The “gigantic cake” was to be divided into four Reich commissariats (Eastland, Ukraine, Caucasia, and Moscovia). Alfred Rosenberg, the former leading ideologue of the party, who in recent years had been repeatedly outmaneuvered and who had been knocking around without employment before his significant appointment as Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, vainly urged partitioning of the Soviet Union into politically autonomous nationalities. Hitler rejected the concept because he considered it dangerous to shape new political units on an ethnic or historical basis. Everything depended, he said, on “avoiding any political organization and thus keeping the members of these nationalities on the lowest possible cultural level.” He was even prepared, he declared, to grant these peoples a certain degree of individual liberty, because all liberty had a reactionary effect, since it negated the supreme form of human organization, the state.
With unflagging enthusiasm, he drafted the details of his imperial daydream: Germanic masters and Slavic serfs together filling the vast Eastern spaces with bustling activity, though with the racially based class distinctions emphasized vividly in every conceivable way. Before his mind’s eye arose German cities with gleaming governors’ palaces, towering cultural and administrative structures, while the settlements of the native population would deliberately be kept inconspicuous. These were by no means to be “in any way refurbished let alone embellished.” Even the “mud stucco” or the thatched roofs would not be permitted to show uniformity, he said.
He insisted on a low educational standard for the Slavic populace. They would be allowed to learn the meaning of traffic signs, the name of the capital of the Reich, and a few words of German, but no arithmetic, for example. General Jodi, he added on one occasion, had quite rightly objected to a poster in Ukrainian forbidding crossing of a railroad embankment, for “it can well be a matter of indifference to us whether a native more or less is run over.” In that facetious Machiavellianism that he fell into in relaxed moments, he added that it would be best to teach the Slavic nationals “nothing but a sign language” and use the radio to present them with “what they can digest: music without limit…. For gay music promotes joy in labor.” He regarded all concern for the health of the subject populations, all hygiene, as “sheer madness,” and recommended spreading the superstition “that inoculation and so on is a very dangerous business.” When he discovered in a memorandum a proposal to ban the sale and use of abortifacients in the occupied eastern territories, he became wildly excited and declared that he would “personally shoot down… the idiots” responsible for this idea. On the contrary, he went on, it seemed to him essential to promote a “vigorous business in contraceptives.” And becoming facetious once more: “But I supposed we’d have to get the help of the Jews to get such things into lively circulation.”79
A system of broad roads and lines of communication (“the beginning of all civilization”) was to make the territory governable and help to open up its natural resources. One of Hitler’s favorite ideas was a railroad to the Donetz Basin with a track width of twelve feet, on which two-story trains would travel back and forth at a speed of 125 miles per hour. At the intersections of the principal arteries of communication there would arise cities conceived as great military bases. These would hold sizable units of mobile military forces, and would be secured at a radius of twenty or twenty-five miles by a “circuit of beautiful villages” with a well-armed rural population. In a memorandum dated November 26, 1940, Himmler had already issued guidelines for rural reconstruction in the conquered Polish territories; he fixed the social hierarchy among the German settlers, from hired man to the representative of an “autochthonous leadership,” with just as much pendantry as the layout of the villages and farms (“wall thicknesses… less than 38 centimeters will not be permitted”). Above all the “provision for greenery” was to help express the German tribes’ inherited love of trees, shrubs, and flowers and give the landscape as a whole a German imprint. The planting of village oaks and village lindens was therefore just as important as bringing “the electric lines… as inconspicuously as possible up to the buildings.” The same romantic idyl was also planned for the rural defense areas of Russia: small, well-garrisoned settlements in the midst of hostile surroundings would preserve the primal situation of the permanent fight for survival, and would thus prove their viability.
Meanwhile, however, it soon became apparent that the vastness of the area presented something of a problem. Those who had been primarily designated as new settlers were the Volksdeutsche, the Germans living in the countries of southeastern Europe and overseas, and also decorated soldiers, sailors, or airmen, and members of the SS. The East belonged to the SS, declared Otto Hofmann, chief of the Race and Settlement Office of the SS. According to the calculations of the planners, however, there were no more than 5 million of such settlers. Assuming extremely favorable circumstances, according to a memorandum dated April 27, 1942, “we can count on a figure of eight million Germans in these areas in about thirty years.”80 For the first time a certain degree of agorphobia seemed to be current.
A whole list of measures was devised to overcome this unexpected dilemma. Thus someone thought of “reawakening in the German people the urge toward settlement in the East” and also allowing the racially valuable neighboring peoples to participate in the colonization. A memorandum of Rosenberg’s considered not only the settlement of Danes, Norwegians, and Dutch, but “after the victorious termination of the war also Englishmen.” All would be “members of the Reich,” Hitler declared, and boasted that this procedure would have a significance similar to the inclusion of several German states in the Customs Union a hundred years earlier. Simultaneously, according to the recommendations of a memorandum issued by Rosenberg’s Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, 31 million of the 45 million inhabitants of western Russia were to be expatriated or killed. Furthermore, it was intended to introduce rival sects and, if this measure should prove insufficient, it would be only necessary, Hitler suggested, “to drop a few bombs on their cities and the job will be done.”
The greatest hopes were placed in the measures for recovery of good blood. Hitler compared his activity during the so-called time of struggle with the effect of a magnet that had drawn all the metallic element, all the iron content, of the German people. “Now we must also proceed in this way in building the new Reich,” he declared at the beginning of February, 1942, speaking in the Führer’s headquarters. “Wherever Germanic blood is to be found anywhere in the world, we will take what is good to ourselves. With what the others have left they will be unable to oppose the Germanic Empire.” In Poland “race commissions” had investigated the “Germanism” of large numbers of selected persons and in some cases brought them back to Germany for Umvolkung (restoration to the race), whether they wished it or not. Minors in particular were taken. Henceforth, Himmler declared at the evening meal in Rastenburg, they would institute annual “fishing parties for bloodlines,” throughout France, and he proposed that the children taken should be removed to German boarding schools in order to teach them the accidental nature of their French nationality and make them conscious of their Germanic blood. “For we will recuperate the good blood, which we can make use of, and incorporate it among us, or else, gentlemen—you may call this cruel, but nature is cruel—we will destroy this blood.”81