Historical Context
See also: Germanization and Nazi–Soviet population transfersHitler intended Poland to serve as the Lebensraum for the German people, and declared that only the soil, not the people, could be Germanized. This did not mean a total extermination of all people there, as Eastern Europe was regarded as having people of Aryan/Nordic descent, particularly among their leaders. Germanisation began with the classification of people suitable as defined on the Nazi Volksliste, and treated according to their categorisation. Those unfit for Germanisation were to be expelled from the areas marked out for German settlement; those who resisted Germanization were to be sent to concentration camps or executed.
To foment support, Nazi propaganda presented the annexation as necessary to protect the German minorities there. Alleged massacres of Germans, such as Bloody Sunday were used in such propaganda, and Heimkehr drew on such attempts although allowing the Volksdeutsche characters depicted to survive. The introduction explicitly states that hundreds of thousands of Germans in Poland suffered likewise. Many terror tactics depicted were those used by the Nazis themselves against minorities.
Similar treatment was given to anti-Serbian propaganda, in Menschen im Sturm.
Baltic Germans were also to be settled into this land. The secret supplementary protocol to the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact included a resettlement plan by which approximately 60,000 ethnic Germans were resettled into the Reich. Nazi propaganda included using scare tactics about the Soviet Union, and led to tens of thousands leaving. After racial evaluation, they were divided into groups: A, Altreich, who were to be settled in Germany and allowed neither farms nor business (to allow for closer watch), S Sonderfall, who were used as forced labor, and O Ost-Falle, the best classification, to be settled in the Eastern Wall—the occupied regions, to protect German from the East—and allowed independence. Similar support therefore was fomented with the use of film to depict Baltic and Volga Germans as persecuted by the Bolshevists, such as the films Friesennot, Flüchtlinge, and GPU.
Read more about this topic: Heimkehr
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