Did German occupation policies in Eastern Europe prefigure those of the Third Reich?

Viewpoint: Yes. The Nazis, who added genocidal racism to the mix, perpetuated German views of the East and its peoples as fields of conquest and development.

Viewpoint: No. The German occupation of Eastern Europe was concerned initially with providing administration and security and subsequently with reorganizing the conquered territory along traditional imperialist lines.

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As the Eastern Front stabilized after the great battles of 1915, grandiose projects of exploitation increasingly appeared in memoranda at the highest levels of the government and the army. A Central European customs union, new thrones in the Baltic states and Poland, German colonization of lands vacated by wartime migrations--all seemed possible. German general Erich Ludendorff suggested annexations of land ranging as far east as the Caspian Sea. The discourse reflected a developed consciousness of the East as a source of both current German power and endless possibilities for the future.
On an everyday level, the German army had instituted what it considered a civilizing campaign behind its lines, regulating the movement of refugees, cleaning streets, disinfecting schools and bathhouses, and establishing public toilets. The soldiers and civil administrators paid little attention to the populations they proposed to benefit. Their normal reaction to the Jews, Poles, and Russians were a mixture of amusement and contempt on one hand, fear and hostility on the other. They reflected a developing prewar sense of racially based superiority to the Ostvölker (Eastern peoples), as well as other experiences that reinforced a sense of cultural alienation. One officer put the matter bluntly: "Only when the population has learned to wash themselves can we think of political measures."
An increasingly racialized imperialism was balanced, if not checked, by the fact that the German occupation of the east overwhelmingly involved involuntary participants. Whether running delousing stations or killing Russian soldiers, the "new Teutonic Knights of the East" were conscripted conquerors and homesick racists. They saw nothing that was not exponentially better in Germany--certainly nothing worth the effort of ruling over the local peoples on a long-term basis. The concept of a German imperium may have attracted generals and politicians. Almost everyone else was marking time until he could return back home. Their feelings about the East were negative: keep these aliens, their folkways, and their diseases as far from Germany as possible. It was a moral compound unpalatable but not as yet toxic. It would require development by racist scholars and Nazi ideologues in order to become the stuff of genocide.



Viewpoint: Yes. The Nazis, who added genocidal racism to the mix, perpetuated German views of the East and its peoples as fields of conquest and development.

Imperial German policies on the Eastern Front during World War I were geared to achieve two basic aims: to make it easier for the Wehrmacht (German army) to rule newly conquered peoples while fighting the war and to ensure a continued German presence in the region after the conflict. Their policies and methods did not differ much from those of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nazis) a generation later; any contrast is essentially a study of the differences between the nineteenth- century world of the Kaiser and the twentieth-century one of the Führer. Many of the excesses and horrors of Nazi occupation could be seen in a slightly more primitive form earlier, during Imperial German occupation and government of the same lands, and both groups of Germans based their policies and methods on similar ways of viewing the world.

It is a problem of recent historians to perceive the Nazis as existing somehow in a vacuum. There seems to be a desire to see the Nazis and their policies as somehow separate from Western European tradition, as an anomaly, an aberration unlike anything that had come before. This conclusion is a mistake. It leads to many faulty interpretations of their policies and of the motivations of the men who conceived and implemented them. It is more accurate, and probably more helpful, to view fascism in general and the Nazi Party in particular as a logical (if despicable) outcome of the Enlightenment. A fundamental belief of post-Enlightenment thinkers is that society can be "shaped," if necessary by force, into a more pleasing, efficient, or "better" form. This belief, that some men know better how to reshape society, led nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and others to conclude that a superior breed of man would then emerge, free of traditional moral constraints. Eventually these "super-men" would triumph over the weak and inferior, if necessary by exterminating them. These Enlightenment ideas of forging a perfect society have had a great impact in Germany and elsewhere and have led many people to try and restructure society the way they would like it.

It is therefore reasonable to expect that Nazi German policies evolved from Imperial German ones: if it was believed to be acceptable to attempt to enslave millions of people to build a better society in World War I, how would it be less so only twenty years later? To the extent the Imperial German General Staff were products of Prussian monarchical, militaristic traditions, they did not embrace the notion of inherent inferiority of other peoples. They saw instead only the glory of the German state--not necessarily of the German race. Adolf Hitler's Wehrmacht officers were another generation removed from the "kinder, gentler" world of the past, another generation down the path of the superman. Like the Communists (who also sought Utopia), the Fascists predicted not the triumph of a German state but of a "race" (equivalent to the Communist "class") of Aryans.

The basic difference between the two periods is the relative importance of the military versus the political elements of the German government. In World War I the military took precedence, as it had for generations. However, once the precise battlefield operations were set in motion, the German army had little planned as far as governing the newly conquered peoples of Eastern Europe. Much of their policy was improvised, largely by professional military officers unaccustomed to making political decisions. By the time World War II began in 1939, the military men had been pushed into the background and policy decisions were made according to long-held plans, conceived by politicians who were members of the Nazi Party. These men saw themselves as learning from the "mistakes" of World War I, and they sought to ensure German domination by planning ahead.

If German rule in Eastern Europe was less harsh during World War I than World War II, it was perhaps because of the type of men making the decisions on how the subject peoples would be treated. They were largely Prussian aristocrats, who were stirred by a sense of honor and duty, and they felt an obligation toward defeated enemies. Furthermore, they were professional soldiers, who are by and large a practical group: nothing so stiffens the enemy's resolve as knowing they will be massacred or enslaved if they lose the war. Under the Third Reich, however, the decisions were made by political figures, who tended to be harsher on subject peoples than military men. Both groups of German decision- makers sought to alleviate immediate problems and accomplish their long-term aims at the same time. The Imperial German General Staff did not have concrete plans going into the war for what to do with the Poles, for example, because that was something they were going to leave to the politicians to solve after the war. Their immediate problem was fighting the Russians, Romanians, and Serbs. Hitler's government already had plans for the Poles and everyone else in Eastern Europe, and they incorporated their "solutions" into the war itself, going so far as to redraw borders and begin population transfers while the fighting was still going on.

In both wars there was massive pressure from the German civilian public to make a "Greater Germany"; that is, to enhance not only the size of Germany but to ensure her protection and economic well-being in whatever world emerged after the war. A "Petition of the Intellectuals" was signed by 1,300 artists, professors, students, and industry leaders in June 1915, which stated that Germany was "entitled" to territorial gain. Only "a few, a very few German subjects," according to Max Hoffmann in War Diaries And Other Papers (1929), thought the demands for expansion would come back to haunt them. Twenty years later the Nazis argued that Germany suffered starvation and postwar revolution because it failed to secure a just peace after World War I--millions of Germans were convinced the only way to prevent this tragedy from happening again was to set Germany above all its neighbors, both militarily and economically. The Germans learned from what they perceived as their mistakes in World War I: it is difficult and expensive to control an unwilling subject population with ad hoc and improvised solutions. In addition, twenty years of independence from German overlordship left many of Germany's neighbors capable of acting on long-standing anti-German sentiment and offering significant resistance. German methods of implementing policy in World War II therefore went beyond brute, physical intimidation by occupation troops and reached into the realm of terror and wide-scale extermination of potential enemies.

Seeds of later Nazi policies and methods can be seen in an examination of five specific cases of World War I German occupation policy: Poland, the Baltic countries, Serbia, Romania, and the Russian Empire as a whole. Poland received perhaps the most prewar attention by German thinkers and writers. Heinrich von Treitschke was a popular German philosopher of the nineteenth century. He and other "Pan-German" authors argued that it was "natural" and "just" that Germans rule over Poland. By and large the prevailing opinion in Germany was that sooner or later a major, victorious war against the Russian Empire would result in the absorption of millions of non-Germans--mostly Poles--into the German Empire. Many thought the lands of the Medieval Teutonic Order, populated by Lithuanians, Poles, Latvians, Estonians, Germans, and other peoples, could over time be "Germanicized"--made more German. The notion ran that some nations were stronger than others, and eventually only a few strong nations would survive, absorbing all the "weaker" nations. This perversion of English naturalist Charles Darwin's theory of evolution into political reality was particularly popular in America, Britain, and Germany at the turn of the twentieth century.

The two men most responsible for Imperial German strategy and policy on the Eastern Front were General Erich Ludendorff and Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg--both important figures in twentieth-century German history. Ludendorff went on to be a founding member of the Nazi Party in the 1920s; Hindenburg was President of Weimar Germany from 1925 until his death delivered near-absolute power into Hitler's hands in 1933.

Ludendorff, in particular, wrote and spoke a great deal during the war on what to do with newly conquered territory. World War I began well for Germany--they conquered vast amounts of territory from the Russian Empire and were by 1916 responsible for governing more than 100,000,000 non-Germans. The generals commanding on the Eastern Front had to devise local governments, largely by themselves or with imported administrators and technicians, since much of the local population had fled east as the Russian army retreated. Strict martial law, school closures (except those taught in German), and cessation of all political activity were the immediate "benefits" the German army brought with them. The Nazis issued similar orders, but went further in "securing" the country by closing all Polish churches and limiting the amount of food individual Poles were allowed to eat.

Ludendorff espoused total political annihilation of the Polish state, at best characterizing this policy as a "severe reduction" of Poland. According to Werner Conze, Ludendorff argued "it is all a matter of power"; that while Poland had great potential for recruiting armies and workers for German factories, Germany would not be safe with an independent Poland on its borders. The land itself would be used for "German colonization": German landlords would run vast estates worked by Polish peasants, who would be bound to serve their German masters. Naturally, this scenario would create some problems, especially since there were so many Poles and would be so few German "settlers," at least at first. Ludendorff solved that problem by suggesting forcibly resettling "undesirables" to a location "further east." The final details would be decided after the war, but in the meantime Hindenburg and Ludendorff set about creating as much hostility between local populations as possible. There are many examples of Lithuanians being imported to run Polish shops, Jewish merchants getting all the local contracts, and Polish workers being brought into Ukrainian towns--all with the purpose of preventing the formation of a united front against the German conquerors.

There was a larger German concern for security in the East. The principal German ally in World War I was the Austro-Hungarian Empire: a collection of German, Hungarian, and Slavic nations ruled over by an Austrian emperor from the Hapsburg family. The two allies' interests collided in Poland; both wanted to annex large swaths of territory. To reduce friction with Austria during the war, the Imperial German government showed some flexibility by proposing several divisions of spoils that greatly reduced the amount of territory, and therefore people, that Germany would take at the end of the war. According to Robert B. Asprey in The German High Command at War: Hindenburg and Ludendorff Conduct World War I (1991), "Many influential Germans had turned to the idea of Mitteleuropa or 'Middle Europe,'--a Central European union under the aegis of Germany." The idea came from a novel of the same name, a best-seller in 1915 Germany, by Friedrich Naumann. This concept shows there was a diversity of opinion in Germany about what to do with Poland--but the range of debate was only over specifics. Poland would still be dismembered and its people ruled by foreign kings.

The Nazis also reached an accommodation during the World War II with their then-ally, the Soviet Union, and divided Poland between them. After its attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, Germany annexed much of Poland outright and established military rule over the rest. "Undesirable" Poles were again shipped eastward, mirroring Ludendorff's policies; but what the prudent military thinker Ludendorff would never have thought feasible was the next step of the Nazis: wholesale liquidation of the Slavic population. German plans for clearing their "elbow room" in Eastern Europe required that thirty million Slavs die to make room for German settlers. The death camps at Auschwitz and elsewhere in Axis Europe, where millions of Poles, Serbs, Russians, Jews, and Gypsies were murdered, were technologically unfeasible for Ludendorff to implement. Ludendorff could be credited, however, with laying the foundation for the mentality and psychology of the death camp. A forty-year-old concentration camp guard in World War II was, after all, a product of Imperial Germany. He was probably a World War I veteran with a good chance of having fought on the Eastern Front; he certainly had his opinions formed long before Hitler left art school in Vienna to pursue a career in politics. And at least some people were already thinking this way if the Nazis could staff a "Race and Settlement Office" in 1935.

A similar picture emerged in the Baltic territories of Kurland (now part of Latvia), Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Independent in Medieval times, these lands had been incorporated over the centuries into the German, Polish, or Russian empires. Arguments in Germany during the war ranged from calls for independence to outright annexation. For his part, Ludendorff saw a strategic necessity for cutting off Russian access to the Baltic Sea by making these regions part of Germany. He also seemed to see Germany as the liberator of these people from "Russian oppression." The "historically Germanic" lands north of Poland and west of Russia along the Baltic Sea were treated differently than the Slavic lands. "Virtually every cultured and politically engaged German [was] dreaming of the 'liberation of the land of the Teutonic Order'," argued Gerhard Ritter in The Sword and the Sceptre: The Problem of Militarism in Germany (1969-1973), for the Medieval Germanic knights, whose hereditary foes were the Slavs. Though Ludendorff did not have much of a chance to implement his policies here, the Nazis again took the next logical step: during their offensive against the Soviet Union they recruited tens of thousands of Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian troops into special SS (Schutzstaffeln) units to fight against the Russians. They were granted "Honorary German" status and were generally exempted from the harsh treatment meted out to others conquered by the Nazis. In return, the newly independent states really did regard the Nazis as liberators and signed the Tripartite (Axis) Pact with Hitler's Germany, Benito Mussolini's Italy, and Hirohito's Imperial Japan.

Further south, the Austro-Hungarian and Bulgarian allies of Germany became bogged down by 1915 in a war of conquest against Serbia. The German General Staff reluctantly committed troops to help. German policy in World War I regarding the Balkans was less concerned with details of occupation than with overall outcome. As early as the Conference of Berlin in 1878, Germany had encouraged Austria-Hungary to move further into the Balkans, which the latter did, eventually annexing Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908. When the Austrians and Serbs might have peacefully resolved territorial and other disputes following Archduke Francis Ferdinand's rash visit to Sarajevo, the Germans put immense pressure on the Austrianns to go to war. Again, the Austrians did what their much stronger ally wanted--at the cost of their empire, as it turned out.

Within weeks of entering the Balkans, there was much agitation in Berlin for an increased German presence, but what the German government was most interested in was a strong Austro- Hungarian neighbor to the south. German XI Army Chief of Staff General Hans von Seeckt lamented "we shall conquer this beautiful land for someone else," meaning the Austrians, when they could have taken it for themselves. To attain the goal of a strong Austria, there could be no strong states on the Balkan Peninsula. Postwar plans called for dividing existing countries up among German allies such as Bulgaria, Turkey, Italy (until 1915), and, of course, Austria-Hungary.

This policy was similar to those employed by the Third Reich in the next war. Though Austria- Hungary was dissolved at Versailles (1919), its successor states became Nazi allies: Croatia and Hungary were used to fight against the Serbs. German war aims did not involve annexation of Serbia, but rather its dissolution into an impotent agricultural region dominated by German business, and with large sections of Serb territory annexed by German allies. The Croatian Nazis ran into the same problem in Serbia as the German Nazis did in Poland: there were too many people to rule them effectively. Their "solution" to the problem was also similar: they established death camps, such as Jasenovac in Croatia, where hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies were tortured and killed.

Another Balkan country that met a tragic fate at the hands of German policymakers in World War I was Romania. A nominal German ally before the war, Romania stayed neutral until 1916, when the Entente Powers (Britain, France, Russia, and, by then, Italy) convinced it to join the war against Germany and Austria-Hungary. It was a terrible miscalculation: within six months the Romanian Army was shattered, with no hope of assistance from its new allies. According to John W. Wheeler-Bennett, in Wooden Titan: Hindenburg in Twenty Years of German History, 1914-1934 (1936), the Treaty of Bucharest (1918) drafted by Germany was, in the words of a contemporary observer, "without precedent or equal in modern history." In fact, its terms made Romania no more than a degraded colony of the German Empire. This punishment served as a warning not only for smaller nations, but also for France and Italy; "is this what will happen if we surrender to Germany?" It was much worse than nineteenth-century peace treaties, which generally amounted to an exchange of fees for damages and the redrawing of borders in favor of the victor. It was an innovation the Germans would regret, as the Treaty of Bucharest (1918) and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (1918) were used as examples by the Entente Powers when they drew up the Versailles Treaty. The policy of total annihilation of a subject people, while not new for the world, was new for Europe in modern times. Hitler's government would impose similar treaties on its defeated enemies two decades later, which would also encourage resistance as the only alternative to slavery or death.

The best examples of Imperial German policies serving as a precursor to Nazi German conduct were within the lands of the Russian Empire proper. After several years of bitter and uncertain struggle, the Russian Empire virtually disintegrated. Hindenburg and Ludendorff, against perhaps the better judgment of others in the German government, had brought Lenin and his Bolshevik intimates to Russia in the famous "sealed train" like a dangerous virus in a germ-warfare experiment. The virus worked: as the Russian Empire collapsed into revolution and its armies melted from the field, the German Empire soon controlled an area ten times its size before the war. Since the collapse was so sudden and largely unexpected, the task of structuring the conquered territory fell to Hindenburg and Ludendorff. In addition, the United States had recently entered the war following President Woodrow Wilson's reelection, and Germany faced new dangers on the Western Front in France. Things had to be settled quickly and efficiently.

Along with a German-dominated Kingdom of Poland (created on 5 November 1916 and ruled by a German prince), several vaguely defined "buffer" states were created along the Baltic Sea out of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia--the details were to be worked out following the conclusion of the war. The rest of the Russian Empire was tentatively carved into "independent" states, though in reality they were garrisoned by German troops and forced to devote almost 100 percent of their monetary, agricultural, and industrial output to the German war effort. The conquered territory was stripped bare. A puppet state was created under a local anti-Russian government in the Ukraine, which furnished 140,000 horses to the German Army as well as cattle and much-needed grain. The Germans generally let them make their own internal decisions (especially those aimed at combating the new Soviet Russian government or the remnants of Russian Imperial forces). Nonetheless, there were almost one million German troops in the Ukraine and surrounding territories, even at the end of the war. General Wilhelm Groener's army of occupation was constantly harassed by Ukrainian peasants and Bolshevik partisan units; by October 1918 German troops were completely unable to transport the vital grain harvest back to Germany because local militias had destroyed railways, bridges, and what few roads existed. Contemporaries viewed the situation in the Ukraine and the other German-occupied sections of Russia as chaotic, and the viability of the new "states" as extremely tenuous and fraught with practical difficulties. None of the local satraps the Germans set up, even in the Ukraine, survived long after the withdrawal of German troops, suggesting that they really were nothing but temporary German puppets.

The sons of General Groener's troops fared no better in World War II: they also came under consistent attack in the Ukraine. To try to deal with this situation, the Nazis also set up client states, carved from the Soviet Union; so, too, did they make distinctions between Germanic and non-Germanic peoples in the way they were treated. They even mirrored their Imperial predecessors in perceiving themselves (and to a great extent in turn being perceived) as liberators of peoples suffering under Communist rule. To their credit, Hindenburg and Ludendorff did not immediately go back on promises of autonomy and freedom the way the Nazis did, but one gets the impression that any clemency shown to conquered peoples was based as much on the practical concerns of winning the war as on humanitarian grounds. Hitler, on the contrary, saw his position as secure enough to dismiss as "futile" German Nazi leader Alfred Rosenberg's ideas of establishing permanent allies among the Slavs.

Elsewhere in Russia Ludendorff indulged in empire-building that was a virtual blueprint for Hitler twenty-five years later. Going beyond initial war aims of establishing a buffer zone to protect Germany, a Berlin newspaper announced that the Crimea would be turned into a "German Riviera," compliments of Field Marshal Hindenburg. Ludendorff "gave" the German navy villages along the Crimea and on the Ukrainian coast from which to cull a labor pool to support the newly acquired shipyards at Sevastopol. This last decision proved to be a violation of an agreement with the Turks, but either way it shows that German policy in the region was harsh, and those subject to German rule were little more than tools. When it was not convenient to pose as a liberator, the German General Staff used brute force to acquire what it needed: in the Caucasus Mountains region of Georgia and Azerbaijan, local nationalist (indeed, pro-German) uprisings were violently suppressed because they threatened to interrupt oil drilling and exploration deemed vital to the German war effort. These policies would be repeated by the armies of the Third Reich, albeit with more mechanical efficiency, but hardly with less brutality or concern for the welfare of the conquered peoples.

In general, Imperial German policy toward conquered Russia was a microcosm of German policy toward their enemies in general; certainly it was viewed this way by many at the time. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which the Provisional Government of Soviet Russia was forced to sign literally at gunpoint, was branded the "Peace of Violence" and used as an excuse to crush Germany after the war. It is rightly considered the harshest peace treaty in modern times. Compared to its draconian and impoverishing conditions and demands, the Treaty of Versailles was a slap on the wrist: nearly everything that could be eaten, ridden, or melted down was to be rounded up and hauled to Germany, by rail, oxcart, or where necessary, on Russian backs. Nothing important to the economy, whether industry or large-scale agriculture, was to remain in non-German hands. Hundreds of thousands of people were forcibly resettled into areas where they could be better controlled or more efficiently put to work for new German landlords. It was a massive undertaking, poorly conceived and requiring vast numbers of soldiers to implement. However, it is easy to imagine the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk as a blueprint for Nazi strategists twenty years later as they planned how to manage the invasion of the Soviet Union. Again the Nazis proved more ready to kill large numbers of people, where Ludendorff was content to make them serfs.

What is perhaps most strikingly similar about the Eastern European plans of both Kaiser and Führer is that they achieved (or failed to achieve) similar results. Throughout the war both had to contend with uneasy and fragile situations in the wake of their temporarily victorious armies. In Poland, Romania, Serbia, and Ukraine it was the same: nowhere was the dream of a free, dominant German master ruling fields toiled in by Slavic peasants to become a reality; it was a "peace" based on bayonets or, later, Panzers. Ludendorff and others wrote that the only unifying force in Eastern Europe was mutual hatred of Germany. If the way in which the many nations of the Soviet Union (even languishing under Joseph Stalin's Communist Party) banded together to defeat the Germans is any indication, they were right. Perhaps what united these peoples, however, was not hatred of Germans but hatred of domination by Germany. They could see clearly, in both wars, that they would be second- class citizens, and possibly much worse. The Germans did not simply seek to enforce their laws on another people, they sought complete hegemony. In carving out an empire larger than Rome, they sought to enforce their kultur (culture) even to the extent of destroying that of their victims.

This theme is largely the same in all times and places, and was certainly not unique to Imperial Germany or the Nazi Party. Conquest is conquest; any differences between conquerors and their policies is quite probably irrelevant to those on the receiving end. To be conquered by a foreign army, and to have them set up a government sympathetic to them, whose first goal is to perpetuate at the very least economic slavery, can never be an occasion for celebration. Ludendorff and his kind, bad as they were, paled beside the Nazis--but not for lack of trying. It is small comfort to think that the children of your oppressors, who themselves gassed your villages and forced you to work on their farms, would reserve the more efficient evils of the gas chamber and the concentration camp for your children.

-- Lawrence A. Helm, NASA Headquarters


Viewpoint: No. The German occupation of Eastern Europe was concerned initially with providing administration and security and subsequently with reorganizing the conquered territory along traditional imperialist lines.

The impressive military success of Imperial Germany on the Eastern Front during World War I gave it the power to determine the future political structure of much of the Russian Empire. In many ways the power that Kaiser William II held over the region after the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918 was equaled by the power to which Adolf Hitler aspired a generation later. The occupation policies carried out by the governments of these two different leaders, however, had practically nothing in common and were oriented toward radically dissimilar goals.

The most critical difference between the German approach to Eastern Europe in 1918 and 1941 (when Hitler launched his invasion of the Soviet Union) derived from the enormous contrasts in the political philosophies of the regimes. The German Empire was firmly rooted in the traditional conservatism of Central Europe. The Kaiser's strategic planners aimed at establishing German hegemony over the continent through economic and diplomatic preponderance. German territory might be expanded territorially in minor ways, for instance in Belgium, but the principal vehicles of hegemonic domination were to be the weakening of the opponents of Germany, the acquisition of overseas colonial possessions, and a more-pronounced domination of European markets.

It was the first of these means that dominated Imperial German policy toward Russia. The aims devised during the war, and their elaboration during the peace negotiations, were not as much about German expansion as they were about decoupling a significant amount of territory from the Russian state, now led by Lenin's Soviet government. Broadly defined, the lands in question were inhabited by non-Russian peoples who had been conquered by the Russian Empire in its long history of expansion. German strategy for a postwar East Central Europe involved establishing new states based roughly on ethnic lines. With that goal in mind, German military and diplomatic efforts supported the emergence (or reemergence) of such historical entities as Finland, Poland, Lithuania, and Georgia as independent states. In places where the historical record was more ambiguous, in Ukraine, Belarus, Livonia, and Estonia, the Germans backed nascent nationalist movements that appeared to have the most chance of success. Territory that was historically Russian by ethnicity was left untouched, and the Muscovite core of the old Russian Empire was to remain under the control of the revolutionary Soviet state. Revealingly, the German government took proactive steps to exclude its Austro-Hungarian ally from a role in the East in order to prevent Vienna from attaching Polish and Ukrainian territory directly to its existing domains. In a caveat developed after the Bolshevik Revolution (1917), German strategic thinkers also identified independence movements in the lands that Lenin's government gave up at Brest-Litovsk as buffers to hold back the spread of communism into continental Europe.

Scholars who compare Imperial occupation policies in the East to those of Nazi Germany often argue that these political formations were just puppets for German domination, and therefore not all that different from what Hitler pursued, but the differences are astonishing. Although princes of lesser states of the German Empire were advanced to become the monarchs of Finland, Lithuania, and Poland, their presence did not imply anything close to what the Nazis were planning. In each case there were few existing political institutions prepared to govern. More than anything else, everyone involved desired the stability of these new nations as trading partners and benevolent small states on the border of Germany. Monarchies led by experienced rulers were a reasonable way to create such stability. The Finnish Diet actually approved a German king in a democratic vote. Some German strategists spoke of incorporating these states into a pan-European federative structure centered around a German core, but no long-term plans for such a development were ever laid out in detail or endorsed officially. Favorable diplomatic, economic, and strategic relations, even if they could be fairly described as biased in its favor or existing for the benefit of the long-term position of Germany in Europe, were the limit of the ambitions of the Imperial government. In other parts of the former Russian Empire, Imperial Germany had no problem leaving government firmly in local hands. In Ukraine the Germans supported a predominantly leftist regime that had specifically invited their intervention to fight the Bolsheviks. After their weak policies failed to bring order, the Germans supported a monarchic state based loosely on the historic political structure of the Ukrainian Cossacks and led by a tsarist general of Ukrainian backgrounds, Pavlo Skoropadsky. Rather than treat Skoropadsky as a colonial agent or puppet ruler, the Germans gave him much military and economic aid and at the same time encouraged him to develop a stable and independent Ukrainian nation-state. In the far-off Caucasus, Imperial Germany secured the independence of the historic Georgian state under a moderate socialist government as part of the Brest-Litovsk agreement. When a German military expedition arrived there in the summer of 1918, it came not to impose German colonial control but to support the independent Georgian government against its regional antagonists.

Nazi Germany pursued policies that were unimaginably more ambitious than, and represented a definitive break with, the policies of Imperial Germany. Advocated by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf (1925-1927), the Nazi program desired nothing less than total German domination of the entire landmass between the Vistula and the Urals. Its "subhuman" population was to be reduced to abject slavery for German masters, and ultimately exterminated and replaced by German settlers who would develop the new Lebensraum (living space) for the health and benefit of the Aryan race. The populations of peripheral regions, such as the Baltic littoral and the Crimea, were to be "Germanized." Nazi plans included no place for national states and, in sharp distinction from the policy of the Imperial government, the Russian state was to be destroyed and was targeted as the main object of the genocide and resettlement.

Even though Hitler never had the opportunity to realize the full extent of his vision, Nazi policies in the East clearly established his seriousness. As Nazi Germany extended its control over Eastern Europe, it took calculated and effective steps to insure that the region would be in the permanent thrall of the Thousand Year Reich. Beginning with the occupation of Bohemia, Moravia, and Poland in 1939, the direct annexation of territory that had never previously belonged to Germany--and which the Imperial government had never considered annexing--became a leading indicator of Hitler's designs. This geographic transformation was followed in short order by the forced resettlement, or "ethnic cleansing," of several million ethnic Poles and Jews from the new lands of the "Greater German Reich" to the truncated "General Government of Poland." After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, special execution squads began the methodical extermination of the Jewish population, another preparatory step for German resettlement. The Nazi government also initiated the process of replacing the expelled Poles and Jews with German settlers, people who had been more or less forced to relocate there from ethnic German enclaves in the Soviet Union and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Although the eventual defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II precluded the further development of these policies in Poland and prevented their application in Soviet territory, there was no doubt that Hitler's government was planning to pursue them to greater lengths in the future.

While the Imperial government had actively supported capable nationalist leaders on the territory of the former Russian Empire, the Nazis targeted them for destruction. Directives issued by the Nazi government and security services ordered the wholesale elimination of the traditional social and political elites (if they still existed), as well as the new communist elite that had sprouted up in Soviet territory. Nationalist agitators of any political stripe who attempted to get the German government to support their ambitions were either arrested right away or used for short-term military and political purposes and then eliminated. The ultimate goal of these policies was to destroy the forces of organization among the Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe and thus facilitate the enslavement of the leaderless peasantry. For administrative purposes the Nazis carved up the East into "Reich Commissariats," ruled by Nazi government officials for no other purpose than to insure the full implementation of Hitler's goals for the region.

If the tangible differences between approaches of Imperial and Nazi Germany to Eastern Europe were clear, their theoretical and intellectual inspirations were also widely divergent. The German Empire had developed an official ideology of pursuing its "special path" or "place in the sun," but both its means and ends conformed to the traditional European pattern of imperialism and diplomacy. As far as this approach touched on Eastern Europe, Imperial German leaders advocated the reorganization of the region in a way that would give Germany strategic and economic advantages. No longer having to deal with a large and powerful Russian Empire, Imperial Germany could gain highly favorable diplomatic and trade relations with its successor states. This development in turn would enable it to maintain a broad hegemony over the entire European continent, assuming it could also win the war on the Western Front.

The Nazi approach was truly revolutionary. Hitler's policy was to pursue the complete subordination of the whole continent to direct German control. The intellectual roots of this ambition came from a relatively small number of extremist academics and publicists who had been marginal cranks in the intellectual life of the Empire but who became cultural icons in Nazi Germany. While the inherently intense racism and genocidal proclivities of such authors had sprouted before World War I, their ideas were never adopted by the conservative officers of the Imperial German Army or by the conservative and tradition-minded administrative bureaucracy. Indeed, experienced colonial administrators of the Imperial government knew that encouraging German out-migration to underdeveloped regions was an impossible task. Only a few thousand settlers ever went to German-controlled parts of Africa, while the overwhelming majority of emigrants went to the prosperous Americas. Indeed, why should anyone leave the comfort, security, and high living standards of modern Germany to farm an undeveloped wasteland in Tanzania or, for that matter, a depopulated battle zone in Russia? It was the Nazis alone who embraced the obscure and fantastic ideas of conquest and resettlement, which plain demographic facts had long contradicted, and made them the basis of their expansionist policies. Much like the Nazis' general approach to traditional German conservatism after 1933, the Imperial elite's vision of Eastern Europe was discarded in favor of a radical new vision that bewildered and disgusted the traditionalists.

Another argument advanced by those who try to compare the two approaches to the East is that regardless of their different ideological backgrounds and professed long-term goals, the occupation policies employed by Imperial and Nazi Germany were uncomfortably similar. In both cases, they argue, the German High Command established military administrations that treated the indigenous populations harshly, and ruthlessly exploited people and resources for the benefit of the German war effort. General Erich Ludendorff, the de facto head of German military planning in World War I, in other words, was merely the predecessor of the Nazi satraps responsible for the region during World War II.

This comparison is misleading for several reasons. First, the exploitation of occupied territories for expedient military reasons was not a policy shared merely by two separate German regimes, but one that has been employed by many armies of many nations throughout modern history. If Imperial German occupation policies in Eastern Europe prefigured Nazi occupation policies on this basis, so did those of every other country that occupied enemy territory while engaged in a desperate war.

Second, although the Imperial German Army was by any objective standard excessive in its application of martial law, summary justice, and extemporaneous violence, it approached neither the method nor the magnitude of what the Nazis perpetrated. While the Imperial government dealt with the region through trade relationships that were concluded under German diplomatic pressure and possibly biased in the favor of Germany, the Nazis carried out the unabashed exploitation of the entire region. To cite one example, that of Ukraine, Imperial Germany bought grain from Skoropadsky's regime at negotiated rates and traded with it in other commodities under the same tariff agreements that had governed trade between Germany and the Russian Empire before 1914. After the Nazi armies occupied Ukraine in 1941, however, German administrators confiscated virtually all of the agricultural produce, livestock, and industrial machinery directly and without compensation. When the Nazi war machine needed laborers, the occupying authority abducted millions of Ukrainian civilians (as well as millions of Poles and Russians) and reduced them to slavery in German mines and factories. Eventually, Nazi plans called for the removal of the entire Slavic population and its replacement with German settlers. There were plainly no antecedents to such policies in even the most determined quarters of the Imperial government, nor is there even the slightest amount of evidence to suggest that it was planning such activities in the future. Certainly the mass murder of millions of East European Jews by the Nazis bore no comparison to the worst atrocities of Imperial German forces a generation earlier.

Third, Ludendorff's directives for occupation and economic exploitation in the territories of the Russian Empire were indistinguishable from those he employed elsewhere. The industrial capacity and agricultural produce of occupied Belgium and northern and eastern France were also adapted to fill the needs of the Imperial German war machine, and the German military administration of those areas shared the reputation of the Eastern Command for ruthlessness and cruelty to civilians. Yet again, neither zone of occupation included genocide or ethnic cleansing among its policies. Nazi German rule over the East was completely different from its control over the rest of occupied Europe. Mainly for "racial" reasons, West European populations were to be given a place in a new European order centered around Germany. Even if their political independence and aspects of their sovereignty were to be limited sharply, the states were to continue to exist and there was no question that their peoples would survive. This policy contrasted essentially with the Nazis' planned genocide of the Slavic peoples and the projected use of their lands for German settlement. If Ludendorff's policies in the East truly foreshadowed the barbarism of the Nazis there, why did his identical treatment of occupied Western Europe not preconfigure an identically radical and genocidal set of Nazi policies?

Despite superficial points of comparison, Imperial German policies in Eastern Europe had nothing in common with Nazi behavior in the region. Although both regimes exploited the East for immediate military purposes, the approach of the Imperial government was entirely determined by existing military and diplomatic conventions, and was infinitely more humane in its practice and goals than that of Hitler's Germany. While the kaiser and his strategists planned the formation of a buffer zone of independent nation-states with close ties to Germany, the Nazis desired the total subordination of a much larger region (including Russia and extending all the way to the Urals) to German domination, the wholesale obliteration of its indigenous population, its resettlement by ethnic Germans, and its physical inclusion in a previously unthought of Germanic Empire. The difference in these approaches was amply indicated by developments in the region before each German regime lost control of it. The Imperial government facilitated the creation of nation-states from Finland to Georgia over the course of 1918. It began setting up stable diplomatic and commercial relationships that respected their independence, as well as the independence of the Soviet Russian state that had taken over from the tsars. The Nazis, on the other hand, stamped out as much potential for Slavic nationhood as they possibly could, thoroughly ravished the economy of the region, began eliminating the Slavic and Jewish populations through mass murder and deportation, and even started to move in German settlers to repopulate the vacant lands. Military defeat ultimately prevented both regimes from realizing their strategies, but the enormous differences in their conception and execution are undeniable.

-- Paul Du Quenoy, Georgetown University


AN AMERICAN OBSERVES THE GERMAN OCCUPATION OF POLAND

Frederick C. Walcott, an American member of the Belgian Relief Commission, visited Poland in 1916 and reported some of his findings:

Wicker baskets were scattered along the way--the basket in which the baby swings from the rafter in every peasant home. Every mile there were scores of them, each one telling a death. I started to count, but after a little I had to give it up, there were so many.

That is the desolation one saw along the great road from Warsaw to Pinsk, mile after mile, more than two hundred miles. They told me a million people were made homeless in six weeks of the German drive in August and September, 1915. They told me four hundred thousand died on the way. The rest, scarcely half alive, got through with the Russian army. Many of these have been sent to Siberia; it is these people whom the Paderewski committee is trying to relieve.

In the refugee camps, 300,000 survivors of the flight were gathered by the Germans, members of broken families. They were lodged in jerry-built barracks, scarcely waterproof, unlighted, unwarmed in the dead of winter. Their clothes, where the buttons were lost, were sewed on. There were no conveniences, they had not even been able to wash for weeks. Filth and infection from vermin were spreading. They were famished, their daily ration a cup of soup and a piece of bread as big as my fist. . . .

In that situation, the German commander issued a proclamation. Every able-bodied Pole was bidden to Germany to work. If any refused, let no other Pole give him to eat, not so much as a mouthful, under penalty of German military law.

This is the choice the German Government gives to the conquered Pole, to the husband and father of a starving family: Leave your family to die or survive as the case may be. Leave your country which is destroyed, to work in Germany for its further destruction. If you are obstinate, we shall see that you surely starve.

Staying with his folk, he is doomed and they are not saved; the father and husband can do nothing for them, he only adds to their risk and suffering. Leaving them, he will be cut off from his family, they may never hear from him again nor he from them. Germany will set him to work that a German workman may be released to fight against his own land and people. He shall be lodged in barracks, behind barbed wire entanglements, under armed guard. He shall sleep on the bare ground with a single thin blanket. He shall be scantily fed and his earnings shall be taken from him to pay for his food.

This is the choice which the German Government offers to a proud, sensitive, high strung people. Death or slavery.

Source: Charles F. Horne, ed., The Great Events of the Great War, volume three (New York: National Alumni, 1923), pp. 426-427.

FURTHER READINGS


References


Robert B. Asprey, The German High Command at War: Hindenburg and Ludendorff Conduct World War I (New York: Morrow, 1991).

Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914-1918 (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Alan Clark, Barbarossa: The Russian-German Conflict, 1941-45 (New York: Morrow, 1965).

Werner Conze, The Shaping of the German Nation: A Historical Analysis, translated by Neville Mellon (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1979).

Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia, 1941-1945: A Study of Occupation Policies (London: MacMillan; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1957).

Oleh S. Fedyshyn, Germany's Drive to the East and the Ukrainian Revolution, 1917-1918 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1971).

Wilhelm Groener, Lebenserinnerungen: Jugend, Generalstab, Weltkrieg (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1957).

Max Hoffmann, War Diaries and Other Papers, translated by Eric Sutton (London: Secker, 1929).

Eric Ludendorff, My War Memories, 1914-1918, 2 volumes (London: Hutchinson, 1919).

Robert Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).

Paul du Quenoy, "The Skoropads'ky Hetmanate and the Ukrainian National Idea," Ukrainian Quarterly, 56 (Fall 2000): 245-271.

John S. Reshetar Jr., The Ukrainian Revolution, 1917-1920: A Study in Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952).

Gerhard Ritter, The Sword and the Sceptre: The Problem of Militarism in Germany, 3 volumes, translated by Heinz Norden (Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1969-1973).

Joseph B. Schechtman, European Population Transfers, 1939-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946).

Woodruff D. Smith, The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

Heinrich Gotthard von Treitschke, Politik, 2 volumes (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1897-1899).

John W. Wheeler-Bennett, Brest-Litovsk: The Forgotten Peace, March 1918 (London: Macmillan, 1938).

Wheeler-Bennett, Wooden Titan: Hindenburg in Twenty Years of German History, 1914-1934 (New York: Morrow, 1936).

Gordon Wright, The Ordeal of Total War, 1939-1945 (New York: Harper & Row, 1968).