Slavophobia

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Hostility to Slavs (also: anti-Slavism ) is a form of racism . It is directed either against all Slavs or against individual Slavic peoples, if they are perceived as part of a supposed Slavic race . In Germany, hostility to Slavs played an important role in the Wilhelmine era , but especially in the ideology of National Socialism .

Hostility to Slavs in the German Empire

While Gobineau's racist attempt on the inequality of human races contained no references to German nationalism , this element was added by Houston Stewart Chamberlain's Foundations of the Nineteenth Century , who had got to know Gobineau's essay through the mediation of Cosima Wagner and was also anti-Semitic . Chamberlain's writing met with broad reception in Germany and shaped German nationalism at the time of Wilhelminism . The Germanic peoples were portrayed as the most highly developed human race and Germany as their natural leading power. This was accompanied by a deterioration in the image of the Slavic neighboring peoples, especially Poles and Russians (see Russia picture ). Here played Baltic German publicists like Paul Rohrbach and Theodor Schiemann who had good contacts with Wilhelm II. , Decreed and military leaders a major role. They changed the Prussian-German elite's previously rather positive image of Russia. Russia was described by them on the one hand as a threatening colossus, on the other hand as culturally and civilizationally backward , it was considered the leading power of the Slavic world, with which Germany as a Germanic leading power would sooner or later have to fight. Wilhelm II and the Prussian Chief of Staff Helmut Graf von Moltke also adopted this point of view .

Due to the partitions of Poland , parts of what was then Prussia were inhabited by Poles . Since the 1850s this led to an anti-Polish thrust of growing German nationalism . The writer Gustav Freytag articulated these anti-Polish prejudices in his novel “ Soll und haben ” published in 1854 .

“There is no other race that has so little what it takes to advance and to acquire humanity and education through capital than the Slavic race. What the people there, in idleness, have brought together under the pressure of the raw masses, they waste in fantastic games. In our country only privileged individual classes do such a thing, and the nation can endure it if necessary. Over there, the privileged claim to represent the people. As if nobles and serf peasants could form a state! They are no more authorized than these people, sparrows on the trees. The only bad thing is that we have to pay for their unfortunate attempts with our money. "

- Gustav Freytag : in his novel: Debit and credit

Later, the hostility towards Poland was intensified by the agitation of the " Deutscher Ostmarkenverein " founded in 1894 (association for the promotion of Germanness in the Ostmarken). This also influenced parts of the liberal bourgeoisie, as the sociologist Max Weber claimed in his inaugural lecture in 1895:

“The Polish smallholder is gaining ground because, to a certain extent, he is eating the grass off the ground, not in spite of, but rather because of his low-lying physical and mental habits. ... Human history knows the victory of lower developed types of humanity and the withering of high blossoms of the spiritual and emotional life when the human community, which was their bearer, lost the ability to adapt to their living conditions, be it their social organization or their racial qualities because of. ... the interest in the inhibition of the Slavic tide calls for the transfer of significant parts of the eastern soil into the hands of the state "

Especially the Pan-German Association under its chairman Heinrich Claß , of which Max Weber was also a member at times, propagated the “racial” difference between Germans and Slavs, which sooner or later would have to lead to battle. Against this background, the expected war between Germany and Russia was seen as a " race war (...) of the Germanic peoples against the cocky Slavs" (Wilhelm II. 1912).

The future Czechoslovak President Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk was an attentive observer of these events.He registered all the statements condescendingly denying the Slavs their right to national self-determination as allegedly incapable of statehood, as there were political publicists in the form of Friedrich List , Paul de Lagarde and Constantin Frantz , who propagated a border colonization extension of the German sphere of influence to Poland and across the Danube to its confluence with the Black Sea. For Masaryk, the situation in which " Pan-Germanism organized itself as the philosophy and politics of the Germans" was polemical: "Lagarde is his leading philosophical and theological spokesman, Treitschke his historian, Kaiser Wilhelm his politician."

Hostility to Slavs in National Socialism

The anti-Slavism popularized in Wilhelminism was picked up by the National Socialists and developed into an important part of their ideology. During the Second World War , the involved Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce (ERR) of the first in the wake West campaign on art and culture robbery the identified by the Nazi regime enemies . In September 1940, Alfred Rosenberg , Nazi chief ideologist and head of the ERR, announced Reich treasurer Franz Xaver Schwarz, among others, that a large Slavic library from France would be added to his " high school ". The conquest of " Lebensraum in the east ", a central point of Hitler's program, was to be done at the expense of the Slavic peoples, who were defined as members of a "minor race". In 1928, Adolf Hitler wrote in his “ Second Book ” that the National Socialist state had to “encapsulate these racially alien elements ... or he had to remove them at all.” Heinrich Himmler and the SS in particular interpreted the medieval conflicts between Feudal lords of German, Polish and Russian tongues as the “ racial struggle ” of the Teutons against the Slavs, Heinrich Himmler believed himself to be the reincarnation of the Saxon King Heinrich I, who was victorious against the Slavs . This shaped Germany's war planning and warfare in Eastern Europe in the Second World War. A few days before the attack on Poland , Hitler declared in a speech to generals:

“The aim is to eliminate living forces. When the war begins and is waged, it is not a question of the law, but of victory ... brutal action, extreme severity. "

After the German conquest, the Polish intelligentsia was murdered by task forces of the SD under the command of Reinhard Heydrich , and the Poles “not capable of Germanization ” were expelled to the “ General Government” , where they were to be available to the Germans as migrant workers. Before the attack on the Soviet Union , several orders were issued, according to which the population in the conquered areas was completely without rights. a. the “ Barbarossa Decree ” of May 13, 1941, which permitted collective retaliation against the civilian population, and the “ Commissar 's Order ” , according to which captured political officers of the Red Army were to be shot immediately. Newsreels showed pictures of Russians who contemporary Germans perceived as "ugly, underdeveloped, ... faces like monkeys, with huge noses, ragged, dirty". The Soviet prisoners of war were grouped in assembly camps and often starved to death; of 5.7 million prisoners, 3.3 million died mostly of starvation or illness. The Wehrmacht was supposed to be able to feed itself from the country, the starvation of the civilian population was accepted in the siege of Leningrad . As a result, several hundred thousand people died of starvation in the winter of 1942/43 in the Ukrainian city ​​of Kharkiv . The “ General Plan East ” passed in 1941 envisaged the expulsion of 31 million “ foreigners ” as the first stage of the Germanization of Russia. The Slavic population should be kept away from education and medical care and only supplied with schnapps, tobacco and contraceptives to prevent their reproduction. Who was able to work, was often to forced labor into the "Empire" deported . In internal conflicts apparatus NS sat in the trailer of a consistently implemented at the plundering and repression policy as Himmler, Goering and the " Reich Commissioner for the Ukraine " Erich Koch against Alfred Rosenberg by, now as head of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories goal sought to make satellite states out of the conquered areas. The National Socialist terror drove many Slavs, who initially welcomed the invasion of the Wehrmacht as liberation from communism, into communist or nationalist partisan resistance .

Hostility to Slavs in other countries

Italy

Many Italian irredentists had a strong hatred of Slavs since the beginning of the 20th century, as there were still "unredeemed" areas with Slavic populations under Habsburg rule for the formation of the nation state. The hatred of the Slavs was deepened by the First World War in which the Slavs fought for Austria-Hungary against Italy. The fact that Italy was only awarded parts of Dalmatia at the end of the war increased the hatred. The Italian fascists then raised the "slavofobia" to their program. In the so-called border country fascism, they proceeded with murders, looting and arson against exponents and institutions of the Slavic population. Shortly after Mussolini came to power, a forced assimilation was carried out under the sign of the "italianizzazione forzata" , which, according to Aram Mattioli, resembled a cultural genocide. With the annexation of the rest of Dalmatia, an ethnic cleansing was carried out in favor of the settlement of Italians in the context of the fight against partisans, by interning parts of the local population in the concentration camps Rab , Molat and Gonars .

Austria

The condemnation of the Beneš decrees made by Austrian politicians and the media without taking their previous history into account is considered by some critics of Austrian politics to be anti-Slav.

literature

  • Gustav Freytag : Debit and Credit , 1854.
  • Uwe-K. Ketelsen: The colonial discourse and the opening of the European East in the German novel , in: Mihran Dabag , Horst founder (ed.): Colonialism, colonial discourse and genocide , Fink, Paderborn / Munich 2004, ISBN 3-7705-4070-0 , p 81-82.
  • Giovanni Libretti: The Presumed Antislavism of Engels . In: "Contributions to Marx-Engels Research" 1998, pp. 191–202 ( online ).
  • Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk : The New Europe. Der Slavische Standpunkt , Berlin 1991, ISBN 3-353-00809-8 (After the Czech edition of 1920, the German one appeared in 1922).
  • Aram Mattioli: The fascist Italy , in: Micha Brumlik et al.: Legal injustice - Racist law in the 20th century , 2005, ISBN 3-593-37873-6 , pp. 159-161.
  • Helmut Schaller: National Socialism and the Slavic World , Pustet, Regensburg, 2002, ISBN 3-7917-1820-7 .
  • Max Weber , Inaugural Address, 1895.
  • Massimo Ferrari-Zumbini: Great Migration and Anti-Slavism: Negative Images of Eastern Jews in the Empire . In: “Yearbook for Research on Antisemitism” 1994, 3, pp. 194–226 ( online ).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Michael Lausberg: The resonance of the Gobinist concept of race in Wagner and Nietzsche . In TABVLA RASA , issue 38, October 2009.
  2. ^ Fritz Fischer : War of Illusions , Düsseldorf 1998, ISBN 3770-0091-34 , pp. 62, 78 ff.
  3. ↑ Martin Broszat : Two hundred years of German politics in Poland , Frankfurt 1972, ISBN 3518-3657-46 , pp. 87 ff.
  4. ^ Fritz Fischer: Hitler was not an industrial accident , Munich 1992, ISBN 3406-3405-12 , p. 229
  5. ↑ Fischer: War of Illusions , p. 270
  6. ^ Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk: The new Europe . Der Slavische Standpunkt , Berlin 1991, pp. 10-26. (After the Czech edition of 1920, the German one appeared in 1922.)
  7. ↑ Masaryk (1991), p. 13.
  8. ^ Ernst Piper : Alfred Rosenberg. Hitler's chief ideologist. Munich 2005, p. 487, ISBN 3-89667-148-0 . (Source: Letter from Rosenberg to Schwarz dated September 18, 1940; IMG, Vol. XXV, p. 181 f. = Doc. 090-PS.)
  9. ^ Eberhard Aleff: The Third Reich , Hanover 1973, ISBN 3771-6202-01 , p. 130
  10. ↑ Aleff 1973, p. 70
  11. ↑ Aleff 1973, p. 174
  12. ↑ Laurence Rees: Hitler's War in the East , Munich 2001, ISBN 3453-1884-62 , pp. 37, 58 (quote)
  13. ↑ Rees 2001, pp. 73, 117
  14. ↑ Aleff 1973, p. 218, Rees 2001, p. 105, 112
  15. ↑ Rees 2001, p. 106 f., Aleff 1973, p. 217
  16. ↑ Rees 2001, p. 113 ff
  17. ^ Aram Mattioli: Fascist Italy - an unknown apartheid regime . Published in: Legal Injustice - Racist Law in the 20th Century . Ed .: Micha Brumlik, Susanne Meinl and Werner Renz, Campus 2005, ISBN 3-593-37873-6 , p. 157 ff.
  18. ^ Pamela Ballinger: History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans . Princeton University Press 2003, ISBN 0-691-08696-6 , p. 139
  19. ^ Radio Praha: Beppe Bayerl on Benes' decrees and anti-Slavism in Austria

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