WI: The Nazis' anti-Slavism is directed somewhere else

Let's assume, that due to butterflies or little things going the other way, the Nazis' ideology does not include anti-Slavism.

Now, before someone says 'but it would make them Not-zis', due to the fact that there's a hole here, in this scenario, the directed hate is brought against groups who didn't get persecuted OTL or didn't get persecuted very much. Perhaps instead of anti-Slavism, they adopt anti-Latinism, or specifically, anti-Frankism.
 
In order for this to work, the Nazis would have to be not-zis, because the whole "Lebansraum" and Anti-Slav/Anti-Communist thing was such a big part of the ideology in OTL; that it is impossible to separate the two concepts without making something new entirely.
 

tenthring

Banned
Hitler's racial ideology was basically him looking around at countries performance during WWI and attributing that to the race (or in the case of Austria Hungary, diversity itself). You'll have to have the Russians do better in WWI, but that has so many butterflies it hurts. For instance, if they do better no communists. And without the communists no way Hitler gains power ("respectable" people grudgingly opened the door for him out of fear of communism thinking they could control him).
 

Insider

Banned
They could adopt a different approach. The Slavs are corrupted and ruled by Jew, but once its influence is removed, they could trive again (under german guidance of course)

In that way they stay nazi and antisemitic, but consider Slavic people... well... people.

All you need is to sign Ribbentrop - Beck pact in 1939. The truth was that Nazi leaders stressed the note they needed the most. There weren't any believes that were set in stone. Like in 1984, it would turn out that Poles were always friends of Germans, despite smear campaign propaganda aim at them until last week.
 
Okay I'm going to have to disagree with Kaiser K here. I think that it is valid to have such a thing as a Nazi in another TL that is different but not different enough to count as a 'Notzi'.

Excuse me whilst I think aloud about whether Nazis that aren't anti-Slavic count as Nazis...

It seems like this is all really dependent on what one thinks the defining features of Nazism is. Alternately, common ones are racial superiority/purity (note: this tends to lend itself to persecution of other groups but isn't necessarily so); extreme nationalism; 'third-way economics; rejection of class as a significant personal identifier; social Darwinism; anti-communism; anti-Semitism or anti-Slavism.

To me personally, I think the minimum amount of boxes you need to tick to be considered a "Nazi" are:

A) German/Germanic nationalism and rejection of internationalism. Probably class too.

B) Rabid anti-communism.

C) Racism. But this can run the gauntlet from public humiliation to stripping of citizenship to ghettoisation to concentration camps.

D) social Darwinism.

So the question of C) is what really comes up. The Nazis didn't come up with much that was new. They often either distilled (anti-Semitism) or adapted (Nietzsche) existing German thought. I think the biggest opportunity for change here is the Sonderweg (special way), the idea that Germans are exceptional and represent a Central European culture that was superior to the effete Western Europeans or the boorish Eastern Europeans. IOTL they saw German destiny in the Drang Nach Osten, settlement of the Slavic East. Whilst that was probably the likely outcome, after WWI the average German hated the French much more than they hated the Poles for instance, blaming them (rightly) for Versailles. If the left wing of Nazism was more successful, you could see distaste for the "vindictive and effete Latins" and "perfidious Anglo-Saxons who dominate international finance". They would still see themselves as better than Slavs, but with the West as a greater threat would devote more of the " national vigour " to combatting the West.
 
Let's assume, that due to butterflies or little things going the other way, the Nazis' ideology does not include anti-Slavism.

Now, before someone says 'but it would make them Not-zis', due to the fact that there's a hole here, in this scenario, the directed hate is brought against groups who didn't get persecuted OTL or didn't get persecuted very much. Perhaps instead of anti-Slavism, they adopt anti-Latinism, or specifically, anti-Frankism.

The problem with swapping out the anti-Slavic ideology and replacing it with anti-Frankism (or whatever), as a means of avoiding the Nazis becoming the dreaded "Notzis", is that that would necessitate reconfiguring the entire Nazi ideology and concept of Lebensraum, a cornerstone of their policy. National Socialism isn't like an engine where you can swap the parts around, it's more like a house of cards.

That said, with a few changes (ala Weber's Germany, you could replace the anti-Slavic policy of extermination/extermination through labor with a slave/"gilded cage" one. These not-quite-Notzi's would still view the Slavs as subhuman and only good to be cleared away in order to make room for German settlers, but the focus would be on basically tricking them into signing their lives away rather than just shooting them.
 
I think this is more legitimate than other people are saying.

I've always wondered whether they could see Slavs and Balts as being a distant branch of the Germanic race, and that they just need to be more thoroughly Germanised in a similar manner to the Dutch. You could even get pseudo-Science that says the Slavs are actually the descendants of Goths and Vandals in a similar way that the Ustase claimed Croats were. It's also consistent with Nazi racial views, given how many Russians and Poles are blue eyed and blonde-haired.

This need not counteract conquest to the East. Lebensraum as a policy in our timeline entailed wiping out far more millions of Slavs than they could ever replace with Germans anyway. You just replace the drive towards the East as uniting the Nordic race and Germanising people who had forgotten their roots, via education and breeding programs. If needed, they could focus on exterminating those who are too "Mongol" blood, if you want to make sure the Nazis are still evil enough.
 
They could adopt a different approach. The Slavs are corrupted and ruled by Jew, but once its influence is removed, they could trive again (under german guidance of course)In that way they stay nazi and antisemitic, but consider Slavic people... well... people...........

There is a easy POD to achieve this. Keep Scheubner-Richter alive and in Hitler's good grace.

Aufbau Vereinigung (Reconstruction Organisation) was a München based counterrevolutionary conspiratorial group formed in the aftermath of the German occuptation of the Ukraine in 1918 and the Latvian Intervention of 1919, composed of White Russian émigrés and early German National Socialist. The object was to overthrow the governments of Germany and the Soviet Union, replacing them with authoritarian regimes of the far right. The group was originally known as Die Bruecke (The Bridge). Aufbau was also the name of a periodical it brought out

Ludwig Maximilian Erwin von Scheubner-Richter (21 January 1884 – 9 November 1923) was an early member of the Nazi Party. It was Scheubner-Richter along with Alfred Rosenberg who devised the plan to drive the German government to revolution through the Beer Hall Putsch. During the Putsch, he was shot in the lungs and died instantly, at the same time dislocating Hitler's right shoulder.
Of all the early party members who died in the Putsch, Adolf Hitler had claimed Scheubner-Richter to be the only "irreplaceable loss". The first part of Hitler's book Mein Kampf is dedicated to Scheubner-Richter and the other fifteen men who died in the Putsch.

More here: Scheubner-Richter
 
Did Aufbau Vereinigung want to unite Russia and Germany then? A Nazi Russia along with a Nazi Germany, would be a very cool, if terrifying, timeline.
 
While Nazis were dedicated anti-semites, but they were opportunist anti-slavs.

Croats, Bulgarians, Slovaks and Cossacks were treated okay, because they were useful. Czechs gave up without fight, so were treated less bad than Poles. Russians and Poles resisted, so were brutalized second only to Jews, gypsies and likes.

All you need to do is to convince top nazis that Poles, Belorussians, Ukrainians and Russians were more useful alive. Have them make excuse that Russian pre-communist elites are half-Varangians descended from vikings, half Baltic Germans descended from Teutons (its half truth. Baltic Germans were considerable part of Russian aristocracy), and you have convenient group that hates USSR to form backbone of collaborative regimes found among white emigre and political prisoners rescued from gulags and prisons. (Not that crazy. Germans were arbitrarily designating members of collaborative Russian Liberation Army as non-slav cossacks, a complete nonsense, but this way they keep illusion of obeying their racial superiority ideology. Guess what, Nazis were hypocrites on top of everything else. Huh, who would have though). Have nazi propaganda aimed to ethnic Russians, blaming jews for Soviet repression.

There is still large amount of suffering on eastern front, since even without explicit Hunger plan aimed at genociding slavs, civilians get caught between Wehrmacht and Red Army, but its behaviour toward non-jews will be more like behavior of World War one wehrmacht, than its OTL counterpart.

If you twist the idea of "lebensraum" to mean indirect exploitation, not direct slavery, you will still get Barbarossa, but with goal of creating puppet states to be economically, politically, and militarily tied to Germany as they were in 1918 after Brest Litovsk, and not making everything between Germany and Ural a slave camp. In instead of Reichkommisariats, Germans would set up "Democratic Republic of Ukraine", "Free State of Belarus", "Sovereign Principality of Rostov", etc. (names are lies, if you are sarcasm-blind)
Nazis still commit holocaust (not nazi enough to count as nazism?) but are more likely to use local puppets to do dirty work for them, still have goal of conquering large territory, still cause untold amount of suffering, its just one (admittingly large) group that manages to not get as screwed as bad it did IRL.

Survival of Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter sounds like a good POD, he would be Russian lobbyist in Berlin, ensuring Nazi policy in the east will be softer than IRL.
 
The whole point of this war business was Lebensraum. Lebensraum was fertile agricultural land that was underdeveloped and underpopulated. The idea was to further thin down the local population and settle the place with German colonists.
The only place in the vicinity of Germany is in the East, and the East is chock-full with Slavs. Going South won't help (overcrowded with lots of Italians and by far not enough fertile land), going West won't help (more or less the same but with French).

The only way in which a German expansionist drive after WWI might work without attacking the Slavs and significantly reducing them in numbers is an expansionist drive that is not motivated by a quest for Lebensraum.
 
The whole point of this war business was Lebensraum. Lebensraum was fertile agricultural land that was underdeveloped and underpopulated. The idea was to further thin down the local population and settle the place with German colonists.
The only place in the vicinity of Germany is in the East, and the East is chock-full with Slavs. Going South won't help (overcrowded with lots of Italians and by far not enough fertile land), going West won't help (more or less the same but with French).

The only way in which a German expansionist drive after WWI might work without attacking the Slavs and significantly reducing them in numbers is an expansionist drive that is not motivated by a quest for Lebensraum.

The point of the war business was the aggrandisement of the Germanic people and the Nordic race, to prepare for the next war to aggrandise them further 20 years down the line. Lebensraum was merely a tool to that end. Plus it's not exactly consistent to say the East was "underpopulated" yet also "chock full of Slavs". Population density in Poland and especially Russia is far lower than in Germany, so there is plenty of areas to settle. Plus, even if you want to kill some of them off, you only need to kill off a small segment to give land to Germans, given that the numbers for the Eastern Plan meant far more Slavs being killed than Germans being settled. The Nazis could just focus on the more "Asiatic" ones.

Oh, and the Nazis expanded just fine into the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria and the Sudetenland without justifying that by exterminating the local population.
 
I think the main problem is that Slavs were looked down by Germans due to history. You had, as maintioned upthread, Drand Nach Osten directed against, well, Slavs. You had Germany/German states holding Polish territory etc. And through that Germans considered Slavs as lwoer, dumber, stupider and such.

Nazis didn't pull their hatred toward various groups out of thin air, they've built on and hardened already existing prejudices and perceptions.

And it's also true that other than Jews most groups were treated as situation demanded. Hitler said Czechs would make excellent foremen in east, keeping Russians in line.
 
Maybe instead of the Drang Nach Osten, the focus of expanding the Lebensraum would be by recreating the historic conquests of their Germanic ancestors by taking over the decadent lands West and South? It wouldn't be as efficient a way of getting Leebensraum as attacking the East but then it wouldn't be the first thing about Nazism that doesn't make sense.
 
the East is chock-full with Slavs
Do have any idea how HUGE was Soviet Union?
One-sixth of land territory of the world.
This wasn't freaking Manhattan, there was plenty of space.

And the idea was, than rather than kill locals and settle territory with your population, you let locals farm the land and force them to export it at criminally low prices. Economical exploitation instead of outright slavery or extermination.
 
indeed big enough to very well possible to push them behind the urals


what if for one reason or another the nazis pick up the viking history of russia (after all rus is a viking/ norse word), and at least keep them out of the list of untermenschen, maybe this is something that would work?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rus'_people
 
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I think the main problem is that Slavs were looked down by Germans due to history. You had, as maintioned upthread, Drand Nach Osten directed against, well, Slavs. You had Germany/German states holding Polish territory etc. And through that Germans considered Slavs as lwoer, dumber, stupider and such.

Nazis didn't pull their hatred toward various groups out of thin air, they've built on and hardened already existing prejudices and perceptions.

And it's also true that other than Jews most groups were treated as situation demanded. Hitler said Czechs would make excellent foremen in east, keeping Russians in line.

But was the anti-Slavism that deeply rooted? I can't think of many instances of history pre-Nazis where there was anything that bad.

Maybe instead of the Drang Nach Osten, the focus of expanding the Lebensraum would be by recreating the historic conquests of their Germanic ancestors by taking over the decadent lands West and South? It wouldn't be as efficient a way of getting Leebensraum as attacking the East but then it wouldn't be the first thing about Nazism that doesn't make sense.

You can still have Drang Nach Osten, just conquest with putting a German elite over the local peasantry in various minor statelets, and maybe Germanising the Slavs that are there.
 
You can still have Drang Nach Osten, just conquest with putting a German elite over the local peasantry in various minor statelets, and maybe Germanising the Slavs that are there.

so essentially continuing the practise that was used in the baltics
 
Essentially 'Blood and Soil' faction and the fact that Hitler was from A-H where he fell under influence of a few anti-slav racist who blamed the demise and paralysis of the Empire on the Slav component needs to be removed.
 
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