Anti-Slavic sentiment
Anti-Slavic sentiment, also called anti-Slavic racism or Slavophobia, refers to different types of negative attitudes, prejudices, collective hatred or animosity, stereotypes, discrimination, and violence directed at one or more ethnic groups of Slavic peoples. Accompanying racism and xenophobia, the most common manifestation of anti-Slavic sentiment throughout history has been the assertion that some Slavs are inferior to other peoples.
Anti-Slavic sentiment reached its highest point during World War II, when Nazi Germany and its collaborators classified most of the Slavs, especially the Belarusians, Croats, Czechs, Poles, Russians, Serbs, and Ukrainians, as "subhumans" and perpetrated a systematic genocide against them, murdering millions of Slavs through the Generalplan Ost and Hunger Plan.
Slavophobia also emerged twice in the United States. The first time was during the Progressive Era, when immigrants from Eastern Europe were met with opposition from the dominant class of Western European–origin American citizens; and again during the Cold War, when the United States became locked in an intensive global rivalry with the Soviet Union.
By country
Albania
Slavophobia in Albania increasingly developed at the beginning of the 20th century, mostly through the work of the Franciscan friars who had studied in monasteries in Austria-Hungary, after the recent massacres and expulsions of Albanians by their Slavic neighbours. The Albanian intelligentsia proudly asserted, "We Albanians are the original and autochthonous race of the Balkans. The Slavs are conquerors and immigrants who came but yesterday from Asia." In Soviet historiography, anti-Slavism in Albania was inspired by the Catholic clergy, which opposed the Slavic people because of the role the Catholic clergy and Slavs opposed "rapacious plans of Austro-Hungarian imperialism in Albania."Italy
In the 1920s, Italian fascists propagated animosity towards people from the neighboring Yugoslavia, especially the Croats, Serbs, and Slovenes. Among others, they fabricated many chauvinistic tropes, for example, claims that the Croats, Serbs, and Slovenes had "atavistic impulses," alongside perpetuating the made-up accusations that the Yugoslavs were conspiring on behalf of "Grand Orient Masonry and its funds." Additionally, some of these prejudices, stereotypes, and racial tropes were connected with anti-semitic conspiracy theories, such the belief that the Serbs were involved in a "social-democratic, masonic Jewish internationalist plot."The leader of fascist Italy, Benito Mussolini, considered the Slavic race inferior and barbaric. Furthermore, he believed that the Croats posed an existential threat to Italy as they supposedly intended to seize Dalmatia, a region which was claimed by Italy, while he also claimed that the threat rallied Italians at the end of World War I: "The danger of seeing the Yugoslavians settle along the whole Adriatic shore had caused a bringing together in Rome of the cream of our unhappy regions. Students, professors, workmen, citizens—representative men—were entreating the ministers and the professional politicians." These claims often tended to emphasize the "foreignness" of the Yugoslavs by stating that they were newcomers to the area, unlike the ancient Italians, whose territories were occupied by the Slavs.
Count Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini's son-in-law, and the Foreign Minister of Fascist Italy, whom Mussolini ordered to be executed in 1944, wrote the following entry in his diary:
Canada
In Canada, many xenophobic white supremacists were deeply tied to their nation's "Anglo-Saxon" culture, especially from the early 1900s to the end of World War II. The Ku Klux Klan in Canada was prominent in the provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta, both of which have had a relatively high share of Eastern European ethnic population. Consequently, many immigrants from Ukraine, Russia, and Poland were frequently faced with public defamation, acts of harassment, and physical assaults.Furthermore, during World War I, thousands of Ukrainian Canadians were perceived as "enemy aliens" as Canadian nativists considered their presence as a "threat" to Canada's Western European heritage. Due to this, many of them were interned in concentration camps. What is more, there was constant discrimination towards Ukrainians who recently immigrated from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Germany
Though anti-Slavic sentiments reached their peak during Nazi Germany, Germany has had a long history of Slavophobia. In particular, the Germanic people of Prussia often depicted Polish people in a negative light, which paralleled future Slavophobia in the Nazi regime. The Teutonic Order played a foundational role in shaping early German anti-Slavic sentiment through its participation in the Drang nach Osten, a medieval and later nationalistic concept referring to German expansion into Slavic and Baltic lands. Beginning in the 13th century, the order launched crusades against pagan and Slavic populations in the eastern Baltic region, including Prussians, Lithuanians, and Pomeranians, under the pretext of Christianization and a civilizing mission. The conquest and colonization of these territories involved the suppression of native Slavic and Baltic cultures, forced conversions, and the settlement of German colonists. These actions were justified by portraying Slavic peoples as barbaric, morally deficient, and politically inferior, a narrative reinforced by Teutonic chroniclers such as Peter of Dusburg. The order imposed German legal systems and language, contributing to a lasting cultural hierarchy in which German identity was seen as superior.in his 1968 article "Замолчанный Маркс" provides ample evidence of anti-Slavism by the founders of Marxism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. For example, in his 1849 article "The Magyar Struggle," Engels wrote that the Slavs living in the Austrian Empire were "barbarians" who "needed to be saved" by the German Austrians.
Gustav Freytag's 1855 novel Soll und Haben was one of the most-read German novels of the 19th century, and contained antisemitic sentiments as well as depictions of Poles as incompetent.
Nazi Germany
Anti-Slavic racism played a significant role within the ideology of Nazism. Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party held the belief that Slavic countries - particularly Poland, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia, as well as their respective peoples - were "Untermenschen". According to their viewpoint, these Slavic nations were deemed to be foreign entities and were not considered part of the Aryan master race. Nazi Germany depicted the Soviet Union as an "Asiatic enemy" of Europeans, in addition to portraying its population as inferior subhumans controlled by Jews and communists.Hitler’s autobiography, Mein Kampf, expressed anti-Slavic views. Among others, he wrote: “One ought to cast the utmost doubt on the state-building power of the Slavs,” and from the beginning, he rejected the idea of incorporating the Slavs into Greater Germany.
Hitler considered the Slavs to be racially inferior, because, in his view, the Bolshevik Revolution had put the Jews in power over the mass of Slavs, who were, by his own definition, incapable of ruling themselves but were instead being ruled by Jewish masters. He considered the development of modern Russia to have been the work of Germanic, not Slavic, elements in the nation, but believed those achievements had been undone and destroyed by the October Revolution, in Mein Kampf, he wrote, “The organization of a Russian state formation was not the result of the political abilities of the Slavs in Russia, but only a wonderful example of the state-forming efficacity of the German element in an inferior race.”
Because, according to the Nazis, the German people needed more territory to sustain its surplus population, an ideology of conquest and depopulation was formulated for Central and Eastern Europe according to the principle of Lebensraum, itself based on an older theme in German nationalism which maintained that Germany had a "natural yearning" to expand its borders eastward . The Nazis' policy towards Slavs was to exterminate or enslave the vast majority of the Slavic population and repopulate their lands with millions of ethnic Germans and other Germanic peoples. According to the resulting genocidal Generalplan Ost, millions of German and other "Germanic" settlers would be moved into the conquered territories, and the original Slavic inhabitants were to be annihilated, removed, or enslaved. The policy was focused especially on the Soviet Union, as it alone was deemed capable of providing enough territory to accomplish this goal.
As part of the Generalplan Ost, Nazi Germany developed the Hunger Plan, a forced starvation programme which involved the seizure of all of the food that was produced in Eastern European lands and the delivery of it to Germany, primarily to the German army. The full implementation of this plan would have ultimately resulted in the starvation and death of 20 to 30 million people. It is estimated that in accordance with this plan, over four million Soviet citizens were starved to death from 1941 to 1944. The resettlement policy reached a much more advanced stage in occupied Poland because of its immediate proximity to Germany.
For strategic reasons, the Nazis deviated from some of their ideological theories by forging alliances with Ukrainian collaborators, the Independent State of Croatia, the Slovak State and Bulgaria. Yugoslav general Milan Nedić would also lead Nazi Germany's Serbian puppet government. The Nazis officially justified these alliances by stating that the Croats were "more Germanic than Slav," a notion which was propagated by Croatia's leader Ante Pavelić, who espoused the view that the "Croats were the descendants of the ancient Goths" who "had the pan-Slavic idea forced upon them as something artificial". Hitler also believed that the Bulgarians were "Turkoman", while the Czechs and Slovaks were Mongolians'' in their origins. After conquering Yugoslavia, attention was instead focused on targeting mainly the nation's Jewish and Roma population.