The Ural Mountains played a prominent role in Nazi planning. Adolf Hitler and the rest of the Nazi leadership made many references to them as a strategic objective of the Third Reich to follow a decisive victory on the Eastern Front against the Soviet Union.
In 1725, Philip Johan von Strahlenberg first used the Ural Mountains as part of the eastern demarcation of Europe. Since c. 1850 most cartographers have regarded the Urals and the Ural River to the south of them as the eastern boundary of Europe, geographically recognised as a subcontinent of Eurasia.
The Nazis rejected the notion that these mountains demarcated the border of Europe, at least in a cultural if not in a geographic sense. Nazi propaganda and Nazi leaders repeatedly labelled the Soviet Union as an "Asiatic state" and equated the Russians both with the Huns [1] and with the Mongols, [2] describing them as Untermenschen ("subhumans"). German media portrayed the German campaigns in the east as necessary to ensure the survival of European culture against the "Asian menace". [1] [3] In a major conference on 16 July 1941, where chief aspects of German rule in the occupied territories of Eastern Europe were laid out, Hitler emphasised to the attendees (Martin Bormann, Hermann Göring, Alfred Rosenberg, and Hans Lammers) that "the Europe of today was nothing but a geographical term; in reality Asia extended up to our frontiers". [4]
Hitler also expressed his belief that in ancient times the concept of "Europe" was limited to the southern tip of the Greek peninsula, and was then "brought into confusion" by the expanding borders of the Roman Empire. He stated that if Germany won the war, the boundary of Europe "would extend eastward to the furthest German colony". [5]
In an attempt to influence Nazi policy, Norwegian fascist politician Vidkun Quisling produced a memorandum for the Germans - "Aide-mémoire on the Russian Question" (Denkschrift über die russische Frage) - which expressed his own ideas on the "Russian question", which he described as "the main problem in world politics today". [6] He advocated the Dnieper River as a general division-line between Western Europe ("Germania") and Russia. This would necessitate the division of Ukraine, but he argued that this "could be defended from geographical and historical perspectives". [6]
Albert Speer recounted a 1941 episode in his post-war memoirs wherein he observed Hitler's early ruminations about the Urals. [7] Soviet Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, travelled to Berlin in mid-November 1940 to discuss German–Soviet relations with Hitler and German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. By then, Hitler had made up his mind that he would attack the Soviet Union the following spring, having already issued orders for a military plan which would later become Operation Barbarossa. [8] A few months later, an army adjutant pointed out to Speer an ordinary pencil line which Hitler had drawn on his globe at the Berghof, running north-south along the Ural mountains, signifying the future boundary of Germany's sphere of influence with that of Japan. [7]
Hitler also mentioned the Urals in his recorded table talks several times; on one occasion he recounts how others questioned him if they were a sufficiently eastward boundary for the Germans to advance to. [9] He confirmed this objective, but emphasised that the primary goal was to "eradicate Bolshevism", and that, if necessary, further military campaigns would be carried out to ensure this. [9] He later stated that Joseph Stalin would be prepared to lose European Russia if he did not succeed at "solving its problems" and thereby "risked losing everything". [10] He expressed his belief that it would be impossible for Stalin to retake Europe from Siberia, comparing it to himself hypothetically retaking Germany if he were driven back to Slovakia, and that the German invasion of the Soviet Union which was then under way would "bring about the downfall of the Soviet Empire". [10] In a discussion with Danish Foreign Minister Erik Scavenius on 2 November 1942, Ribbentrop stated that the Germans expected Asian Russia to eventually split up into several harmless "peasant republics" after Germany had occupied the country's European parts. [11]
On 16 September 1941, Hitler mentioned to Otto Abetz, the German ambassador in Paris, that "the new Russia as far as the Urals" would become Germany's India, but that due to its geographic proximity to Germany was far more favorably located for the Germans than India was for Britain. [12]
In the above-mentioned conference of 16 July 1941, it was codified as policy that in order to "secure the safety of the [Third] Reich" no non-German military power would ever again be allowed west of the Urals (including non-Russian native militias), even if it meant war for the next hundred years. [4] Hitler's future successors were to be instructed of this, if necessary. [4] This was to be done to prevent any western powers hostile to Germany from conspiring against it with its eastern neighbors in the future, like the French had supposedly done with the Turks, and which the British were alleged to be doing with the Soviets. [13] No organised Russian state would also be allowed to exist west of this line, which Hitler clarified as actually meaning a line 200–300km east of the mountains, [13] approaching the 70° east longitude line the Japanese had proposed as the westernmost limit of their own influence.
SS leader Heinrich Himmler went into some detail about how he envisaged the mountains during the 1943 Posen speeches. [3] He stated that the "Germanic race" would have to gradually expand to this border so that after several generations this "master race", as the leader of Europe, would again be ready to "resume the battles of destiny against Asia", which were "sure to break out again". [3] He stated that Europe's defeat would mean "the destruction of the creative power of the earth". [3]
The Urals were noted as a distant objective of Generalplan Ost , the overall Nazi colonisation scheme of Eastern Europe. [14]
Hitler later rejected the mountains as an adequate border, calling it absurd that "these middle-sized mountains" represented the boundary between the "European and Asiatic worlds", stating that one might as well accord that title to one of the large Russian rivers. [15] He explained that only a "living [racial] wall" of Aryan fighters would do as a frontier, and that keeping a permanent state of war present in the east was necessary to "preserve the vitality of the race".
The real frontier is the one that separates the Germanic world from the Slav world. It is our duty to place it where we want it to be. If anyone asks where we obtain the right to extend the Germanic space to the east, we reply that, for a nation, its awareness of what it represents carries this right with. It is success that justifies everything. The reply to such questions can only be of an empirical nature. It is inconceivable that a higher people should painfully exist on a soil too narrow for it, while amorphous masses, which contribute nothing to civilisation, occupy infinite tracts of a soil that is one of the richest in the world... We must create conditions for our people that favour its multiplication, and we must at the same time build a dike against the Russian flood [...] Since there is no natural protection against such a flood, we must meet it with a living wall. A permanent war on the eastern front will help form a sound race of men, and will prevent us from relapsing into the softness of a Europe thrown back upon itself. It should be possible for us to control this region to the east with two hundred and fifty thousand men plus a cadre of good administrators... This space in Russia must always be dominated by Germans.
— Adolf Hitler [16]
The theme of a "living wall" was used by Hitler as early as Mein Kampf (published 1925–1926). [17] In it he presented the future German state under National Socialist rule as a "father's house" (Vaterhaus), a safe place which would keep in the "right human elements", and keep out those which were undesirable. [17] This metaphorical building was to have solid and supportive foundations (Fundamente) and walls (Mauern), and could only be protected by a living wall (lebendige Mauer) of patriotic and fanatically devoted German people. [17]
The idea became more prominent in Hitler's mind as the war went on. [18] On 10 December 1942 (as the Battle of Stalingrad was turning unfavourably against the Germans), he told Anton Mussert, a Dutch Nazi collaborator, that the "Asiatic waves were threatening to overrun Europe and exterminate the higher races", and that this threat could only be countered by wall-building and long-term fighting. [18] On 20 April 1943 (Hitler's birthday), he had a discussion with Speer and Karl-Otto Saur on a design he had personally drawn for a six-person bunker that was to be used in the Atlantic Wall, featuring machine guns, an anti-tank gun, and flamethrowers. [19] He indicated that this design was also to be used for defence purposes at Germany's "ultimate eastern border deep within Russia" [19] — if the Axis had completely defeated the Soviets, there might have existed the possibility of any remnant Soviet forces or Japanese forces from the northwesterly mainland Siberian-located extremities of Imperial Japan's Co-Prosperity Sphere attempting to cross such a frontier westwards.
Various German agencies assumed a number of different boundaries in the east.
The administrative planning carried out by Alfred Rosenberg from April to June 1941 in his capacity as Plenipotentiary for the Central Treatment of Questions of the Eastern European Space (basis of the future Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories) for the territories that were to be conquered in the Soviet Union based the envisaged civil districts of the Reichskommissariate to a large extent on the borders of the pre-existing Soviet oblasts and autonomous republics, particularly in Reichskommissariat Moskowien. [20] This included even territory to the east of the mountains, such as the Sverdlovsk (Yekaterinburg) region. [20]
The Wehrmacht assumed an eastern boundary at the A-A line (a limit along the Volga river between the cities of Archangelsk and Astrakhan), which was the military objective of Operation Barbarossa.
In a later treaty with Japan, the Japanese proposed allocating all of Afro-Eurasia west of the 70th meridian east to the Germans and Italians in the case of a total Soviet collapse, but after negotiations the boundary was changed to the Yenisey River.
Martin Ludwig Bormann was a German Nazi Party official and head of the Nazi Party Chancellery, private secretary to Adolf Hitler and a war criminal. After the war, he was convicted and sentenced to death-in-absentia for crimes against humanity. Bormann gained immense power by using his position as Hitler's private secretary to control the flow of information and access to Hitler. He used his position to create an extensive bureaucracy and involve himself as much as possible in the decision making.
Lebensraum is a German concept of expansionism and Völkisch nationalism, the philosophy and policies of which were common to German politics from the 1890s to the 1940s. First popularized around 1901, Lebensraum became a geopolitical goal of Imperial Germany in World War I (1914–1918), as the core element of the Septemberprogramm of territorial expansion. The most extreme form of this ideology was supported by the Nazi Party and Nazi Germany. Lebensraum was a leading motivation of Nazi Germany to initiate World War II, and it would continue this policy until the end of the conflict.
Fritz Todt was a German construction engineer and senior figure of the Nazi Party. He was the founder of Organisation Todt (OT), a military-engineering organisation that supplied German industry with forced labour, and served as Reich Minister for Armaments and Ammunition in Nazi Germany early in World War II, directing the entire German wartime military economy from that position.
The Generalplan Ost, abbreviated GPO, was Nazi Germany's blueprint for the genocide, extermination and large-scale ethnic cleansing of Slavs, Eastern European Jews and other indigenous peoples of Eastern Europe categorized as "Untermensch" in Nazi ideology. The campaign was a precursor to Nazi Germany's planned colonisation of Central and Eastern Europe by Germanic settlers, and it was carried out through systematic massacres, mass starvations, chattel labour, mass-rapes, child abductions and sexual slavery.
The Reichskommissariat Ostland was established by Nazi Germany in 1941 during World War II. It became the civilian occupation regime in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and the western part of Byelorussian SSR. German planning documents initially referred to an equivalent Reichskommissariat Baltenland. The political organization for this territory – after an initial period of military administration before its establishment – involved a German civilian administration, nominally under the authority of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories led by Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg, but actually controlled by the Nazi official Hinrich Lohse, its appointed Reichskommissar.
Welthauptstadt Germania or World Capital Germania was the projected renewal of the German capital Berlin during the Nazi period, part of Adolf Hitler's vision for the future of Nazi Germany after the planned victory in World War II. It was to be the capital of his planned "Greater Germanic Reich". Albert Speer, the "first architect of the Third Reich", produced many of the plans for the rebuilt city in his capacity as overseer of the project, only a small portion of which was realized between the years 1938 and 1943.
The Party Chancellery, was the name of the head office for the German Nazi Party (NSDAP), designated as such on 12 May 1941. The office existed previously as the Staff of the Deputy Führer but was renamed after Rudolf Hess flew to Scotland in an attempt to negotiate a peace agreement without Adolf Hitler's authorization. Hess was denounced by Hitler, his former office was dissolved, and the new Party Chancellery was formed in its place under Hess' former deputy, Martin Bormann.
The New Order of Europe was the political and social system that Nazi Germany wanted to impose on the areas of Europe that it conquered and occupied.
During World War II, Reichskommissariat Ukraine was the civilian occupation regime of much of Nazi German-occupied Ukraine. It was governed by the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories headed by Alfred Rosenberg. Between September 1941 and August 1944, the Reichskommissariat was administered by Erich Koch as the Reichskommissar. The administration's tasks included the pacification of the region and the exploitation, for German benefit, of its resources and people. Adolf Hitler issued a Führer decree defining the administration of the newly-occupied Eastern territories on 17 July 1941.
Reichskommissariat Moskowien was the civilian occupation-regime that Nazi Germany intended to establish in central and northern European Russia during World War II, one of several similar Reichskommissariate. It was also known initially as the Reichskommissariat Russland, but was later renamed as part of German policies of partitioning the Russian state. Siegfried Kasche was the projected Reichskomissar, but due to the Wehrmacht's failure to occupy the territories intended to form the Reichskommissariat, it remained on paper only.
The Gaue were the main administrative divisions of Nazi Germany from 1934 to 1945.
Reichskommissariat is a German word for a type of administrative entity headed by a government official known as a Reichskommissar. However, many offices existed, primarily throughout the Imperial German and Nazi periods, in a number of fields it is most commonly used to refer to the quasi-colonial administrative territorial entity established by Nazi Germany in several occupied countries during World War II. While officially located outside the German Reich in a legal sense, these entities were directly controlled by their supreme civil authorities, who ruled their territories as German governors on behalf of and as representatives of Adolf Hitler.
"Hitler's Table Talk" is the title given to a series of World War II monologues delivered by Adolf Hitler, which were transcribed from 1941 to 1944. Hitler's remarks were recorded by Heinrich Heim, Henry Picker, and Martin Bormann and later published by different editors under different titles in four languages.
The Greater Germanic Reich, fully styled the Greater Germanic Reich of the German Nation, was the official state name of the political entity that Nazi Germany tried to establish in Europe during World War II. The territorial claims for the Greater Germanic Reich fluctuated over time. As early as the autumn of 1933, Adolf Hitler envisioned annexing such territories as Bohemia, western Poland and Austria to Germany and the formation of satellite or puppet states without independent economies or policies of their own.
Reichskommissariat Turkestan was a projected Reichskommissariat that Germany proposed to create in Russia and the Central Asian republics of the Soviet Union in its military conflict with that country during World War II. Soviet historian Lev Bezymenski claimed that names Panturkestan, Großturkestan and Mohammed-Reich were also considered for the territory.
Wehrbauer, plural Wehrbauern, is a German term for settlers living on the marches of a realm who were tasked with holding back foreign invaders until the arrival of proper military reinforcements. In turn, they were granted special liberties. Wehrbauern in their settlements, known as Wehrsiedlungen, were mainly used on the eastern fringes of the Holy Roman Empire and later Austria-Hungary to slow attacks by the Ottoman Empire. This historic term was resurrected and used by the Nazis during the Second World War.
As the Axis powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan cemented their military alliance by mutually declaring war against the United States on December 11, 1941, the Japanese proposed a clear territorial arrangement with the two main European Axis powers concerning the Asian continent. On December 15, they presented the Germans with a drafted military convention that would delimit the continent of Asia into two separate "operational spheres" by a dividing line along the 70th meridian east longitude, going southwards through the Ob River's Arctic estuary, southwards to just east of Khost in Afghanistan and heading into the Indian Ocean just west of Rajkot in India, to split the Lebensraum land holdings of Germany and the similar spazio vitale areas of Italy to the west of it, and the Empire of Japan to the east of it, after a complete defeat of the Soviet Union by the Third Reich.
Franz Xaver Dorsch was a German civil engineer who became the chief engineer of the Organisation Todt (OT), a civil and military engineering group in Nazi Germany that was responsible for a huge range of engineering projects at home and in the territories occupied by the Germans during the Second World War. He played a leading role in many of the Third Reich's biggest engineering projects, including the construction of the Siegfried Line (Westwall), the Atlantic Wall and numerous other fortifications in Germany and occupied Europe. Following the war, he founded the Dorsch Consult consulting engineering company in Wiesbaden.
The foreign relations of Third Reich were characterized by the territorial expansionist ambitions of Germany's dictator Adolf Hitler and the promotion of the ideologies of anti-communism and antisemitism within Germany and its conquered territories. The Nazi regime oversaw Germany's rise as a militarist world power from the state of humiliation and disempowerment it had experienced following its defeat in World War I. From the late 1930s to its defeat in 1945, Germany was the most formidable of the Axis powers - a military alliance between Imperial Japan, Fascist Italy, and their allies and puppet states.
The Reich Plenipotentiary for the Total War Effort was a position created by Adolf Hitler, the Führer ("leader") of Nazi Germany, on 23 July 1944 for Joseph Goebbels, who was also at the time the regime's Propaganda Minister. The purpose of the new office was to rally the German people behind an effort to achieve "total war", in which all civilian resources and all aspects of civilian infrastructure are subordinated to the needs of the military and the war effort. The idea to create the new office, and to appoint Goebbels to it, had come from Goebbels himself. Hitler had acceded to it because of the rapid deterioration of the German military position in the war in the East against the Soviet Union; he had finally been convinced that only a total war effort could counter what Hitler felt was the constant undermining of his military strategies by his generals.