This oscillation between the metaphysical and the instrumental played out on a monumental double screen: on one side, the bid to open up a vast but ill-defined colonial ‘living space’ (Lebensraum) in the east where the German people could flourish and expand and fulfil its own racial destiny; and, on the other, the idea of establishing a pan-European New Order rescued from Bolshevism, plutocracy, democracy, and international Judaism. As so often, these barely compatible aspirations were not the sole property of the Nazis but were rooted in ideas long cultivated by German nationalists. But in the hands of Hitler and Nazi ideologists such as Himmler, Goebbels, or the agricultural expert Walther Darré, their meaning was to be inflated to the point of racial and geopolitical hyperbole, exploding more conventional understandings of national security, empire, or European reinvention.

. . .

For Hitler, these claims served to mask geopolitical objectives that could not be achieved without war; but unless Germany’s defences were strengthened and the western powers kept at bay, the climactic campaign of territorial conquest in Russia would carry too many risks. His ideal would therefore be not so much a singular ‘war’, but a sequence of localized and carefully calibrated political and military victories which would also minimize the strain on the overstretched German arms economy and the home front. In each of these conflicts, Hitler would achieve a preparatory strategic objective or overcome one of his intermediate antagonists without risking a more general war. Germany would then be secure enough to strike out for its ultimate prize of Lebensraum in the east.

. . .

One key event can stand as an example here. At a secret meeting of top military chiefs called in November 1937 to discuss the worsening shortages of raw materials for rearmament (known as the Hossbach conference), Hitler shocked his audience by tearing the veil off hitherto defensive military planning, and presenting an unexpected and unnerving exposition of his aggressive strategy for Lebensraum. He outlined the preparations for its conquest that had to be engaged before Germany lost its competitive edge in the arms race, starting with the destruction of Czechoslovakia, which would bring crucial political, economic, and strategic advantages. Once France and Britain had then been forced into submission, Germany would be free to return to its primary project of eastern conquest.

. . .

These visions of ruthless economic exploitation combined with the intensifying race war to turn the east into Europe’s slaughterhouse. For these were not simply occupied countries: they were supposed to be the nucleus of a new German empire outlined in the so-called Master Plan for the East (Generalplan Ost) developed in the RSHA between 1940 and 1942. This programme for wholesale ethnic cleansing and colonization envisaged an extension of militarily secured German Lebensraum to the edge of the Urals. International law was violated by the dismemberment of states and the ruthless war against their allegedly dangerous but racially ‘inferior’ peoples: the destruction of their elites, the degradation of their non-Jewish populations, and the extermination of their Jewish inhabitants.