The impact of settlement policies

Settling Germans throughout large parts of eastern Europe was an important long-term aim for some Nazi racial ideologists, including Hitler. This conflicted with the exploitative or economic imperialism also pursued by some of the same ideologists (see Chapter 7). Some historians have argued that the settlement policy determined the German policies of violence in eastern Europe; they view the displacement of populations and large-scale mass murder against Jews and Slavs as fairly straightforward implementations of an ideological blueprint of Germanization. Given the ideological contradiction just mentioned, German settlement schemes and their effects require evaluation.

This matter is often discussed under the headline ‘Generalplan Ost.’ Scholars understand the Generalplan Ost as a number of interconnected plans drawn up by a variety of SS authorities, namely the Planning Office of the Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of Germandom (RKF) – the planning authority in charge – and the Head Office of Reich Security (RSHA). Other authorities such as the German Labor Front and some civil administrations also produced less detailed or less comprehensive plans. A first RKF draft from June 1941 referred to occupied Poland. A later version produced by the RSHA in late 1941 provided for the eastward displacement of 31 million– plus all of the Jews – of the 45 million inhabitants of Poland, the Baltic area, Belarus and northwestern Ukraine to be replaced over thirty years by 4.5 million Germans who would later proliferate. According to an RKF scheme from May 1942, 5.5 million Germanic settlers (including about 700,000 Germanized locals, especially from the Baltic countries) were to settle within twenty to twenty-five years in western Poland, large parts of central Poland, two strings of a total of twenty-two small settlement areas in the Baltic and Ukraine, and larger settlement regions in and north of the Crimea as well as around Leningrad. An enhanced RKF “general settlement plan” of December 1942 covered Poland, Bohemia and Moravia, Alsace, Lorraine, Luxembourg, parts of Slovenia and settlements in the Baltic countries. The non-German population was to be reduced by about 25 million to 11 million people within 30 years and replaced, excluding the Baltic area, by 12 million Germanic settlers. All of these plans anticipated the assimilation of various percentages of non-Germans in the settlement areas.