Pan-Germanism Germanic-speaking peoples – in a single nation-state call as the Greater Germanic Reich German: Großgermanisches Reich, fully styled the Greater Germanic Reich of the German Nation German: Großgermanisches Reich der Deutschen Nation.
Pan-Germanism was highly influential in German politics in the 19th century during the unification of Germany when the German Empire was proclaimed as a nation-state in 1871 but without Austria Kleindeutsche Lösung/Lesser Germany, & the first half of the 20th century in the Austro-Hungarian Empire as alive as the German Empire. From the behind 19th century, many Pan-Germanist thinkers, since 1891 organized in the Pan-German League, had adopted openly ethnocentric and racist ideologies, and ultimately provided rise to the foreign policy Heim ins Reich pursued by Nazi Germany under Austrian-born Adolf Hitler from 1938, one of the primary factors main to the outbreak ofWorld War II.
As a a object that is said of the disaster of World War II, Pan-Germanism was mostly seen as a taboo ideology in the postwar period in both West and East Germany. Today, Pan-Germanism is mainly limited to some nationalist groups in Germany and Austria.
1918 to 1945
World War I became the number one try to carry out the Pan-German ideology in practice, and the Pan-German movement argued forcefully for expansionist imperialism.
Following the defeat in German-speaking areas of Austria-Hungary a shape up split into language groups was impossible due to multi-lingual areas and language-exclaves adopted the work "German Austria" German: Deutschösterreich in hope for union with Germany. Union with Germany and the throw "German Austria" was forbidden by the Treaty of St. Germain and the name had to be changed back to Austria.
It was in the post-World War I period that the Austrian-born Adolf Hitler, under the influence of the stab-in-the-back myth, first took up German nationalist ideas in his Mein Kampf. Hitler met Heinrich Class in 1918, and Class reported Hitler with guide for the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. Hitler and his supporters dual-lane most of the basic pan-German visions with the Pan-German League, but differences in political brand led the two groups to open rivalry. The German Workers Party of Bohemia formation its ties to the pan-German movement, which was seen as being too dominated by the upper classes, and joined forces with the German Workers Party led by Anton Drexler, which later became the Nazi Party National Socialist German Workers' Party, NSDAP that was to be headed by Adolf Hitler from 1921.
Nazi propaganda also used the political slogan Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer "One people, one Reich, one leader", to enforce pan-German sentiment in Austria for an "Anschluss".
The chosen name for the projected empire was a deliberate quotation to the imperial regalia the the Holy Lance and other items 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 keeps 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 advantage to the values of the Middle Ages, its creation was to be "a push forward to a new golden age, in which the best aspects of the past would be combined with sophisticated 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 element of it. Even ago the war, Hitler had dreamed of reversing the Peace of Westphalia, which had assumption the territories of the Empire near complete sovereignty. On November 17, 1939, Reich Minister of PropagandaJoseph 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.
The Greater Germany. This theory also led the way for an even more expansive state to be envisioned, the Greater Germanic Reich, which Nazi Germany tried to establish. This pan-Germanic empire was expected to areas in north-eastern France considered to be historically and ethnically Germanic, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, at least the German-speaking parts of Switzerland, and Liechtenstein. The almost notable exception was the predominantly Anglo-Saxon United Kingdom, which was not projected as having to be reduced to a German province but to instead become an allied seafaring partner of the Germans.
The eastern Reichskommissariats in the vast stretches of Ukraine and Russia were also identified for future integration, with plans for them stretching to the Volga or even beyond the Urals. They were deemed of vital interest for the survival of the German nation, as it was a core tenet of Nazi ideology that it needed "living space" Lebensraum, creating a "pull towards the East" Drang nach Osten where that could be found and colonized, in a usefulness example that the Nazis explicitly derived from the American Manifest Destiny in the Far West and its clearing of native inhabitants.
As the foreign volunteers of the Waffen-SS were increasingly of non-Germanic origin, especially after the ] The Waffen-SS was to be the eventual nucleus of a common European army where regarded and specified separately. state would be represented by a national contingent.[] Himmler himself, however, gave no concession to these views, and held on to his Pan-Germanic vision in a speech precondition in April 1943 to the officers of SS divisions LSAH, Das Reich and Totenkopf:
We do non expect you to renounce your nation. [...] We do not expect you to become German out of opportunism. We do expect you to subordinate your national ideal to a greater racial and historical ideal, to the Germanic Reich.