During World War II and the period of the Nazi regime in Europe, all of the Jews, Gypsies, Blacks, mixed race people and Slavic people – mainly ethnic Poles, Serbs, and Russians, along with other ethnic groups whose racial origin were non-European (with some small exceptions i.e. the "honorary Aryans", the "Indische Legion", or the "Free Arabian Legion"), according to the Nazi ideology were classified as "subhumans" (Untermenschen) and were viewed as the opposite to the superior Aryan "master race" (Herrenvolk). The Nazi philosophy was that the Germans were part of a "master race", and therefore had the right to expand their territory and enslave or kill members of other races deemed inferior.[141] Approximately 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust. In the longer term, the Nazis planned to exterminate some 30–45 million Slavs (mostly Poles and Serbs), however some of them were seen as good material for slaves.[142] Eventually over 2.5 million ethnic Poles, 0.7 million Gypsies, and 0.5 million ethnic Serbs died during the World War II, and were among the main non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust.[143]
Before Nazi Germany invaded Poland, Nazis prepared a special settlement plan named Generalplan Ost ("Master Plan East") which foresaw the eventual expulsion of more than 50 million non-Germanized Slavic peoples of Central Europe and Eastern Europe through forced migration and partial extermination of those Slavs by starvation. Also, according to the Nazi plans for Eastern Europe, some of the Balts were to be expelled beyond the Ural Mountains and into Siberia. In their place, Germans would settle in an extended "living space" (Lebensraum) of the 1000-Year Empire (Tausendjähriges Reich). Herbert Backe was one of the orchestrators of the Hunger Plan – the idea to starve tens of millions of Slavs in order to ensure steady food supplies for the German people and troops.[144]
Heinrich Himmler speech to about 100 SS Group Leaders in Posen, German-occupied Poland, 1943: