“Blonde Provinzen”: National Socialist Territorial and Homogenization Policies and the Murderous Consequences of Their Failure

• Published in: Journal of urban history 2024-01, Vol.50 (1), p.46-60
• Main Author: Jureit, Ulrike
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0096-1442; 1552-6771
• DOI: 10.1177/00961442231164178

This article discusses the interaction between the national-socialist expulsion and resettlement programs, which emerged in the forefront of the so-called Generalplan Ost, and their disorganized and ultimately failed implementation on the basis of the German occupation policy in Poland between 1939 and 1941. The racial homogenization of the former Polish territories during this first phase of the war was used as a field of experimentation before the planners transferred the principle of “repopulation” with certain modifications to the occupied parts of the Soviet Union from June 1941 onward. Basically, it is argued that it was not primarily the implementation of existing expansion and occupation concepts that caused the radicalization of the extermination policy, but in particular the failure of the intended population exchange. The homogenization policy escalated into a historically unprecedented extermination program when the colonial space could no longer be populated “Aryan” even in its own imagination. The discrepancy between state planning and concrete implementation points to complex configurations of action that were not only fatal but decisive for the murderous radicalism of the National Socialist extermination policy as well as for the procedural decisions on the Holocaust.