I have to admit that I – a native German speaker – was not familiar with the the term "Polabian Slav" before this post and there seems to generally be a more varied terminology for Western Salvs in Germany since I am mainly familiar with the term "Sorbs" (also used officially by the group itself and by the legal framework for minority rights in Germany) and sometimes also Wends.

Anyways, the Sorbs, having a long history in Germany, are still however a comparatively small community with about 60.000 Sorbs in Germany. While there is a historiography dealing with Sorbs during the Third Reich, it is not exactly plentiful. So, here is the broad strokes of what we know:

The Sorbs/Wends were defined by the Nazis as a "Germanic tribe" meaning that they didn't fall into the purview of the discriminatory measures of the Nuremberg laws and similar provisions. In the early days of the regime, the Nazis tried to coopt the Sorbic/Wend institutions for their own purposes. They tried to turn their organization into a National Socialist one and incorporate them into the party structure. This was rejected by Sorbs/Wends and especially the leadership of their political organization, the Lausitzer Volkspartei and the Domowina and credited mainly to Pawoł Nedo, then head of the Domowina.

Nedo is a somewhat ambivalent figure, who in his political career was mainly guided by a burning passion and interest for all things Sorb. Himself part of a Sorb family he basically started modern Sorb linguistics, ethnology, and pedagogy in Germany. This however meant that he tended to work with whatever political power he perceived as supporting Sorb language being taught and culture being preserved. This meant that when the NSDAP made him their official consultant in Sorb questions in the early 30s, he used his influence to get Sorbs to support the Nazi party.

By extension, when the Nazis tried to force a new form of organization onto the Sorbs and in 1937 started trying to incorporate Sorb political and cultural structure into Nazi party structures, Nedo lead Sorbic political resistance to these undertakings and was subsequently imprisoned when the the Domowina was outlawed in 1937. After his brief imprisonment he started contacting the Polish secret service and working against the Nazi regime, which lead to another arrest of Nedo later in the war.

In 1945 he joined the KPD and later the SED in East Germany, where he build the official cultural and political structure of the GDR for Sorbic culture, language and ethnology.

Returning to the Nazis, while Nedo was arrested for his political tendencies and their official sturcutres were dissolved, there was no policy of systematic persecution against them. The Nazis in subsequent years tried basically to "Germanize" them. That included re-naming of people and places, the prohibition on using the Sorb language, especially when holding mass, and generally a prohibition on any political or cultural organizations. The Sorbs were to be "peacefully assimilated into the German Volkskörper" as one Nazi official put it.

This also included the persecution of their intelligentsia. Numbers are not clear but we know of about a dozen cases of Sorb priests, politicians, and activists being imprisoned in Concentration Camps such as Pauline Krautz, a seamstress famous for her Sorb dresses or Alojs Andricki a Sorb priest who opposed the cultural policy of the Nazis.

As for most Srobs, the historian Peter Schurmann of the Sorb institute in Cottbus says that most went along with NS policy accepting losing their names and cultural traditions, so while they weren't systematically persecuted and while individual lives could be good for some Sobrs under the Nazi regime, there is a noticeable pattern of trying to erase their culture and traditions.

Sources:

• Dr. Peter Schurmann: Zur Lösung der „Wendenfrage“ im so genannten Dritten Reich, in „Nowy Casnik“ vom 10.03.2009 (Nr. 10/2009)

• Frank Förster, Die Wendenfrage in der deutschen Ostforschung, 1933 bis 1945.

• Martin Kasper/Jan Solta, Aus Geheimakten nazistischer Wendenpolitik.