WI: The Nazi's prioritize holocausting the western slavs instead of the jews.

[Sirdragon]

What would be the impacts on eastern European geopolitics, if the Nazi regime had ignored the Jews and Roma and instead focused 100% their hatered on genociding the western slavs like the Poles,Czechs and Slovaks?

OTL the Nazi's horrifically exterminated around 6 million Jewish people. What if for example they massacred 6 million Czechs?

What would be Soviet's and Allies reaction to this? OTL the Allies restored the Czech territory to back to the Czechs post ww2 but what would they do if when they liberated that area all the ethnic Czechs and Slovaks are dead?

 

[cmakk1012]

This would require a fundamental change in Nazi ideology dating back to Mein Kampf if not earlier—the Slavs were inferior but the Jews were an evil plague in their twisted ideology.

 

[Sam R.]

Raul Hilberg suggests that by the occupation of Czechoslovakia the "organised" faction inside the junker-syndicate-party-government factions was predominant. This means a planned transportation / ghettoisation system. Not that it could even have been planned. The population is too large to actualise this before Barbarossa. The historical structures of racial myth in Germany means that the "non-indispensable" Jew does not have a Slavic cousin: slavs can be given dispensations where indispensable to the war to continue existing.

The change comes in 1941 with the hunger plan. Slavic elites are registered, transported, ghettoised and liquidated. Unlike with the historical Jewish holocaust Slavic resistance is immediate and high. This parallels Slavic resistance historically. I would suggest the Czech, Polish, anti-communist Soviet and Soviet resistance all authorise hard, total "go" orders. With complete population support for whatever local faction.

This breaks German population and war plans from 1942.

 

[BigSteve]

What would be the impacts on eastern European geopolitics, if the Nazi regime had ignored the Jews and Roma and instead focused 100% their hatered on genociding the western slavs like the Poles,Czechs and Slovaks?

OTL the Nazi's horrifically exterminated around 6 million Jewish people. What if for example they massacred 6 million Czechs?

What would be Soviet's and Allies reaction to this? OTL the Allies restored the Czech territory to back to the Czechs post ww2 but what would they do if when they liberated that area all the ethnic Czechs and Slovaks are dead?

Was there really a priority system? AFAIK the numbers of jewish and non-jewish polish civillian losses were roughly the same.

 

[Sam R.]

Was there really a priority system? AFAIK the numbers of jewish and non-jewish polish civillian losses were roughly the same.

The first priority was the registration and expropriation of newly reich Jews and of newly general government Jews. The failure to export Jews to the general government led to ghettoisation. The lessons of 1941 in controlled and Heer areas (esp Soviet POWs and the morale and throughput failure of actions) led to the introduction of camps over the top of actions.

A considerable number of Poles were executed – including by The Soviet Union – as surrendered, non recognised combatants or as civilians of interest. Add to that clearing actions, starvation increased disease. So a lower prioritisation of Poles results a lower per capita, but with a higher starting population…

Of course if there are no Jews to shoot today we may as well inflict reprisals on Poles. Consider German and Ustashi Yugoslavia where slavs were the primary target of actions.

Yours,
Sam R.

 

[lionhead]

OTL the Nazi's horrifically exterminated around 6 million Jewish people. What if for example they massacred 6 million Czechs?

The holocaust was the worst in Poland, 3 million jews and 3 million ethic Poles were murdered. The reason this was possible was of the horrific way the Nazis took control of the country. The occupation was harsh, mostly because Poland was seen as a travesty, a mockery of what the Germans considdered their lands and had to be punished. This harsness allowed for certain policies to be implemented like Ghettos where Jews were rounded up and easier to control. Mainly because of this the extermination of the jews of Poland went so efficiently, fighting back or escaping was almost impossible(yet still happened).

i don't think the Nazis can get the same level of efficiency in Czechoslovakia, despite occupying it much sooner than any other country. They just couldn't excuse such a harsh treatment on the population, not so early and not on that country. You gotta remember for example that Slovakia was allowed a certain autonomity as a puppet regime, the Nazis couldn't implement their harsh policies on them, the Slovaks wouldn't allow it. The slavic population can't be expected to sit around and watch half the population being exterminated without doing anything. They weren't in ghettos like the Jews were, nor could they make all of Prague, Plzen, Brno, Bratislava and other major cities Ghettos.

 

[Matteo]

This would require a fundamental change in Nazi ideology dating back to Mein Kampf if not earlier—the Slavs were inferior but the Jews were an evil plague in their twisted ideology.

Most people, including me until very recently, talk about Mein kampf without having read it.

Reading it is however very instructive.

The book is very raw, poorly built, repetitive, and using circular thinking.

It is indeed full of repetitive hate about jews and tells about the aryan/german need to separated from the jews from the German nation in order to restore Germany’s greatness and more than that, to establish Germany greater than it had ever been.

But, this repetitive hate against jews is subsidiary to the main issue of Mein kampf.

The main issue of the book can be summed-up as follows.

1 - We, Germans, are the superior race and, in a Darwinian world, we must prevail at the expense of others or be overwhelmed by others.

2 - The new world standard of powers is that of giant powers such as the British empire, the US, Russia and, in the future, China which enjoy huge landmass and huge natural resources.

3 - Germany must lift itself into this league of giants or it will be overcome by one of these giants.

4 - To reach this goal, Germany must conquer a lebensraum in the east and mimic what the anglo-saxon settlers did in North America to the native amerindians.

5 - And Germany, as WW1 just demonstrated, won’t be able to reach this goal without first of all destroying France, described as the eternal enemy of the German People.

Now you take the figures, and you will realize that although no other people suffered as high a rate of death as the jews (6 million of civilian deaths), 20 million civilian Slavs died during WW2 and that 75% of soviet POW soldiers died under German « custody », while only 20% of german POW soldiers died against soviet custody.

That was quite an « efficient » way of implementing generalplan ost :
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost

 

[sloreck]

While all sorts of depredations against the Jews; racial laws, confiscations, Kristalnacht, etc happened before the war and were basically done openly, the really horrific part of the Holocaust happened after the war began. The Wannsee Conference was not until January, 1942. The Nazis made great efforts to keep the extermination program secret, and while knowledge did seep out the fact that it occurred in areas somewhat "remote" and was never mentioned kept information minimized and the true extent obscured. Had the Germans pursued such a policy before September, 1939 in Czechoslovakia for starts, it would have been impossible to hide it. The other problem with a "Slavs first" policy is sheer numbers. Compared to the populations of Slavs, the number of Jews in all of Europe, even parts the Nazis never occupied, was a very, very small percentage of the population - the estimate of the WORLDWIDE Jewish population in 1939 was 17 million, less than 1% of the world population. Slavs in Europe (forget places like the USA) a lot more than that.

Jews were scattered, and had no nation state, and were basically unarmed. The Slavs had several countries, with militaries so resistance could be, and was, quite significant even OTL. In order to cull the Slavs and reduce to slavery the survivors, the Nazis needed to reduce the nation states to nothing (win the war) and, like in the AANW T/L, have a free hand in occupied territory. As a final point, we need to remember that in many Nazi occupied areas the local populations were often glad to assist the Nazis in the roundup and subsequent elimination of the Jews. These populations, of course, did not realize what was in store for them once the Jews had been dealt with.

 

[Max Sinister]

Was there really a priority system? AFAIK the numbers of jewish and non-jewish polish civillian losses were roughly the same.

But there were way more non-Jewish Poles than Polish Jews.

 

[Matteo]

But there were way more non-Jewish Poles than Polish Jews.

Around half of the jews killed by the Nazis and their auxiliaries were polish jews.

 

[Matteo]

While all sorts of depredations against the Jews; racial laws, confiscations, Kristalnacht, etc happened before the war and were basically done openly, the really horrific part of the Holocaust happened after the war began. The Wannsee Conference was not until January, 1942. The Nazis made great efforts to keep the extermination program secret, and while knowledge did seep out the fact that it occurred in areas somewhat "remote" and was never mentioned kept information minimized and the true extent obscured. Had the Germans pursued such a policy before September, 1939 in Czechoslovakia for starts, it would have been impossible to hide it. The other problem with a "Slavs first" policy is sheer numbers. Compared to the populations of Slavs, the number of Jews in all of Europe, even parts the Nazis never occupied, was a very, very small percentage of the population - the estimate of the WORLDWIDE Jewish population in 1939 was 17 million, less than 1% of the world population. Slavs in Europe (forget places like the USA) a lot more than that.

Jews were scattered, and had no nation state, and were basically unarmed. The Slavs had several countries, with militaries so resistance could be, and was, quite significant even OTL. In order to cull the Slavs and reduce to slavery the survivors, the Nazis needed to reduce the nation states to nothing (win the war) and, like in the AANW T/L, have a free hand in occupied territory. As a final point, we need to remember that in many Nazi occupied areas the local populations were often glad to assist the Nazis in the roundup and subsequent elimination of the Jews. These populations, of course, did not realize what was in store for them once the Jews had been dealt with.

In fact things were more ambivalent.

In the Nazi plan, all Slavs were not to be expelled or exterminated.

The point was :
- to push tens of millions of them westeward in order to make their lands available for German colonization.
- and to keep a part of them as second rank population due to racial standards, a part of which would be some kind of quasi-slaves, like the hilotes in ancient Sparta.

This also explains while many Slavs willingly embraced not only cooperation with Nazi Germany but also gave tens of thousands of volunteers to fight in the German army, serving in foreign divisions of the Waffen SS : Croats, Bosnians, Ukrainians, Latvians, Hungarians, ... etc. They thought victory against USSR/Russia would enable them to improve the situation of their country/nation/ethnic group.

The ethnically intertwined situation of central and Eastern Europe caused a high degree of hate among these groups.

This is one of the reasons why, at the end of WW2, the soviets and the allies decided to impose ethnic homogeneity by forced populations’s moves. The poles had to be separated from the Ukrainians, from the Belorussians, from the Russians, from the Lithuanians, ... etc.

 

[Bulldoggus]

What if John Breckinridge had run on an abolitionist platform in 1860? Honestly, the profusion all these WIs that involve people just not developing a core part of their ideology is getting old. If that was the Nazi platform, they’d have lost! Most Germans, particularly Bavaria, the hearth of Nazism, and Austria, which produced many of its most loyal soldiers, were culturally close to Czechloslovakia and Hungary and all those, and saw them as fellow civilized nations. An anti-West Slav Party would have no popular appeal.

 

[Anarch King of Dipsodes]

Raul Hilberg suggests that by the occupation of Czechoslovakia the "organised" faction inside the junker-syndicate-party-government factions was predominant. This mean so a planned transportation / ghettoisation system. Not even planned. The population is too large to actualise this before Barbarossa and the historical structures of racial myth in Germany means that the non-indispensable Jew does not have a Slavic cousin.

The change comes in 1941 with the hunger plan. Slavic elites are registered, transported, ghettoised and liquidated. Unlike with the historical Jewish holocaust resistance is immediate and high. This parallels Slavic resistance historically. I would suggest the Czech, Polish, anti-communist Soviet and Soviet resistance all authorise hard total go orders. With complete population support Forbes whatever local faction.

This breaks German population and war plans from 1942.

Looks like autocorrect went wild on this post...

 

[Sam R.]

Looks like autocorrect went wild on this post...

And it did, I've subedited my phone's "corrections."

 

[Bulldoggus]

Also, for the love of all that is right in this world, “holocaust” should not be a verb.

 

[cmakk1012]

Most people, including me until very recently, talk about Mein kampf without having read it.

Reading it is however very instructive.

The book is very raw, poorly built, repetitive, and using circular thinking.

It is indeed full of repetitive hate about jews and tells about the aryan/german need to separated from the jews from the German nation in order to restore Germany’s greatness and more than that, to establish Germany greater than it had ever been.

But, this repetitive hate against jews is subsidiary to the main issue of Mein kampf.

The main issue of the book can be summed-up as follows.

1 - We, Germans, are the superior race and, in a Darwinian world, we must prevail at the expense of others or be overwhelmed by others.

2 - The new world standard of powers is that of giant powers such as the British empire, the US, Russia and, in the future, China which enjoy huge landmass and huge natural resources.

3 - Germany must lift itself into this league of giants or it will be overcome by one of these giants.

4 - To reach this goal, Germany must conquer a lebensraum in the east and mimic what the anglo-saxon settlers did in North America to the native amerindians.

5 - And Germany, as WW1 just demonstrated, won’t be able to reach this goal without first of all destroying France, described as the eternal enemy of the German People.

Now you take the figures, and you will realize that although no other people suffered as high a rate of death as the jews (6 million of civilian deaths), 20 million civilian Slavs died during WW2 and that 75% of soviet POW soldiers died under German « custody », while only 20% of german POW soldiers died against soviet custody.

That was quite an « efficient » way of implementing generalplan ost :
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost

Fair enough, I was just guessing that the very focused Jew-hate started from the book.

My impression came from looking over a website of Nazi memorabilia—they had board games about defeating the threat of the Jews! I can’t find that website now unfortunately...

 

[Anarch King of Dipsodes]

The point was :
- to push tens of millions of them westeward in order to make their lands available for German colonization.

ITYM "eastward".

Another odd point: the Nazis ranted about racial purity and regarded any trace of Jewish ancestry as a foul taint. But under the Lebensborn program, they kidnapped thousands of Polish children with "Aryan" characteristics to be adopted by German families and incorporated into the Volk. They would never do that with a Jewish child, however "Aryan" in appearance.

 

[Matteo]

Fair enough, I was just guessing that the very focused Jew-hate started from the book.

My impression came from looking over a website of Nazi memorabilia—they had board games about defeating the threat of the Jews! I can’t find that website now unfortunately...

There were not one but several reasons to Nazi antisemitism.


Some had nothing to do with the specificity of nazism. Pseudo-scientific racism was quite « fashionable » since the late 19th century.

And antisemitism was a new avatar of the old antijudaism.


Some other probable reasons were specific to nazism. The idea that germans were the racially/chosen people made it untolerable that there could be other people that was racially despised and that however succeeded so well in science, arts and business.

And jews, like slavs or africans, were despised by Nazis and Nazis wanted to avoid any possible racial mixing between Germans/aryans and them.


Then, there were reasons specific to the defeat that Germany had just suffered in WW1.

Germany was indeed the strongest country in Europe and intrinsically remained so even after having been weakened by the Versailles treaty. Even the Entente could not defeat Germany. It needed the strong economic support of the US to defeat the central powers. This made defeat untolerable and the desire of revenge irresistible.

And since some British jews that had strong positions in finance and politics were influential in bringing the US into active economic support and then military intervention and some American jews were influential in the US too, all jews were hated by Hitler and Nazis in part for this : the anglo-saxon special relationship.

 

[Sam R.]

Well the definition of "Jew" used in the Reich and other occupied territories was constructed unusually and functionally in order to designate certain "mixtures" for differently fates.

Marriage and cultural observance (with leeways for divorce) could either rule a "mixed" person as Jewish or merely non-Aryan. Certain categories of person could be Aryanised, such as unknowing "mixed" people who were loyal party old-fighters.

Then the RSHA and SS developed their own internal or polish specific rules for Jewishness. Even in the East Himmler questioned, at his visit to an action, whether the blond blue eyed man had any non "Jewish" ancestors two generations back: "No? Then _I cannot help you_"

Two definitions intersect outside the Reich proper: institutional liquidation orders, and the popular everyday imaginary.

All "Jews" were detested, but who is a Jew continued to be bloodily ground out until the last death march ended, camp was liberated and action ceased. Later even as Polish citizens discovered fatally when returning to their lives.

Yours,
Sam R.

I hate that I know this stuff.

 

[sloreck]

There were several different kinds of antisemitism in Europe and Germany by the early 20th century. There was the traditional religious antisemitism with all Jews as "Christ-killers", it was not until the 1960s that the Church absolved the "Jews" as a people of the actions of the Sanhedrin in terms of the story of the trial of Christ. The there was the emergence in the 19th century after Darwin of racial antisemitism, which saw Jews as a different strain of humanity with both physical and moral characteristics inimical to the betterment of humanity. With the publication of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" in the late 19th century there arose a "political" antisemitism, where Jews were seen as plotting against Christianity/Western Civilization as a whole. The relative prominence of Jews in the socialist movement was seen as part of this especially after the Russian revolution. Particular to Germany was the Dolchstoss, or stab in the back, explanation of the defeat in WWI where Jews were seen as a particular group who worked to cause this defeat - in part tied in with socialism. Finally, the prominence of some Jewish politicians in the immediate postwar Weimar Republic added to the resentment/hatred.

Comparing this toxic mix to the more eugenic Aryan versus Slav dialogue makes it pretty clear why it was easy for the Nazis to come up with the Endlosung. Unsurprisingly the Nazis embraced eugenics, and long before Jews were being killed 100% Aryans were being sterilized for mental disabilities and other reasons, and don't forget the T4 program. Even the most fantastic excesses of Generalplan Ost were deigned to reduce the Slav population in numbers to make them useful for labor, and of course destroying their culture and language. The goal of the Nazis was to ensure that anywhere their rule extended not one Jew was left alive, and that included those with 50% Jewish ancestry for sure, and those with 25% or less in many cases - of course absolute purity was needed for entry in to the SS elite (at least in theory).