Vejas Liulevicius: belief

Transcript context

…es, in the absence of the ideology that he himself subscribed to and described in hateful detail in Mein Kampf and other manifestos and speeches, is an enterprise that’s doomed to failure justifiably. The notion that the mass murder of Jews, Poles, Slavs, and Gypsies was an event that simply happened as a result of unforeseen events, and that it was understood as somehow being humane, also runs contrary to the historical fact. When Poland was invaded, the Nazis unleashed a killing wave in their so-called Operation Tannenberg, which sent in specially trained and ideologically pre-prepared killers who were given the name of the units of the Einsatzgruppen in order to wipe out the Polish leadership and also to kill Jews. This predates any of the Operation Barbarossa and the Nazi’s invasion of the Soviet Union. 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. So do you think it was always the case that Nazi Germany was going to invade the Soviet Union? 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. The idea of Lebensraum, is it possible to implement that idea without Ukraine?…

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