According to Porter's translation here:
The slaughter of Russian soldiers was to be part of a process in which Russians would eventually disappear - "this whole mass of people is coming to an end." Himmler also bemoans the fact that "a Russian military generation consists of two and a half to three times as many men as a German military generation." The killing of soldiers therefore has a genocidal rationale that makes it far more criminal than an act of war. The extinction of the Russian people in Europe, by one means or another, is clearly a long-term goal.
And we'll have to defeat them, smash them, and slaughter them [abschlacten]. When a people like the Russians already have their whole army full of everything from 16 year-olds to 50 or 55 year-olds, then reason tells us that this whole mass of people is coming to an end, like everything on this earth.This slaughter was clearly framed in the context of ethnic cleansing:
When you know that, the evolutionary and racial development of the Slavic peoples, then you know that we have a task to do if we wish to purify these areas – and we must do that, if we want to live.Himmler advocated the creation of "an area in which there will be no one but Germans and Teutons, approximately 1,000 kilometres from the old German Reich border." There would clearly be catastrophic consequences for non-Germans in that zone, and people who had the most "Mongolian" blood by Himmler's reckoning would have the lowest value to justify being kept alive.
The slaughter of Russian soldiers was to be part of a process in which Russians would eventually disappear - "this whole mass of people is coming to an end." Himmler also bemoans the fact that "a Russian military generation consists of two and a half to three times as many men as a German military generation." The killing of soldiers therefore has a genocidal rationale that makes it far more criminal than an act of war. The extinction of the Russian people in Europe, by one means or another, is clearly a long-term goal.