Lost Blood Reclaimed: Nazi Germanization between Metropole and Empire

• In Event: Slavs in the Nazi World, 1933-1945

Abstract

This paper will examine the so-called Re-Germanization Procedure – an SS-run demographic initiative which sent some 50,000 “racially valuable” foreign nationals to live with German families in the heart of the Third Reich between 1940 and 1945. The first half of the paper will focus on everyday relations between “re-Germanizable” Poles and their native hosts, with an eye toward teasing out the dynamics of forced assimilation on the home front. The second half will detail the broader impact of the program on Nazi policymaking in the occupied and annexed territories of Slavic-speaking Eastern Europe.

Author

• Bradley Nichols, U of Missouri