ABSTRACT
In Hitler’s ideological programme, already laid out in Mein Kampf, the projected expansionism on the European continent was a response to the vital needs of the Germanic people. After Hitler’s rise to power, the regime used this research to legitimate Germany’s presumed right to a hegemonic position in Eastern Europe. The legitimization was based mostly on the assumption that German culture had left enduring signs of its supremacy during a millennium of eastward expansion. The removal and dispossession of the Poles and the Jews were supposed to create an economic basis for the incoming Germans. The exclusion of the racially ‘less valuable elements’ was to be carried out by a variety of methods, which ranged from forced migrations and mass terror aimed at the Polish ruling classes to the extermination of the Jews. The Nazis planned to remove several million ethnic Poles and Jews from the territories incorporated in the autumn of 1939.
