ABSTRACT
Between 1939 and 1945, the National Socialist regime oversaw one of the largest and most radical campaigns of cultural assimilation in modern history. From the Atlantic Coast to the Ukrainian steppe, over six million people became “Germans” in one way or another during the Second World War. Yet despite the sheer magnitude of this undertaking, we still know relatively little about its contours and complexities. Although scholars have left us with a sophisticated and voluminous literature on the catastrophic violence of Nazi rule in occupied Europe, they have not extended nearly the same degree of scrutiny to the integrative dimension of National Socialist imperialism: the attempt to incorporate conquered populations into the German body politic instead of oppressing, enslaving, or annihilating them.
This chapter will shed light on this multifaceted endeavor by focusing on one of its most influential components — the so-called Re-Germanization Procedure (Wiedereindeutschungsverfahren, WED), a special demographic initiative designed to integrate “racially kindred” foreigners by sending them to live with German families in the heart of the Third Reich. Because it relied on the direct involvement of civilians, the WED created a unique space in which Germans and non-Germans could articulate notions of race in proximity to one another and help shape the boundaries of the national community at home and abroad. It thus provides an illustrative medium for tackling a series of crucial yet relatively unexplored questions: Who determined whether or not a given person was German? Which criteria factored into such decisions? To what extent did these practices draw on earlier modes of ethnic ascription and racial classification in Europe and the wider world?
My analysis addresses these questions in two stages. The first will detail the discursive genealogy of the myth of “lost German blood”: the belief that many members of foreign nationalities were actually the descendants of Germanic migrants from centuries past. The second section of the chapter traces the consequences of this idea in the annexed or occupied territories of western Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, France, and the Soviet Union, and concludes by briefly discussing the implications of Nazi Germanization policy for our understanding of the wartime Third Reich.
