Black Earth(10)

The complete loss of the African colonies during and after the war created the possibility for a vague and malleable nostalgia about racial mastery. Popular novels about Africa with titles such as Master, Come Back! could make sense only after such a complete break. Germans could continue to see themselves as good colonizers, even as the realm of colonization itself became fluid and vague, projected into the future. Hans Grimm’s novel A People Without Space, which sold half a million copies in Germany before the Second World War, concerned the plight of a German who had left Africa only to be frustrated by confinement within a small Germany and an unjust European system.

The problem suggested its own solution. Since racism was an asserted hierarchy of rights to the planet, it could be applied to Europeans who lived east of Germany. Africa as a place was lost, but “Africa” as a form of thinking could be universalized. The experience in eastern Europe had established that neighbors could also be “black.” Europeans could be imagined to want “masters” and yield “space.” After the war, it was more practical to consider a return to eastern Europe than to Africa. Here, as in so many other cases, Hitler drew vague sentiments to remorselessly tight conclusions. He presented as racial inferiors the largest cultural group in Europe, Germany’s eastern neighbors, the Slavs.

—

“The Slavs are born as a slavish mass,” wrote Hitler, “crying out for their master.” He meant primarily the Ukrainians, who inhabited a stretch of very fertile land, as well as their neighbors—Russians, Belarusians, and Poles. “I need the Ukraine,” he stated, “in order that no one is able to starve us again, like in the last war.” The conquest of Ukraine would guarantee “a way of life for our people through the allocation of Lebensraum for the next hundred years.” This was a matter of natural justice: “It is inconceivable that a higher people should painfully exist on a soil too narrow for it, whilst amorphous masses, which contribute nothing to civilization, occupy infinite tracts of a soil that is one of the richest in the world.” As their land was taken, Ukrainians could be given, said Hitler, “scarves, glass beads, and everything that colonial peoples like.” A single loudspeaker in each village would “give them plenty of opportunities to dance, and the villagers will be grateful to us.” Nazi propaganda would simply remove Ukrainians from view. A Nazi song for female colonists described Ukraine thus: “There are neither farms nor hearths, there the earth cries out for the plough.” Erich Koch, chosen by Hitler to rule Ukraine, made the point about the inferiority of Ukrainians with a certain simplicity: “If I find a Ukrainian who is worthy to sit with me at table, I must have him shot.” Even in the racial murder threats, the dining room was the backdrop.

When German occupation came in 1941, Ukrainians themselves made the connection to Africa and America. A Ukrainian woman, literate and reflective in a way that Nazi racism could not have contemplated, recorded in her diary: “We are like slaves. Often the book Uncle Tom’s Cabin comes to mind. Once we shed tears over those Negroes, now obviously we ourselves are experiencing the same thing.” Yet in one respect, colonialism in eastern Europe had to differ from the American slave trade or the conquest of Africa. It required two feats of imagination: the wishing away not just of peoples but also of political entities that were similar to the German state. Hitler’s preoccupation with the racial struggle for nature occluded both nations and their governments. It was always legitimate to destroy states; if they were destroyed, that meant that they should have been destroyed.

Some states, claimed Hitler, were inviting attack. Lower races were incapable of state building, so what appeared to be their governments was illusory—a fa?ade for Jewish power. Hitler maintained that the Slavs had never governed themselves. The lands east of Germany had always been ruled by “foreign elements.” The Russian Empire had been the creation of an “essentially German upper class and intelligentsia.” Without this tradition of German leadership, “the Russians would still be living like rabbits.” Ukrainians were by nature a colonial people and, as German colonial administrators would say, “blacks.” After Germany was forced in 1918 to withdraw its troops and cede its new empire, most of Ukraine, like most of the lands of the Russian Empire, was consolidated within a new communist state known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (Soviet Union, USSR). Hitler claimed that the USSR was an expression of a Jewish “worldview.” The idea of communism was simply a deception that led Slavs to accept their “new leadership in Jewry.”