Greater Germanic Reich
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.
This pan-Germanic Empire was expected to assimilate practically all of Germanic Europe into an enormously expanded Reich. Territorially speaking, this encompassed the already-enlarged German Reich itself, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Liechtenstein, parts of northern and northeastern France, and the German-speaking and French-speaking parts of Switzerland.
The most notable Germanic-speaking exception would have been the United Kingdom: the Nazis' New Order envisaged the role of Britain not as a German province but instead as a German-allied seafaring partner. Another exception was the German-populated territory in South Tyrol, an area which Germany assigned to its fellow-Axis power, Fascist Italy, in 1939. Aside from Germanic Europe, the Reich's western frontiers with France were to revert to those of the earlier Holy Roman Empire, which would have meant the complete German annexation of all of Wallonia, French Switzerland, and large areas of northern and eastern France. Additionally, the policy of Lebensraum required mass expansion of Germany and the settlement of Germans eastwards as far as the Ural Mountains. Hitler originally planned for the deportation of any "surplus" Russian population living west of the Urals to resettlement east of the Urals in Siberia.
Ideological background
Racial theories
regarded the Germanic peoples of Europe as belonging to a racially superior Nordic subset of the larger Aryan race, who were regarded as the only true culture-bearers of civilized society. These peoples were viewed as either "true Germanic peoples" that had "lost their sense of racial pride", or as close racial relatives of the Germans. German Chancellor Adolf Hitler also believed that the Ancient Greeks and Romans were the racial ancestors of the Germans, and the first torchbearers of "NordicGreek" art and culture. He particularly expressed his admiration for Ancient Sparta, declaring it to have been the purest racial state:Furthermore, Hitler's concept of "Germanic" did not simply refer to an ethnic, cultural, or linguistic group, but also to a distinctly biological one, the superior "Germanic blood" that he wanted to salvage from the control of the enemies of the Aryan race. He stated that Germany possessed more of these "Germanic elements" than any other country in the world, which he estimated as "four fifths of our people".
According to the Nazis, in addition to the Germanic peoples, individuals of seemingly non-Germanic nationality such as French, Polish, Walloon, Czech and so on might actually possess valuable Germanic blood, especially if they were of aristocratic or peasant stock. In order to "recover" these "missing" Germanic elements, they had to be made conscious of their Germanic ancestry through the process of Germanization. If the "recovery" was impossible, these individuals had to be destroyed to deny the enemy of using their superior blood against the Aryan race. An example of this type of Nazi Germanization is the kidnapping of "racially valuable" Eastern European children. Curiously, those chosen for Germanization who rejected the Nazis were viewed as being racially more suitable than those who went along without objections, as according to Himmler "it was in the nature of German blood to resist".
On the very first page of Mein Kampf, Hitler openly declared his belief that "common blood belongs in a common Reich", elucidating the notion that the innate quality of race should hold precedence over "artificial" concepts such as national identity as the deciding factor for which people were "worthy" of being assimilated into a Greater German racial state. Part of the strategic methods which Hitler chose to ensure the present and future supremacy of the Aryan race was to do away with what he described as the "small state rubbish" in Europe in order to unite all these Nordic countries into one unified racial community. From 1921 onward he advocated the creation of a "Germanic Reich of the German Nation".
Name
The chosen name for the projected empire was a deliberate reference to the Holy Roman Empire that existed in medieval times, known as the First Reich in Nazi historiography. Different aspects of the legacy of this medieval empire in German history were both celebrated and derided by the government of Nazi Germany. Hitler admired the Frankish Emperor Charlemagne for his "cultural creativity", his powers of organization, and his renunciation of the rights of the individual. He criticized the Holy Roman Emperors however for not pursuing an Ostpolitik resembling his own, while being politically focused exclusively on the south. After the Anschluss, Hitler ordered the old imperial regalia residing in Vienna to be transferred to Nuremberg, where they were kept between 1424 and 1796. Nuremberg, in addition to being the former unofficial capital of the Holy Roman Empire, was also the place of the Nuremberg rallies. The transfer of the regalia was thus done to both legitimize Hitler's Germany as the successor of the "Old Reich", but also weaken Vienna, the former imperial residence.After the 1939 German occupation of Bohemia, Hitler declared that the Holy Roman Empire had been "resurrected", although he secretly maintained his own empire to be better than the old "Roman" one. Unlike the "uncomfortably internationalist Catholic empire of Barbarossa", the Germanic Reich of the German Nation would be racist and nationalist. Rather than a return to the values of the Middle Ages, its establishment was to be "a push forward to a new golden age, in which the best aspects of the past would be combined with modern racist and nationalist thinking".
The historical borders of the Holy Empire were also used as grounds for territorial revisionism by the NSDAP, laying claim to modern territories and states that were once part of it. Even before the war, Hitler had dreamed of reversing the Peace of Westphalia, which had given the territories of the Empire almost complete sovereignty. On November 17, 1939, Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary that the "total liquidation" of this historic treaty was the "great goal" of the Nazi regime, and that since it had been signed in Münster, it would also be officially repealed in the same city.
Pan-Germanism versus Pan-Germanicism
Despite intending to grant the other "Germanics" of Europe a racially superior status alongside the Germans themselves in an anticipated post-war racio-political order, the Nazis did not however consider granting the subject populations of these countries any national rights of their own. The other Germanic countries were seen as mere extensions of Germany rather than individual units in any way, and the Germans were unequivocally intended to remain the empire's "most powerful source of strength, from both an ideological as well as military standpoint". Even Heinrich Himmler, who among the senior Nazis most staunchly supported the concept, could not shake off the idea of a hierarchical distinction between German Volk and Germanic Völker. The SS's official newspaper, Das Schwarze Korps, never succeeded in reconciling the contradiction between Germanic 'brotherhood' and German superiority. Members of Nazi-type parties in Germanic countries were also forbidden to attend public meetings of the Nazi Party when they visited Germany. After the Battle of Stalingrad this ban was lifted, but only if the attendees made prior notice of their arrival so that the events' speakers could be warned in advance not to make disparaging remarks about their country of origin.Although Hitler himself and Himmler's SS advocated for a pan-Germanic Empire, the objective was not universally held in the Nazi regime.
Germanic mysticism
There were also disagreements within the NSDAP leadership on the spiritual implications of cultivating a 'Germanic history' in their ideological program. Hitler was highly critical of Himmler's esoteric völkisch interpretation of the 'Germanic mission'. When Himmler denounced Charlemagne in a speech as "the butcher of the Saxons", Hitler stated that this was not a 'historical crime' but in fact a good thing, for the subjugation of Widukind had brought Western culture into what eventually became Germany, however he criticised the religious policies that came with it, claiming that even Islam would have been better than Christianity due to its meekness. He also disapproved of the archaeological projects which Himmler organized through his Ahnenerbe organization, such as excavations of pre-historic Germanic sites: "Why do we call the whole world's attention to the fact that we have no past?", in reference to Germany's lack of urban civilisation historically.In an attempt to eventually supplant Christianity with a religion more amenable to Nazi racial theories, Himmler, together with Alfred Rosenberg, sought to replace it with Germanic paganism, of which the Japanese Shinto was seen as an almost perfect East Asian counterpart. For this purpose they had ordered the construction of sites for the worship of Germanic cults in order to exchange Christian rituals for Germanic consecration ceremonies, which included different marriage and burial rites. In Heinrich Heims' Adolf Hitler, Monologe im FHQ 1941–1944, Hitler is quoted as having said on 14 October 1941: "It seems to be inexpressibly stupid to allow a revival of the cult of Odin/Wotan. Our old mythology of the gods was defunct, and incapable of revival, when Christianity came...the whole world of antiquity either followed philosophical systems on the one hand, or worshipped the gods. But in modern times it is undesirable that all humanity should make such a fool of itself." This was in reference to bringing Germans back to idol worship in what Hitler saw as an era of science that would reject it.