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Anti-Slavism, also known as Slavophobia, a form of racism or xenophobia, refers to various negative attitudes towards Slavic peoples, the most common manifestation being claims of inferiority of Slavic nations with respect to other ethnic groups. Its opposite is Slavophilia. Anti-Slavism reached its highest peak during World War II, when Nazi Germany declared Slavs to be subhuman and planned to exterminate the majority of Slavic people.
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Albania
At the beginning of the 20th century, anti-Slavism was developed in Albania by the work of the Franciscan monks who had studied in monasteries in Austria-Hungary. They imitated and transposed the national epics of the literature produced there, as Gjergj Fishta did with his Lahuta e Malcís, but they substituted the struggle against Ottoman Empire with the struggle against the Slavs, propagating anti-Slavic feelings. 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 played in preparations "for Italian aggression against Albania" and Slavs opposed "rapacious plans of Austro-Hungarian imperialism in Albania".
Fascism and Nazism
Anti-Slavism was a notable component of Italian Fascism and Nazism both prior to and during World War II.
In the 1920s, Italian fascists targeted Yugoslavs, especially Serbs. They accused Serbs of having "atavistic impulses" and they claimed that the Yugoslavs were conspiring together on behalf of "Grand Orient masonry and its funds". One anti-Semitic claim was that Serbs were part of a "social-democratic, masonic Jewish internationalist plot".
Benito Mussolini viewed the Slavic race as inferior and barbaric. He identified the Yugoslavs as a threat to Italy and he viewed them as competitors over the region of Dalmatia, which was claimed by Italy, and he claimed that the threat rallied Italians together at the end of World War I: "The danger of seeing the Jugo-Slavians 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".
Anti-Slavic racism was an essential component of Nazism. Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party movement regarded Slavic countries (especially Poland, Russia, and Serbia) and their peoples as non-Aryan Untermenschen (subhumans), they were deemed as foreign nations that could not be considered part of the Aryan master race. There were exceptions for some minorities in these states deemed by the Nazis to be descendants of ethnic German settlers and not Slavs who were willing to be Germanised. Hitler considered the Slavs to be inferior, as 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 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 those achievements had been undone and destroyed by the October Revolution. 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 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 (Drang Nach Osten). 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 towards the Soviet Union, as it alone was deemed capable of providing enough territory to accomplish this goal. As part of this policy, the Hunger Plan was developed, which included seizing food produced on the occupied Soviet territory and delivering it primarily to German army. This should ultimately result in the starvation and death of 20 to 30 million people (mainly Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians). It is estimated that in 1941–1944 over four million Soviet citizens were starved according to this plan. The resettlement policy reached a much more advanced state in Occupied Poland because of its immediate proximity to Germany.
To deviate from ideological theories for strategic reasons by forging alliances with Croatia (a puppet state created after the invasion of Yugoslavia) and Bulgaria, the Croats were officially described as "more Germanic than Slav", a notion supported by Croatia's fascist dictator Ante Pavelić who maintained that the "Croatians were descendants of the ancient Goths" and "had the Panslav idea forced upon them as something artificial". Hitler also deemed the Bulgarians to be "Turkoman" in origin.