Hitler's Foreign Executioners by Christopher Hale

Author:Christopher Hale
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780752463933
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2011-07-24T16:00:00+00:00

The study of eastern peoples (Ostforschung) dominated German race science and especially fascinated Himmler. But it would be wrong to conclude that the race experts had no interest in ethnic diversity in Western Europe. Himmler also energetically promoted Westforschung, the study of European peoples. Race science in the Third Reich would never be a merely scholarly pursuit. It had an instrumental political purpose: to facilitate ‘Germanisation’. The task of Hitler’s experts in both Eastern and Western Europe was to measure the quantity of Nordic blood possessed by different ethnic groups. On that basis, some would be selected for future assimilation as ‘Germanics’, the rest would be discarded. After 1939, the lion’s share of Westforshung fell into the hands of Himmler’s think tank the SS-Ahnenerbe (ancestral heritage), and for the Ahnenerbe’s race experts, the people of the Netherlands, like the Nordic Scandinavians, had a special status.

In October 1940, the Ahnenerbe took over Der Vadaren Erfdeel (DVE), a right-wing Dutch institute linked to the National Socialist Party (NSB). The DVE had been set up in 1937 to study the Germanic ancestry of the Dutch. In the occupied Netherlands, SS race experts and their obliging Dutch counterparts collaborated on what became known as the ‘Holland Plan’ – the western version of the Generalplan Ost. The core idea had first been proposed by Bonn university professor Dr Otto Plaßmann, who headed the Forschungsstätte für Germanenkunde, germanische Kulturwissenschaft und Landschaftskunde (Research Facility on Germanic Ancestry, Cultural and Geographical studies). In a letter to the Director of the Ahnenerbe, Plaßmann outlined a wildly ambitious scheme to create a ‘Greater Holland’ carved out from the Netherlands and parts of Belgium. As in the case of the Ostplan, implementing the Holland Plan meant that any non-Germanic ethnic groups must be removed or even liquidated; and ‘non-Germanic’, of course, meant the Francophone Belgians, the Walloons. German race scientists already knew a great deal about the Walloons.

The doyenne of Walloonian studies was Franz Petri.18 In the mid-1920s, Petri and like-minded scholars had become fascinated by different ethnic cultures that lay scattered along German borderlands. These included Petri’s own special study, the Flemish population of the Netherlands. In common with many German anthropologists, Petri welcomed the coming of Hitler’s Reich since leading Nazis like Himmler and Rosenberg favoured the systematic study of race. In 1936, Petri joined the SA and the NSDAP and began cultivating connections inside the SS. He also formed close ties with Flemish nationalists based in Cologne and was a founder of the Deutsch-Vlämische Arbeitsgemeinschaft (DeVlag), which before too long would fall into the hands of Gottlob Berger. Petri too was a passionate advocate of a ‘Greater Holland’.

In October 1939 a Belgian journalist called Maurice Wilmotte read Petri’s somewhat obscure papers concerning the ‘Flanders-Germanic borderland’ and raised the alarm: Petri’s ideas, he revealed to the readers of Le Soir, were nothing less than an invasion plan. Wilmotte was right to be concerned. After the German invasion of the Netherlands and Belgium, Hitler approved Petri’s appointment as Kulturpapst (literally, culture pope) – a key position within the Belgian military administration.

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