a note on Nazi terminology

[truepenny]

One of the issues that greatly exercised the Nazis as they expanded their Lebensraum eastward was the fate of the Volksdeutsch, the "ethnic Germans" of Poland, Volhynia, Ukraine, and other regions of eastern Europe which were variously part of the Soviet Union and of the "successor states" created after World War I. The Nazis were just as eager--if not more so--to move these "ethnic Germans" into the Reich as they were to move the Jews out of it; it was one of Himmler's particular hobby horses, flaming racist nutbar that he was, and I've read a lot about the grotesque, ludicrous, horrifying lengths the Nazis went to in attempting to rearrange the demographics of Europe to suit their ideology. But the one thing I haven't been able to find is a definition of "ethnic German." The historians I've read have all used the term as if it were unproblematic, as if there were some obvious definition that both scholars and Nazis could agree ...

Wait a minute.

You begin to see why I was bothered. If there is one thing I've learned from reading about Nazi ideology of race, it is that those fuckers were crazy, completely stark, barking unhinged. Their ideas are pseudo-scientific at best; they're also contradictory, slippery, and prone to change without notice. So surely the idea of "ethnic Germans," being as it is an idea the Nazis believed in whole-heartedly, needs to be interrogated. But I haven't found a historian (and please note, I don't pretend my reading has been anywhere near exhaustive) who even mentions the obvious but easily overlooked fact that "ethnic German" is a constructed category, much less goes about deconstructing it.

I've been getting a little frustrated about it.

But finally, Karel C. Berkhoff, in Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine Under Nazi Rule, at least talks about how the Nazis defined "ethnic Germans":

From the outset there was confusion as to who was volksdeutsch, or "national German." A 1941 Reich rule said that in order to qualify one needed at least three "purely German" grandparents, but the SS also could confer the status after a "racial review." Wehrmacht guidelines barred people of "foreign blood," but others argued that a person who had no German ancestors at all was still eligible if there were no "racial concerns" and if he or she felt and behaved as "a member of the German nation." [...] Early in September 1942, Himmler ordered [Erich Koch, the Reichskommissar for Ukraine] to introduce an official registry that already existed in the Reich, the German Nationality List, which was a stepping stone toward German citizenship. Koch complied on December 7. Koch's rules were rather broad: the list should include even "carriers of German blood" who rejected "Germanness," as well as any spouses of those on the list (except for Jewish spouses, whom he ordered killed along with their children). "Alien" first names such as Jacob were summarily altered. On March 19, 1943, all on the Reichskommissariat list in one stroke became German citizens, whether they wanted to or not.
(211-12)

Berkhoff also remarks that the "ethnic German" peasants in Ukraine "knew little about the Third Reich and had reservations about it or even feared it" (212) and that the approximately five thousand "ethnic Germans" in Kiev "spoke little or no German" (213). Other historians remark that some of these groups of "ethnic Germans" had been living in eastern Europe for hundreds of years. So where, exactly, in all of this is the basis for the definition of "ethnic Germans"?

But wait--it gets even worse:

[...] many--"everybody," as one Kievan puts it--wanted to register as ethnic Germans. Many succeeded, especially in the first year. A bribe of five thousand rubles apparently did the job in Kiev. The new "ethnic Germans" could include a Finnish family or a Georgian professor and his Ukrainian wife who had one ethnic German grandparent.
(212)

So the best definition we get for "ethnic German" is someone with three "purely German" grandparents--and this definition itself is nothing but a fallacy, since it defines being "German" only in terms of the "Germanness" which it fails to define. And this definition, utterly inadequate as it is, is superseded, first by the SS and by the competing definition of "ethnic German" as someone who "felt and behaved" like a German, and then by this even vaguer notion of "carriers of German blood." "Ethnic German," as a category, isn't defined by language; it isn't defined by having kin within the Reich; it isn't defined by any sense of identity with Germany. It's defined by Nazi fiat or 5,000 rubles, whichever comes first.

And while I don't expect any better from the Nazis, about whom the most charitable thing a person can say is that they were muddled thinkers at their best, I'm disappointed in the historians I've read who've accepted the term at face value. Because seriously, with the Nazis? You should know better.

Comments

[txanne.livejournal.com]

...how do you *stand* this? I'd be dancing naked in the town square by now.

[davidpv.livejournal.com]

The following is from a WIP chapter:

Article 19 of the 1867 Constitution for the newly created Austria-Hungary Empire, stated that,

“All races of the empire have equal rights, and every race has an inviolable right to the preservation and use of its own nationality and language. The equality of all customary languages (landesübliche Sprache) in school, office and public life, is recognized by the state. In those territories in which several races dwell, the public and educational institutions are to be so arranged that, without applying compulsion to learn a second country language (Landessprache), each of the races receives the necessary means of education in its own language.”

Many studies have been devoted to the implications of this Article for the multi-ethnic Empire; however, all agree that the Article was the basis for many problems. By 1880, the Empire passed a language ordinance which required local schools to use the language of the majority in the area. For German-speaking residents in Bohemia, the Alps and Sudeten areas, they were in the minority and the government would not provide German-language schools. An Austrian organization, the Deutscher Schulverein (German School Union), was created to provide such schools. The following year, the Allgemeiner Deutscher Schulverein (ADS, General German School Association) was formed as a private organization to support the Deutscher Schulverein. By 1908, the ADS had expanded to provide support to German-language schools in other areas in Europe, as well as in its colonies and the United States, and had changed its name to the Verein für das Deutschtum im Ausland (VDA, Society for Germans Abroad).

After the First World War, the Treaty of Versailles created new countries containing areas of ethnic Germans who had previously been German nationals, as well as stripping German of its colonies. By 1925, it had “1,914 local and 1,172 school groups,” in addition to other activities, including “cultural institutions such as churches, kindergartens, libraries and newspapers but it also concerned itself with the welfare of the German nationals. Economic assistance was given to university students, especially to those who were studying at universities in Germany.”

As far as sources:

Susanne Czeitschner, "Discourse and Hegemony and Polyglossia in the Judicial System of Trieste in the 19th Century," in Diglossia and Power: Language Policies and Practice in the 19th Century Habsburg Empire, ed. Rosita Rindler Schjerve (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003), 78.

For more information on the VDA, see: Gerhard Weidenfeller, VDA: Verein fuer das Deutschtum im Ausland. Allgemeiner Deutscher Schulverein (1881-1918): Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des deutschen Nationalismus und Imperialismus im Kaiserreich [Transl.: VDA: Association for Germans Abroad. Gernal German Schools Association (1881-1918): A contribution to the history of German nationalism and imperialism within the Empire] (Frankfurt a. M.: Lang, 1976); Tammo Luther, Volkstumspolitik des deutschen Reiches 1933-1938: Die Auslanddeutschen im Spannungsfeld zwischen Traditionalisten und Nationalsozialisten [Transl.: The Ethnic Policy of the German Empire, 1933-1938: The Germans in international tension between traditionalists and the National Socialists] (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2004).

My research has been with the VDA in the US during the 20s-40s.

Hope this helps,
David

[razziecat.livejournal.com]

" Article 19 of the 1867 Constitution for the newly created Austria-Hungary Empire, stated that,

“All races of the empire have equal rights, and every race has an inviolable right to the preservation and use of its own nationality and language. "

This is interesting in light of the fact that during much of the 19th century until around the end of WW I, Poland did not exist as a country, having been divided between Russia, Germany and the Austrian Empire. How does one maintain one's nationality as a Pole if one's entire country has been divided up this way? My grandmother (Polish mother, German father) was born somewhere in the area of Poznan (aka Posen) in 1894, and remembered that she and her brothers were not allowed to speak Polish in school--they had to speak German. So it doesn't seem as if this Constitution was strictly observed.

[the-monkey-king.livejournal.com]

I'd say that you are perhaps bringing a New World idea of ethnicity to an Old World setting. Let me discuss passports and maybe that will provide context (or not).

As an American citizen, one's ethnicity is defined by birth. Born in the States? Great, you are an American! If you like, you can be a hyphenated American.

Born in France, Germany, or Poland? You might be an ethnic Frenchman, German, or Pole, but probably not. And you damn sure won't get citizenship in France as a child of Algerian parents, or in Germany as a child of Turkish parents or even grandparents. You need to be born to at least one French or German parent to get a passport and become a citizen. Accidents of birth help you not at all.

And so we return to the ethnic Germans. The Nazis believed in racial essentialism or purity or whatever it was, and so in their eyes the Bohemians, Volhynians, Sudetenlanders, and etc etc were really citizens because at some point their ancestors had been Germans. The fact that they emigrated 300 years ago was probably considered irrelevant; they were still the descendants of Germans and thus somehow racially distinct.

We might call these mysterious bloodlines "genetic markers" today, or we might admit that a population in an area just isn't that distinct from its neighbors after a few generations (and we have proof of this today for all sorts of human groups).

Ok, the Nazi bloodline bit still doesn't make a lot more sense than Lysenkoism or other racial/genetic dogma. But I think there's something to the notion that European standards of ethnicity are far less plastic and far more based on parental inheritance than New World standards.

The Volga Germans might not speak German in a recognizable form, but the Nazis thought they had passed down some essentialist spark to their children, and based their propaganda and policies on that. Identification with the Nazi state had nothing to do with it.

[the-monkey-king.livejournal.com]

Considered another way, accidents of history provided a fine excuse for the nazis to invade their neighbors. The "rescue" of the Volksdeutsche was a fig leaf.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Well, it's a fig leaf that at least some of them believed in with all their evil little hearts. Himmler, for example, meant it.

[the-monkey-king.livejournal.com]

Hm, true. I always seem to consider the Nazis an amalgam of the Himmlers and the, oh, von Brauns. The ones who didn't believe it with all their evil little hearts, but who did want the power and money that came with membership in the ruling party.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Oh, there are all sorts of problems with "ethnicity" in America, including the slippage between that term and "race," and the fact that any definition of either of them is inherently problematic--but in fact that was kind of my point, that this is intensely problematic terminology, even when not being deployed by Nazis, and therefore it needs to be unpacked and interrogated. (And actually, "ethnicity" in America is defined very much the same way: by your ancestors and where they came from, even if, as in my own personal case, that was so long ago that it is personally meaningless. To the best of my knowledge, Americans don't consider "American"--as distinct from "Native American"--an ethnicity; at least, I have never heard anyone make that claim. In our o'erweening arrogance, we consider "American" the unmarked state from which everyone else deviates. Hence all the hyphens.)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

And of course the unmarked state of "American" is WASP.

[(Anonymous)]

iow, whoever we think is German is German, except when we think they ain't (like Jews) when they ain't. Why we think this makes no sense, but we'll make up some 'science' to support it if you insist.

It's unsurprising that people were bribing their way to an ethnicity that was perceived as privileged, or for this reason claiming it based on a grandparent and some barely remembered kitchen German. Claimed ethnicity can often be a juxtaposition of self interest and real life fluidity - an ironic example is the Russians who moved to Israel (because they had a Jewish grandparent) suddenly discovering their Jewishness after years of forgetting it, or not really caring about it one way or another. For many of them it had everything to do with the economic situation in Russia, and why not I say? Good for them.

Zaf

[azdak.livejournal.com]

Please excuse me while I delurk...

German ethnicity is an enormously complex topic, but it has always been based fundamentally on language - a "German" was someone who spoke German. It couldn't be a geo-political category, because the German nation state didn't come into existence until 1871. Prior to that you had a disparate collection of German-speaking principalities under the umbrella of the Holy Roman Empire (which, in spite of being "das heilige roemische Reich deutscher Nation" in fact incorporated many countries that weren't German-speaking). Even after 1871 set the definitive borders of the German state, there were still many voices calling for the inclusion of Austria within Germany. Hitler, of course, agreed (to go off at a tangent for a moment, the great post-war Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky once said that Austria's greatest achievement had been to convince the world that Beethoven was Austrian and Hitler German), and the name that it was given when it had been incorporated into the Reich was "die Ostmark" - the Eastern Marches.

The point I want to make - if you've ploughed through all that - is that historically being "German" - part of a greater German nation than the little local principalities - was de facto based not on political or religious allegiance, and certainly not on borders, but on language. The German Volk was therefore the mass of people who spoke German, regardless of whose territory they happened to find themselves living in. This consideration determined the boundaries of the modern nation state - it wasn't a category confusion invented by the Nazis, but lies at the root of German national identity.

The Nazis, of course, take the confusion a step further with their mystical mumbo jumbo about "Blut und Boden". Nonetheless, the fundamental marker of an ethnic German living outside the borders of the nation state was linguistic - not the language the individuals themselves spoke, but that of their ancestors.

This is, incidentally, still true today. When the Iron Curtain came down, "ethnic Germans" from the former Eastern bloc were allowed to immigrate to Germany on exactly the same curious ancestral-language=ethnic-identity basis as in Nazi times.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm chipping in to confirm and expand on the last entry here. I did a check on german wikipedia concerning today's definition of "ethnic german". it is these days used to determine who is eligible to reacquire a German passport and move (back) to Germany - aimed at people who were driven out of their native region at the end od WW2. It includes a language exam (and you're not allowed to have learned the language in school/classes). On top of that, the law (today) defines a "Deutschen Volkszugehörigen" (Member of the German people) as someone who "has committed to German culture as long as this commitment is confirmed by origin, language, education or culture." So yes, the definition of ethnic German has always been a little murky, and defined differently than most other nations due to the previously mentioned historic complications.

-Andreas

[redbird]

But of course they weren't defining a German as someone who spoke German, or my mother and her family would have counted as German. A definition based on language might work, but it's not what was or is being used: as someone already noted, a person can be a native speaker of German, born in Munich, and not count as an "ethnic German" because their grandparents were from Istanbul.

[azdak.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. And of course most German Jews only spoke German, but that wasn't enough to redeem them either. What matters is not whether youspeak German but whether your ancestors did.

It hangs together with a cult of older forms of the language being considered "purer" because somehow closer to the roots of German identity (what anglophone historical linguists call Indo-European is referred to in Germany as Proto-Germanisch). The SS revived a lot of archaic Germanic words as part of their cult rituals. And certain dialects were considered superior because they were supposed to be closer to this purer form of old German.

There is wonderful true story (turned into an excellent play by Felix Mitterer) about an Austrian actor called Leo Reuss who was sacked from the Theater in der Josefstadt in Vienna in the 1930s for being Jewish. He went into hiding in Salzburg, where he dyed his hair, lightened his irises with acid (yeah, ouch) and learned Tyrolean dialect, reemerging a few months later as "Kaspar Brandauer", Tyrolean peasant and untrained actor of astonishing natural talent (he deliberately learned Tyrolean rather than Salzburg dialect, because he knew that Tyrolean would be more highly valued by the Nazis). Sure enough, he was seized on by the theatres, and the Nazi press loved him, because he fulfilled all their ideas of what an Aryan peasant genius should be. He got rave reviews for his "first" lead role, before being outed and having to flee to America.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I was quite sure it was a complicated and difficult topic; that was why I was so frustrated at the lack of discussion.

And I love that Kreisky quote.

[azdak.livejournal.com]

Kreisky was fab. I had that quote up on my kitchen wall, along with another one of his that ran "The West of Austria is full of bone-headedAryans and Nazis; the East of Austria is full of perfectly normal gypsies and Czechs and Hungarians and Jews. It's the government's job to make sure the good lot stays on top of the crazies."

[kameron-hurley.livejournal.com]

If you think *this* is crazy, you should see some of the doublethink gymnastics the South African government engaged in for *decades.*

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I know a very little bit about that, and yes.

[miriander.livejournal.com]

I love your posts, seeing as how your clever thinking makes me want to read them even though I always thought I've heard enough about the Nazis (in the German school system, they repeat it every year and after a while, you get tired of hearing the same stuff over and over again). But you always mention an interesting facet we never talked about. I researched how you can get a German passport today, and in fact what another person in this discussion said is not true: Since 2000, you get a passport even if both your parents don't have one, if one of them lived at least for 3 years with a legal permit/8 years generally in Germany. Regarding the general discussion, I would say that you'll have a hard time defining the nationality or ethnicity of any of the major countries in Europe (say, the Spanish: What about the influx of Muslim culture and genes there in the past?). As an archaeologist, I can say that it is not just the Nazis who referred to the murky past in search of common ancestors - the British for example normally mention the Anglo-Saxons and forget the native Romano-British who lived on the island before the Anglo-Saxons arrived. As an ethnologist, I can say that ethnicity is a much-discussed topic there. The general consensus seems to be that neither shared language nor shared culture not shared territory alone are the deciding factors. Only if people believe they belong together and believe in shared traits (even though it might be fictional), we speak of an ethnicity. In this light, the "ethnic Germans" who did not see themselves as Germans would in fact not have been Germans, even if they spoke the language. It would have been fairly easy for the historians to find the relevant literature.

[(Anonymous)]

say, the Spanish: What about the influx of Muslim culture and genes there in the past?

As a Spaniard, I feel somewhat obliged to point out that in contemporary Spain there is very little notion of "ethnic Spanishness", and what is more, historically there was never such an idea.

There was of course the nasty 17th-c. obsession with the "purity of blood", which concerned whether you were an "Old Christian" or not (you needed to prove that your family had been Christian, with no Jewish or Muslim ancestors, for seven generations. Which, in a country with the amount of intermingling that Spain had during the Middle Ages, was possibly the whackiest idea you could come up with -- because practically everyone was guaranteed to have Jewish and/or Muslim ancestors). But it was a matter of religion, not of belonging to a nation (given that the notion of "Spain" is a fairly late one, and for centuries people regarded themselves as Castilian, or Aragonese, or Leonese, or Galician, or Asturian, or what have you, rather than as Spanish).

Of course, when in 1492 Isabella expelled the Jews and the Moors from Spain unless they converted, religion became the standard for nationality. And if you were a "New Christian" (i.e. a convert) you were officially Spanish (though in real life a second-class citizen).

[twa-in-yin.livejournal.com]

Sorry, that was me.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Thank you for taking the time to offer that explanation. I knew some of that history, but not all of it.

[annafdd.livejournal.com]

You want weird? Italy. Italy has pretty much never been a nation, was until about fifty years ago peopled by folks who spoke different languages, and yet there is always been a concept of Italy, its confines have more or less always been clear to everybody (we had the advantage of a nice clearly defined watershed up there), and everybody living in there was convinced that they were Italians despite not speaking the same language, being governed by a motely crew of mostly foreign kings, and having different social, political and economic histories.

Then, after centuries of aspiring to nationhood and unity, within fifty years of the unification of Italy people have started to clamor that We are totally not like Those people and demanding secession.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

I don't think the historians are taking the term at face value, so much as they are failing to unpack it for the benefit of those not familiar with the notion.

The Eastern European Auslandsdeutsche were a part of the scene from the Middle Ages on.

It is, as usual, subject to the usual caveats, but Wikipedia takes a stab at explaining Ethnic Germans (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auslandsdeutsche#Terminology). Historicaly, the Germans have been great emigrators; the great 19th century spread abroad was not a new thing. In the medieval period, there was substantial expansion into non-German speaking parts of Eastern Europe, called the Ostsiedlung (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_eastward_expansion); later on, people moved east for religious reasons (think of groups like the Mennonites and Hutterites) or by explicit invitation; the Russians, in the 18th century, invited in Germans on purpose. More on all of this here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_German_settlement_in_Eastern_Europe). Think of groups like the Teutonic Knights (so much easier to campaign against the pagans in the Baltic instead of going all that way to Jerusalem!) and the Hanseatic League (unofficial motto: We'll go wherever we have to to make a pfennig).

Sometimes, the Germans assimilated into the local populations (whence you get the "you're Germans because we say so" business), and sometimes they didn't; besides the Sudenten Germans in Czechoslovakia, there were distinctly German-speaking groups like the Transylvanian Saxons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transylvanian_Saxons) (who were actually mostly from Franconia, but "Saxons" sounds so unambiguously German).

Of course, a lot of the territory they were moving into was part of, or under the strong influence of the Holy Roman Empire, which was largely run by Germans, so it probably made a lot more sense at the time than it does looking at the modern European map. In other cases, the settled area was right on the borders of Imperial territory, and sending in settlers was a way to do the rulers a "favor" by sending in skilled tradesmen who would build towns and pay taxes in cash, while getting rid of excess population of your own and setting up a group sympathetic to you in that territory.
The third link above has a neat little map of the Austro-Hungarian Empire c. 1910, showing areas with German-speakers/Ethnic Germans in red.
Current theories on the Pied Piper of Hameln (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pied_Piper#Hypotheses_for_the_origin_of_the_legend) story are that it's a disguised account of an emigration group.

Of course, the Nazis were still crazy about this topic, along with many other things.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I don't think the historians are taking the term at face value, so much as they are failing to unpack it for the benefit of those not familiar with the notion.

But my point is that that amounts to the same thing. If you (general "you") use the term without addressing the ways in which it is problematic, you just reinscribe the muddled thinking that came up with it in the first place. Although I don't have a lot of patience with Derridean literary theory, deconstruction is a valuable tool--and it's crucial when you're talking about anything as shaped by ideology as Nazi ideas about "Germanness."

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

...and it's crucial when you're talking about anything as shaped by ideology as Nazi ideas about "Germanness."

You are 100% correct there, for my money. I think the historians are suffering from a blind spot in this area--since the topic of ethnic minorities was such as well-known one in post-World War I Europe (and pre-war as well, given all the agitation by various minority groups within the Austro-Hungarian state for greater autonomy and privileges) the Nazis didn't have to say what they meant by the term (even though what they meant may have been different from what other people understood by it). Expecting that understanding to carry over into the late 20th and early 21st centuries--as well as awareness of where the Nazi use of the term may have differed from its use by others, especially among readers who haven't been soaking in this stuff, is at least naive, and certainly not helpful.

As a chronic autodidact wandering about, I notice this happens a lot, and not just in history. Terms are used all the time, and examples are regularly referenced, with the assumption that anyone reading this already knows, without further explanation or examination.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Well, it is--to be fair--a hell of a tightrope walk, and a lot of it has to do with assumptions about audience. If you assume that your audience is other professionals in your field (which may be a perfectly justified assumption), you don't want to waste your and their time with endless pages of As You Know Bob exposition. And if you assume that your audience is not other professionals in your field, how do you decide where the explanations stop? Do you have to explain the Austro-Hungarian empire's formation in order to talk about Hitler's accession to power in 1933?

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

This is where the Internets Will Save Lives; all historians and others need to do is say, in a brief Note at the beginning of the book: "Questions about the definitions of the terms we are using here by persons from outside this field may be referred to [URL Speshul Technical Definitions for X]. Please be aware that these terms are considered Terms of Art, and while they may mean one thing in this field, it is entirely possible they mean something else in another one. Love and Kisses, the Author(s).

Because there really is no end to it all. To sort out the Austro-Hungarians, you have to have a handle on the Holy Roman Empire and its neighbors, and the line does pretty much stretch out to the very crack of doom. Modern Germany rests inevitably upon the foundations laid much earlier, and, boy, AsyouknowBob, this is true of the rest of world, and as in history, so in the fine arts and literature.

So: online definition sites, by discipline and subdiscipline. Think of the time it will save! Think of the pages that could be used for other things! Think of the academic infighting over who gets to run the sites!

Volksdeutsche und so weiter

[(Anonymous)]

For me the most interesting part of this issue is the light it sheds on the interaction of (attempted) scientific thinking and irrationalism (mysticism, really) in the Nazis' world view. Sure, they loved precise definitions when they could come up with them, but I think their difficulty in defining an 'ethnic German' in a way that made empirical sense stemmed primarily from the 'mumbo jumbo' aspect of their ideology. When 'ethnic German' has a mystical element to it, scientific or historical justification becomes almost irrelevant, or just a cover story; it's really a matter of 'blood.' And the issue can be left there even by Nazi pedants, because that's the way mystical belief works.

I would also argue that everyone on earth does exactly the same thing in their own heads, though usually to less destructive ends. I could point to a list of beliefs I hold that are not easily amenable to proof. So this problem isn't a Nazi difficulty, really; it's a human one.

Melanie
Albuquerque

[girlpunksamurai.livejournal.com]

Actually, America also had it's ethnic ideas about nationality

For a while it was Anglo-Saxon, for the win. One example that comes to mind is the AFL and the IWW. They were both unions trying to get workers out of the slave wager trap (man were things crappy back then if you weren't rich) as well as improve working conditions. Now the AFL (American Federation of Labor) was a union that only allowed skilled workers that were white, or in other words, 95% of that union was made up of white men. This is what created the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World); a group of unionists disliked the AFL's exclusionary ways and formed the IWW for all peoples, black, white, immigrants, even women. These two sort of exemplify the struggle between the white-is-superior and we-are-all-Americans groups.

I suspect many countries went through the same arguments about superiority of race; it seems to be a human failing.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

So not trying to argue that the history of America is not saturated with white supremacist thinking. ("Manifest Destiny," anyone?)

[girlpunksamurai.livejournal.com]

*shudders* oh gods, let's not go there

That just leads to what we did to the Indians-I think the only reason we didn't get up on par with Hitler was simply because there weren't enough Indians to compare. That's about it. As it is, we did our level best to kill the culture of any survivors, stealing away young Indian kids and putting them in schools that cut their hair short, beat them if they practiced their religion, or spoke in their language, and made them wear 'normal' white American school clothes.

I'm a history buff, but I'm the first to admit, a lot of natural reactions to history read by first timers tend to be along the lines of 'ugies, ugies, ugies >.<'

o.O *sigh*

[vcmw]

I suspect the question of how many Indian deaths there were and what responsibility European immigrants had for them is kind of an involved one academically, as it seems to depend on when you set your time start (1492? 1630? 1800?) and how you count the spread of infectious disease. And which population extrapolations and early colonial writings you trust.

(Sorry, I just finished reading 1491 by Charles C. Mann.)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Well, without wanting in any way to downplay the atrocities committed by people of European ancestry upon Native Americans (or upon Africans brought to America, for that matter), there is still a qualitative difference between the Trail of Tears and Auschwitz (to pick two symbolic synechdoches). There was never in America a state apparatus with no purpose other than to kill as many human beings as possible as quickly as possible.

I don't like playing comparative atrocities because it's too easy for it to end up looking like saying one is "more important" than the other. Which is utterly totally and one-hundred-percent completely not what I'm saying. Nor am I saying that people of European descent in America deserve a pat on the back because, hey! our ancestors didn't build Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka! Go team us! No. Just because our ancestors weren't as bad as the Nazis doesn't ameliorate the horror of what they did do.

[miriander.livejournal.com]

About the connection between the Nazis and some mythical past: Some German archaeologists, the most (in)famous one being Gustav Kossinna, had this theory that the roots of German-kind could be found as early as the Stone Age. He explicitly links race, ethnicity, language, ancestors and territory. From this point of view, you could see how notions of a mythical shared Germanic heritage could, for the Nazis, erase profane problems such as language with regard to 'ethnic Germans'.
I don't know how "important" Kossinna or his theories were in their time out of the academic ivory tower, but researching ideas about ethnicity and race in that time, I'm sure one would to stumble over him sooner or later.

[marycatelli]

Have you read about the children selected for Germanization? It was not unknown for them to kidnap children off the street based on looks. And the Germans paid special attention to orphanages and foster children, in the belief that Poles were deliberately Polonizing German children. It makes their analyses in the Baltic State look orderly.

(Lynn H. Nicholas's Cruel World has some interesting stuff on it.)