Inside Story of Hitler’s Failed Policy Towards the Slavs

Winter Watch Takeaway: I am occasionally challenged in podcasts about my negative views about Adolf Hitler in particular. This is in part my retort to this.

Erich Koch (1896-1986) , the guardian of National Socialist doctrine on its eastern borders, remained an ardent admirer of the Soviet Union long after Hitler’s seizure of power.

Koch based his trial defense in October 1958 on a document which he had prepared called “Political Sketch of My Struggle.” “It was made to sound,” wrote the correspondent of the London Times, “like the personal file of a good Communist party member.”

Koch told the Warsaw court that he had been converted to revolutionary socialism at the age of twenty, in the WWI trenches of the Russian front.

In 1921 Koch had joined the National Socialist party—as party member number 90.

While Hitler was in Landsberg prison, the socialist Strasser brothers had ousted the Baltic-born conservative mystic, Alfred Rosenberg, from the leadership of the party. Koch’s passionate devotion to the left wing Strassers lay behind his remorseless antagonism toward Rosenberg in later years, when he governed the Ukraine. Strasserians opposed Hitler’s more anti-semitic beliefs.

In 1928 Hitler made Koch Gauleiter, or party leader, for the province of East Prussia, a position he held until 1945.

Koch’s pre-war rule in East Prussia was characterized by efforts to collectivize the local agriculture and ruthlessness in dealing with his critics inside and outside the Party. He also had long-term plans for mass-scale industrialization of the largely agricultural province – classic Leninism. These actions made him unpopular among the local peasants.

In 1934 he wrote an essay, ‘The Orient of German Youth.”  The youth of Germany were bidden to look away from the decadent capitalist West and to join their fortunes with the virile classless youth of Russia. They were to share the great land spaces of the East, not in the role of armed settlers, but as comrades and brother pioneers.

Koch was slated to be taken out as a Strasserian in the Night of the Long Knives. In the “political sketch” read out at Koch’s Warsaw trial, it was revealed that Koch held a secret meeting with Gregor Strasser at Merano, where he had tried to persuade him to form an opposition party against Hitler. In the meantime, Goering dismissed Koch from his office of Oberpraesident in East Prussia and raided his home and office. Before Koch was reinstated by Hitler personally, there was an attempt to murder him in a Berlin restaurant.

In April 1936, Koch told Hans Gisevius, a former member of the Gestapo, that the purge of June 1934 was not the end of the killings. “They would be coming for him any day now, he said. And by ‘they’ he did not mean only Himmler’s henchmen; he was also thinking of the Fuehrer.

In 1939 he had admitted to Carl Burckhardt, the League of Nations commissioner in Danzig, that he welcomed the Moscow pact as one who had been “almost a Communist”.

Koch appointment as master of Ukraine:

Hitler could not replace the old salaried officials and he dared not dispense with the generals and admirals, but he dearly loved an amateur or two from the ranks of “the revolution,” to work alongside the professionals and to give him contradictory advice.

Eventually one of these amateurs, Martin Bormann, who possessed no talent beyond recording everything that was said, and was likely a Soviet agent, became the master of Hitler’s soul. Also negatively influencing Hitler’s judgment at this point was heavy use of meth and other drug cocktails administered by Dr. Theodor Morell. I ask the question openly, was Hitler a plant to butcher European whites (Edom)?

When Poland was overrun Koch was made chief of the Office for Strengthening German Nationhood (RKFDV). This meant that he was responsible for Germanizing suitable Poles. Unsuitable Poles and Jews were removed to the General Government under Hans Frank. In my criticism of the Hitlerians I hold that the 1939 conquest of Poland was mostly about the eradication of a functioning white Catholic Slavic nation, not merely reparation of former German lands. Readers are reminded that Poland was cynically carved up with Stalin.

For more than two years Koch delayed the preparation of the Volksliste, Himmler’s elaborate categories for the subjects of annexed territory. Himmler wanted Ciechanow, a largely Polish district, to be aggressively Germanized. Koch would neither decide who were the Poles who had to go, nor would he find room for the Germans from Lithuania who had been expelled under the 1939 Moscow non-aggression pact. In fairness to Koch, Germanization was complicated by common German-Slavic mixed families in these districts.

The squabble with Himmler’s resettlement officials went on till long after Koch had added the Ukraine and Belarus to his empire. In the Ukraine Koch used the same tactics, neglecting to provide for the native-born Volksdeutsche, simply because Himmler was in charge of the crack-pot scheme and by once again the common practice of mixed Ukrainian-German-Polish inter-marriage, especially in the western old Hapsburg territories.

There is little evidence that Slavs were actively exterminated although the war itself took a toll. The primary issue was about abuse, neglect and alienation.

Alfred Rosenberg, the future Minister for the Eastern Territories and the author of The Myth of the Twentieth Century, recommended the ruthless Koch to Hitler as a possible Reichskommissar for Great Russia, the heartland of Muscovy. Rosenberg was pro-or at least sympathetic to Slavs and wanted to incorporate them into a renewed White Russian movement which would be fiercely anti-Bolshevik and anti-semitic. He wanted Koch out of the way.

Initially greeted as liberators in western Ukraine, Rosenberg’s Ukrainian patriots could provide a revived Ukrainian nation that could prevent the rebirth of the Soviet multi-nation state, the hot bed of world revolution. The Ukrainian language must therefore be revived as a medium of education and a regional culture must be discovered at all costs.

In November 1941 under Rosenberg’s guidance, the German Labor Front created a volunteer work program for men and women living in the Occupied Eastern Territories. The program promised high wages, additional food rations, and better housing in exchange for a six-month stay working in Germany. Posters, newspaper ads, and leaflets calling for able-bodied men and women between the ages of 16 and 50 to volunteer were distributed throughout cities, towns, and villages. German authorities also encouraged Catholic and Orthodox church leaders to publicize the volunteer work program during church services.

Ribbentrop, Rosenberg, and Canaris wanted a Ukrainian and in general a Slavic alliance; the High Command wanted at least their friendship; but Hitler, unaware how far pro-German collaboration had already gone, believed the Ukrainians to be too treacherous and too divided among themselves to deserve a minute’s encouragement.

Der Failure Hitler Blows it Once Again

But on July 16, 1941 on Hitler’s special train, Rosenberg was horrified to find Goering pushing heavily for Koch’s appointment as Reichskommissar for the Ukraine and Belarus. Rosenberg protested, but all had been pre-arranged between Hitler and Goering. Before the conference ended, Hitler read out his list of civil governors for Russia, and in it Koch appeared as governor of the Ukraine.

To Koch the course of action was plain. He could rid himself of the interference of Rosenberg, and perhaps even of Himmler and Goering. With him were the old party fighters, the most intransigent Gauleiters, who had been brought up for the past twenty years and more on the doctrine that the Germans were a master race, destined to rule the East.

Koch stated that Slavs were “racially and biologically a thousand times inferior compared to the lowliest German worker” in a 1941 speech. Sounds like an Israeli mind set- another people set to learn the hard way.

Koch, Stalin is alleged to have reminded the Soviet citizen every day of what he had to fight against.

German government in the Ukraine was not entirely the embodiment of the views expressed by Koch. Of the six Generalkommissars, two criticized him openly and favored a more liberal policy: Leyser at Zhitomir and Frauenfeld at Melitopol.

While Koch was Reichskommissar the Ukrainians suffered more bitter repression and not soon after the Holodomar. The key to this repression was the removal of over two million Ukrainians as slave workers to Germany and the removal of five and a half million tons of wheat.

Under the terms of Goering’s notorious “Green Folder,” non-food-producing populations were to be ignored. The cities were left to get along as best they could on the black market. Their internal affairs were of so little consequence that they could run an unofficial and parallel administration to deal with the illicit feeding system without much intervention from the Germans. Believing that his standing with Hitler depended solely on his deliveries of food and slaves, Koch ignored the dangers of this situation.

On one occasion Rosenberg wrote to Hitler that Koch should not compare himself with the British in India, since the British kept silent about their harshness and only boasted of the blessings they conferred on the Indians. Rosenberg had missed the point: Koch was compelled to boast about excesses in the Ukraine in order that Hitler might give him the sole credit for them.

The Battle for Hitler’s Favor between Rosenberg and Koch:

On December 19, 1941, Hitler promised Rosenberg not to receive Koch except in his presence, a promise he failed to keep. Lammers, the Chancellery chief, was instructed to tell Koch that his claim to act under Hitler’s direct orders was untenable. Koch thereupon descended on the Ukraine, which he had avoided throughout the winter, and enlivened the months of March and April 1942 with addresses to his staff, instructing them how to treat a “nigger people.” Rosenberg sent his protests in writing.

By May 1942, when Rosenberg next had an interview with Hitler, he was too scared to bring the matter up, but sent a circular to Koch’s subordinates, criticizing the tone of Koch’s instructions. Rosenberg warned them in particular against the use of corporal punishment, press gangs, and summary hangings. Koch complained to Hitler that this circular had made his position intolerable.

The flood of memoranda and counter-memoranda which followed left Hitler unmoved, and possibly he would not have intervened but for the interference of Martin Bormann, who came into the tearoom at Hitler’s headquarters at Vinnitsa on the night of July 22, 1942, after a long drive in the Ukrainian countryside. Hitler was goaded by Bormann’s expatiation on the fruitfulness of Ukrainian families. He embarked on a dissertation on the future of the Ukraine, picturing the inhabitants tilling gardens huddled into kraals outside the handsome new German towns, deprived of education or health services.

On May 19, 1943, Hitler consented to receive Rosenberg and Koch at his East Prussian headquarters. Although Hitler decided none of the issues, he showed in a long dissertation that Koch had acted according to his own views. Koch was to have the right to submit counter-proposals, and if Rosenberg contested them, the arbiters were to be Bormann and Lammers who were Koch’s best supporters. Effectively Rosenberg’s counterweight to the worst racial instincts of Nazism was finished, and the Red Army was closing in anyway.

Rosenberg in 1943 mustered a counter attack. On February 23, 1943, he issued a decree reopening the technical schools. Koch intercepted it, altered it, and instructed his staff to get themselves rubber stamps with the words “inessential to the war effort” for dealing with further Ministry instructions. After calling in another Rosenberg directive, which urged caution in press-ganging Ukrainian labor, Koch appealed to Hitler on March 16 in a fifty two page memorandum.

Koch opposed, the partial de-collectivization decree of the Rosenberg ministry, which Hitler finally sanctioned in February 1942. Koch opposed the total restoration of private land-ownership which Rosenberg decreed in June 1943. Koch opposed  Rosenberg’s attempts to reopen the universities and technical high schools. Koch would permit nothing beyond the elementary stage.

Where he had to employ large numbers of native local government officials, as for instance in the city administration of Kiev, Koch preferred to employ Russians. At the beginning of 1942, when Kiev was handed over by the Wehrmacht to Erich Koch, the city swarmed with Bandarites and Ukrainian anti-Soviet elements (mostly from Galicia) which Koch suppressed and failed to mobilize against Soviet Russia.

See: Some Proper Historical Context on the Russo-Ukrainian War

Dr. Otto Bräutigam, a high ranking Rosenberg associate in the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, stated the frustration in a secret memorandum:

“With the inherent instinct of the Eastern peoples, the primitive man soon found out that for Germany the slogan: ‘Liberation from Bolshevism’ was only a pretext to enslave the Eastern peoples according to her own methods…With unequaled presumption, we put aside all political knowledge and treated the peoples of the occupied Eastern territories as ‘Second Class Whites’ to whom Providence has merely assigned the task of serving as slaves for Germany.”

However, as the low hanging labor fruit had been procured, reversals in the war even forced Rosenberg to back off on his pro-Slavic stance.  In August 1942, Sauckel and Alfred Rosenberg, approved the use of force by the Wehrmacht during recruitment campaigns if people refused to comply.

Inexplicably the Allies, including the Soviet Union, had little interest in pursuing Erich Koch as a war criminal. Finally Koch stood trial in Poland and was convicted in 1959 of war crimes and sentenced to death. The sentence was later commuted to life in prison and Koch died of natural causes in his cell at the Barczewo prison on 12 November 1986 at the ripe old age of 90.

Alfred Rosenberg was hung in 1946 after the Nuremberg Trials. This could be explained because of his strident anti-semitism more than his war crimes. Rosenberg took the battle and means of victory against Judeo-Bolshevism too seriously to influence his survival after the war, whereas Koch was all about lording over Slavs.