Keywords
Second World War
Nazi racial policy
Generalplan Ost
German People's List
German settlement policy
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Abstract
The population transfers carried out or planned by the Nazis during the Second World War constitute one of the most massive and singular phenomena in modern history. A comparative analysis of their foundations, typologies, and methods across the whole of occupied Europe – including not only transfers actually carried out but also projects that remained unrealized – had not yet been elaborated in the historical literature.
This article analyzes the general principles and character of Nazi population transfers, distinguishing the premises of these transfers (general policy, racial, military, police, and post-war strategy), the forms of Aussiedlung, Ausweisung, and Verdrängung, and the three phases of the policy (1939-1941, 1941-1943, 1943-1945) as defined by R. L. Koehl and refined by the author.
The analysis draws on German archival sources, publications concerning Generalplan Ost, R. L. Koehl's RKFDV: German Resettlement and Population Policy 1939-1945, V. Král's studies, and works by Polish and other historians on Nazi occupation policies.
The analysis shows that Nazi transfers operated according to five types of premises: territorial revisionism, racial ideology, military necessity, police terror, and post-war strategy. In the West, evacuations retained a traditionally territorial-revisionist character; in the East, they formed part of an Entvölkerungspolitik aimed at clearing the Lebensraum of non-Germanic peoples by combining deportations, biological extermination, and colonization. The Deutsche Volksliste and Generalplan Ost were the essential instruments of racial restructuring of Europe. The factors impeding these operations included military necessities, organized resistance, and the shortage of German settlers. The author proposes a revised periodization and identifies non-typical methods employed: racial screening of deportees, Wehrbauer colonization, and the unrealized project of settling potentially Germanizable non-German populations in the East.
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