Research efforts, particularly in Poland, into German occupation policy then shifted in the subsequent period to its even more violently imposed aspects and took three fundamental hypotheses as their basis. The first one claimed that “the German imperialists . . . had detailed plans for expansion and conquest and tried to implement them consistently,” with examples ranging from the preinvasion compilation of extensive wanted-person lists to detailed geopolitical plans in the form of the “General Plan for the East” (“Generalplan Ost”).46 The second hypothesis, because of the “General Plan for the East” and the great number of persons murdered, assumed that German policy aimed at the genocide of the Polish people and of Slavic populations in general who stood in the way of the dystopian vision of a “German Lebensraum” in the east. Borrowing from the Nuremberg war-crimes trials and particularly from Raphael Lemkin’s definition of genocide, but generally without mentioning him, many scholarly studies spoke of a “direct annihilation” and an “indirect annihilation” of the Polish people, citing the targeted liquidation of its elites, the mass deportations, and the measures for the repression of Polish culture.47 In that line of reasoning, it was not uncommon to additionally claim that those measures were even more urgent for the German occupiers than, for example, their anti-Jewish goals.48 In the studies following the third hypothesis, insights into the functional aspects of Nazi population policy were frequently and unquestioningly placed alongside the claim that they had been predetermined by the racist ideology of the occupiers and had been guided by “National Socialist race theory.”49 In these studies, theoretical ideology and practical interest stand alongside one another, but their interrelationship is not explained and remains unexplored.
The results of my investigation diverge from these hypotheses, sometimes considerably. As I will show, it is hard to identify any uniform Germanization policy, as the SS apparatus was unable—and the Reich Interior Ministry even less so—to maintain control over the wayward powers on the periphery and the competing power blocs in Berlin or to steer them onto prescribed paths. In this regard, my study is more inspired by Czesław Madajczyk’s work Die Okkupationspolitik Nazideutschlands in Polen 1939–1945 (Nazi Germany’s occupation policy in Poland, 1939–1945), still considered a standard reference today.50 To a much greater degree than most Polish researchers before him, he investigates not only the relevant Berlin head offices, but also their interactions with regional and local offices. As Madajczyk later stated in a personal rereading of his research, it was this approach that first allowed him to unravel the “discrepancy between the program formulated in advance . . . and the modifications forced on it by the actual conditions of war.”51 Nonetheless, Madajczyk’s research also has gaps, with only fragmentary analysis of the roles played by the UWZ and the DVL.
It was after the implosion of Eastern Europe’s states that the wider research field experienced a quantum leap. The reasons are easy to identify, ranging from the so-called “deideologization” of historiography in a post–Cold War world to the greater accessibility of Eastern Europe’s archives.52 It is often the more narrowly focused in-depth studies that have proved the most innovative, with investigations of specific policy areas leading to more generalized conclusions about Nazi rule.
Of particular importance for me have been—first—investigations of the role played by Germany’s intelligentsia and scholarship in formulating plans. In this regard, particular praise goes to Götz Aly and Susanne Heim, whose book Architects of Annihilation (originally published as Vordenker der Vernichtung in 1991) not only highlighted a “new” class of perpetrators, but also contextualized the regime’s decision to annihilate the Jews within the wider framework of Nazi population policy, which itself was no longer treated as merely an addendum to occupation policy, but instead put at the focus of investigation.53 But the question of how important scholarly advice was in shaping policy, as explored in that and later studies, remains largely unresolved.54 On this point, I will argue more cautiously, because scholarship was often requested only when the purpose was to legitimize decisions already made.
Tied closely to those investigations are—second—studies that, while focusing on the Shoah, depart from earlier approaches that tried to explain it solely as a dynamic of antisemitic violence and embed it instead within the dystopian project of expanding “German Lebensraum.” Worth noting here is another work by Götz Aly, which spotlights the relationship between wider population planning and the annihilation of the Jews, with the faltering program of deportation and resettlement then made responsible for the decision to commit mass murder.55 Although Aly may have overstated the causative connection, he nonetheless achieved an important advance in uncovering the radicalizing influence of deportation and resettlement policies.56
The detailed demonstration of the importance of Nazi population policy has had a decisive impact, with—third—most published studies in the last two decades on the German occupation of Eastern Europe likewise devoting more attention to that aspect. The effect can be seen first and foremost in scholarly investigations of the various SS main offices (SS-Hauptämter, the top-level departments of the SS) that were directly involved in Germanization policy as a result of Himmler’s parallel roles as the RKFDV and as overall head of the SS. Noteworthy examples here include the study by Valdis O. Lumans on VoMi, and especially Michael Wildt’s study of the Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt), which had a major role in the planning of population policy.57 Building on Wildt, who has already highlighted the importance of the Reich Security Main Office in the expulsion of local “Fremdvölkische” and the selection of the “Volksdeutsche,” I will demonstrate for the first time that it also played an important role in the wrangling over the DVL. Another gap in research was addressed by Isabel Heinemann with her investigation of RuSHA; although I think she overestimated its importance, for it did not in fact become the “coordination headquarters for the settlement and race policy of the SS” or the “key institution” of Nazi population policy.58 Instead, the marginalization of all racially oriented selection processes would also push RuSHA to the sidelines.
Also proving helpful are—fourth—regionally focused studies that show, to a greater or lesser degree, the close connection between Nazi Germany’s racist plans for the east, its resettlement policy, and its mass murder of Jews. While Czesław Łuczak, for example, fails to examine more closely the difference between the regime’s racial theories and its actual policies on the ground, taking instead the former as an explanation for the latter and thus mistakenly claiming that the selection practices of the DVL were oriented toward the “racial criteria applicable to Germans in the Reich,” Sybille Steinbacher takes this complicated relationship as a defining topic.59 For her, it is clear that the German occupation’s selection and deportation policies certainly did not represent some strange “wartime experiment by irrational fantasists,” but instead must be analyzed as an undertaking “founded upon the concrete interests of power politics.”60 In all these studies, the central roles played by the UWZ and the DVL