This is the most ridiculous nonsense which unfortunately has to be suffered because of base ignorance.
These people - Ubersoy, Keith Woods, Martinez Politics - have enough intelligence to string together a bunch of quotations divorced from historical context - not to say the quotes themselves aren't correctly contextualized, most are, some aren't - but the purposefulness and meaningfulness of these quotations are given a more sinister life than they deserve by filling the gaps with a narrative that isn't true by trying to reify a narrative of anti-Slavic intentionalism in Hitler's foreign policy - which didn't exist, and where it did was primarily incidental - and over emphasize criticisms or observations Hitler had about different Slavic groups.
First of all, Hitler is being impugned for not having held contemporary enough views on pan-Europeanism that those on the 'Right' have today is uncharitable and anachronistic.
Anyone can, with enough effort, string together quotations from Slavic Germanophobes, or Slavs who are themselves Slavophobes (the Poles aren't too fond of the Ukrainian Nationalist Stepan Bandera, who killed and hated Poles, for instance), or whoever about whomever.
When all is said, how many of the 'plans' or 'intentions' (which is a stretch) were to apply to those Slavs left who were not assimilable or otherwise of good enough stock? We cannot say. But some quotations from 20 years prior about non-assimilability (i.e. the one or two which exist in
Mein Kampf or the
Zweites Buch) - which is mainly what Hitler discusses, a far cry from 'genocide' and 'enslavement' - was not thought out in the 1920s to any degree worth harking back to when evaluating the course of events in the active war of the 1940s. In fact, these ideas weren't even thought-out in the 1940s, ideas and 'plans' being constantly in flux.
Assimilation for the right elements was never off the table; the first document which comes to mind in this regard is Himmler's well-known undated memo "Reflections on the Treatment of Peoples of Alien Races in the East", which stated, among other things, that the "alien races in the East" which he identified as being made up of Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, White Russians, Gorals, Lemcos, Cashubos and any other "small and isolated national groups" that could be found ought be split up "into as many parts and fragments as possible" and sifted so that the "racially valuable" could be brought to Germany and assimilated. Hitler was shown this memo on May 25, 1940, and he regarded it "very good and correct" according to Himmler; and it clearly shows that this simplistic determination of 'inferiority' was not simply a broad racial generalisation about all Slavs, but conditional on differentiating the good elements from the bad. The same view was held by the Germans about their own people.
There's really nothing of any substance here.
Trying to determine plans and intentions from dinner table musings is obviously ridiculous and frankly disingenuous. It derives from the idea that since Hitler was top dog, that what he said would be implemented. But there's a difference between Hitler acting in an official capacity determining actual policy, and just talking and giving his views on various topics and possible 'policies' which we have no way of estimating in any detail.
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Most of the quotations provided by Ubersoy (from the Table Talks) where he prefaces quotations with primers like: "[Hitler]
Advocates against being soft towards Slavs and improving their infrastructure.", "
Keeping the Slavs underdeveloped, disorganized and backwards must be the official colonial policy of Germany", "The Slavs should not be looked after even medically", "
Active Prevention of Education", are all framed as policy of Hitler's sinister intentions toward the Slavs as away to punish them for being so lowly, but this is obviously untrue if you simply read the quotations he provides.
Hitler did say that he wanted the Germans separate from whatever unassimilable ethnic elements would exist in the future as he saw it. In the quote provided by Ubersoy he's talking about Ukrainians (22 July, 1942):
The greatest possible mistake we could make would be to take the local population too much under the wing of the State ; and to avoid all danger of our own people becoming too soft-hearted and too humane towards them, we must keep the German colonies strictly separated from the local inhabitants. Germans will in no circumstances live in a Ukrainian town. If essential, it will be better to put Germans in barracks outside a town than to allow them to live inside it. Otherwise, sooner or later, the process of cleaning up and improving the town will inevitably start; and Russian and Ukrainian towns are not in any circumstances to be improved or made more habitable. It is not our mission to lead the local inhabitants to a higher standard of life; and our ultimate object must be to build towns and villages exclusively for Germans and absolutely separate from Russian or Ukrainian towns. The houses to be constructed for the Germans must in no respect resemble those of the Russians, and lime-plaster and thatched roofs will not be used.
Adolf Hitler, July 22, 1942: Hitler's Table Talk 1941-1944: His Private Conversations (New York: Enigma Books, 2000), p. 589.
This is like accusing white people of "advocating" for the non-improvement of the third world by just wanting to be left alone - it's utter nonsense. Hitler isn't advocating Ukrainians, in this case, suffer poor infrastructure because the Germans want to inflict it upon them, he's pre-conceptualizing the conditions he expects they'd make for themselves, and simply saying that the Germans will leave them be and not try to "lead the local inhabitants to a higher standard of life", which they can't meet on their own. There's nothing sinister about this, though one might lament the less than favourable view Hitler had of these elements among these groups, and wished he'd seen more potential in them, that's neither here nor there in terms of accusing Hitler of being intentionally cruel.
Next Ubersoy claims Hitler wanted to "keep" the Slavs underdeveloped, disorganized and backwards; this implies that Hitler thought the "Slavs" would otherwise not be "underdeveloped, disorganized and backwards" had it not been for German colonial rule ensuring they had no chance to develop, organize, and emerge from backwardness. This is obviously not what Hitler thought if you read the quotation Ubersoy provides (from July 9, 1942). Hitler says, "we must not try too ardently to impose our own German ideas of personal cleanliness on the local inhabitants and attack them daily with currycomb and polish", And most significantly Hitler says quite plainly, "It really does not matter to us whether they wash and sweep their houses daily; we are not their overseers". Yet nobody who is honest could take from this that Hitler wanted to intentionally ensure that these people had no access to brooms, or soap; it was only that he didn't care whether they maintained standards tolerable for a German if such standards were what suited them best according to their own inclinations. "By leaving the local inhabitants to their own devices and by not interfering with their local customs", and encouraging the 'natives' "to adhere to their own ways and discourage them from aping ours", is a benign non-interventionist attitude which assumes only that these 'natives' - Hitler is non-specific in this table talk about whom he's talking about exactly - would live in such conditions conditions only as "bad" - relative to the perception of German standards - as they themselves were willing to tolerate.
Next Ubersoy claims "The Slavs should not be looked after even medically", which is another disingenuous framing. Hitler says he "absolutely forbid the organization of any sort of hygiene or cleanliness crusades in these territories." (April 11, 1942) Which assumes that such territories would already be lacking in hygiene and cleanliness in the first place.
But Hitler's critics, people like Ubersoy, rejecting this - again lamentable - view Hitler had of some of these populations as to their potential for civility, see these peoples as inherently just the same as Germans and all other Europeans, and taking their preconception they apply it to Hitler and then assume that Hitler must've been taking the position of intentionally disenfranchising these people from decent lively conditions; but this is to get it all backward.
It is mistaken to think Hitler wanted to induce these conditions upon these people he's talking about, when clearly, Hitler just expected them to persist in these conditions of their own accord because it was their natural state, and he didn't care for the German cultural bloc to intervene in their lives to try and improve them according to Western European standards. Like giving aid to Africa, basically.
To describe it as Ubersoy does is to ignore Hitler's perspective and the context it provides to his statements.
Ubersoy, here, connects two different quotes about 'vaccination' from different entries in the Table Talks.
Here's a fuller quotation:
In the field of public health there is no need whatsoever to extend to the subject races the benefits of our own knowledge. This would result only in an enormous increase in local populations, and I absolutely forbid the organisation of any sort of hygiene or cleanliness crusades in these territories. Compulsory vaccination will be confined to Germans alone, and the doctors in the German colonies will be there solely for the purpose of looking after the German colonists. It is stupid to thrust happiness upon people against their wishes. Dentistry, too, should remain a closed book to them; but in all these things prudence and commonsense must be the deciding factors, and if some local inhabitant has a violent tooth-ache and insists on seeing a dentist—well, an exception must be made in his particular case!
Adolf Hitler, April 11, 1942: Hitler's Table Talk 1941-1944: His Private Conversations (New York: Enigma Books, 2000), p. 425.
It would've been rather inconvenient to quote the part where Hitler actually doesn't say these people should be deprived of medical care, but that "prudence and commonsense must be the deciding factors, and if some local inhabitant has a violent tooth-ache and insists on seeing a dentist—well, an exception must be made in his particular case!", which shows you that Hitler simply believed that true to their nature they wouldn't care for vaccinations or even dentistry, hence: "It is stupid to thrust happiness upon people against their wishes." This was symptomatic of the same non-interventionalist position, not some cruel plan to make them suffer for being 'inferior Slavs'.
The same disingenous framing occurs when Ubersoy claims Hitler wanted to "actively prevent" their education. He draws on the Table Talks for April 11, July 22, and September 14, 1942, respectively.
In the quotations Ubersoy provides, Hitler talks about "tormenting [Ukrainians] with schools" (but still saying that "we'll see to it that the natives live better than they've lived hitherto"), and not wanting "a horde of schoolmasters to descend suddenly on these territories and force education down the throats of subject races." He just generally expresses his view that an education in history, politics, and mathematics would be useless, or at worst, counter-intuitive to the victorious German project in those regions.
Again, it's not very pleasant, but he doesn't advocate making their lives "actively" worse in order to humiliate and punish them because he hates them. Rather, Hitler clearly views their propensity for destruction, particularly of the Germanic way of life, to be geared particularly by their political behaviours, which is undoubtedly motivated primarily by the war Hitler was currently engaged in fighting. That he'd express ideas like this doesn't really surprise me.
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The so-called "outline" for "the basic logic for the Great Replacement against Slavs", as Ubersoy puts it, is completely logical from Hitler's perspective as the prospective victor over a defeated and demolished Soviet Russia.
The remnants of old cities would be swept away, new cities constructed, a new age after the largest war in human history and so on. This is hardly a novel historical development. It has occurred in centuries past, and would obviously occur again.
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Ubersoy wrongly claims Hitler "admits that the Bolshevik Revolution was good for Germany because it gave him a perfect excuse to genocide, enslave and replace the indigenous Slavic populations which fell under Bolshevism". This is the most ridiculous claim Ubersoy makes, and he provides no evidence for it.
In fact, quite the opposite since the preponderance of evidence presented obviously shows that Hitler expected the continued existence of these Slavic populations for sometime into the future adjacent to the territories Germany would take for herself as the price for victory against the Soviet Union.
As for the idea that Hitler viewed the Bolshevik Revolution as "good" - an obvious attempt to frame Hitler as a supporter of Bolshevism to cement just how 'evil' he must've been - the quotation he provides from the Table Talk entry of November 12, 1941, says nothing of the sort. He merely says: "The Bolshevik domination in European Russia was, when all is said, merely a preparation [...] for the German domination." At most you could say Hitler viewed the Bolshevik revolution as
convenient for Germany, but nothing so far as being "good" as if he supported it - which implies something ideological as well as tactical.
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There are other problems, but they're of comparably less significance, dealing with Hitler's attitudes on history and ethno-psychology of different groups, like the Russians, Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, whom he occasionally insults and which Ubersoy then uses to construct "racial hierarchies" and claims of inferiority.
It's all very, 'meh', in my view.
Many mountains out of many molehills.
I don't agree with Hitler's views about Ukrainians, or even Russians, though I respect he might've felt he had good reasons to hold his own opinions. I certainly agree with Hitler that the Poles are aggressive in nature because they have an inferiority complex. But this is all just opinion and trivial observation, nothing about it is particularly sinister.
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There are two outright errors as well.
First, Ubersoy claims:
In 1930 Hitler
wrote that Poland and Czechia were:
rabble not worth a penny more than the inhabitants of Sudan or India. How can they demand the rights of independent states?
This quotation can be found on various online forums, but if you look hard enough you'll find a source on Wikipedia - which Ubersoy seems to cite in his Substack post - to a book by the Polish historian Jerzy Wojciech Borejsza. The relevant passage from Borejsza's book is the following:
Hitler held up to his inner-circle the British as teachers of racism, as examples to the Germans. He said: “what India was to England, Ostraum (space in the east) will be to us”. He argued that the Czechs and Poles were a “rabble not worth a penny more than the inhabitants of Sudan or India. How can they demand the rights of independent states?”.
Jerzy W. Borejsza, A Ridiculous Hundred Million Slavs: Concerning Adolf Hitler's Worldview (Warsaw: Instytut Historii PAN, 2017), p. 49.
No citation is provided.
The date for 1930 is evidently taken from the previous paragraph in which Borejsza quotes from an article by Hitler written on May 24, 1930, published in the
Illustrierter Beobachter, which Borejsza incorrectly cites twice (he incorrectly states the article is from "Politik der Woche", but this is not a publication, it was a merely a segment published in the
Illustrierter Beobachter; and he cites the wrong volume of primary sources in which the article is republished), and doesn't contain this quotation.
If the statement was made before 1933, then it must've been published in the primary source collections
Hitler: Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen 1905-1924 (Stuttgart, 1980), or,
Hitler: Reden, Schriften, Anordnungen: Februar 1925 bis Januar 1933 (Munich, 1992-1998) - which is the only collection Borejsza used, other than the Goebbels diaries - but it doesn't appear in any of these document collections; it doesn't appear in
Mein Kampf or the
Zweites Buch, it doesn't appear in Max Domarus' collection of speeches from post-1933 to 1945, it doesn't appear in any readily available primary source collection, and Borejsza didn't use archival sources, so it's unlikely to have been squirreled away in some unpublished memoir or diary.
The only other explanation is that Borejsza invented the quotation from whole cloth.
I will reserve definitive judgement on that.
Secondly, Ubersoy attributes a quotation to
Mein Kampf about annexing Poles, this is actually from the
Zweites Buch. It's not worth quoting here because it's not of any significance, though in the past
I have addressed it. The only other observation I'd hasten to make would be that Hitler is using the Poles as an example of something the "völkisch state" wouldn't do, like annexing Poles "with the intention of one day making Germans out of them." He was not actually talking about annexing Poles. There's no reason to think he thought more about this beyond a mere example.
But to emphasise the ridiculousness with which even the most innocuous statements can be stripped out of their context, and made into intentions, the aforementioned Polish historian Ubersoy relies on, Jerzy W. Borejsza, claimed from this quotation from the
Zweites Buch that Hitler obviously resolved to exterminate the Poles as early as 1928! :
In 1928 Hitler repeated in Zweites Buch by and large the same arguments from Mein Kampf about the impossibility of Germanizing the Poles. “The Folkish State, conversely, must under no condition annex Poles with the intention of wanting to make Germans out of them some day. On the contrary, it must muster the determination either to seal off those alien racial elements, so that the blood of its own Folk will not be corrupted again, or it must without further ado remove them and hand over the vacated territory to its own National Comrades”.43 They are, as we can see, more stridently formulated. The terms “throw out”, “remove”, belong to that “euphemistic language” of the Nazis, that replaced the words “physically eliminate, displace”, etc.
Jerzy W. Borejsza, A Ridiculous Hundred Million Slavs: Concerning Adolf Hitler's Worldview (Warsaw: Instytut Historii PAN, 2017), pp. 95-96.
Ah yes! The ever-so brilliant "euphemistic language" argument! Even more ridiculous at this time, in 1928, when Hitler according to all scholarship had not even considered the extermination of the Jews. It's beyond ridiculous. Obviously, it's also baseless supposition, and typical of all Polish historians I've read who are zealous, and as a result, remarkably loose with the facts. So this doesn't surprise me.
