Anti-Slavic sentiment

Anti-Slavism, also known as Slavophobia, a form of racism or xenophobia, refers to various negative attitudes towards Slavic peoples, 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 2 when Nazi Germany declared Slavs to be subhuman and planned to exterminate majority of Slavic people.

Albania
At the beginning of the 20th century, Anti-Slavism developed in Albania through the work of the Franciscan monks who had studied in monasteries in Austria-Hungary. They imitated and transposed national epics of the literature produced there, like Gjergj Fishta did with his Lahuta e Malcís, but substituted the struggle against Turks with struggle against the Slavs, propagating Anti-Slavic feelings. 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 took position against Slavic people because of role the Catholic clergy had in preparations "for Italian aggression against Albania" and because Slavs opposed "rapacious plans of Austro-Hungarian imperialism in Albania".

Fascism and Nazism
Anti-Slavism was notable in Italian Fascism and Nazism prior to and during World War II.

In the 1920s, Italian fascists targeted Yugoslavs—especially Serbs—and accused Serbs of having "atavistic impulses", claimed that Yugoslavs were conspiring together on behalf of "Grand Orient masonry and its funds" and one anti-Semitic claim that Serbs were part of a "social-democratic, masonic Jewish internationalist plot".

Benito Mussolini identified Yugoslavs as a threat to Italy and as competitors over the region of Dalmatia which was claimed by Italy, and claimed that this threat rallied Italians together at the end of World War I, saying: "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 and their peoples as Untermenschen (subhumans), one of a number of inferior "foreign races" (de) that were, unlike the "Aryan master race", although there were exceptions for some Slavs who were deemed by the Nazis to be of descendants of ethnic German settlers and 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. Because according to the Nazis the German people was in need for 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). This drive was focused especially towards the Soviet Union, as it alone was deemed capable of providing enough territory to accomplish this goal, although they reached a much more advanced state in occupied Poland due to its immediate proximity to Germany. According to the resulting genocidal Generalplan Ost, millions of German and other "Germanic" settlers would be moved into the conquered territories, while the original Slavic inhabitants were to be annihilated, removed, or enslaved.

Hitler perceived the development of the modern Russian state had been the work of Germanic elements in the nation and not that of Slavs, but that those achievements had been undone and destroyed by the October Revolution.

The Nazis policy towards Slavs was to exterminate, ethnically cleanse and enslave the vast majority of the Slavic population and repopulate their land with millions of ethnic Germans and other Germanic peoples. a. In order to deviate from their 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.