Nazi's plan for Slavic People in the Occupied East

‘Our task does not consist in Germanizing the east in the traditional sense, that means by teaching the German language and German laws to the people who live there, BUT RATHER TO ENSURE THAT ONLY PEOPLE OF ACTUAL GERMAN AND GERMANIC BLOOD LIVE THERE.’
— Heinrich Himmler

The outbreak of the war against the Soviet Union compelled Himmler to revise his entire settlement planning. Two days after the Germans launched their attack, on 24 June, he gave his head of planning, Konrad Meyer, in the Main Office of the Settlement Commissariat the task of adapting the planning to the new circumstances. Meyer was ready in July with a first version of the revised ‘General Plan East’. It was now envisaged that the General Government and the territories being annexed to the east of it would be Germanized, though only two days later this project turned out already to be outdated, because Hitler, at a meeting about the future of the east, sketched out more extensive plans for annexation. settlement policy and racial selection.

Meanwhile the Reich Security Main Office was working on its own general plan for the east. It was presented in 1941 and assumed that, in addition to the annexed Polish territories and the General Government, the Bialystok district, the Baltic States, the western Ukraine, and Byelorussia would also be settled by Germans. THE PRECONDITION FOR THIS WAS THE EXPULSION OF 31 MILLION INHABITANTS OF THESE TERRITORIES.

On 28 May 1942 the Reich Settlement Commissariat Main Office produced a new version of its General Plan East. The suggestion was now that so-called ‘settlement marches’ be set up in the Baltic area, the Ukraine, and the Leningrad region, as well as thirty-six settlement bases, which would function also as SS and police bases. In the meantime there was no more talk of extensive relocation of indigenous populations, and instead discussion FOCUSED ON ‘DECIMATING’ THE URBAN POPULATION ABOVE ALL BY MEANS OF STARVATION AND FORCED LABOUR.

Himmler read the plan, which he considered ‘VERY GOOD ON THE WHOLE’, and charged Meyer with enlarging it into a European ‘Comprehensive Settlement Plan’ incorporating the older projects for the annexed eastern territories but also including Alsace and Lorraine, Upper Carniola and Southern Styria, and Bohemia and Moravia. In addition Himmler ordered the complete ‘Germanization’ of Estonia and Latvia. The period envisaged for this settlement process was, he instructed, to be reduced from between twenty-five and thirty years to twenty years

From documents Meyer presented at the end of 1942 it is apparent that the plans now aimed to ‘transfer’ within thirty years a ‘pool of settlers’, amounting to more than 10 million people from the Reich, more than a million from the ‘Germanic’ countries, and 200,000 more from overseas, to the territories to be settled. A process of ‘complete Germanization’ was envisaged; further details about the fate of the native, non-German population were, in the author’s view, clearly superfluous. Himmler responded by instructing Meyer to include Lithuania, White Ruthenia (Byelorussia), the Crimea, and Taurien in the comprehensive plan also. Work to refine these plans continued until some time in mid-1943

The efforts put into a comprehensive settlement plan can therefore be described as Himmler’s attempt to harmonize settlement planning as a whole throughout his various offices.

In a speech on 16 September 1942 to the SS and police leaders from the Russia South area Himmler set out how he saw the settlement of the eastern territories. In the next twenty years the annexed Polish territories, the General Government, the Baltic States, White Ruthenia, Ingria (the area around Leningrad), and the Crimea WERE TO BE SETTLED BY ‘TEUTONS’. In the remaining occupied Soviet territories bases would be established on the main transport routes so that ‘settlement enclaves’ would arise—first of all ‘from the Don to the Volga’, but later ‘as far as the Urals’. ‘This Germanic east reaching to the Urals must’, according to Himmler’s vision, ‘be a seedbed for Germanic blood, so that in 400–500 years [ . . . ] instead of 120 millions there will be 500–600 million Teutons.’ The indigenous population would be sifted according to those of ‘inferior’ race and those ‘of good race’.
What lay at the heart of the settlement of the east he had summed up succinctly in the summer of 1942 as the maxim of the ‘ethnopolitical monthly’ Deutsche Arbeit (‘German Work’) in the words: ‘Our task does not consist in Germanizing the east in the traditional sense, that means by teaching the German language and German laws to the people who live there, BUT RATHER TO ENSURE THAT ONLY PEOPLE OF ACTUAL GERMAN AND GERMANIC BLOOD LIVE THERE.’