The Race and Settlement Main Office of the SS

The SS's Race and Settlement Main Office (RuSHA), which resided at Hedemannstraße 23/24, is much less known and studied today than other SS institutions. It was founded by Heinrich Himmler on January 1, 1932 in the "Race Office" and soon developed into a main office. [1] The office played a key role in the Nazi regime's ethnic and expansionist policy: its "experts" determined the "racial value" of the local population, which in turn served as the basis for the ethnic reorganization of the occupied eastern territories demanded by Adolf Hitler. [2] Together with the "Reich Commissariat for the Consolidation of German Nationality" and within the framework of the expansionist "General Plan East", the RuSHA formed the "organizational nucleus of a future Greater Germanic Empire under National Socialist rule"[3]. The policy of appropriation, resettlement and extermination in a colonial context can be regarded as an extreme variant of continental Germanization.

The RuSHA, which after its foundation was initially responsible for the racial examination and selection of SS candidates and their relatives, advanced in the further course of the war to become a central "coordination office of the SS settlement and racial policy" and the importance of the office increased in line with the progressive annexation of the eastern territories. [4] After the invasion of Poland and the Soviet Union by the German Wehrmacht, about 500 so-called "race experts" of the RuSHA assessed the local population on the basis of a specially developed "race formula". It was a four-point scale that differentiated between "capable of Germanization" and "asocial",[5] but also divided into four rating levels from "Nordic" to "Eastern". [6] Measurements of the appearance of the persons served as a basis.

The physical characteristics were evaluated using a number system (nine for ideal shape to one for deformity), which in turn were assigned letters (a for pure Nordic to e for foreign-blooded). [7] This procedure was administered using the then state-of-the-art punch card technology developed by Hermann Hollerith. This system was based on the teachings of Hans F. K. Günther ("Rasse-Günther"), who provided the reference point as early as 1922 with his "Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes" (Racial Science of the German People). He published numerous anthropological studies on the characteristics and characteristics of the Nordic "master race"[8], was a widely read author in the interwar period and became a full professor of "racial science", ethnobiology and rural sociology at the University of Berlin in 1935.

In cooperation with the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) and the Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Nationality (RKF), the RuSHA drew up the "German People's List" (DVL), which was officially introduced in October 1939 and defined not only ethnicity but also the "racial value". [9] This mustering, which was to lead to the "Germanization of the landed races" or the "resettlement of the peoples"[10], was officially referred to as "smuggling" and aimed at the complete reorganization of the eastern territories to be colonized. [11] In addition to the "mustering", the office also carried out the settlement of SS members in farms in the annexed eastern territories and the forcible resettlement of the population – true to the symbolic concept of "blood and soil" coined by Richard Walther Darré. [12] The agricultural politician Darré was also head of the RuSHA until 1938. When he resigned, he was replaced by the staff leader of the SS Obersektion Nordwest and SS Gruppenführer Günther Pancke.

After the occupation of Poland, the classification in the category of "foreign" and "asocial" also meant that the persons concerned were forcibly resettled in the so-called General Government, which functioned as a reserve for Poles who had a negative "racially" rating as well as a reservoir for forced laborers. The experts of the RuSHA took a particularly strict approach to "racial selection" against persons of Jewish origin who were categorized as antipodes of the "Aryan race" and as "racially inferior". [13] According to this scheme, half a million people had already been forcibly resettled by the end of 1940. This was intended to prevent a renewed loss of the Polish colonial territories as in 1919 (Treaty of Versailles) and to consolidate the plan for a "Greater Germanic Empire". [14] Until the end of the Second World War, the DVL procedure was the most extensive Germanization project of all time, categorizing about 2.9 million people into "race" categories. [15] Under the leadership of Otto Hofmann, who headed the RuSHA from 1941 to 1943 and was a convinced anti-Semite and racist, "selection" in the occupied territories reached its most extreme proportions. For the Jewish population, categorization usually meant the death sentence.

The National Socialists' thinking in terms of "race" had its references to the increasing preoccupation with hereditary biology and "racial hygiene" – so-called eugenics – in science, politics and the public sphere throughout Europe at the end of the 19th century. At the same time, Darwinist teachings were increasingly transferred to society. [16] These concepts were already taken up in colonialism: the oppressed natives were researched in order to scientifically substantiate the concept of "race" and the concept in turn served to legitimize the oppression of the natives. In addition, such thought patterns were channeled by the völkisch movement and found widespread support among a völkisch-nationally oriented population. [17]

The term eugenics was significantly coined by Francis Galton – a traveller to Africa, intelligence researcher and authoritative developer of statistical methods still used in psychology today. He called for an "improvement of the characteristics" of humans by preventing hereditary diseases and by "keeping the race pure". [18] Among the German pioneers of eugenic "racial theory" under National Socialism were the physician Alfred Ploetz, who coined the term "racial hygiene", founded the German Society for Racial Hygiene in 1905 and, along with the aforementioned Günther, sat on the Expert Advisory Board for Population and Racial Policy from 1933 onwards, as well as the physicians Eugen Fischer and Fritz Lenz, both of whom held leading positions at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Berlin. As early as 1921, the latter two, together with Erwin Bauer, wrote a work that was formative for the National Socialists' ideas of "race" after 1933: "Human Heredity and Racial Hygiene". [19] With the pamphlet "Race as a Value Principle", published in 1933, the younger Lenz offered the regime an apparently scientific foundation for the "eradication of persons unworthy of life" and thus made a significant contribution to the preparation and scientific legitimation of the genocide. [20]

Eugen Fischer had also appeared with research in German South West Africa; he had published a study on the so-called Basters in German South West Africa. The Basters had emerged from the mixture between European men and Nama women in the Cape region and represented an ethnic group allied with the German Reich. Fischer examined the group, which he referred to as the "Rehobother Bastards", in the context of the "bastardisation problem" and came to the conclusion that these "mixtures" showed signs of degeneration, but he attributed these to more social factors. [21]

In Hitler's propaganda pamphlet "Mein Kampf", "bastardisation" becomes a major danger for humanity, which must be stopped. In the section "Völkischer Staat und Rassenhygiene" (Ethnic State and Racial Hygiene), Hitler is directly inspired by the works of the eugenicists. The expansionist striving is also placed in this context: the state must not leave the "settlement of newly acquired countries" to chance, "specially formed race commissions" must issue "settlement certificates": "In this way, marginal colonies can gradually be founded, whose inhabitants are exclusively their bearers of the highest racial purity and thus the highest racial fitness." [22] Here, the tasks of the RuSHA are described in the context of an assimilative colonization process. The scientific activity that formed a link between the overseas and the National Socialist colonization project ensured the seemingly rational safeguarding of the "race" ideas of "degeneration, selection, racial purity and racial defilement" and thus also a higher acceptance among the population. [23]

In addition to the "Race and Settlement Main Office" of the SS, other offices of the NSDAP dealt with the ideological core points of "racial purity" and the plans for continental Germanization. The "Racial Policy Office" (RPA) of the NSDAP published various training materials on the discourse of the concept of "race" and corresponding classification schemes for the party offices under the "racial hygienist" and Nazi politician Walter Groß. In contrast to the RuSHA, however, the RPA could not intervene in the practical "mustering" of the occupied territories and its core competencies lay exclusively in partisan "enlightenment". [24]

There is no doubt that certain lines of connection can be drawn between overseas colonial rule and National Socialist rule in the eastern territories. [25] However, the Nazi regime did not understand the acquisition of new "living space in the East" through forced resettlement, expulsion, and murder of the civilian population as a "cultural mission," but as eugenic appropriation and segregation. [26] Although there is a close connection between the claim to power and the exercise of violence, expansion and exploitation, this approach also marks a significant difference. [27] Even though the colonial character of the National Socialist eastward expansion is controversially discussed in research, continuities in "racial studies" and eugenics between colonialism and Nazi rule in the East can be identified. [28] However, it is difficult to conclusively answer at present whether the "race experts" of RuSHA had been influenced by the ideological concepts of colonialism overseas and whether they expanded and continued eugenic colonial policies. The concept of "race" was fundamental to the legitimization of the violent expropriation and oppression of the native population in both colonialism and the National Socialists.