"The basic National Socialist objective in those parts [Poland, Belarus, and western Ukraine] marked as future German Lebensraum ('living space') was Germanization - but, as Hitler declared in Mein Kampf, 'of the soil, not the people'" (Hagel, 311).

 

Nazi racial ideology is the culmination of radical 19th and early 20th century views of health, fitness, race, and competition. Robert Paxton characterizes it as "built upon the purifying impulses of the twentieth-century medicine and public health, the eugenicists’ eagerness to weed out the unfit and the unclean, an aesthetic of the perfect body, and a scientific rationality that rejected moral criteria as irrelevant" (Paxton, 13). Leading Nazis had come to accept certain romanticized racial views of a 'Nordic' or 'Aryan' race, and believed that the well-being of the German national community (Volksgemeinschaft) depended upon acquiring a larger empire for the German people. Nazi ideology asserted the superiority of the 'Aryan' or Germanic peoples with scientific racism. The Nazis saw racial hygiene as instrumental in protecting the health of the population: practicing eugenics, enforcing sterilization, and encouraging selective breeding were to the benefit of the individual and the larger society. The pure 'Aryan' individual "was thus assumed to be racially superior" (Moeller, 13), and the state encouraged Germans to "see themselves as enlightened colonizers, ready to establish order, create a new home for Germans, and to seize territory that had been 'mismanaged' by the Poles" (Moeller, 18).

 

To Nazi ideology that stressed the unity and purity of the national community, and sought to cleanse society of 'weak' or 'anti-social' elements (mentally unfit, disabled, homosexuals, political dissidents, Jews, Gypsies, etc.) within its territory, and to rescue and reunite the millions of ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) who were living outside the Reich throughout Eastern Europe. Some of these communities of ethnic Germans, such as the Banat Germans in the Balkans and the Volga Germans in Russia, had left Germany in the Middle Ages; others had been forcibly removed from the Reich following Versailles (Germans in Polish Silesia, Posen, the Corridor, and the Free City of Danzig) or were Germans unjustly stranded outside the Reich as the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed (Sudeten Germans, Austrians), despite pan-German appeals.

 

After Germany's defeat in the Great War, German and Polish paramilitaries had fought for control of Silesia from 1919-1921. In the 1930s, Germans in the Czech Republic, influenced by nationalist leadership, agitated for closer ties with Nazi Germany. By 1938-1939, Germans welcomed the incorporation of the Sudetenland into Germany, and saw the conquest of Poland as fait accompli given the separation of East Prussia from Germany proper, and the German character of Danzig. War of aggression was necessary to right the wrongs imposed on Germany. "Many German civilians followed the army into Poland, encouraged by the state to see themselves as enlightened colonizers, ready to establish order, create a new home for Germans, and to seize territory that had been 'mismanaged' by the Poles" (Moeller, 17-18).

 

The German invasion of the Soviet Union represented the culmination of the 19th-century German desire for a 'push east' (Drang nach Osten). At last, Germans everywhere would be reunited. The suffering and the cost on the Slavs affected was not important to Nazi officials. What was important was to bring the Volkdeutsche back home; Heim ins Reich. "In the Soviet Union, the Third Reich sought to create... an empire within Europe, a space into which a 'people without space,' the Aryans crammed into Germany, could expand. From the start, the Nazis viewed the war in the east as a race war, aimed at eliminating racially inferior Slavs and Jews in order to open up a new homeland for the racially superior Aryans" (Moeller, 18).

The question you are asking has been asked, in variation, many times before. /u/commiespaceinvader has answered several of these questions related to Nazi ideology and the Slavs in depth:

  *Why did Hitler view Slavs as racially inferior?

  *Why is the treatment of Slavs under Generalplan Ost considered different from the Holocaust?

  *How did Slavs fit in under Nazi racial ideology?

 

References

Hagen, William W. German History in Modern Times. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Moeller, Robert G. The Nazi State and German Society. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2010.

Paxton, Robert O. The Anatomy of Fascism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.

 

Additional Bibliography

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. New York: Verso, 2016.

Burleigh, Michael and Wolfgang Wippermann. The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Fritzsche, Peter. Germans into Nazis. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Mann, Michael. Fascists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.