Were "Aryan featured" Russian POWs treated better than their fellow countrymen?

by J2quared
hamiltonkg

Aryan-featured or otherwise, Hitler's racial ideology as laid out in Mein Kampf and developed elsewhere considered all Slavs (not just Russians, but Poles, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Czechs, etc.) to be just about the lowest of the low that evolutionary Darwinism had produced. The answer to your question is a resounding no.

From pp. 951, 960:

[T]he organization of [the] Russian State structure was not the result of Russian Slavdom's State-political capacity, but rather a wonderful example of the State-building activity of the German element in an inferior race. Thus have innumerable mighty empires of the earth been created. Inferior nations with German organizers and lords as leaders have more than once expanded into powerful State structures, and endured as long as the racial nucleus of the constructive State-race maintained itself. For centuries Russia drew nourishment from this Germanic nucleus of its superior strata of leaders. [...]

[T]he fact of the conclusion of a treaty with Russia embodies the declaration of the next war. Its outcome would be the end of Germany.

In addition, there is the following: the present rulers of Russia do not at all think of entering an alliance sincerely or of keeping one. We must never forget that the regents of present-day Russia are common bloodstained criminals [...] Nor must we forget that these rulers belong to a nation which combines a rare mixture of bestial horror with an inconceivable gift of lying, and today more than ever before believes itself called upon to impose its bloody oppression on the whole world.

We must not forget that the international Jew, who today rules Russia absolutely, sees in Germany, not an ally, but a State marked for the same destiny. But one does not conclude a treaty with someone whose sole interest is the destruction of his partner.^([)^(1)^(])

The poetic irony of Hitler predicting a treaty with the Soviet Union being the harbinger of German decline and then signing a treaty which has come to be remembered as signaling the kernel of German decline aside, you can see above that Hitler quite virulently hated the Slavic races, whom he accused throughout his aforementioned opus of 'Slavifiying' Austria and other 'superior nations' via upward osmosis, thus degrading the purity of the more powerful Aryan races.

In Hitler's eyes, the Slavs were a people who had only come about because stronger races (like the Germans, Mongols, Tatars, etc.) had retreated from certain areas they had inhabited after centuries of subjugating these people and thus allowing untermenschen like the Slavs to come about as independent nations of people in the first place.

As such, the idea that Nazi Germany would enforce any kind of special treatment policy for a sort-of Germanic-looking Red Army soldier is not realistic for many reasons:

  • They were either Slavs or 'Asiatics,' and therefore, subhumans.
  • They were the soldiers of Judeo-Bolshevism, which represented an existential threat to National-Socialism.
  • Pragmatism (whom on the frontline do you task with finding these Aryans among the subhumans? What supplies do you have to provide for them? This is the weakest of the reasons for not enacting some kind of policy similar to the one you're asking about in the Nazi mind-- they showed themselves more than willing to get on with killing Jews and others using scarce resources when such materiel was needed at the front.)

I can't explicitly tell you that it never happened, I'm sorry. The Nazis were vaguely in cahoots with fascist organizations like the Russian Fascist Party, but this was an emigre movement based in Manchuria-- they weren't likely to have ended up POWs on the Eastern Front during Operation Barbarossa. Though, an interesting phenomena worth noting: the Great Fatherland War (how the Eastern Front conflict is known in Russia), did not galvinize fascist emigre support for Hitler-- it actually caused a rupture within the party:

The long-desired German attack on the Soviet Union did not have the expected effect, but rather the opposite. Party membership [...] dropped sharply in light of Russia’s ordeal, because many former followers and sympathizers felt that their loyalty should lay with their fatherland despite the communist regime.^([)^(2)^(])

The Russian-translation of Mein Kampf didn't even bother to remove the anti-Slavic rhetoric upon its original printing-- the RFP had to do it themselves.^([)^(3)^(])

There may exist a story that I don't know about somewhere of a Baltic German who was living in the Soviet Union who fell into the hands of the Wehrmacht as a POW and was therefore treated better in a single case, but any kind of formalized or widespread 'better' treatment of Aryan-featured Soviet POWs was not common (also remember that 'Aryan' was more than a phenotype-- to Hitler, 'Aryan' identity had genetic implications as well).

Many others have answered similar questions which touch on the topics addressed by this question, but this one is a bit different so I wanted to provide an explicit answer myself. The real meat of the underlying issue has been discussed in great detail by the following authors: