New Order (Nazism)

The term New Order of Europe refers to various political and social concepts Nazi Germany sought to impose on German-occupied Europe and beyond.
Planning for the commenced prior to World War II, but Adolf Hitler first proclaimed a "European New Order" in a speech on 30 January 1941.
Among other things, the New Order followed an emergent Nazi vision for a pan-German racial state structured to the benefit of a perceived Aryan-Nordic master race, and drafted plans for German colonization into Central and Eastern Europe alongside the continued Holocaust of Jews, Romani people, and other ethnicities deemed "unworthy of life". These plans intersected with the proposed extermination, expulsion or enslavement of most of the Slavic Peoples and other groups deemed "racially inferior" called Untermenschen. Nazi Germany's aggressive desire for territorial expansion ranks as a major cause of World War II.
There remains historical contention on the ultimate scope involved with the New Order: it may have exclusively been a continental project limited to the scope of Europe, or a broader roadmap for an eventual German-centric world government.

Origin of the term

The term Neuordnung is an abbreviation of die Neuordnung Europas, used by the Nazi establishment to broadly refer to a planned "reorganization" of the geopolitical landscape.
The Nazi government claimed to pursue Neuordnung as a means of rearranging territory for the common benefit of a new, economically integrated Europe. Nazi racial views regarded the "Judeo-Bolshevist" Soviet state as a criminal institution in need of destruction and a barbaric place so culturally devoid of "European" character as to make its existence intolerable to the Third Reich.
The central objective of Neuordnung was to assure absolute continental hegemony for Nazi Germany following the war. This was to be realised foremost through the direct expansion of Germany, and supplemented by the political and economic subjugation of the rest of Europe.
Its use in Nazi propaganda found the phrase resonance within Western media. In English-language academic circles especially, it increasingly grew to more broadly refer to the civic policies and war aims of the Third Reich, making it synonymous with the term "Co-Prosperity Sphere" utilised by the Empire of Japan in reference to their planned imperial domain.

Ideological background

Nazi bio-politics

The Nazis implemented a strict racial hierarchy founded upon pseudo-scientific beliefs and practices. At its top was the "master race" composed of the purest stock of the Aryan race; the Nazis iconised the Nordic race as its strongest manifestation, followed by other "inferior" races. The Nazis believed that Western civilization was predominantly created and maintained by Nordic civilizations, accordingly making the "Nordic" peoples racially superior. The Nazis believed this qualititative superiority entitled them to dominate the world, a concept known as Nordicism.

Geopolitical strategy

Hitler's ideas about eastward expansion were greatly influenced during his 1924 imprisonment through contact with a mentor, Karl Haushofer. Haushofer perceived a dire necessity for Germany to attain the Eurasian heartland in order to permanently secure its role as a global power. Italy and Japan were viewed as being ideally situated to complement German control there, geopolitically shielding Germany's more insular position with their regional naval power.

Anticipated territorial extent of Nazi imperialism

The emergent need for a dominant global power was well-established within Hitler's worldview. In a published 1930 Speech first delivered at Erlangen University, Hitler proclaimed that no people held a greater right to seize "control" of the globe than the Germans. It built upon principles professed in a 1927 letter from Rudolf Hess, paraphrasing Hitler's vision: "World peace is certainly an ideal worth striving for; in Hitler's opinion it will be realizable only when one power, the racially best one has attained complete and uncontested supremacy. That can then provide a sort of world police, seeing to it at the same time that the most valuable race is guaranteed the necessary living space. The lower races will have to restrict themselves accordingly".

Implementation in Europe

Preceding the War

The Anschluss of Austria in 1938 empowered Austrian Nazis against rival Austro-fascists, finally realizing the Pan-Germanist cause, while also encircling Czechoslovakia for a future expansionist movement against Slavic states. This led to the Partition of Czechoslovakia, in which the Reich annexed the Sudetenland and established a Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia to forcibly integrate Czechs to the German nation, reducing Slovakia into a German puppet state and attracting Hungary and Poland to the German sphere of influence by providing for some territorial concessions of left-over Czech lands in the First Vienna Award.File:Europe1937-1939.png|thumb|291x291px|Territorial evolution of Germany, based on Hossbach Memorandum definition of Lebensraum for the short-term
Next came the implementation of the Ostpolitik, originally involving the proposed development of a barrier of German client states from Finland to Romania to contain Soviet expansionism in a cooperative front against the Comintern. This cooperative front would facilitate conspiracy and sabotage against the Soviet sphere of influence. This Ostpolitik promised to weaken Germany's eastern neighbors to the point of economic subordination, allowing for the easy utilisation of existing German settlements to intervene or balkanise those states and reverse Germany's post-1918 territorial losses.
Based on those neocolonialist plans, the Reich established the German–Romanian Treaty, the 1939 German ultimatum to Lithuania, and the expansion of the Anti-Comintern Pact. However, the Reich's failure to subdue the Poles in the Danzig crisis convinced Hitler that the Polish nation needed punishment for its lack of cooperation with Germany's interest in the Polish Corridor through Berlinka. Although Poland had been initially willing to avoid war and conform to the annexation of the Free City of Danzig, anti-Polish sentiment intensified after Hitler took great offense to the establishment of an Anglo-Polish alliance. Nazi officials became convinced that the existence of a Polish state was no longer geopolitically viable for the New Order due to its relation as an Anglo-French buffer state against the Ostpolitik, and thus Polish territorial integrity was partially conceded to the Soviets to keep them away from the Western Powers, securing Germany and postponing the conquest of all the Lebensraum until France and British weren't a menace.
The Reich capitalised on the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact to put an end Stalin's policy of the anti-fascist popular front. This shift reignited internal left-wing conflicts and Stalinist hostility toward non-Marxist-Leninist socialists, who Stalin dismissed as "social fascists". More importantly, the pact provided an opportunity to partition Eastern Europe with Soviet consent, exploiting the USSR's desperation for "secure borders" amidst its isolation from Western aid. This alignment led to Soviet concessions to Germany's agenda and opened the possibility of a fascist-communist anti-capitalist bloc as a perceived lesser evil. A significant step toward preparing Hitler's "New Order", the Nazi–Soviet agreement tacitly sought to restore the former spheres of influence of the Russian Empire, the German Empire, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Balkans. This vision included the partitioning of Poland-Lithuania, with Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech protectorate, and Lithuania recognised as projected German puppet states. Meanwhile, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Bessarabia were temporarily ceded to the Soviet sphere. Shortly afterward, however, Lithuania was transferred to Soviet control in exchange for Germany gaining Lublin and Lesser Poland. Initially, the agreement stipulated that Germany would only claim post-Napoleonic Austrian and Prussian Poland, excluding former Russian Poland. However, Stalin opposed the creation of a residual pro-German Polish puppet state, which led instead to the establishment of the General Government under German administration.
However, the Nazis were never satisfied with this concession to the Soviets and still made efforts to contract deals with non-Soviet agents interested in their assigned sphere of influence in Eastern Poland, including overtures to Lithuania, to Hungary, and to domestic Ukrainian Nationalists before the Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland and searching for potential collaborators among the Fascist Poles to turn Central Poland into a German Protectorate.

Military campaigns in Poland and Western Europe

The initial phase of the establishment of the New Order was:

First, the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact on 23 August 1939 prior to the invasion of Poland to secure the new eastern border with the Soviet Union, prevent the emergence of a two-front war, and to circumvent a shortage of raw materials due to an expected British naval blockade.
Second, the Blitzkrieg attacks in Northern and Western Europe to neutralise opposition from the West. This resulted in the conquest of Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France, all of which were under German rule by the early summer of 1940.

Had the British been defeated by Germany, the political re-ordering of Western Europe would have been accomplished. There was to be no post-war general peace conference in the manner of the one held in Paris after the First World War, merely bilateral negotiations between Germany and her defeated enemies.

Plans for Great Britain

One of the primary German foreign policy aims throughout the 1930s had been to establish a military alliance with the United Kingdom, and despite anti-British policies having been adopted as this proved impossible, hope remained that the UK would in time yet become a reliable German ally. Hitler professed an admiration for the British Empire and preferred to see it preserved as a world power, mostly because its break-up would benefit other countries far more than it would Germany, particularly the United States and Japan. Britain's situation was likened to the historical situation of the Austrian Empire after its defeat by the Kingdom of Prussia in 1866, after which Austria was formally excluded from German affairs but would prove to become a loyal ally of the German Empire in the pre-World War I power alignments in Europe. It was hoped that a defeated Britain would fulfill a similar role, being excluded from continental affairs, but maintaining its Empire and becoming an allied seafaring partner of the Germans.
William L. Shirer, however, claims that the British male population between 17 and 45 would have been forcibly transferred to the continent to be used as industrial slave labour and the remaining British females were to be impregnated by German soldiers ensuring that Britain would be fully Germanised within one or two subsequent generations.
The remaining population would have been terrorised, including by taking civilians hostage and punishing even the most trivial acts of resistance with the death penalty. The UK would have been militarily occupied, and plundered for anything of financial, military, industrial or cultural value. German workers would be sent to England, and British industrial production directed towards the Eastern Front. The Germans would extract agricultural goods, raw ore, and timber, and would produce war materiel. The Einsatzgruppen, led by Dr. Franz Six, were to be unleashed to round up and execute all political, intellectual and public figures who had previously spoken out against the Nazis, and other people who might in the future cause problems for the occupying forces.
After the war, Otto Bräutigam of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories claimed in his book that in February 1943 he had the opportunity to read a personal report by Wagner, regarding a discussion with Heinrich Himmler, in which Himmler had expressed the intention to exterminate about 80% of the populations of France and England by the Sicherheitsdienst after the German victory.
During the proposed invasion of Great Britain under Operation Sea Lion, there were plans to invade neutral Ireland under Operation Green. By occupying large territories in northeastern France, Hitler hoped to marginalise the country to prevent any further continental challenges to Germany's hegemony.
Evidence suggests the monarchy was to survive. There were proposals to unite Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland, and support a Celtic union, to secure the help of the Irish Republican Army. There were also proposals to establish an independent and republican Scotland, as a socialist-nationalist counter to the capitalistic English monarchy. Some members of the Scottish National Party expressed varying degrees of support for similar ideas. Ultimately, none of these proposals came to fruition, as neither Britain nor Ireland were actually invaded.