INTRODUCTION

The goal of national self-determination has always played a central role in German history. It also has given German nationalism an expansionist tendency because the German state rarely included the entire German nation. The most extreme manifestation of this expansionist tendency occurred in Nazi Germany, which justified most of its annexations and early conquests with the right of ethnic German self-determination. The vast majority of Germans believed in the rightfulness of these territorial acquisitions; it considered the Sudetenland, Austria, the Memel territory, and Alsace-Lorraine as well as parts of Poland to be unquestionably German national territory, despite the sizable and at times even majority presence of other nationalities. This view of a “Greater Germany” is still shared by a considerable number of Germans today. In 1989, the New Right German party Die Republikaner disseminated a map which claimed virtually the same areas for Germany in the name of national self-determination as the early Nazi conquests.3