Most Slavs were to be replaced (killed or deported), turned into slaves by those replacing (German farmer settlers), or Germanized. The Lebensraum thing.

But once the decision was made, the geopolitical ambition to control the Eurasian heartland, supported by the assiduous activity of geographers, anthropologists and ethnographers now working for institutes set up by Heinrich Himmler’s SS, became paramount. Hitler hoped that the resources embedded in Eurasia would supply what was necessary to defeat the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ powers and confirm the prediction made in 1919 by Mackinder that whoever controls the heartland (the ‘world island’) would dominate the globe. Mackinder had argued that technology, above all the railway, had transformed the strategic possibilities for whichever powers occupied the heartland. Hitler brought that argument up to date with plans for high-speed Autobahnen (highways) that would reach out across the Eurasian space, transforming the possibility of its development, but also ensuring that power could be projected wherever it was needed to safeguard the heartland’s security.

The paradigm used by German planners was essentially a colonial one. Though historians debate whether there was any direct continuity between German pre-1914 imperialism and the new project in Eurasia, there is no doubt that those engaged in the conquest and pacification of the new geographical zone thought in terms borrowed from the prevailing practice of territorial empire and the long history of racial discrimination and extermination that had accompanied it. Hitler’s famous comment that ‘Russia will be our India’, though it revealed how little he understood British imperialism, also revealed the extent to which the German project was seen as an extension of an existing geopolitical reality. The harsh racial policies, including the eradication of the Jewish population in the East, were part and parcel of a larger ethnic project which foresaw the Germanisation of Eurasia and the extermination of up to 30 million ‘useless eaters’. The remodelling of the entire area was at the core of General Plan East, an ambitious project for the geopolitical transformation of the Eurasian heartland.

The problem confronting Hitler (and the party’s planners and geographers) was obvious at the time. The Soviet Union was not ’empty space’, but was a rapidly arming and modernising industrial giant, with a well-organised state apparatus and a strong sense of identity as the world’s first communist state. Though the invading Germans sneered at what they viewed as primitive living conditions and ‘bestial’ people, when the war ended in August 1945 the whole of Mackinder’s heartland was occupied by the Red Army, from central Europe to Manchuria, and a new era of geopolitical thinking opened up as the Western states confronted the vast Communist bloc constructed after the war’s end. The imperial fantasy that had fed German nationalism for decades was overturned and the metaphorical ‘east’ became a real east of powerful and vengeful armies bent on destroying Germany’s imperial endeavour entirely.

Most Slavs were to be replaced (killed or deported), turned into slaves by those replacing (German farmer settlers), or Germanized. The Lebensraum thing.

But once the decision was made, the geopolitical ambition to control the Eurasian heartland, supported by the assiduous activity of geographers, anthropologists and ethnographers now working for institutes set up by Heinrich Himmler’s SS, became paramount. Hitler hoped that the resources embedded in Eurasia would supply what was necessary to defeat the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ powers and confirm the prediction made in 1919 by Mackinder that whoever controls the heartland (the ‘world island’) would dominate the globe. Mackinder had argued that technology, above all the railway, had transformed the strategic possibilities for whichever powers occupied the heartland. Hitler brought that argument up to date with plans for high-speed Autobahnen (highways) that would reach out across the Eurasian space, transforming the possibility of its development, but also ensuring that power could be projected wherever it was needed to safeguard the heartland’s security.

The paradigm used by German planners was essentially a colonial one. Though historians debate whether there was any direct continuity between German pre-1914 imperialism and the new project in Eurasia, there is no doubt that those engaged in the conquest and pacification of the new geographical zone thought in terms borrowed from the prevailing practice of territorial empire and the long history of racial discrimination and extermination that had accompanied it. Hitler’s famous comment that ‘Russia will be our India’, though it revealed how little he understood British imperialism, also revealed the extent to which the German project was seen as an extension of an existing geopolitical reality. The harsh racial policies, including the eradication of the Jewish population in the East, were part and parcel of a larger ethnic project which foresaw the Germanisation of Eurasia and the extermination of up to 30 million ‘useless eaters’. The remodelling of the entire area was at the core of General Plan East, an ambitious project for the geopolitical transformation of the Eurasian heartland.

The problem confronting Hitler (and the party’s planners and geographers) was obvious at the time. The Soviet Union was not ’empty space’, but was a rapidly arming and modernising industrial giant, with a well-organised state apparatus and a strong sense of identity as the world’s first communist state. Though the invading Germans sneered at what they viewed as primitive living conditions and ‘bestial’ people, when the war ended in August 1945 the whole of Mackinder’s heartland was occupied by the Red Army, from central Europe to Manchuria, and a new era of geopolitical thinking opened up as the Western states confronted the vast Communist bloc constructed after the war’s end. The imperial fantasy that had fed German nationalism for decades was overturned and the metaphorical ‘east’ became a real east of powerful and vengeful armies bent on destroying Germany’s imperial endeavour entirely.

It is tempting to ask whether geopolitics really caused this disaster. It is clear that geopolitical categories and concepts were useful in supplying a scientific underpinning to legitimise military aggression and crude colonial practice, just as current biological theory underpinned the brutal eugenic and racist policies of the regime. It can also be argued that Hitler’s exposure to the geopolitical and imperial literature of the 1920s provided him with a language to define his intentions and to justify them in terms that derived directly from ideas about ‘space-conquering peoples’ as an expression of racial vitality and cultural superiority. It is also difficult to explain why so many among the German academic and military elite were prepared to follow his strategic course unless they shared in one form or other the central view of Germany as a nation without adequate space, denied its cultural birthright by the old imperial powers whose global order was in apparently terminal decline. Hitler, from this standpoint, reflected the worldview of a much broader constituency of Germans in the 1920s and 1930s who believed that geographical and political realities had to be altered if Germany was to achieve the destiny its people deserved. The argument that the Germans were waging a geopolitical war was popular in the wartime United States, where the work of both Mackinder and Haushofer was well known to geographers. Roosevelt’s conception of future war, in 1940–41, was based on calculations of geographical resources and the problems faced by maritime powers facing an enemy dominant on land. Recent research on the continuities in German thinking about empire and space has reinforced this earlier appreciation. It is difficult now to deny that geopolitics helped to shape the territorial and racial ambitions of the Third Reich, and that it helped to cause the war.

Most Slavs were to be replaced (killed or deported), turned into slaves by those replacing (German farmer settlers), or Germanized. The Lebensraum thing.

But once the decision was made, the geopolitical ambition to control the Eurasian heartland, supported by the assiduous activity of geographers, anthropologists and ethnographers now working for institutes set up by Heinrich Himmler’s SS, became paramount. Hitler hoped that the resources embedded in Eurasia would supply what was necessary to defeat the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ powers and confirm the prediction made in 1919 by Mackinder that whoever controls the heartland (the ‘world island’) would dominate the globe. Mackinder had argued that technology, above all the railway, had transformed the strategic possibilities for whichever powers occupied the heartland. Hitler brought that argument up to date with plans for high-speed Autobahnen (highways) that would reach out across the Eurasian space, transforming the possibility of its development, but also ensuring that power could be projected wherever it was needed to safeguard the heartland’s security.

The paradigm used by German planners was essentially a colonial one. Though historians debate whether there was any direct continuity between German pre-1914 imperialism and the new project in Eurasia, there is no doubt that those engaged in the conquest and pacification of the new geographical zone thought in terms borrowed from the prevailing practice of territorial empire and the long history of racial discrimination and extermination that had accompanied it. Hitler’s famous comment that ‘Russia will be our India’, though it revealed how little he understood British imperialism, also revealed the extent to which the German project was seen as an extension of an existing geopolitical reality. The harsh racial policies, including the eradication of the Jewish population in the East, were part and parcel of a larger ethnic project which foresaw the Germanisation of Eurasia and the extermination of up to 30 million ‘useless eaters’. The remodelling of the entire area was at the core of General Plan East, an ambitious project for the geopolitical transformation of the Eurasian heartland.

The problem confronting Hitler (and the party’s planners and geographers) was obvious at the time. The Soviet Union was not ’empty space’, but was a rapidly arming and modernising industrial giant, with a well-organised state apparatus and a strong sense of identity as the world’s first communist state. Though the invading Germans sneered at what they viewed as primitive living conditions and ‘bestial’ people, when the war ended in August 1945 the whole of Mackinder’s heartland was occupied by the Red Army, from central Europe to Manchuria, and a new era of geopolitical thinking opened up as the Western states confronted the vast Communist bloc constructed after the war’s end. The imperial fantasy that had fed German nationalism for decades was overturned and the metaphorical ‘east’ became a real east of powerful and vengeful armies bent on destroying Germany’s imperial endeavour entirely.

Most Slavs were to be replaced (killed or deported), turned into slaves by those replacing (German farmer settlers), or Germanized. The Lebensraum thing.

The paradigm used by German planners was essentially a colonial one. Though historians debate whether there was any direct continuity between German pre-1914 imperialism and the new project in Eurasia, there is no doubt that those engaged in the conquest and pacification of the new geographical zone thought in terms borrowed from the prevailing practice of territorial empire and the long history of racial discrimination and extermination that had accompanied it. Hitler’s famous comment that ‘Russia will be our India’, though it revealed how little he understood British imperialism, also revealed the extent to which the German project was seen as an extension of an existing geopolitical reality. The harsh racial policies, including the eradication of the Jewish population in the East, were part and parcel of a larger ethnic project which foresaw the Germanisation of Eurasia and the extermination of up to 30 million ‘useless eaters’. The remodelling of the entire area was at the core of General Plan East, an ambitious project for the geopolitical transformation of the Eurasian heartland.

The problem confronting Hitler (and the party’s planners and geographers) was obvious at the time. The Soviet Union was not ’empty space’, but was a rapidly arming and modernising industrial giant, with a well-organised state apparatus and a strong sense of identity as the world’s first communist state. Though the invading Germans sneered at what they viewed as primitive living conditions and ‘bestial’ people, when the war ended in August 1945 the whole of Mackinder’s heartland was occupied by the Red Army, from central Europe to Manchuria, and a new era of geopolitical thinking opened up as the Western states confronted the vast Communist bloc constructed after the war’s end. The imperial fantasy that had fed German nationalism for decades was overturned and the metaphorical ‘east’ became a real east of powerful and vengeful armies bent on destroying Germany’s imperial endeavour entirely.

Most Slavs were to be replaced (killed or deported), turned into slaves by those replacing (German farmer settlers), or Germanized. The Lebensraum thing.