Between ‘Racial Awareness’ and Fantasies of Potency: Nazi Sexual Politics in the Occupied Territories of the Soviet Union, 1942–1945

Abstract

‘Racial restructuring of Europe’ (Rassische Neuordnung Europas) was the term under which the Germans envisioned the creation of a new social order in Europe based on racial criteria. The territory upon which this concept was to be realized in its most radical form was occupied Eastern Europe. German politics of colonization, extermination, and ‘germanization’ in Poland and the occupied territories of the Soviet Union was extremely violent. ‘Racial selection’ became the basic principle of the German efforts to control and organize the populations in these countries: everybody deemed ‘useful’ was to be separated from the ‘useless’; the ‘healthy’ from the ‘ill’; and the ‘own’ from the ‘other’.1