ABSTRACT
It is impossible to understand the post-1938/39 extension of the NS genocidal policies beyond the boundaries of the old Reich and across the vast areas of NS-occupied Europe without placing them into the context of a much wider campaign that involved both territory and populations in ‘total’ terms. On the one hand, the campaign of Lebensraum-expansion in the continent related to the crusade for the production of the ‘new (fascist) man’ (see Ch 3). This ‘new man’, according to NS ideology, needed an optimal territorial environment (quantitatively and qualitatively) in order to flourish. This is why the NS regime was so eager to capitalise on eminently modern ‘scientific’ research on populations studies, demographics, economic management, and topographical planning; and why so many amongst the relevant experts hastened to assist with enthusiasm the Third Reich in its far-reaching reorganisation project. On the other hand, territorial expansion created a constantly broader domain of jurisdiction and utopian management for the NS regime. The acquisition of land was seen as a crucial precondition for the envisioned ideal national community (Volksgemeinschaft). It was part of a campaign to ‘redeem’ those Germans still living under foreign rule (pan-German irredentism), to repatriate ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) into the national living space, and to unite the entire German racial community (and the territories inhabited by them) within a national state. But territorial expansion also took the form of acquiring territorial resources for economic, geopolitical, or purely historical reasons, regardless of the ethnic or ‘racial’ identity of the people living there (W Smith 1991; Kallis 2000: Chs 2, 4). The identity of the populations living in the contested area mattered when they were of German origin but did not constitute a serious obstacle when they belonged to a different group. Once control had been established over large areas of central and Eastern Europe, the primary goal of settling ‘valuable’ populations there also became a far wider issue of large-scale population management that involved (re-)settlement, displacement, and eventually elimination. The racial-anthropological fixations of the NS vision that had motivated
the first stages of elimination inside the Reich were constantly being fuelled and escalated by ideas and experiments forged inside the Reich and then exported to the occupied territories. At the same time, however, new opportunities and problems were being identified as the Reich expanded, causing further radicalisation in the overall NS ‘cleansing’ project. Every new territorial acquisition offered previously unfathomable opportunities for realising the NS utopia but also came with huge overheads in terms of managing the existing resident groups that did not fit in the original plan.
