “Anti-Slavism…common to the West in general, and in Germanic notions of racial superiority over eastern neighbors. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, writers such as Friedrich Forster, Johann Reitemeier, and Heinrich von Treitschke had vilified the ‘Sarmatian brutality’ and ‘notorious uncleanliness’ of Germany’s eastern neighbors…” (pp. 10-11).

The German war against Poland and the Soviet Union cannot be belittled. It was all about Germany dominating others–by war if necessary. He comments, “Many officers hankered after Lebensraum in part out of a desire for national greatness. In part, it was a legacy of the Germans’ long-standing urge to ‘go east’. [DRANG NACH OSTEN]. In part, finally, it was a development of the old imperial army’s expansionist ambitions of World War I.” (p. 6).

With regards to the 1939 war, the author writes, “Nor did Hitler make any secret of his desire that the Polish campaign be fought with special harshness. For the Germans were going in to Poland not merely to defeat it, but to subjugate it utterly so that it could not ‘be taken into account as a political factor for the next few decades’…They rounded up and murdered members of the Polish ruling and administrative classes, the clergy, and the intelligentsia.” (p. 18).

The same was true of German actions elsewhere against the Slavic East. Shepherd writes, “National Socialist Germany’s war against the Soviet Union aimed not at a mere military victory, but at the complete destruction of the state’s political and economic basis, and the decimation, subjugation, and exploitation of its people.” (p. 224).

HOW DARE AUTHOR SHEPHERD RELATIVIZE THE HOLOCAUST!

As for Operation Barbarossa, Shepherd makes these “forbidden” statements, “The outrages perpetrated in its course may have been less systematic than those of the Holocaust of European Jewry, but in the degree of death and suffering they spawned, they clearly rival it.” (p. 225). Comparing and almost equating the Holocaust with the sufferings of non-Jews! Heresy!

Author Shepherd also touches on the genocidal aspects of German anti-Slavism, “Thus the Wehrmacht leadership readily accepted a plan guaranteed to cause the starvation of millions of Soviet prisoners of war and civilians in occupied areas, something Reich Marshall Goering readily foresaw as ‘the biggest mass death in Europe since the Thirty Years’ War.'” (p. 25).

For more on German anti-Slavism, see:

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2025/10/25/poles-targeted-biologically-not-just-jews/

https://www.jewsandpolesdatabase.org/2025/10/05/sleazy-practical-anti-slavic-racism-at-dora/