Heil Hitler

8 posts

Schmeisser

Hitler only cared about Germany, and that meant drang nach osten. Nowadays there are all kinds of self-proclaimed "nationalists" who don't get that sort of thing and always say weird things like "I support nationalism for everybody!" I don't think Slavs are shitty, but I get why Hitler thought so, and he definitely did think so. When he spoke of the Russian race, he always did so with disgust. He guarded Russian prisoners after WWI and apparently didn't have a positive impression.

From all I gather, Uncle Wolf wasn't interested in being the defender of Western Civilization even if that's effectively the role he was cast as. I have books of reprints of Signal magazine issues that show that a clear propaganda focus after the conquest of France was the establishment and defense/expansion of the New Europe, but I don't the Fuhrer's heart was really into it. Even foreign fighters in the SS were shocked by how harshly the Germans treated Russians on the Eastern Front. They signed on to combat Bolshevism and would've been happy to play liberator, but the Germans were fighting a racial war.

Maybe it would have been more internationally ideal if Barbarossa was a liberation campaign, but it's important to try keep an accurate view of how things really were. Especially somebody like Hitler who was such a spectacular and unprecedented character that he could be all things to all men. Anti-White Genocide activists will say he was the defender of Western Civilization. According to Varg, Hitler was leading a pagan campaign to resist civilization itself. Then there are cargo cultists like Savitri Devi. But as always, the reality is more interesting than the fantasies. In any event, I think the world is in debt to Hitler for launching an annihilation war against Russia that at least permanently crippled the Russian nation.

Niccolo and Donkey
Besides the continuation of Drag Nach Osten a large part of these attitudes were simply carried over from WW1 as the war in the East was a fucking slaughter and not just between soldiers of the opposing sides. Massacres of civilians were taking place everywhere from East Prussia all the way down to Bessarabia. I forget which historian said it but he stated that the Eastern fronts in WW1 saw a war of extermination that spared the West, but the term 'extermination' is only applied to the Holocaust now whereas our imagery of WW1 involves Tommies and Fritz slugging it out in trenches of mud under barbed wire.
Thomas777
There's a fantastic recent book by an academic historian called ' 'Terror in the Balkans'' . Its actually one of the best military history books of the last decade in my opinion but few people outside of a handful of esoteric (and largely British and European) military history journals seems to have noticed it.

Congruous with your point, the author emphasizes that the war in the Balkans and the activities of NDH in other theatres 1941-45 (with an emphasis upon the anti-partisan activities of the ''Home Guard'', the Ustase armed groupings, the Crna Legija, the Heer, the Waffen SS (particularly 9th SS (Prinz Eugen), and the Italian Army) was a direct continuation of World War One - in political/conceptual terms: Every German senior commander (of general officer rank) in the Balkan theatre was Austrian and had served previously in the Hapsburg Emperor's Army - none of these men held an award higher than the War Merit Cross, and their personal view of their mission orientation (as evidenced by their personal correspondences as well as in the language of their orders to subordinates and speeches/directives to enlisted men) unmistakably was animated by a visceral hatred of Serbs and Russians, premised on a (not incorrect) belief that the Eastern Slavs were bandit races and that the Serbs in particular had conspired to soak the peninsula (and central Europe generally) in the blood of German people and that of their allies.

One can look at this two ways - as per the OKWs reasoning in charging Hapsburg officers with waging an anti-Partisan war against Chetniks. I'll share my own opinion on it shortly.
Stars Down To Earth
Thomas777 - the Balkan theatre in WW2 was a bit separate from the rest of the war and didn't have much to do with Hitler's "drang nach osten".

The Third Reich were originally allied with Yugoslavia and wanted to avoid getting entangled in the Balkans all over again, and ideally Yugoslavia would've stayed pro-Axis or at least neutral to them. A war against the Serbs wasn't a part of the Nazi programme, but circumstances turned out otherwise and the Germans/Austrians went back to the familiar old WW1 anti-partisan policies.

"Generalplan Ost" definitely wasn't a continuation of WW1, other than the geostrategic goals (take farmland, achieve self-sufficiency) that motivated all of Germany's eastern wars. Wiping whole nations off the map and creating a neo-Sparta is totally unprecedented in German history.
Thomas777

Hitler did not so much as covet an alliance with Yugoslavia as he favored a status quo that would protect discrete interests (namely Romanian oil fields) with strategic depth, would facilitate the continued Wehrmacht ''German military mission'' to Romania, and concomitantly would assuage Antonescu's strategic and political anxieties (the ostensible purpose for the aforementioned ''mission'' in the first place) while preserving (unbelievable at it may seem) a splendid secrecy as to the real purpose of the mobilization, and finally, the status quo as Hitler and OKW envisioned it (a mobilized, garrisoned, politically and militarily friendly Yugoslavia) would simply have represented an 'advance guard'/fortress in the Southern European corridor - a corridor that is essential to German interests in all epochs, under all conceivable conditions (note Kohl's immediate recognition of Tudjman's Croatia almost half a century later).

The 1941 Yugolsav military Junta was in essence a Chetnik coup...the only real discernible purpose of which would be to facilitate Soviet strategic goals in a future offensive (this is very relevant to the ''Icebreaker'' debate ). As it transpired, Hitler apprehended very quickly that ''Yugoslavia'' could only harm Axis interests were it to continue its (already contrived) existence. This is why Hitler opted to support Pavelic and the establishment of the NDH with such a fervent commitment. Its also telling that Berlin was so much in favor of the Ustase program when in other operational theatres, Hitler himself, the OKW, the intelligence establishment (exempting some particularly ideologically zealous elements within the SD etc) the tendency was to oppose the activities of Revolutionary Fascist and National Socialist elements no matter how ideologically ''pure'' such movements may have been (Romania and the Iron Guard are a striking example).

Why the NDH became a true 'satellite' regime of the Reich and why the bloodletting and political and military gamesmanship and combat took on such a brutal fervor and the relative insularity of the Balkans conflicts vis a vis the wider War is significant yes - but I understand very well the nuances of the issue. I've made a study of it for years.

Jargon

Why did Hitler admire the English so much? Or is it even accurate to say that?

RedHand
From what I've read, in biographies and also in Ben Novak's essays and David Irving's book on Hess the Nazi leadership looked at Britain as a power that was able to bind together several White-Western 'tribes' and set them upon a grand mission. They admired how the British army could maintain control when outnumbered 1000 to 1 in the colonies. Hess especially admired the English, he considered them 'more nordic than the norse', as it were. No doubt a lot of 'anti-British' feeling was propaganda posturing after the war began in earnest, I'm not sure though.
DochDochDoch
I'd be cautious about talking about the Ostfront without the context of the brutality of the Soviet side. The Germans and the SS in particular were harsh with their captives(though, they did also have HIWI's and I'm not aware of a Soviet corollary) but it's important to remember that the Soviets did not as a rule take SS prisoners either and both sides were cognizant of that. These were brutal guerrilla wars and the Soviet propaganda has a distinct racial tinge to it as well.