Everything that benefits the people is right, everything that harms them is wrong. This quote from Hans Frank, Hitler's chief jurist and governor-general, known as the butcher of Poland, encapsulates the principles, claims, and practices of Nazi population policy in one sentence. Hierarchization and selection, integration and exclusion, promotion and reduction are the logics of such thinking about a permanent evolution of the people. But what is this people? A convincing definition is sought in contemporary sources in vain. This work poses the question of how the Germans applied the concept of the German people in practice within an ethnically heterogeneous microcosm. In East Upper Silesia, Germans, Poles, and Czechs lived together between the Neisse and Warthe rivers alongside Silesians, water Poles, and Upper Silesians.