. NMT04-T0763
Volume IV · Page 763
| the Reich Leader SS, Reich Commissioner for
the Strengthening of Germanism, will have to master in the annexed Eastern
territories. When solving this task, which is most closely connected with the
problem of nationality in the Eastern territories,* the racial selection is of
superior and utterly decisive importance besides the viewpoints of language,
education, and religion. Necessary as it is for a permanent purgation of the
German Eastern territories not to allow the elements of alien origin living
there to remain or become settled down, it is just as indispensable to regain
for Germanism the German blood existing in these districts even in cases where
the person concerned is Polonized in language and religion. Especially from
these persons of Teutonic blood there accrued for the former Polish state,
those leaders who ultimately bitterly fought against their own German folkdom
— either from delusion or by willful or unconscious misunderstanding of
their blood connection. It is, therefore, an absolute national-political necessity to screen the annexed Eastern territories and later also the General Government for such persons of Teutonic blood in order to make this lost German blood again available to our own people. It may be of secondary importance what measures are to be taken against renegades. It is decisive that at least their children no longer belong to Poland, but that they are educated in German environments. A re-Germanization, however, can in no case take place in the hitherto Polish surroundings, but only in Germany proper or the Ostmark. Thus, there are mainly the following two reasons which make the regaining of this lost German blood an urgent necessity: 1. Preventing a further increase of the Polish intellectual class from tribes destined to be Germanic, though Polonized. 2. Increasing of the racially desirable growth of the population for the German people and procurement of nationally biologically unobjectionable forces for the German reconstruction in agriculture and industry. This task of the re-Germanization of lost German blood has first been handled by evacuating those Poles in the Warthegau who had to make room for the purpose of settling Baltic and Volhynic Germans. For carrying through the necessary measures the following basic directives and decrees were issued: |
Directive 17/II of the Reich Leader SS, Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of Germanism, dated 9 May 1940, |
* Compare herewith the paragraph "culture Politics — question of nationality." [Footnote is original.]
