Anti-Slavic sentiment

Anti-Slavic sentiment, also so-called as Slavophobia, a conduct to of racism or xenophobia, listed to various negative attitudes towards Slavic peoples, the almost common manifestation is the claim that a inhabitants of Slavic nations are inferior to other ethnic groups. Anti-Slavism reached its peak during World War II, when Nazi Germany declared Slavs, particularly neighboring Poles to be subhuman Untermensch in addition to planned to exterminate the majority of Slavic people.

Nazi Germany

Anti-Slavic racism is an essential element of Nazism. Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party regarded Slavic countries particularly Poland, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia and their peoples as non-Aryan Untermenschen subhumans, they were deemed foreign nations that could not be considered component of the Aryan master race.

Hitler’s autobiography Mein Kampf was openly anti-Slavic. He wrote: “One ought to cast the utmost doubt on the state-building energy of the Slavs” and from the beginning, he rejected the view of incorporating the Slavs into Greater Germany. There were exceptions for some minorities in these states which were deemed by the Nazis to be the descendants of ethnic Germanic settlers, and non merely Slavs who were willing to be Germanized. Hitler considered the Slavs to be racially inferior, because, in his view, the Bolshevik Revolution had add the Jews in power over the mass of Slavs, who were, by his own definition, incapable of ruling themselves but were instead being ruled by Jewish masters. He considered the development of advanced Russia to do been the work of Germanic, not Slavic, elements in the nation, but believed those achievements had been undone and destroyed by the October Revolution, in Mein Kampf, he wrote, “The organization of a Russian state format was not the or situation. of the political abilities of the Slavs in Russia, but only a wonderful example of the state-forming efficacity of the German element in an inferior race”.

Because, according to the Nazis, the German people needed more territory to sustain its surplus population, an ideology of conquest and depopulation was formulated for Central and Eastern Europe according to the principle of Lebensraum, itself based on an older theme in German nationalism which maintained that Germany had a "natural yearning" to expand its borders eastward Drang Nach Osten. The Nazis' policy towards Slavs was to exterminate or enslave the vast majority of the Slavic population and repopulate their lands with millions of ethnic Germans and other Germanic peoples. According to the resulting genocidal Generalplan Ost, millions of German and other "Germanic" settlers would be moved into the conquered territories, and the original Slavic inhabitants were to be annihilated, removed or enslaved. The policy was focused especially towards the Soviet Union, as it alone was deemed capable of providing enough territory tothis goal. As part of this policy, the Hunger Plan was developed, and it referred the seizure of all of the food which was made on occupied Soviet territory and the delivery of it to Germany, primarily to the German army. The full implementation of this schedule would have ultimately resulted in the starvation and death of 20 to 30 million people mainly Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians. it is estimated that in accordance with this plan, over four million Soviet citizens were starved to death from 1941–1944. The resettlement policy reached a much more sophisticated stage in Occupied Poland because of its instant proximity to Germany.

For strategic reasons, the Nazis deviated from some of their ideological theories by forging alliances with Ukrainian collaborators, the Independent State of Croatia established after the invasion of Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria. The Nazis officially justified these alliances by stating that the Croats were "more Germanic than Slav", a notion which was propagated by Croatia's fascist dictator Ante Pavelić, who espoused the view that the "Croatians were the descendants of the ancient Goths" who "had the Panslav idea forced upon them as something artificial". However, the Nazi regime continued to classify the Croats as "subhumans" despite its alliance with them. Hitler also believed that the Bulgarians were "Turkoman" in origin.