„Völkische Flurbereinigung“ –: Vertreibungen im Nationalsozialismus

Abstract

This essay focuses on the Nazi ethnic and racist policy in Eastern and Western Europe. From the beginning on the Nazi plans for the war against Poland intended to transform huge parts of Polish territory into areas of German settlement – the realization of the Nazi project of Lebensraum in Eastern Europe. Germanization of these areas meant racist differentiation of the local people and different practices of inclusion and exclusion, whether they were classified as German or of German origin, as friendly or hostile Poles or as Jewish. These racist measures had been practiced in Western Europe, too. The context of Nazi ethnic politics was a conceptual shift from nation to Volk, from demos to ethnos since the end of nineteenth century. The coincidence of the definition of people not only an ensemble of citizens but as a cultural, ethnic unit and the rise of biology as a dominant pattern of interpreting human nature made ‘biopolicy’ (Foucault) a common political practice not only in Nazi Germany but all over Europe. What made Nazi ethnic politics unique was the unalterable, exclusionary Anti-Semitism which lead to systematic mass murder and the violent eagerness of the Nazi regime to realize its vision of an ethnically structured ‘New Europe’ in which Germans should rule as a superior race.