Hitler's Hangman (61 page)

To co-ordinate the myriad approaches to the Germanization of the

Protectorate, a conference was held in Neurath’s office on 9 October 1940.

Three possible strategies were discussed: first, a large-scale population

transfer of all Czechs living in Moravia to Bohemia, thereby creating

living space for German settlers from the East; secondly and most radi-

cally, the complete deportation of all Czechs from the Protectorate to an

unknown destination; and thirdly, the ‘assimilation’ of approximately half

of the Czech population and the ‘resettlement’ of the remaining half.119

Hitler decided in favour of the third option: Germanization efforts in

the Protectorate should be reinforced by the Reich Protector while

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

simultaneously maintaining the façade of Czech autonomy for the dura-

tion of the war.120 At Himmler’s request, Karl Hermann Frank and the

head of the Prague SD, Horst Böhme, made preparations for testing

Czech schoolchildren in January 1941. In February they were joined by

SS-Sturmbahnführer Erwin Künzel, who had previously established the

Race and Settlement Office in Posen and Litzmannstadt and now began

to set up similar offices in the Protectorate.121

As German troops invaded the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941,

health experts from the Reich Protector’s Office gathered German

medical officers and their assistants for lessons in the science of racial

selection. Unlike in Poland, however, very few people in the Protectorate

were actually subjected to racial tests before Heydrich’s arrival in Prague.

The main concern of the Reich Protector’s Office was the containment of

underground resistance movements and industrial sabotage. Moreover,

Germanization measures involving large-scale expulsion and settlement

had few devoted proponents within the Protectorate. As in occupied

Poland, the Protectorate’s four Nazi Gauleiters objected to large-scale

racial testing in order to prevent the political or economic destabilization

of their respective fiefdoms.122

Unlike Neurath and the Gauleiters of the Protectorate, however, Heydrich

was genuinely determined to realize the complete Germanization of

Bohemia and Moravia, reminding his subordinates on various occasions

that ‘al short-term tasks have to be carried out in a way that does

not compromise the faultless execution of the final aim’.123 A narrow

focus on Heydrich’s role in the appeasement of the Protectorate therefore

misses the crucial point that his pragmatic terror campaign, sweetened

by incentives for col aboration, was merely a short-term strategy that

would ultimately give way to the long-term project of political y, cultural y

and racial y integrating the Protectorate into the Greater German

Reich.124

In his first official speech in Prague on 2 October 1941, Heydrich elabo-

rated on his long-term policy aims for the Protectorate and Europe more

general y. The fact that by the end of 1941 the land masses control ed by

Nazi Germany stretched from the Arctic Ocean to the fringes of the Sahara

desert, from the Atlantic to the Ukraine, made him confident enough to

speculate publicly about Europe’s future. Asserting that the German occu-

pation of Europe ‘wil not be temporary, but permanent’, he raised the

crucial question of what the future post-war European order would

look like. With an ‘iciness’ that stunned even some of the senior

Nazi Party representatives in the audience, Heydrich talked about ethnic

cleansing programmes on a historical y unprecedented scale.125 The ultimate

aim was the creation of a German
Lebensraum
in the middle of Europe

R E I C H P R OT E C TO R

247

that would incorporate all Germanizable inhabitants: ‘The future of the

Reich after the war’s end depends on the ability of the Reich and the

ability of the people of the Reich to hold, to rule and if necessary to fuse

these [newly acquired] areas with the Reich. It also depends upon the

means . . . [with which we] deal with, lead and fuse with these people.’

‘These people’ included the Norwegians, Dutch, Flemish, Danes and

Swedes, who thanks to ‘bad political leadership and the influence of

Jews’ had forgotten their Germanic roots, but who would eventually

be assimilated into the Greater German Reich by being treated like

Germans. In the lands further east, Germans would rule over the indige-

nous populations and exploit the regions’ raw materials. A third space,

which included incorporated Western Poland, would form an Eastern

Wall facing the Slavic world. Germans must inhabit the lands behind this

wall, while ‘piece by piece, step by step, the Polish element [will be] tossed

away’.126

The Protectorate was included behind this Eastern Wall and would

thus fall within the German Empire. ‘The final solution’ of the Czech

question, Heydrich told his audience, ‘must be the following: that this

space will once and for all be settled by Germans.’ Historically, Bohemia

and Moravia had always been a part of the German sphere of influence,

forming a ‘bulwark of Germandom’ and a ‘sentry facing east’. Heydrich

therefore demanded his subordinates to produce – through various forms

of systematic pseudo-scientific racial testing – a ‘total picture’ that would

allow him to ‘get a feel for the racial and
völkisch
character of the entire

population’ as well as an inventory of ‘people from this space who are

Germanizable’.127

It has become popular among some historians to interpret the Third

Reich’s war of conquest in the East in general and Nazi Germanization

policies more specifically as a German form of colonialism.128 Such ideas

have been inspired by statements made by Himmler and the Führer, most

famously perhaps Hitler’s statement of September 1941 that ‘the Russian

space is our India, and just as the English have ruled it with a handful of

men, so will we rule this colonial space of ours’.129

Yet such quotations are misleading. The actual policies employed by the

Nazis in the governance of the occupied territories bore little resemblance

to British or French colonial techniques, and in fact underlined how

limited the Nazis’ knowledge of Western blue-water colonialism really

was. Nowhere in occupied Eastern Europe, for example, did the Nazis

employ ‘indirect rule’ – a characteristic feature of early twentieth-century

British imperialism. The Nazi leadership’s frequent references to Western

colonialism may have reflected its admiration for Britain’s ability to

rule the world’s largest empire with a handful of colonial officers, or,

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

alternatively, they may have been an attempt to justify Germany’s violent

expansion by pointing to the misdeeds of other European nations, but

they hardly amount to proof that the Nazis ever treated or intended to

treat the populations of Eastern Europe in the same manner as the British

treated the Indians.130

If British colonialism in the early twentieth century was characterized

by a combination of development and force, with the aim of creating new

commercial markets, the ‘development’ of Poland, Belorussia, the Ukraine

and indeed the Protectorate involved the physical annihilation of the

indigenous elite, the expulsion and possibly death of some 30 million

people and the complete eradication of all indigenous culture. No member

of the indigenous elites of Eastern Europe would ever be allowed to

follow the example of Nehru or Gandhi by studying law at the best

universities of the colonial motherland. Moreover, the policy of expelling

or murdering ‘racially inferior’ populations was not a means to bring the

war to a triumphant end or to ‘restore order’, as was often enough the case

in the colonial wars fought by Britain and France, but rather an end in

itself. Mass murder, expulsion and exploitation, coupled with the aim of

turning the remaining population of East-Central Europe into Germans

or slaves, constituted the very purpose of Operation Barbarossa and the

General Plan East of July 1941.

More directly relevant to SS population policies than Western coloni-

alism were the models established by Imperial Germany and Habsburg

Austria. In relation to their Eastern European neighbours and ethnic

minorities, both Germany and Austria-Hungary had indeed shown a

colonial attitude long before 1933. The idea of a ‘civilizing mission’ had

also been part of Imperial Germany’s and Habsburg Austria’s policy

towards their own Slavic minorities. For Heydrich and the racial experts

in the SS, however, Prussia’s attitude towards the Poles and the Habsburgs’

policies towards the Czechs were prime examples of how
not
to pursue a

policy of empire-building. Both states, Heydrich insisted, had never ful y

grasped the importance of race, which he and his closest associates consid-

ered the sole criterion for the reordering of Europe. Neither had they

tried to identify Germanizable population groups.131 Leaving behind

what he saw as a misguided, outdated and half-hearted nationalities

policy, Heydrich wanted to turn race and biology into the guiding prin-

ciple for administration. This commitment to the ethnic homogeneity of

the states of East-Central Europe was not confined to Nazi Germany,

having under very different auspices also guided Woodrow Wilson’s

Fourteen Points at the end of the First World War and most notably his

concept of ‘national self-determination’. What was different about the

implementation of such homogeneity by the SS was its unshakeable

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249

adherence to biological racism and its determination to resolve the

‘unweaving of peoples’ in a violent way.

Heydrich was therefore highly dismissive of the Habsburgs’ pre-1914

population policies: the ‘old ways’ of ‘turning this Czech garbage into

Germans’ had failed, he insisted in his speech of October 1941. Now it

was time to be guided solely by the ‘objective’ criterion of race. Heydrich

promised to act on this idea without further ado: ‘When [Germanization]

happens is a question the Führer must decide. But the planning and

collection of raw data can begin immediately.’132

Heydrich’s speech, praised by Goebbels as ‘refreshingly clear’ and

‘exemplary for the occupied territories’, drew on the latest ideas on the

reordering of Europe within the Nazi leadership, most notably those

articulated in the General Plan East of July 1941.133 In late June 1941,

Himmler, in his capacity as Reich commissar for the strengthening of

Germandom, had ordered one of his chief demographic planners, Professor

Konrad Meyer, to produce a comprehensive expulsion and resettlement

plan for occupied Poland. Meyer had been the principal organizer of the

exhibition ‘Construction and Planning in the East’, which Himmler and

Heydrich had visited in Berlin on 20 March 1941. Both were so impressed

by Meyer’s model villages for German settlers that Himmler commis-

sioned him to develop a grand design for the future of the conquered

territory: the General Plan East.134

On 15 July, just three weeks after receiving Himmler’s order, Meyer

presented the first version of his General Plan East, which called for the

Germanization of Poland’s and its western border regions. In the mean-

time, however, German troops had already invaded the Soviet Union,

advancing so quickly that the plan no longer seemed ambitious enough:

only one day after Meyer’s first submission, Hitler demanded the creation

of a Garden of Eden in the East, a vast settlement area for Germans in

the Baltics, Belorussia, Ukraine and the Crimea. Himmler consequently

ordered Meyer to extend his planning to the Soviet Union. Its designs, to

be implemented over the next twenty to thirty years, envisaged that large

numbers of ethnic Germans would be transplanted to the occupied East

where they would live in a neo-feudal system of farms and model villages,

interspersed with heavily armed SS outposts along two main communica-

tion routes leading to Leningrad and the Crimea respectively. The great

majority of the local population were to be expelled while a small minority

would be retained as helots. On the most eastern border of the new

Germanic Empire, along the Urals, warrior villages would protect the

frontier against the barbarian hordes of the East.135

Heydrich’s speech in the Černín Palace was therefore informed by the

latest ideas emanating from Hitler, Himmler and various SS racial experts,