Vejas Liulevicius
speaker
414 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Vejas Liulevicius’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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The Nazis, moreover, in many different expressions of their ideology, had made clear that their plans—you can read this in Mein Kampf—for Eastern Europe were subjugation and ethnic cleansing on a vast scale. So I consider both of these claims absolutely untenable, given the facts and documents.
I think, as you can read in Mein Kampf, this is what's necessary in order to bring that racial utopia to pass. And so while the timetable might be flexible, while obviously geopolitical constellations would play a role in determining when such a thing might be possible, it was most definitely on his list.
And I would want to add that in my own scholarship, I've worked to explore some of these themes a little bit further. My second book, which is entitled The German Myth of the East, which appeared with Oxford University Press, examines centuries in the German encounter with Eastern Europe and how Germans have thought about Eastern Europe, whether in positive ways or in negative ways.
And one thing that emerges from this investigation is that even before the Nazis come to power in Germany, there are certainly negative and dehumanizing stereotypes about Eastern Europeans, some of them activated by the experiences of German occupation in some of these regions during the First World War.
But the Nazis take the very most destructive and most negative of all those stereotypes and make them the dominant ones, making no secret of their expected future of domination and annihilation in the East.
Hitler has Ukraine in his horizon as one of the chief prizes. And the Nazis then craft extensive plans, a master plan that they work on in draft after draft after draft, even as the balance of the war is turning against them on the Eastern Front. This master plan is called the Generalplan Ost, meaning the general plan for the East.
And it foresees things like mega highways on which the Germanic master race will travel to vacation in Crimea or how their settlements will be scientifically distributed in the wide open spaces of Ukraine for agriculture that will feed an expanded and purified Germanic master race. So this was not peripheral to the Nazi ambitions, but central.
In their worldview, the Jews were especially demonized. And so the project of the domination of Eastern Europe involves this horrific program of mechanized, systematized, bureaucratically organized, and horrifyingly efficient mass murder of the Jewish populations. What the Nazis expected for the Slavs had a longer timeline.
Himmler expected the head of the SS, the SS is given a special mission to be part of the transformation of these regions ethnically. And Himmler, in his role of envisioning this German future in Eastern Europe, gives such a chilling phrase.
He says that while certain Slavs will fall victim immediately, some proportion of Slavs will not be shipped out or deported or annihilated, but instead they will remain as slaves for our culture. And in that one phrase, Himmler managed to defile and deface everything that the word culture had meant to generations of the best German thinkers and artists in the centuries before the Nazis.
The notion of slaves for our culture was part of his longer-term expectation. And then there's finally a fact that is... speaks volumes about what the Nazis planned for the East. Hitler and Himmler envisioned permanent war on the Eastern Front.
Not a peace treaty, not a settlement, not a border, but a constant moving of the border every generation, hundreds of miles east, in order to keep winning more and more living space and And with analogy to other frontiers, to always give more fighting experience and more training and aggression to generation after generation of German soldiers.
In terms of nightmarish visions, this one's right up there.
And even in the case of the Germans themselves, the... hidden message behind even Nazi propaganda about unity and about German national identity was the Nazis envisioned relentless purges of the German genetic stock as well. So among their victims are people with disabilities, people who are defined as not racially pure enough for the future, even though they are clearly Germans by identity.
The full scale and the comprehensive ambitions of the Nazis are as breathtaking as they are horrifying.
That's right. I would think that the Nazis with atomic weapons with no compunctions about deploying them would rank up there as even worse than the horrors that we saw.
Yeah. And I think that nobody should like oversimplified narratives. We need a subtle and accurate narratives.
I mean, they're certainly striking and unique historical characters in the record. One of the things that's so disturbing about Hannah Arendt's model of totalitarianism is that leader can be changed. The system itself demands that there be a leader who allegedly is all-powerful and all-knowing and prophetic and the like.
But whether particular figures are interchangeable in that role is a key question.
I would think that the reality was probably But that was certainly their ambition. German communists get quoted as saying, after Hitler, it's our turn. Their sentiment was that the arrival of Nazism on the scene was a sign of how decrepit and incompetent and doomed capitalism was. In hindsight, that's almost impossible to believe.
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