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Weltanschauung
Nazi Weltanschauung “worldview” - the core ideological force that launched Naziism violent project in pursuit of a new global order - aimed to dissolve the contradictions between the Nazi conceptualizations of “race” and “space” through the creation of a Germanic Lebensraum [see blog post] and achieve world domination by the, so-called ‘Nordic people’. This combination both ‘biopolitical’ & ‘geo-political’ formed the basis for its Germanization policies, the mission of what it regarded as the “purification of the Volksgemeinschaft a mystical unity, a form of racial soul uniting all German peoples a racial/community,” at very core its state-sponsored genocide of the “other.”
Ken Funk, of Oregon State University, explains 21 March 2001: “Woldview” as literally, a perception of the world as “At the heart of one’s knowledge is one’s “worldview”; a foundation for all reasoning, providing the standards of value to establish the cognitive goals towards which reason works and to select the rules by which reason operates. - A worldview is the set of beliefs about fundamental aspects of Reality that ground & influence all one’s perceiving, thinking, knowing, and doing “… with all reasoning focused & goal-directed …”
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Lebensraum
Lit. “Living space” a German concept of expansionism and Völkisch nationalism {see blog post herein] and a geopolitical goal of Imperial Germany in WW1 (1914–1918) whose ultimate goal of was to establish a Greater German Reich. The Nazi policy Generalplan Ost (Master Plan for the East) was based on its tenets - Slavic populations were to be removed permanently either through mass deportation to Siberia extermination, or enslavement. Jews were to be killed for being “parasitic”.
Hitler told General Wilhelm Keitel [(1882–1946), Chief of Staff of the German Armed Forces High Command from 1938 to 1945: “that the war would be a difficult racial struggle and that the General Gouvernement was set-up to “purify the Reich territory from Jews and Polacks” [At Nuremberg trials Keitel was guilty of the shooting of hostages, the massacre of prisoners of war & civilians in German occupied territories.]
In the words of Norman Naimark, historian : “If the awful counterfactual of a Nazi victory had come to pass… (Slavs) Russians, Belarusians & Ukrainians would surely have shared the fate of the Poles and been eliminated culturally and ethnically as distinct peoples and nations.”
Vejas Liulevicius wrote: “While the Soviets retreated, “trading space for time,” the Nazis gave up time to gain space — seeking an everlasting, timeless present of destructive expansion in their vision of the Ostland. As the tide of events turned in the East, Hitler refused to give up the spaces conquered and forbade withdrawal again and again, producing military disasters.”
See: Wochenspruch der NSDAP series, 17 December 1939 Hitler’s quote reads “we are fighting for the Security of our people & for our living space”
See: Stylised map _Das Grossdeutschland in der Zukunft _ “Greater Germany in the future” (1943) Nazi Occupied Eastern Europe depicted as as a settler-colonial territory of Nazis
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Volksdeutschen (ethnic Germans)
The estimated 10-million Volksdeutschen (ethnic Germans) of central- and eastern- Europe were useful prpoganda tools for Nazi Germany. Even before Whermacht troops began their assault on Poland, The German Foreign Office prepared a propoganda offensive. With wildly exagerated accounts of agressions and reports of atrocities against ethnic Polish-Germans by their neighbours. The reconstitution of Poland, following the Treaty of Versailles (1919), made ethnic German minorities of what were ‘Prussian provinces of the German Empire,’ now citizens of the Polish nation state. In September 1939, reports of atrocities against Volksdeutsche accompanied the German invasion of Poland - included were detailed descriptions of rape, dismemberment, and mass slaughter. The “real aggressors,” being, the Poles, Jews, and their allies and backers - presented the Volksdeutschen of Polabd as victims only - and as the only victims.
After Germany occupied western Poland, it established a central registration bureau, called the Deutsche Volksliste, DVL (German People’s List)), whereby Poles of German ethnicity were registered as Volksdeutsche. The German occupiers encouraged such registration, in many cases forcing it or subjecting Poles of German ethnicity to terror assaults if they refused. Those who joined this group were given benefits including better food, as well as a better social status.
The Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle [or VoMi, a Nazi Party agency founded, in 1937, to manage the interests of the Volksdeutsche and responsible the implementation of Nazi Lebensraum, “living-space” policies, see blog post,] organised large-scale looting of property and redistributed goods to the Volksdeutsche. They were given apartments, workshops, farms, furniture, and clothing confiscated from Jews and Poles. In turn, hundreds of thousands of the Volksdeutsche joined the German forces, either willingly or under compulsion.
During WW2, the Polish citizens of German ancestry that identified with the Polish nation faced the dilemma whether to register in the Deutsche Volksliste. Many families had lived in Poland for centuries and more-recent immigrants had arrived over 30 years before the war. They faced the choice of registering and being regarded as traitors by the Poles, or not signing and being treated by the Nazi occupation as traitors to the Germanic race.
Polish Silesian Catholic Church authorities, led by bishop Stanisław Adamski and with agreement from the Polish Government in Exile, advised Poles to sign up to the Volksliste in order to avoid atrocities and mass murder that happened in other parts of the country.
In occupied Poland, Volksdeutscher enjoyed privileges but were subject to conscription, or draft, into the Whermacht. In occupied Pomerania, the Gauleiter of the Danzig-West Prussia region Albert Forster ordered a list of people considered of German ethnicity to be made in 1941. Due to insignificant voluntary registrations by February 1942, Forster made signing the Volksliste mandatory and empowered local authorities to use force and threats to implement the decree. Consequently, the number of signatories rose to almost a million, or about 55% of the 1944 population.
Ethnic German colonisers, resettled into German-annexed and occupied Poland during “Heim ins Reich” action (see my blog post]. The Deutsche Volksliste categorised non-Jewish Poles of German ethnicity into one of four categories: Category I: Persons of German descent committed to the Reich before 1939. Category II: Persons of German descent who had remained passive. Category III: Persons of German descent who had become partly “Polonised”, e.g., through marrying a Polish partner or through working relationships (especially Silesians and Kashubians). Category IV: Persons of German ancestry who had become “Polonised” but were supportive of “Germanisation”.
Volksliste of Category 1 and 2 in the Polish areas annexed by Germany numbered 1-million, and Nos. 3 and 4 numbered 1.7-million. In the General Gouvernement there were another 120,000 Volksdeutsche.
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Gau Ausland [overseas Nazi-party membership]
1925 was an interesting year for postwar Germany. The Weimar Republic was beginning to reap some of the rewards of economic recovery, and the nation was once again assuming a more meaningful role in world affairs. The “spirit of Locarno,” with its arbitration 7-treaties guaranteeing the frontiers of France, Belgium, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, opened the way for Germany’s membership in the League of Nations. Early 1930s also saw steps taken in the direction of searching for peaceful solutions to certain problems in foreign affairs. For example, the first important treaty that Hitler agreed to with Poland on January 26th, 1934 was a 10-year non-aggression pact that added diplomatic prestige for both nations, in reality it hamstrung Poland : in that Poland would not interfere if Germany moved against Austria or Czechoslovakia, and it did not address the smoldering German resentment toward the existence of the “Polish Corridor” [see my Blog Post] that had been created as a result of the 1919 Versailles peace settlement. It also complemented the non-aggression pact concluded by Poland a year and a half earlier, in July 1932, with the USSR
In 1931 the Nazi Party extended its membership to Germans who lived overseas, this class of membership was known as Auslandsorganisation der Nationalsozialistischen Deutschen Arbeiterparte [NSDAP/AO or Gau Ausland]had as its Gaulieter Ernst Bohler. Gau Ausland Poland had only 17-party members, but no organization as Polish members were scattered all over Poland. The other limiting factor was that Gau Ausland only accepted full-German citizens. The Treaty of Versailles had placed millions of people who were former-German citizens into the border territories of Denmark, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, and France, while other thousands were separated from their homeland in Danzig, Memel, and the Saar, but they did nor have access to the NSDAP
So, in Poland, these Polish-Germans, who could not become members of Gau Ausland had to wait till specialised categories were formed for Polish nationals of German Descent the [see my blog post] Volksliste
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