Generalplan Ost

Generalplan Ost was a Nazi German plan to colonize Eastern Europe through mass displacement, murder, and German settlement. It envisaged reshaping the region’s population and territory under German rule.

Lebensraum: Lebensraum was the Nazi doctrine that Germany needed territorial expansion, especially eastward, for its supposed racial and national survival. It supplied the expansionist rationale for taking Eastern European land and remaking it for German settlement.
Nazi racial ideology: Nazi racial ideology ranked people in purported biological hierarchies and promoted German racial supremacy and antisemitism. Its hierarchy determined who the planners imagined as settlers, exploitable laborers, or targets for removal.
Generalplan Ost memoranda of May 1942: The May 1942 Generalplan Ost memoranda were SS planning texts outlining proposed German settlement and population policies in Eastern Europe. They provide a concrete surviving formulation of the plan’s territorial and demographic ambitions.
Generalplan Ost and the Nuremberg trials: The Nuremberg trials were postwar proceedings prosecuting leading Nazi officials for crimes committed during World War II. Evidence about eastern colonization plans helped establish the regime’s deliberate policies of conquest and population coercion.
Heim ins Reich: Heim ins Reich was Nazi Germany’s policy of transferring ethnic Germans from outside the Reich into German-controlled territory. Resettling ethnic Germans was one population policy intertwined with the plan’s colonization aims.
Heinrich Himmler: Heinrich Himmler was the head of the SS and a leading organizer of Nazi racial persecution and genocide. He commissioned and promoted SS plans for demographic transformation in occupied Eastern Europe.
Hunger Plan: The Hunger Plan was a Nazi wartime strategy to divert food from occupied Soviet territories, causing mass starvation. It illustrates how German plans for eastern colonization accompanied policies that knowingly exposed populations to famine.
Expulsion of Poles by Nazi Germany: Nazi Germany forcibly expelled hundreds of thousands of Poles from annexed territories during World War II. These expulsions show the human cost of making land available for German settlers.
Generalplan Ost (SS planning documents): Generalplan Ost documents were SS planning proposals for Germanizing conquered Eastern Europe through settlement and population removal. The surviving drafts show how officials translated racial goals into proposed demographic and territorial measures.
SS Race and Settlement Main Office: The SS Race and Settlement Main Office administered racial screening and settlement policies within the SS. Its racial-selection work connected settlement policy with the regime’s hierarchy of populations.

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