One of the intriguing situations related to World War II was the signing of the Non-Aggression Pact between Nazi Germany and the USSR, in August 1939. Also known as German-Soviet pact, it stipulated that the two countries would not enter into conflict and that there would be neutrality in cases of annexations of some European countries by both parties.
The pact ended up overcoming for a time the ideological and social differences between the two political regimes, as well as representing Hitler's last attempt to initiate the territorial expansion plan to the east. European. The pact also allowed the USSR to annex Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Finland and part of Eastern Poland to its borders. On the other hand, the Nazis could annex Danzig, Poland. This agreement allowed Germany to invade Poland on September 1, 1939, starting World War II days later.
But Hitler's expansionist project was not limited to Polish territories. It included the conquest of the “living space”, known as Lebensraum, which encompassed all of Eastern Europe. Such expansionist measure was ideologically based on the Nazi meaning that the Slavs were an inferior race in relation to the Nordic peoples, to which the Germans belonged. In addition to the Poles, the Russians, Ukrainians, Czechs and Slovaks, for example, were also Slavs, so Hitler's expansionist action would not spare the USSR.
The aim was to transform Eastern Europe into a II Reich farmland. For this, Hitler proposed the elimination of the Slav leaders and their more educated members, who could offer greater resistance. The other members of this ethnic group would be transformed into modern slaves who would work the land. In Nazi planning for Eastern Europe, cities and industries would be destroyed, left in ruins, to complete the total ruralization of this vast geographic area. There would be encouragement to settlers from the supposed Nordic people to settle in the region, thus becoming the new masters who would control this slave labor force.
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The new lords would live in fortified areas, linked by new roads that would be built, abandoning everything that had been built before. This measure was inserted in the New Continental Order proposed by Hitler, in which, in a complementary way to the industrialized Reich, there would be a ruralized Slavic space, limited to agriculture and underground exploitation, destroying industry in Poland, the USSR and the Yugoslavia1.
This proposal was an action planned by a specialized bureaucracy, in which such economic measures were heavily overlaid of a racial character, of subjugation of a people considered superior, the Germans, over another, considered sub-human, the Slavs.
The German-Soviet pact was just a tactical action by Hitler not to place the USSR as a strong enemy in the beginning of the war actions. The extermination actions of the Slavs were carried out in the first moments of the expansion to the east. Then, after the German invasion of the USSR and the start of fighting on Soviet soil, around five million Russians were taken to concentration camps. The military defeat of the Nazis to the Soviets prevented the planning of enslavement and ruralization of Slavic spaces were carried out and that the extermination carried out by Hitler's forces was still bigger.
1 BERNARDO, João. labyrinths of fascism. Doctoral thesis. Campinas: Unicamp, 1998. P. 93. available in: http://www.bibliotecadigital.unicamp.br/document/?code=vtls000134486
By Tales Pinto
Graduated in History
Would you like to reference this text in a school or academic work? Look:
PINTO, Tales of the Saints. "Soviet-German Pact and Slavic Enslavement"; Brazil School. Available in: https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/historiag/pacto-germano-sovietico-escravizacao-eslava.htm. Accessed on June 27, 2021.
