Reich Propaganda Offices and Political Mentoring of Ethnic German Resettlers

Abstract

Ethnic German minorities in Eastern Europe have often been regarded as ‘Hitler’s fifth column’. To be sure, from the 1970s, some historians have explored their history in more nuanced ways.1 Nevertheless, ethnic Germans, or ‘Volkdeutsche’, still tended to be treated as passive objects of Nazi Germany’s foreign policy. The National Socialist regime itself had portrayed these groups as helpless victims of heavily exaggerated Czech and Polish atrocities, invoking their fate to legitimate military action against these countries.2 As Doris L. Bergen suggested, ‘if the Volksdeutsche had not existed, the Nazis might have invented them.’3 Historiography has also drawn attention to the instrumentalization of ethnic Germans in the megalomaniac resettlement plans developed by Heinrich Himmler as ‘Reich commissioner for the strengthening of Germandom’ (RKF) from October 1939.4 Gotz Aly was one of the first to explore the connection between these resettlement plans and the evolution of the Holocaust.5