Slavs in the Nazi World, 1933-1945

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Bernard Newman remarked in 1948 that Germany had always shown “two faces” toward the east; the Nazi era was no exception. Both in the Third Reich and occupied Eastern Europe, Hitler’s government practiced a ruthless Slavophobia ranging from forced assimilation to persecution and displacement to outright extermination. Yet there were also ways in which the Nazi regime accommodated or collaborated with Slavic peoples, including the recruitment of Eastern Europeans into the Wehrmacht and the persistence of Russian emigrants in the Third Reich.
This interdisciplinary panel presents four papers that each consider an aspect of Nazi Germany’s encounter with people from Slavic backgrounds. Philip Decker investigates the activities, motives, and ultimate fate of Russian fascist organizations in the Third Reich. Nikolas Weyland explores shifting official policies toward the Polish minority in the Ruhr region between 1933 and 1939 and Gestapo investigations into Ruhrpolen denounced for loyalty to Poland after 1939. Bradley Nichols moves the panel’s focus eastward, investigating the “re-Germanization” project initiated by the SS in occupied Poland, which sought to forcibly assimilate “racially valuable” foreign nationals. Finally, Volha Charnysh examines the enduring legacies of the Nazi regime’s presence in Poland, probing how its persecution of Polish Catholicism exercised a long-lasting impact on church attendance and voting patterns. The panel thus aims to contribute to ongoing scholarly debates on Nazi racial policy, the negotiation of political identities in twentieth-century European dictatorships, and the impact of mass killing in Eastern Europe.

Sub Unit

• History: 1900-1945

Chair

• Jan Musekamp, German Historical Institute Warsaw (Poland)

Papers

• 'Shooting a Slingshot at a Battleship': Russian Fascist Parties in the Third Reich - Philip Decker, Princeton U

• Between Two Poles: The Experience of the Ruhrpolen in Nazi Germany - Nikolas Weyland, Harvard U

• Lost Blood Reclaimed: Nazi Germanization between Metropole and Empire - Bradley Nichols, U of Missouri

• Razing the Church: The Enduring Effect of Nazi Repression in Poland - Volha Charnysh, MIT

Discussant

• Omer Bartov, Brown U