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Journal of Contemporary History

2016, Vol. 51(1) 61–90

! The Author(s) 2015

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Article

Hitler’s Africa in the

East: Italian Colonialismas a Model for German Planningin Eastern Europe

Patrick BernhardTrinity College Dublin, Republic of Ireland

Abstract

Since Hannah Arendt’s essay on the ‘Origins of Totalitarianism’ in 1951, there has been avivid scholarly debate about a nexus between Imperial Germany’s colonial endeavours inAfrica and the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe. Some historians have gone so far asto draw a direct line from the colonial massacres of Windhoek to those committed atAuschwitz. Yet my article suggests a different answer to the question of historicalcontinuities: in its plans for Poland and the Soviet Union, the Third Reich did not

draw upon its own colonial past but looked to the undertakings of Fascist Italy inAfrica for inspiration. Italy’s huge settlement project, with which it sought to producethe racially superior Fascist New Man, served as a model for Nazi Germany particularlyin one crucial regard: in the organization and regulation of a new Volksgemeinschaft atthe edge of the empire. These findings are of far-reaching significance for our under-standing of both Italian Fascism and National Socialism. The still dominant image of Mussolini’s regime as an insignificant appendage to the superior Nazi state is inaccurate.Rather, modern social engineering of Italian Fascism acted as an ‘inspirational’ force onNazi Germany, catalysing the evolution of Hitler’s dictatorship.

Keywords

colonialism, Fascist Italy, Generalplan Ost, Libya, Nazi Germany, settlement schemes

Corresponding author:

Patrick Bernhard, Department of History, School of Histories and Humanities, Trinity College Dublin 2,

Republic of Ireland.

Email: [email protected]

at Central European University on January 18, 2016 jch.sagepub.comDownloaded from

http://jch.sagepub.com/






Ever since Hannah Arendt published her famous study The Origins of

Totalitarianism in 1951, there has been much scholarly debate about the link

between Imperial Germany’s colonial policies in Africa and the Nazi occupation

of Eastern Europe.1 Historians such as Benjamin Madley and Ju ¨ rgen Zimmerer

have made the claim that the atrocities committed against the Hereros and Namas

in German south-west Africa between 1904 and 1907 served as a blueprint for the

mass killings of civilians in Poland and the Soviet Union in Hitler’s war of conquest

and annihilation. According to these scholars, a more or less direct line runs from

Windhoek to Auschwitz: the genocide in Africa so inured Germans to violence that

they did not think twice when exterminating European Jews.2 Other scholars, how-

ever, have disputed this thesis, arguing that the Nazis had no need for role models

when it came to exercising violence, as they had already been sufficiently brutalized

in the cauldron of the First World War and immediately afterwards in the wake of the German Revolution.3

While this discussion is important, as it seeks to situate National Socialism

within a larger historical context, it also has its limits. On the one hand, both

sides of the debate have placed focus on historical arcs unique to individual

nations. On the other hand, the debate has concentrated exclusively on the issue

of violence, which is only one – albeit constituent – aspect of modern colonialism.4

In this article, I hope to widen the scope of existing debate, both geographically and

topically. I argue that there was indeed a link between Africa and the German

Ostraum but that the connection was of a different sort than Madley and Zimmererpresume. Nazi leaders did not draw on the country’s colonial experiences when

planning the future of Eastern Europe; on the contrary. The Third Reich made a

clear break with Germany’s African past. SS chief Heinrich Himmler and his

planning staff saw colonization under the Kaiser as appallingly outdated. They

instead modelled their strategies in part on colonial projects undertaken by

Fascist Italy, Germany’s main partner, which had been greatly admired by Hitler

1 H. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York 1951). Sebastian Conrad provides an excellentoverview of the discussion in his Deutsche Kolonialgeschichte (Munich 2008), 100–6.2 See B. Madley, ‘From Africa to Auschwitz: How German South West Africa Incubated Ideas andMethods Adopted and Developed by the Nazis in Eastern Europe’, European History Quarterly, 35, 3(2005), 429–64; J. Zimmerer, ‘The Birth of the ‘Ostland’ Out of the Spirit of Colonialism: A Post-Colonial Perspective on the Nazi Policy of Conquest and Extermination’, Patterns of Prejudice, 39, 2(2005), 197–219.3 S. Malinowski and R. Gerwarth, ‘Hannah Arendt’s Ghosts: Reflections on the DisputablePath from Windhoek to Auschwitz’, Central European History, 42 (2009), 279–300 and P. Grosse,‘What Does German Colonialism Have to Do with National Socialism? A ConceptualFramework’ in E. Ames, M. Klotz and L. Wildenthal (eds), Germany’s Colonial Pasts (Lincoln, NE2005), 115–34.

4 See similar the critique of R.A. Berman, ‘Colonialism and No End: the Other Continuity Thesis’,in V. Langbehn and M. Salama (eds), German Colonialism: Race, the Holocaust and PostwarGermany (New York, NY 2011), 164–90, T. Kuu ¨ hne, ‘Colonialism and the Holocaust: Continuities,Causations, and Complexities’, Journal of Genocide Research, 15, 3 (2013), 339–62, and R. Pergher andM. Roseman, ‘The Holocaust – An Imperial Genocide? A Scholars’ Forum’, Dampim, 27, 1 (2013),42–9.

62 Journal of Contemporary History 51(1)








since Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922.5 Numerous Nazi officials saw great

promise in the Italian example, particularly with regard to the colonization of

Libya, and they talked about Mussolini’s expansionism as the quintessence of

fascist modernity. Accordingly, Nazi plans for Poland and the Soviet Union

were not so much an extension of German territorial expansion immediately pre-

ceding the war, but must be more properly viewed within the broader context of

European colonial rule during the interwar period. In this way, there was more

rupture than continuity in Germany’s expansionist ambitions.6

When planning the ethnic remaking of Eastern Europe, the Germans were espe-

cially interested in the ‘eugenic’ aspect of Italian social engineering in their colonies,

particularly by plans to better the Italian people by settling some 1.5–6.5 million

colonists in Africa.7 This brings us to the central thesis of this article: For Nazi

Germany, Italian practices and experiences in colonial population managementserved as a model and ‘best practice’ example, crucially informing German plans

for the settling and ethnic remaking of Eastern Europe.

This issue dovetails with a core aim of the National Socialist regime: the creation

of a new, racially pure society, a vision that included the conquest of Lebensraum

and the extermination of the Jews.8 Indeed, the Nazis’ crusade to purge Europe of

the Jews was only one part, yet the centrepiece, of a much broader programme

designed to reshape the ethnic composition of Germany and, later on, the entire

continent. This effort to purge ‘alien’ ethnic elements was part and parcel with

ambitious projects to further the cultural, material, and biological prerogativesof the ‘Aryan race’; the elimination of ‘alien’ elements and nurturing of ‘Aryan’

ones were thus two sides of the same coin in Nazi racial and population policy.9

Settlement policy played a central role in the effort to cultivate a racially pure

populace. Similar to Fascist Italy in Africa, the Third Reich developed a massive

colonization project for Eastern Europe, commonly called Generalplan Ost, which

foresaw the settlement of 16 million colonists.10 In both Germany and Italy, a key

aim of settlement policy was to strengthen the nation biologically. Beyond these

commonalities, there was also a quite vivid exchange of ideas across borders, espe-

cially between German and Italian scientists. In both countries, scientists were toplay a major role in planning and optimizing the new colonial societies, including

geologists, who would select the best location for settlements, as well as architects,

5 P. Morgan, Fascism in Europe, 1919–1945 (London and New York, NY 2007), 161–3 andS. Reichardt and A. Nolzen, (eds), Faschismus in Italien und Deutschland: Studien zu Transfer und Vergleich (Go ¨ ttingen 2005).

6 For a different view, see S. Baranowski, Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperialism fromBismarck to Hitler (Cambridge 2011).

7 On Fascist social-engineering see especially R. Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy 1922–1945(Berkeley, CA 2001).

8 D. and W. Su ¨ ß, ‘Volksgemeinschaft und Vernichtungskrieg. Gesellschaft im nationalsozialistischenDeutschland’, in D. und W. Su ¨ ß, (eds), Das ‘Dritte Reich’. Eine Einfu ¨ hrung (Munich 2008), 79–100.

9 M. Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe (New York, NY 2008) andB.A. Valentino, Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the 20th Century (Ithaca, NY 2004), 154.10 I. Heinemann and P. Wagner (eds), Wissenschaft, Planung, Vertreibung: Neuordnungskonzepte und Umsiedlungspolitik im 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart 2006).

Bernhard 63








who would design standardized colonial housing. In short, technocrats were heav-

ily involved in the social engineering of the colonial projects pursued by both the

German and Italian dictatorships.11 It is exactly here, in the reshaping of a new

racial settler society, that German experts borrowed from their Italian colleagues.

My argument has five parts. After showing in the next section how the topic

relates to larger trends in Italo–German history and historiography, I then describe

in greater detail Mussolini’s colonial programme, which sought to being about the

racial renewal of the Italian people. The National Socialists’ deep fascination with

Italian settlement schemes, which will be discussed in the third section, is only

comprehensible against this backdrop. The fourth section outlines the personal

encounters that took place between those responsible for colonial affairs in both

countries after the Rome–Berlin Axis was proclaimed by Hitler and Mussolini in

1936. In the last fifth part, I argue that Nazi plans for Eastern Europe shifted in thelate 1930s as German settlement experts took a closer look at the colonial policy

pursued by Italy, particularly in Libya. They made changes precisely in those areas

where they considered the Italians to be well ahead of the Third Reich: namely, in

the social and ideological support that was granted to settlers. In this connection,

the overarching concern was to provide the tools that would enable the creation of

a new racist society.

The broad and intensive exchange between the German and Italian dictatorships

that I illuminate in my research will perhaps surprise some readers, for it contra-dicts traditional portrayals of German–Italian relations. In some respects my study

offers a new historical interpretation of Axis relations, as accounts to date have

tended to emphasize the supposedly large ideological differences between National

Socialism and Italian Fascism.12 The traditional view of the alliance between the

Italians and Germans is that it was motivated exclusively by shared interests that

merely papered over deep-seated nationalistic and racial resentments. Accordingly,

the alliance is said to have broken down not just under the pressures of the war, but

also because of its internal contradictions. Ultimately, historians have traditionally

argued, the Axis alliance lacked a solid core.13

In this way, the history of the Axis isoften viewed as a history of disasters, difficulties, and setbacks, for the alliance was

doomed from the outset to failure.

11 See the introduction by Sven Reichardt and Kiran Patel in this issue and L. Raphael, ‘DieVerwissenschaftlichung des Sozialen als methodische und konzeptionelle Herausforderung fu ¨ r eineSozialgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 22, 2 (1996), 165–93. Very similar,though without referring to Raphael’s work, is the argument by E.R. Dickinson, ‘Biopolitics, Fascism,Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse about ‘‘Modernity’’’, Central European History, 37, 1

(2004), 1–48.12 P. Bernhard, ‘Renarrating Italian Fascism: New Directions in the Historiography of a EuropeanDictatorship’, Contemporary European History, 23, 1 (2014), 151–63.13 See M. Funke, ‘Hitler, Mussolini und die ‘Substanz’ der Achse’, in K.D. Bracher (ed.),Nationalsozialistische Diktatur 1933–1945. Eine Bilanz (Bonn 1983), 345–69. Very critical of this ideais Morgan, Fascism in Europe, 1919–1945, 176.









This old view has a number of shortcomings, however, three of which are par-

ticularly glaring. First, there is little empirical backing for the claim that the Axis

partnership lacked substance or a solid foundation. A comprehensive history of the

Axis has yet to be written. And while much has been published about the Axis, little

primary research has been conducted.14 An additional problem is that most rele-

vant studies take a very selective approach. In his twentieth century history of Italy,

Hans Woller, one of the most knowledgeable German scholars of Italian fascism,

writes that most existing studies have concentrated on domains in which cooper-

ation did not get off to a good start, and ran into numerous problems, such as

military cooperation.15 By contrast, domains in which exchange between the

regimes ran much more smoothly have simply been ignored. Thus, it is no coinci-

dence that we know so little today about transnational learning and borrowing

within the fascist alliance, for viewing the regimes as interrelated would contradicta long-held historical narrative.

Second, many older studies have tended to overestimate the extent of conflict

within the German–Italian alliance. Scholars have implicitly judged the alliance

based on contemporary notions of international cooperation functioning at its

most optimal.16 Yet the crucial question in appraising German–Italian relations

is not whether conflict existed, but whether this conflict was severe enough

to critically undermine the alliance, or whether solutions were sought and found

to defuse tensions and preserve the partnership. Philip Morgan and Ruth Ben-

Ghiat assert that Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy ‘were actually capableof cooperating with each other across the battle ground of conflicting national

interests, and did so out of a sense of ideological affinity’.17 Indeed, beyond

instances of disharmony, 1936 to 1943 saw a ‘flood of Italian–German

collaborations.’18

Third, many older studies were influenced by the political exigencies of the

postwar period. Historiographical research tells us that the perception of a funda-

mental difference between Italian Fascism and National Socialism is not based

solely on empirical reality.19 While there were real differences between the two

regimes – the Holocaust being the most fundamental – for political reasons themagnitude of divergence between them was portrayed in exaggerated terms after

1945, and differences were even postulated in areas where the similarities were

14 On the state of the art see T. Schlemmer, L. Klinkhammer and A. Osti Guerrazzi (eds), Die ‘Achse’ im Krieg: Politik, Ideologie und Kriegfu ¨ hrung 1939 bis 1945 (Paderborn 2010).15 H. Woller, Geschichte Italiens im zwanzigsten Jahrhundert (Munich 2009), 163.16 See P. Bernhard, ‘Konzertierte Gegnerbeka ¨ mpfung im Achsenbu ¨ ndnis: Die Polizei im DrittenReich und im italienischen Faschismus, 1933–1943’, Vierteljahrshefte fu ¨ r Zeitgeschichte, 59, 2 (2011),229–62.

17 Morgan, Fascism in Europe, 160.18 R. Ben-Ghiat, ‘A Lesser Evil? Italian Fascism in/and the Totalitarian Equation’, in H. Dubiel andG. Motzkin (eds), The Lesser Evil: Moral Approaches to Genocide Practices (New York, NY andLondon 2004), 137–53, here: 139.19 Path-breaking in this connection is Ben-Ghiat, ‘A Lesser Evil? See also K. Bartikowski, Deritalienische Antisemitismus im Urteil des Nationalsozialismus 1933–1943 (Berlin 2013), 9–12.

Bernhard 65








large. The notion of fundamental difference is thus partially a cultural construct,

and was influenced heavily by historical events in 1943, as Italy switched sides in

the war.20 The need for an antifascist postwar narrative that exonerated the Italians

for their collaboration with Nazi Germany was fulfilled by the portrayal of

Mussolini’s regime as a somewhat harmless dictatorship in which racism and anti-

semitism were alien concepts. Through constant repetition, this postwar narrative

assumed the status of a ‘self-fulfilling myth’, not only amongst the broader public,

but also in academia, leading the notion of a fundamental divergence between the

regimes to become ‘historical reality’.

However, in recent years a new, more self-reflective direction in research has

recognized the scope of interrelationship that existed between the German and

Italian regimes, and has begun to revise traditional interpretations of the Axis

alliance, shedding new light on differences as well as commonalities. The resulthas been revolutionary for our understanding of Italian Fascism. Anglo–US his-

torians have spearheaded this new research, which, according to David Roberts,

‘counters the long-standing stress on difference’ between Germany and Italy.21

Indeed, for many researchers racism is now viewed as an essential element of

Italian Fascism. In this way, racism, far from being only a point of difference

between the regimes, is now understood also as a common element, as

Alexander de Grand, the doyen of Italian research in the USA, has posited.22

Researchers such as Robert S. Gordon and Christopher Duggan have developed

this idea, highlighting the close relationship between racism and the brutal andexpansionist character of the Italian dictatorship.23

Younger scholars in particular have mounted a broad-based effort in most recent

years to reassess the relationship between National Socialism and Italian Fascism,

while drawing on comparative and transnational perspectives;24 this effort has her-

alded a virtual renaissance in international fascism research. This new generation of

scholars understands the Axis not merely as a military alliance, but also as a cultural

partnership and large-scale social experiment that was marked by a consensus over

war and expansion, and which ultimately enveloped all levels of the state and society

in both Italy and Germany. The fact that this partnership had a solid foundation

20 For this and the following F. Focardi and L. Klinkhammer, ‘The Question of Fascist Italy’s WarCrimes: The Construction of a Self-Acquitting Myth (1943–1948)’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 9,(2004), 330–48.21 D. Roberts, ‘Italian Fascism: New Light on the Dark Side’, Journal of Contemporary History, 44, 3(2009), 523–33, here: 524.22 A. De Grand, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany (2nd edn. New York, NY 2004), 2–3 and very similaralso K. Ishida, ‘Racisms Compared: Fascist Italy and Ultra-Nationalist Japan’, Journal Of ModernItalian Studies, 7, 3 (2002) 380–91.23 R.S.C. Gordon, ‘Race’, in R.J.B. Bosworth (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Fascism (Oxford 2009),296–316; C. Duggan, Fascist Voices: An Intimate History of Mussolini’s Italy (London 2012).

24 R. Hofmann, ‘The Fascist Reflection Japan and Italy, 1919–1950’, Ph.D. thesis, ColumbiaUniversity (2010) and D. Hedinger, Der Traum von einer neuen Weltordnung: Die Achse Tokio – Rom – Berlin 1931–1942 (forthcoming); P. Bernhard, ‘Rasse’ und ‘Raum’ transnational:Bevo ¨ lkerungsmanagement im faschistischen Bu ¨ ndnis 1936–1943 (Munich 2014) as well as the edited vol-umes T. Schlemmer and H. Woller (eds), Die faschistische Herausforderung: Netzwerke,Zukunftsverheißungen und Kulturen der Gewalt in Europa 1922 bis 1945 (Munich 2015).









beyond the propagandistic pronouncements made by both regimes is clearly evident

in the large number of treaties concluded between the two nations; in the numerous

visits by delegates from academia and politics; extensive cultural exchange; as well as

local projects, such as sister-city partnerships, which were often initiated at the

ground level of Italian and German society, and not just by political elites.25

However, while an emphasis on commonalities and successful cooperation is a key

feature in new research, these studies cannot be said to merely parrot Fascist rhet-

oric, or negate the differences between the Axis partners.

My research pursues this new line of investigation. While a number of new

studies have a rather narrow focus, often addressing tangential issues,26 I delve

into a central and sinister aspect of both regimes: namely, their policies of expan-

sion, and associated settlement programmes. Ultimately, both Germany and Italy

were interested in securing hegemony in Europe, and viewed themselves as com-petitors. Yet despite the dissonance and frictions evident in their official diplomatic

relations, they engaged in intensive exchange, and this exchange, which took place

via various channels, proved to be remarkably stable over the years. To reveal in

advance one finding of my research: By 1938, the Third Reich is traditionally

viewed to have ‘liberated’ itself from the influence exerted by its Italian partner,

and began to set the tone of the relationship. Yet it was not until this year that

German experts first began to collect information on a large scale about Italian

colonial policy. Whatever mistrust or racial prejudice may have existed against the

Italians, it did little to dampen German interest in Italian settlement efforts. Andthis interest went far beyond the borrowing of knowledge in relation to the urban

planning of settlements. It involved an intense intellectual dialogue, the importance

of which for the National Socialist state can hardly be overestimated. The incessant

drawing of contrasts and parallels to the Italian fascists and their policies of expan-

sion played a crucial role in informing the self-identity and Weltanschauung of

the Nazi state. I will address this issue in greater detail in the final section of

this article.

My aim is not merely to reconstruct concrete instances in which knowledge or

cultural practices were transferred. Rather, I am concerned with mapping the (noless real) ideological frameworks that structured processes of borrowing. I assume

that the objects of borrowing must be imbued with a certain meaning if they are to

be successfully integrated into another cultural context. This even applies to the

tools of social engineering that are ostensibly technical in nature. Accordingly, two

questions are of key importance: What commonalities and differences between the

regimes did the participating actors perceive? And how did they interpret and make

these perceptions useful within the context of their own values, hopes, and experi-

ences? The process of borrowing reveals a great deal about how the Nazis perceived

25 C. Regin, ‘Die Achse Hannover-Cremona. Eine vergessene Stau ¨ dtefreundschaft und ihreKunstausstellungen’, Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken 90 (2010),373–414.26 See in particular the eclectic essay collection from W. Schieder (ed.), Faschistische Diktaturen:Studien zu Italien und Deutschland (Go ¨ ttingen 2008).

Bernhard 67








their Italian cousins, yet it almost tells us more about how they positioned them-

selves within the wider world, and how this gave meaning to their thoughts and

actions. In this way, my research can be viewed as a form of cultural history that

emphasizes the subjective perceptions of contemporary actors from a transnational

perspective.

Fascist Italy initially stood in the long shadow cast by the colonialism of its liberal

predecessor regime.27 At the same time, under Mussolini colonialism was trans-

formed. As a recent study by Ju ¨ rgen Osterhammel shows, new forms of imperial

domination were developed in the interwar period in Europe and Asia, initially by

Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan. The study argues that in sharp contrast to the

traditional colonialism of the nineteenth century, both of these dictatorships sought

to implement a form of settler colonialism that was totally directed from above,and which foresaw the transfer of millions of colonists. Furthermore, both colonial

projects were based to a much greater degree on racist ideology, and unleashed

unprecedented violence against native populations.28 One of the first to experience

this new form of settler colonialism was the native population of Libya, one of

Italy’s oldest colonies. Founded in 1911, it was nearly lost during the First World

War, and the new Fascist regime had to reconquer Italy’s North African posses-

sions after Mussolini’s takeover in October 1922. Up to 1931 Italy waged an

extremely brutal colonial war against Arabs in North Africa. As Angelo Del

Boca and Nicola Labanca have shown,29

Italian armed forces under GeneralRodolfo Graziani – celebrated in Italian propaganda as the archetypal Fascist

soldier30 – crushed resistance with military terror. Italian forces bombed villages

indiscriminantly, used poison gas against civilians, and built several concentration

camps in the desert. In these years a total of 100,000 people, more than 10 per cent

of Libya’s estimated 800,000 inhabitants, died of hunger or were murdered.31

Those who survived the camps were expelled to less fertile regions to make way

for Italian settlers.

In 1938 Mussolini began an enormous state colonization programme in his

African territories: the Fascist regime wanted to settle a total of 1.5–6.5 million

27 A. Del Boca, Dal fascismo a Gheddafi , in Gli italiani in Libia, vol. 2 (Rome 1988).28 J. Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (5th edn. Munich2010), 606. Similar is C. Elkins and S. Pedersen, ‘Settler Colonialism: A Concept and its Uses’, inC. Elkins and S. Pedersen (eds), Settler Colonialism and Twentieth Century: Projects, Practices,Legacies (New York, NY 2005), 1–20, here: 7. On Fascist violence in the colonies see A. Mattioli,‘Entgrenzte Kriegsgewalt. Der italienische Giftgaseinsatz in Abessinien 1935–1936’, Vierteljahrshefte fu ¨ rZeitgeschichte, 51, 3 (2003), 311–37 and P. Bernhard, ‘Behind the Battle Lines: Italian Atrocities and thePersecution of Arabs, Berbers, and Jews in North Africa during World War II’, Holocaust and GenocideStudies, 26, 3 (2012), 425–46.29 See Del Boca, Dal fascism; and N. Labanca, Oltremare: Storia dell’espansione coloniale italiano

(Bologna 2007).30 A. Osti Guerrazzi, ‘Rodolfo Graziani, Karriere und Weltanschauung eines faschistischenGenerals’, in C. Hartmann (ed.), Von Feldherren und Gefreiten. Zur biographischen Dimension desZweiten Weltkriegs (Munich 2008), 21–32.31 Others have cited figures as high as 250,000 dead for the period between 1912 and 1943. SeeD.J. Vandewalle, A History of Modern Libya (Cambridge 2006), 31.









people by the middle of the century.32 On 28 October 1938 – the 16th anniversary

of the Fascist seizure of power – the Italian dictator sent the first 20,000 settlers to

Libya, accompanied by the fanfare of a huge international propaganda campaign.

By the time Italy entered the Second World War, in June 1940, the settlement

programme was well under way: over 40,000 Italian colonists lived in Libya and

several thousand more were in Abyssinia, which had been incorporated into the

Italian Impero in 1936 after another extremely brutal war.33

Beginningin1938,some40townsandhundredsoffarmswerecarvedoutofthesoil

within the span of a few short months. Each rural settlement was laid out on a grid

pattern and featured a standard set of public buildings grouped around a central

square. These included a church, a school, administrative buildings, a cinema, a med-

ical facility, a hotel and party offices such as the Casa del Fascio.34 The party head-

quarters, outfitted with a prominent bell tower, functioned as the political, social, andeducational centre of these isolated settlements, and promoted collective ideals of

Fascism through social and recreational programmes. Life and work in these new

settler towns bore more features of totalitarianism than in the Italian homeland.35

The settlement programme was drawn up with the help of so-called colonial

scientists, who conceived a comprehensive ‘demographic colonization’ plan for

Libya. Long before the settling of the first colonists, geologists and hydrologists

had tested the conditions of the ground and water, and agronomists working in

Sidi Mesri, an internationally renowned experimental station, had determined the

most suitable crops for the region. Later the military and newly founded coloniza-tion companies began construction of a vast system of roads and waterways for

irrigation: the Italians made ample use of technologies such as motorized pumps to

lift artesian water up to a depth of 400 metres. The future farmland was then

cleared and levelled to prepare for cultivation.36 In this context, Italian experts

also developed new techniques to fight soil erosion. Only then were farmhouses and

new villages erected. Every colonist was given a modern and completely standar-

dized house with running water, furniture, workhorses, and food supplies for the

first weeks.

With its colonies, Fascist Italy pursued imperial and demographic goals.37

Theregime’s main ambition was to fight the alleged negative consequences of

32 See M. Fuller, Moderns Abroad: Architecture, Cities, and Italian Imperialism (London 2006); andR. Pergher, ‘A Tale of Two Borders: Settlement and National Transformation in Libya and South Tyrolunder Fascism’, PhD thesis, University of Michigan (2007).33 F. Cresti, ‘Comunita ` proletarie italiane nell’Africa Mediterranea tra XIX Secolo e periodo fascista’,Mediterranea Ricerche storiche, 5 (April 2008), 189–214.34 See F. Mangione, Le case del fascio in Italia e nelle terre d’oltremare (Rome 2003).35 This is corroborated in particular by Pergher, ‘A Tale of Two Borders’, 319–21.36 See ibid., 465–70.

37 For this and the following see G.B. Strang, ‘Places in the African Sun: SocialDarwinism, Demographics and the Italian Invasion of Ethiopia’, in G.B. Strang (ed.), Collision of Empires: Italy’s Invasion of Ethiopia and its International Impact (Farnham and Burlington, VT2013), 11–31 and P. Bernhard, ‘Borrowing From Mussolini: Nazi Germany’s Colonial Aspirations inthe Shadow of Italian Expansionism’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 41, 4 (2013),617–43.

Bernhard 69








modernity such as the rural exodus. It was believed that the drop in Europe’s birth

rate was due to urbanization and that a consistent policy of rural settlement would

increase fertility levels.38 However, Italian settlement policy was not only to sup-

port child bearing. The Fascist regime also wanted to enhance the Italian popula-

tion in qualitative terms.39 Mussolini’s main idea was that improving the soil would

improve those who worked it.40 He believed that by selecting healthy settlers

inclined to produce large families, a new breed of Italian colonists would

emerge, an army of ‘soldier-peasants’ who would defend the borders of Empire

and improve the Italian people. In order to foster healthy families, the state covered

all initial costs: the settlers received loans on very favourable terms, and after

several years they would own the land they were working on.41 For Mussolini’s

regime, the quantitative and qualitative improvement of the Italian people was a

prerequisite for conquering new spazio vitale.42 The dictator’s dream was to createan immense empire that stretched from Libya and Abyssinia to Egypt,

the Sudan, and other territories in the Horn of Africa. This is the reason

why Mussolini attacked the British in Egypt and Somaliland in the autumn

of 1940.43

Around the world the settlement programme of the Italian Fascists stirred great

interest.44 In Great Britain, for instance, it was lauded not only for being

carried out ‘on the strictest scientific lines’. As its purpose was social and pol-

itical rather than ‘purely economic’, it also differed fundamentally from anythingthat had previously been put ‘into large-scale operation’, the British agricultur-

alist and director of the Rothamsted Experimental Station, Edward John

Russell, said in 1939.45 The American Ruth Sterling Frost put it more bluntly:

what made Fascist Italy’s colonization scheme so unique was its ‘utopian qual-

ity’ in terms of reshaping the nation, she wrote in one of the USA’s most

renowned geography journals.46 This fascination with the massive state-run col-

onization project of Fascist Italy went so far that British crofters, who wanted

38 C. Ipsen, Dictating Demography: The Problem of Population in Fascist Italy (Cambridge 1996);M.S. Quine, Italy’s Social Revolution: Charity and Welfare from Liberalism to Fascism (Houndmills2002).39 Gordon, ‘Race’.40 P. Dogliani, Il fascismo degli italiani: Una storia sociale (Milan 2008), 103.41 See especially Pergher, A Tale of Two Borders, 293.42 D. Rodogno, Fascism’s European Empire. Italian Occupation During the Second World War(Cambridge et al. 2006).43 See R. Mallett, Mussolini and the Origins of the Second World War, 1933–1940 (New York, NY2003).44 A. Bauerka ¨ mper, ‘Interwar Fascism in Europe and Beyond: Toward a Transnational Radical

Right’, in: M. Durham and M. Power (eds), New Perspectives on the Transnational Right(Houndsmills 2010), 39–66.45 E.J. Russell, ‘Agricultural Colonization in the Pontine Marshes and Libya’, The Geographical Journal , 94, 4 (1939), 273–89.46 R. Sterling Frost, ‘The Reclamation of the Pontine Marshes’, Geographical Review, 24 (1934), 584– 95, here: 595.









to improve their economic situation, asked for permission to settle in Libya as

colonists.47

In Germany, the interest in Italian colonialism was even greater. From its incep-

tion the Nazi movement was deeply fascinated by Italian colonial activity in

North Africa. In the Weimar Republic the NSDAP dedicated numerous illustrated

articles in their publications to Africa italiana, and at party rallies it presented

slideshows of Italy’s achievements in Africa.48 The Nazi party sang much praise

for the modern and orderly planning of Italy’s new colonial cities, lauding their

geometric street layout, public buildings, and excellent social facilities.49 The ideol-

ogy underlying the Italian settlement effort resonated with Nazi party members,

who saw it as an example of how their own racial and expansionist aspirations

could be realized.50 Clearly, Africa italiana served as a prism through which the

Germans entertained their own visions of empire.The Germans had been dreaming of a new German Reich and Lebensraum in

the East since the nineteenth century, but this vision had remained a distant fan-

tasy. The Treaty of Versailles had forced the cession of large swaths of territory in

the East, and this loss had been highly traumatic.51 With their colonial policy the

Italians had managed to at least partially achieve that which the German right-

wing had long sought, thus lending new momentum to German irredentism and

expansionist ambitions. The drawing of parallels between Italian colonialism and a

‘German East’ was additionally facilitated by the fact that Poland had long been

the object of colonial aspirations for the Germans, as new research has shown.52

The Nazis were quick to grasp the propaganda value of Italian colonial settle-

ment. Touting Mussolini’s ‘brilliant’ successes was not only a way to stir up mass

anger about an ‘inept’ Weimar Republic that had ‘acquiesced’ to the loss of

German colonies under the Treaty of Versailles. The Nazis also believed that

Italy’s violent expansion on the African continent had helped to promote the ‘per-

manent mobilization’ of the Italian population, one of the key features of totali-

tarian rule.53 The Vo ¨ lkischer Beobachter stressed in 1927 that Italy had been at war

since the 1922 March on Rome.54 In establishing dominion over North Africa, the

party newspaper concluded, Italy had instilled a ‘warrior spirit’ in its people.55

47 See the memo ‘Colonization of Libya’ by the military attache ´ of the British Embassy in Rome, 15June 1939, Public Record Office/National Archives London (PRO/NA), series Foreign Office (FO),371, 23391.48 See, for example, the script for the slideshow ‘Italy’, 15 September 1931, Bundesarchiv Berlin(BArch), series Deutsche Arbeitsfront (NS 5), VI, 28179.49 See, for example, R. Matschuk, ‘Tripolis’, Der SA-Mann (20 June 1933), 8.50 J. Petersen, Hitler–Mussolini: Die Entstehung der Achse Berlin–Rom 1933–1936 (Tu ¨ bingen 1973),484.51 S. Baranowski, ‘Nazi Colonialism and the Holocaust: Inseparable Connections’, Dapim: Studies onthe Holocaust, 27, 1 (2013), 40–73.

52 K. Kopp, Germany’s Wild East: Constructing Poland as Colonial Space (Ann Arbor, MI 2012).53 S.G. Payne, ‘Fascism: A Working Definition’, in C. Iordachi (ed.), Comparative Fascist Studies.New Perspectives (London 2010), 95–112, here: 110.54 M. Knox, Common Destiny: Dictatorship, Foreign policy, and War in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany (Cambridge 2009).55 ‘Italiens Wehrmacht’, Vo ¨ lkischer Beobachter (17 September 1927).

Bernhard 71








The beginning of Italy’s massive colonization programme in 1938 was keenly

watched in Germany. The degree of attention devoted to this programme in

Germany is particularly notable because it occurred at a time when, according to

conventional interpretations, National Socialism no longer viewed Italy as a

role model.56 In this connection older studies often cite events in Austria, which

was annexed by Germany in 1938. These studies argue that Mussolini was pre-

sented with a fait accompli, leading to disputes between the regimes.57 But this

narrative suffers from two problems: Recent works in diplomatic history show that

Mussolini had accepted Austria as a German satellite as early as 1936, and spoke of

the ‘common destiny’ shared by the two regimes, which he said should trump

points of dispute.58 Furthermore, at the expert level, the primary sources corrob-

orate the view of continued good relations between the regimes. Not only did

numerous newspapers59 and books enthusiastically report on Italian successes inLibya and Abyssinia; between 1938 and 1941, more than 20 large monographs were

published, among them studies by renowned authors such as Louise Diel, a jour-

nalist who published extensively on women as well as on Italian Fascism.60 More

important, German offices and administrators charged with planning policy for the

East started collecting and assessing information about Italy’s colonial activities in

Africa. This included Hermann Go ¨ ring’s Four-Year Plan organization, Robert

Ley’s German Labour Front (DAF), the German Academy for Building

Research (a research unit in the Reich Labour Ministry), the Minister of

Agriculture Walter Darre ´ , and, most important, the Planning Department inHimmler’s Reich Commissariat for the Strengthening of Germandom. The

Planning Department of the Reich Commissariat – the central Nazi organization

for planning resettlement in the eastern territories – was headed for years by the

young agronomist Konrad Meyer, who became the chief architect of the infamous

Generalplan Ost. Meyer also published the planning journal Neues Bauerntum,

which carried several richly illustrated articles about Italy’s colonization pro-

gramme when plans for the eastern territories were still in their infancy.61

Information on Africa italiana was collected in numerous ways, including the

systematic analysis of Italian literature; scholarships to study Italian methods of colonization awarded by research-funding institutions such as the Deutsche

56 See W. Schieder, ‘Das italienische Experiment. Der Faschismus als Vorbild in der Krise derWeimarer Republik’, Historische Zeitschrift, 262 (1996), 73–125, who, however, does not provide anyempirical evidence for his claim.57 G.L. Weinberg, ‘German Foreign Policy and Austria’, in G.L. Weinberg (ed.), Germany, Hitler,and World War II: Essays in Modern German and World History (Cambridge 1995), 95–108.58 Woller, Geschichte Italiens, 146.59 The collection of newspaper cuttings at the DAF Institute of Labour includes, for example, fivefolders each containing some 50 newspaper articles making specific reference to the Italian colonies after

1938. See BArch, NS 5, VI, 27928, 28359, 28375, 28378–28379.60 See K. Bartikowski, ‘Italy’s Abyssinian Campaign’, in G. Besier (ed.), Fascism, Communism and theConsolidation of Democracy (Berlin 2006), 32–40.61 For example, see H. Dittmer, ‘20,000 Italiener in einem Jahr angesiedelt’, Neues Bauerntum:Fachwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift fu ¨ r das la ¨ ndliche Siedlungswesen, 31 (1939), 140–2; and G. Wolff,‘Faschistische Siedlung in Libyen’, Neues Bauerntum, 31 (1939), 105–7.









Forschungsgemeinschaft (of which Meyer was vice president); diplomatic trips; and

scientific fieldwork. To learn more about Italy’s colonial settlement programme,

Wolfgang Spakler, the German Labour Attache ´ to the German Embassy in Rome,

accompanied the first 20,000 Italian settlers from Genoa to their new homes in

Libya in the autumn of 1938. There, the young diplomat not only paid a visit to

some of the new villages, but also had the opportunity to speak to governor Italo

Balbo – a flying ace on friendly terms with Go ¨ ring – about Italy’s colonial plans.

Immediately after his return to Rome, Spakler sent a report about his journey

directly to Franz Seldte, the Nazi Minister for Labour. As Seldte explained, he

had a ‘special interest’ in the making of the Italian colonial Empire.62 Konrad

Meyer also sent staff to undertake fieldwork, particularly in Libya.63 Gu ¨ nter

Wolff, one of his closest colleagues, travelled in March 1939 with a delegation of

more than 20 German scholars, journalists and Party representatives to Tripoli,where they inspected the ‘settlement work achieved last year’.64 While in Libya,

Gu ¨ nter Wolff came to believe that Italy’s experiment would go down in history as a

model for large-scale colonization.65 Finally, colonialism was so important to the

Reich Commissariat that it organized special training programmes for its staff;

knowledge on Africa was thus spread within Himmler’s planning apparatus.66

The available sources show clearly that the information gathered on Africa

italiana was used primarily for planning activities in Eastern Europe. In 1940,

Hans Thierbach, a settlement expert at the German Institute for Foreign

Relations, another Nazi think tank,67

wrote:

The enormous colonization tasks facing us in the Eastern territories, and perhaps one

day in the African colonies, oblige us to observe closely others’ colonization methods

and to investigate their successes and failures so we can provide a critical analysis of

their potential. Italy’s experiments are of particular interest to us since the Fascist

state has many features in common with National Socialism.68

Italy’s example aroused German interest mainly for three reasons. First, the Nazi

planners did not want to pursue traditional German colonial policy. The settlementactivities undertaken in German south-west Africa and elsewhere were seen as a ‘com-

plete disaster’, for settlers had been left alone by a laissez-faire German state.

62 Letter of the German Ambassador in Rome to the Foreign Office in Berlin, 23 November 1938,Political Archive of the German Foreign Office in Berlin (PA–AA), series German Embassy in Rome(DBR), 713e.63 Letter from Gu ¨ nter Wolff the German Foreign Ministry, 6 May 1939 BArch Berlin, seriesReichskolonialamt (R 1001), 8687a, 4.64 Circular from the Reich Food Ministry regarding International Congress for Tropical andSubtropical Agriculture, 14 January 1939, BArch Berlin, R 1001, 8680, 49.

65 G. Wolff, ‘Faschistische Siedlung in Libyen’, Neues Bauerntum, 31 (1939), 105.66 See ‘training material colonies’, in BArch, R 49 (Reichskommissar fu ¨ r die Festigung des DeutschenVolkstums), 3121, fol. 9–50.67 G. Botsch, ‘Politische Wissenschaft’ im Zweiten Weltkrieg: Die ‘Deutschen Auslandswissenschaften’ im Einsatz 1940–1945 (Paderborn 2006), 302.68 H. Thierbach, ‘Die Siedlungspolitik der autorita ¨ ren Staaten I’, Geist der Zeit, 18, 3 (1940), 162.

Bernhard 73








Accordingly, ‘completely different methods had to be applied’ in the future.69

What was needed was massive state intervention and a long-term plan for the

future German Lebensraum, said Heinrich Walter, an expert for geobotany, who

had done comparative field trips to Libya and Namibia and later on worked for the

Zentrale fu ¨ r Ostforschung, an institution of Alfred Rosenberg’s Ministry for the

Occupied Eastern Territories which organized, among other things, agricultural

research for Russia in close cooperation with the already mentioned Konrad Meyer.70

Second, Nazi planners did not want to adopt the colonial policy of other

Western powers. It is true that they collected and assessed information on the

British and French presence in Africa, but in the end the planners voted against

these models. For them, a country’s form of government should determine its

colonial policy. Democracies were thus seen as ‘anti-models’.71 On more than

one occasion, Konrad Meyer distanced himself from the ‘mere capitalist’ agrarianprogramme of Canada and the USA.72 It is probably no coincidence that senior

German settlement experts such as Max Sering, who had established close ties to

other Western countries and still held ‘conventional perceptions’, lost their influ-

ence within the regime in favour of a younger generation of agronomists headed by

Konrad Meyer, who was quick to forge links with colleagues in Fascist Italy, a

country that was still seen as giving the best answers to the challenges posed by

modernity.73 It is telling that in his memoirs, written after 1945 (thus after the

Italians had changed sides in the war and committed ‘treason’ in German eyes),

Meyer still remembered his first academic trip to Rome as one of the most import-ant international experiences in his career.74

Third, the Nazi planners even wanted to put an end to tendencies in German

domestic settlement that dated back to the Middle Ages.75 As Meyer and his staff

69 Fritz Tiebel, head of the Reichsbeamtenbund, in a conversation with Colonel Osti, Secretary of theItalian Ministry for Africa Italiana. See Letter of Bernardo Attolico to Foreign Minister Ciano, 19November 1938, in I Documenti Diplomatici Italiani, ottava serie: 1935–1939, vol. X (Rome 2003), 460.70 Walter had toured Libya in 1939. See his Report on the 8th International Congress of Tropical andSub-Tropical Agriculture in Tripoli, [probably March 1939], BArch Berlin, R 1001, 8680, 84. On Walterand the Zentrale fu ¨ r Ostforschung see S. Heim, Kalorien, Kautschuk, Karrieren: Pflanzenzu ¨ chtung und

landwirtschaftliche Forschung in Kaiser-Wilhelm-Instituten, 1933–1945 (Go ¨ ttingen 2003), 230.71 See Bernhard, ‘Die Kolonialachse: Der NS-Staat und Italienisch-Afrika 1935 bis 1943’, inC. Cornelißen and C. Mish (eds), Wissenschaft and der Grenze: Die Universita ¨ t Kiel imNationalsozialismus (Essen 2010), 165.72 W. Oberkrome, Ordnung und Autarkie. Die Geschichte der deutschen Landbauforschung,Agraro ¨ konomie und la ¨ ndlichen Sozialwissenschaften im Spiegel von Forschungsdienst und DFG (1920– 1970) (Stuttgart 2009), 211.73 For the cross-Atlantic exchange of ideas between North American and German settlement expertsbefore 1933 see the interesting study by R.L. Nelson, ‘From Manitoba to the Memel: Max Sering, InnerColonization and the German East’, Social History, 35 (2010), 439–57. Yet Nelson’s assumption thatSering continued, even after his fall in 1933, to exert influence on Nazi concepts of ‘space’ is lessconvincing and lacks empirical backing. Very critical also is J.-U. Guettel, German Expansionism,

Imperial Liberalism, and the United States, 1776–1945 (Cambridge 2013).74 K. Meyer, U ¨ ber Ho ¨ hen und Tiefen. Ein Lebensbericht [ca. 1970–2], 88.75 M.A. Hartenstein, Neue Dorflandschaften: Nationalsozialistische Siedlungsplanung in den ‘eingeglie-derten Ostgebieten’ 1939 bis 1944 (Berlin 1998), 166 and E. Harvey, ‘Management and Manipulation:Nazi Settlement Planners and Ethnic Germans in Occupied Poland’, in Elkins and Pedersen, SettlerColonialism, 95–112, here: 95.









argued, the medieval colonization of the East offered little guidance.76 What they

wanted was to overcome traditional social and economic structures. The Nazis

wished to create new settlements within a larger national community that incorpo-

rated the modern trade channels and Großraumwirtschaft of Hitler’s economic New

Order. Here, Fascist Italy seemed to provide the right model for the future. This

was particularly true in light of the fact that since 1933, the Germans had gathered

not much first-hand experience with implementing settlement policy in the old

provinces of the Reich. While there was much talk of inner-colonization in the

years following Hitler’s takeover, rearmament had first priority.77 As a result, only

a few model settlements had been established prior to the outbreak of the war. At

the end of the 1930s the Germans had thus not moved beyond an experimental

stage when it came to settlement policy. This lack of ideas was particularly evident

with regard to the ethnic situation in Eastern Europe where large-scale settlementwas to take place. Germans were to live at least initially alongside other ethnicities.

The absence of significant ethnic minorities within Germany meant that the plan-

ners had no precedents to study. This made the situation in Italy’s colonies all the

more intriguing for German planners, as Italian settlers lived alongside indigenous

populations, even if they were spatially segregated.

Several aspects of the Fascist experiment in Africa inspired German observers.

The first was the extent of the colonization programme and the speed of its imple-

mentation. The migration of 20,000 Italian colonists each year to Libya ‘is a feat

that is unique in modern history’, reported the visibly impressed German consulgeneral in Addis Ababa in 1938.78 No nation on earth had undertaken such a

project, concluded a report of the DAF’s Institute of Labour Science, another

Nazi think tank.79 It was said that the dimensions of Italy’s settlement completely

overshadowed the past efforts of many nations, including the Greeks, Turks and

the Soviets.80 In this connection, the report was referring to the compulsory

resettlement of people that took place after the First World War; Greeks and

Turks, for instance, exchanged their religious minorities in order to create so-

called homogeneous spaces.81 This meant that projects of social engineering carried

out by other states in Europe were viewed as less relevant to Nazi planners.It was not just the size of Italian colonization that impressed German planners.

In Libya and Abyssinia Italy pursued policies designed to fundamentally change

76 K. Neupert, ‘Die Gestaltung der deutschen Besiedlung’, Raumforschung und Raumordnung, 5(1941), 62–8. Very similar is K. Kummer, ‘Rassische Zielsetzung bei der Neubildung deutschenBauerntums’, Archiv fu ¨ r Bevo ¨ lkerungswissenschaft und Bevo ¨ lkerungspolitik, 5 (1934), 348–51, here 349.77 C. Buchheim, ‘Das NS-Regime und die U ¨ berwindung der Weltwirtschaftskrise in Deutschland’,Vierteljahrshefte fu ¨ r Zeitgeschichte, 56 (2008), 381–414.78 Memo of the German Consul General in Addis Ababa, November 1938, BArch Berlin, R 1001,9714.

79 Report ‘Das italienische Siedlungswerk in Nordafrika’, January 1939, BArch Berlin, NS 5,VI/28041.80 P. Ahonen, People on the Move: Forced Population Movements in Europe in the Europe in the Second World War and its Aftermath (Oxford and New York, NY 2008).81 See for a broad perspective E.D. Weitz (ed.), A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation(2nd edn., Princeton, NJ 2005).

Bernhard 75








the ethnic makeup of the population. German observers predicted that Africa

italiana would soon be ‘white man’s’ country.82 The German labour attache ´ in

Rome even reported to Minister of Labor Franz Seldte that the Italian colony

would produce ‘a new racial type that favourably combines the qualities of all

parts of the Italian population’.83 Italian experts had deliberately decided against

sending groups of colonists from a single region, opting instead to include people

from all over the country. The Italians believed that this made dealings between

colonists more lively and productive.84 At the borders of its empire the Fascist

regime wanted to rear ‘Empire Italians forged through constant struggle with

the desert, not narrow minded Sicilians and Venetians’.85 To German eyes,

Libya and Abyssinia served as ‘schools for Italy’s sons’.86 ‘With a broad and far

gaze, acting as masters of the natives’ the New Man of Fascism would purportedly

thrive.87

The third aspect of Italian colonization that aroused German admiration was

that Fascist policy in Africa was based on modern technology and science. The

‘scholarly foundations’ of the colonization programme rested on extensive and

coordinated research by agronomists, ethnologists and geologists, as Oskar

Schmieder and Herbert Wilhelmy, two leading geographers of the Third Reich,

explained in an account of their journey to Libya in 1938.88 As Enno von Rintelen,

Hitler’s liaison officer with the Italian Armed Forces, recorded his trip to Libya in

his postwar memoirs, the Italians had turned the desert green by making use of a

highly sophisticated system of irrigation.89

With the comprehensive plan developedby colonial scientists, Italy’s settlement policy had become ‘systematic’ and ‘goal-

directed’.90 As German observers explicitly said, Africa italiana was a huge labora-

tory: programmes of social engineering could be tested ‘more easily’ in Italy’s

colonies than in metropolitan areas, and Germany would profit from the experi-

ences gleaned there.91 In this sense, Fascist colonialism was highly modern to

German eyes. This is why, in 1940, Paul Ritterbusch strongly advised the careful

examination of the Italian example, calling for more field trips to be undertaken in

North Africa.92 As head of the National Board for Areal Research, Ritterbusch

82 See ‘Italiens Libyensiedlung’, Deutsche Siedlung, 7 (1939), n.p.83 See the labour attache ´ ’s report to the German Embassy in Rome regarding the settlement of Italiancolonists in Libya, 13 November 1938, PA-AA [Politican Archive of the Foreign Office, Berlin], DBR,713e.84 A. Sievers, ‘Auswahl der Libyensiedler fu ¨ r 1940’, Raumforschung und Raumordnung, 4 (1940), 135.85 F. Vo ¨ chting, ‘Italienische Siedelung in Libyen’, Jahrbu ¨ cher fu ¨ r Nationalo ¨ konomie und Statistik, 151(1940), 265.86 R. Pfalz, ‘Libyen in der Politik Italiens’, Deutsche Kolonial-Zeitung (1 October 1937).87 Thierbach, ‘Die Siedlungspolitik der autorita ¨ ren Staaten I’, 165.88 O. Schmieder and H. Wilhelmy, Die faschistische Kolonisation in Nordafrika (Leipzig 1939), 83.89 E. von Rintelen, Mussolini als Bundesgenosse: Erinnerungen des deutschen Militau ¨ rattaches in Rom

1936–1943 (Tu ¨ bingen 1951), 36.90 See ‘Planma ¨ ßige Siedlungsarbeit in Italien’, Deutsche Siedlung, 7 (1939). See also H.-N. Wagner,‘Agrarland Libyen’, Odal (December 1938), 916–22.91 R. Pfalz, ‘Libyen in der Politik Italiens’, Deutsche Kolonial-Zeitung (1 October 1937).92 Memo No. 1972/40 of the Reichsforschungsstelle fu ¨ r Raumplanung, March 1940, BArch Berlin,series Reichsstelle fu ¨ r Raumordnung (R 113), 1586, 13.









enjoyed considerable clout, for he coordinated the wartime contributions of

German scholars in the sciences and humanities. One of the results of

Ritterbusch’s efforts was that information on modern Fascist colonialism was col-

lected in a huge research project entitled ‘Questions of Living Space for European

Peoples’, published between 1941 and 1943 by German geographers.93 The publi-

cation was to give the murderous racial politics of the Nazi regime in Eastern

Europe a solid scientific underpinning.

German experts were most fascinated by the alleged excellent organization of

Italian colonialism. The Italians gave attention to all aspects of the settlement

effort. Each settler family was provided with the necessary means to start a new

life in Libya.94 Walther Darre ´ , the Nazi Minister of Agriculture, even cited the

Italian model to wage a sharp critique of the Reich’s settlement policy. For Darre ´ ,

the Italians in 1939 were ‘at least ten years ahead’ of the Third Reich: in Libya theyhad already implemented what he had long pleaded for, though without success: a

settlement programme whose main concern was bettering the race, and not the

income of the colonists.95

Yet Darre ´ and his staff pointed to additional advantages of the Italian model: it

featured an extensive support system designed to give each settler in Libya the

feeling ‘that he was not alone in the endless distances of the savannah or

desert’.96 This support system included medical care and recreational activities

made possible by the mass organizations of the Fascist party, or PNF.97 German

observers believed, more or less correctly, that the system was equipped to reacheven the most isolated settlement.98 Detailed information about the legal status of

the PNF in the colonies was subsequently collected in 1939 by the Academy for

German Law, which at the time was administered by Hans Frank, a fervent

admirer of Mussolini’s regime who soon became the Governor General of

Poland.99 Later Frank tried to establish a liaison office between his government

and Italy to discuss questions of ruling an occupied country.

German visitors noted that Italy’s colonial architecture was designed to serve the

Fascist goal of social integration. Every settlement, however small, possessed a cen-

tral piazza with official buildings that contained all the facilities ‘required in

93 K.H. Dietzel, O. Schmieder and H. Schmitthenner (eds), Lebensraumfragen europa ¨ ischer Vo ¨ lker,vol. 1: Europa, vol. 2: Europas koloniale Erga ¨ nzungsra ¨ ume, vol. 3, 1: Gegenwartsprobleme der NeuenWelt, Nordamerika (Leipzig 1941–1943).

94 H. Walter, ‘Die biologischen Grundlagen der Kolonisation in Libyen’, Der Biologe, 8 (1939),288–301.

95 Reichsna ¨ hrstand (ed.), Fu ¨ hrer durch die 5. Reichsna ¨ hrstands-Ausstellung in Leipzig vom 4.-11. Juni 1939 (Berlin 1939), 52.

96 H. Dittmer, ‘Italiens libysches Siedlungswerk’, Odal (September 1939), 789–90.97 See the report by Wolfgang Spakler, the labour attache ´ at the German Embassy in Rome,

13 November 1938, 23–24, PA-AA, DBR, 713e.98 Thierbach, ‘Die Siedlungspolitik der autorita ¨ ren Staaten I’, 165.99 See W. Schubert, ‘Das imagina ¨ re Kolonialreich: Die Vorbereitung der Kolonialgesetzgebung

durch den Kolonialrechtsausschuss der Akademie fu ¨ r Deutsches Recht, das Reichskolonialamt unddie Reichsministerien (1937–1942)’, Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung fu ¨ r Rechtsgeschichte, 115 (1998),100.

Bernhard 77








a modern village’.100 This gave settlers even in remote areas ‘cultural and political

ties’ to the homeland. As German visitors had learned from talking to settlers, the

piazza served as an important ‘support’ that ‘preserved and consolidated’ Italian

civilization.101 These were the main findings of a PhD thesis written by

SS-Obersturmfu ¨ hrer Helmut Mu ¨ ller-Westing, not only a pupil of agrarian expert

Wilhelm Saure, who worked for the Race and Settlement Office of the SS, but also

the protege of Oswald Pohl, one of Himmler’s closest collaborators and responsible

for building matters within the SS.102 Konrad Meyer was so interested in

Mu ¨ ller-Westing’s conclusions that he immediately published them in his journal

Neues Bauerntum, noting that the author gave settlement experts much to

consider.103

The Germans were well aware that the knowledge Italy gained in Africa would

be difficult to apply to the restructuring of the Ostraum. Rudolf Stegemann, thedirector of the German Academy for Building Research, cited as one example the

fact that Italian settler houses were adapted to local Arabic architecture.

Nevertheless, Stegemann was convinced that Italian experiences in Africa could

help Germany’s planning. He highlighted that the information had to be appro-

priately abstracted to fit German needs in a different climatic and cultural envir-

onment. In 1940, shortly after his institution had been commissioned with

standardizing the new settler houses in Eastern Europe, Stegemann wrote, ‘Right

now [Libya] offers valuable illustrative material’.104 This means that in sharp con-

trast to the mainstream of historical scholarship,105

German specialists did notdraw a distinction between ‘colonial space’ and the Ostraum; on the contrary.

The Nazis considered the expertise gained in North Africa transferable to other

areas as well.

Nazi interest in Italy’s colonial activities grew as German officials spent more

time with Italy’s settlement experts. Konrad Meyer, one of the most important

scientific administrators of the Third Reich and an important ally of Himmler, was

quick to forge ties with Italy’s leading agricultural experts, particularly with

Giuseppe Tassinari, an agronomist himself and under-secretary in the Italian

100 Vo ¨ chting, ‘Italienische Siedlung’, 277–8; and Dittmer, ‘20,000 Italiener in einem Jahr angesiedelt’,140.101 H. Mu ¨ ller-Westing, ‘Der Siedlungshof in Libyen Teil 1’, Neues Bauerntum, 34 (1942). The authorhad toured Libya in March 1940.102 For Saure see I. Heinemann, ‘Rasse, Siedlung, deutsches Blut’: Das Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamtder SS und die rassenpolitische Neuordnung Europas (Go ¨ ttingen 2003), 633.103 Mu ¨ ller-Westing, ‘Der Siedlungshof in Libyen’, 218–24, here: 218.104 R. Stegemann, ‘Das italienische Kolonisationswerk in Libyen’, Siedlung und Wirtschaft:Zeitschrift fu ¨ r das gesamte Siedlungs- und Wohnungswesen, 22 (1940), 185–91. See a very similar

report by the German consul in Palermo for the German Foreign Office regarding land reform inSicily and Africa, 25 October 1939, BArch Berlin, NS 5, VI, 28042.105 The exception are Mazower, Hitler’s Empire, 587 and D. Furber and W. Lower, ‘Colonialism andGenocide in Nazi-occupied Poland and Ukraine’, in A.D. Moses (ed.), Empire, Colony, Genocide:Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History (New York, NY 2008), 372–401,here: 373.









Ministry of Agriculture whose area of responsibility included colonization.106

Between 1938 and 1943 Meyer and Tassinari met several times.107 In May 1938

Tassinari appeared at the Harnack House in Berlin, one of the most important

forums for scientific dialogue in the Third Reich. The subject of his talk, given to an

audience of selected Nazi officials and settlement experts, was the agricultural

potential of Abyssinia.108 In his lectures he emphasized that colonial expertise

could provide practical solutions to political problems.

Lectures about Africa alone were not enough for Himmler; he wanted to see for

himself. In December 1937 he visited North Africa at the same time as Robert Ley,

Rudolf Hess and Hermann Go ¨ ring.109 While there, he reached an agreement with

Governor Italo Balbo about training more than 150 SS officers in the Italian colo-

nial school in Tivoli near Rome; the idea was that his new elite should gain as much

experience abroad as possible.110 But this visit had a much larger impact than thispractical agreement on training: Standing in the Libyan desert, Himmler dreamed

of developing huge swathes of territory together with Italians.111 As Joseph

Goebbels recorded in his diary, Himmler returned home ‘deeply impressed’ and

immediately reported his experiences to Hitler.112

Just a couple of months later, after his famous visit to Rome in May 1938, Hitler

himself praised the colonial endeavours of his main Axis partner. Hitler, who was

overwhelmed by what he had seen in the capital of Mussolini’s Reich and admitted

that Italian Fascism was still in a league of its own,113 praised in a wire to Mussolini

the ‘monumental undertaking of erecting the Italian Empire’.114

Hitler’s remarkswere by no means mere kabuki theater to curry favour with an ally. The German

dictator also regularly praised Mussolini’s policies in candid conversations with his

closest collaborators. In 1942, for instance, during a ‘table talk’ with his inner circle,

106 See the letter from the Reich Federation of German Agronomists to the German Embassy inRome, 23 October 1937 (copy), PA-AA, series Reich (R), 112247.107 See also F. Angelini, ‘Das Meliorationswerk der Pontinischen Su ¨ mpfe’, Raumforschung und Raumordnung, 1 (1937), 608–11.108 G. Tassinari, ‘Die landwirtschaftlichen Entwicklungsmo ¨ glichkeiten Abessiniens’, Berichte u ¨ berLandwirtschaft, 23 (1938), 599–620. See also the letter written by the German delegate to the

International Agricultural Institute in Rome, 3 March 1938, PA-AA, DBR, 693a.109 See the report of the Governo Generale della Libia for the Italian Minister of Italian Africa, 30April 1939, Archivio Storico del Ministero degli Affari Esteri (ASMAE), series Archivio Storico delMinistero dell’Africa Italiana (ASMAI), Fondo Affari politici del Ministero dell’Africa Italiana, 60;‘Il viaggio del S.E. Hess in Libia’, L’Azione Coloniale (18 November 1937).110 See the letter written by Himmler to the Italian chief of police Arturo Bocchini, 20 June1938 (Italian translation), Archivio Centrale dello Stato (ACS), Ministero dell’Interno (MI),Direzione generale della Pubblica Sicurezza (DGPS), Divisione Polizia Politica, fascicoli per materia,b. 44, fasc. 7.111 See the memoirs of his interpreter and liaison officer in Rome, Eugen Dollmann, who accompa-nied him during his trip to Libya. See Dolmetscher der Diktatoren (Bayreuth 1963), 79–80 and 85.112 M. Wildt, ‘Himmlers Terminkalender aus dem Jahr 1937’, Vierteljahrshefte fu ¨ r Zeitgeschichte, 52

(2004), 688.113 Entry of 21/22 July 1941, in W. Jochmann (ed.), Adolf Hitler, Monologe im Fu ¨ hrer-Hauptquartier1941–1944. Die Aufzeichnungen Heinrich Heims (Hamburg 1980), 44. Cf. the almost identical entry of 21–2 October 1941, ibid., 99–101.114 M. Domarus, Adolf Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen, 1932–1945. Kommentiert von einemdeutschen Zeitgenossen, vol. 1: Triumph (1932–1938) (Wu ¨ rzburg 1963), 862.

Bernhard 79








the German dictator lauded the technical skills of Italian engineers, and drew a strong

parallel between Africa and the Ostraum. What was crucial in German-occupied

Russia as well as in Italian-occupied Egypt was the penetration of the territories

with the necessary physical infrastructure, Hitler said, adding that the Italians had

been ‘great road builders’ since ancient times. He was convinced that the Italians, who

had already shown themselves to be ‘extremely industrious’ in Abyssinia and Libya,

would turn their newly conquered territories into ‘colonial paradises’ as well. The

Italians were colonizers without peer, the Fu ¨ hrer concluded.115

In their discussions German and Italian settlement experts found ‘so much

common ground’ that they created official channels to supplant what had until

then been only personal ties.116 Yet this effort to put German–Italian contact in the

area of settlement policy onto firmer footing was just the beginning of much greater

institutional cooperation.117 The Italians, for example, established their ownAcademy for Building Research so they could cooperate more effectively with

their German counterpart, the Deutsche Akademie fu ¨ r Bauforschung. In the late

1930s, settlement experts from both sides of the Alps also started regular joint

meetings known as the Italo–German Study Conference on Agriculture. Its mem-

bership list reads like a veritable ‘who’s who’ of agricultural research: Giuseppe

Tassinari, Giuseppe Medici, Giangastone Bolla, Franco Angelini, Arrigo Serpieri,

Lorenzo Mossa, Antonio Azara, Herbert Backe, Hermann Reischle, Konrad

Meyer and Hans Ludwig Fensch.118 The idea behind the meetings was not just

to foster academic dialogue on agricultural questions. As the Italians explained,they also expected ‘a common progressive development’ of agrarian policy – a

convergence of the agrarian systems in both countries.119 The meetings went so

well that the Germans and Italians decided on further collaboration.120 They even

went so far as to draw up joint settlement projects. A group of German experts was

to work out a soil improvement programme for Italy, while their Italian colleagues

were commissioned to do the same for the Reich.121 It was only the outbreak of the

Second World War that prevented these plans from being carried out.

This cooperation was marked by a high level of mutual regard between Meyer

and Tassinari.122

Meyer described the doyen of Italian agricultural research – who

115 Entry of 5 August 1942, in Jochmann (ed.), Adolf Hitler, Monologe, 328.116 ‘Deutsch-italienische Gemeinschaftstagung der Deutschen Akademie fu ¨ r Bauforschung in Rom’,Deutsche Siedlung, 7, 39 (1939), n.p.117 Letter of the German Academy for Building Research to the Foreign Office, 3 January 1940,PA-AA, DBR, 1311b, vol. 1.118 See Fensch’s manuscript ‘Basi fondamentali della statistica delle aziende rurali’ of 1928, ArchivioStorico dell’Accademia dei Georgofili Archivio moderno, Carte Tassinari, b. 6, Fascicolo 6.7.119 See the note of the Italian Embassy in Berlin, 6 August 1938 (in German translation), PA-AA,DBR, 958b.

120 See the letter of the German representative at the International Institute of Agriculture in Rome tothe German Embassy in Rome, 6 July 1939, PA-AA, DBR, 958b.121 See report no. 791 of the German representative at the International Institute of Agriculture inRome, 26 October 1939, PA-AA, DBR 955b.122 See the letter of the German Minister of Agriculture to the Reichsstatthalter General von Epp, 7March 1939, Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv (BayHStA), series Reichsstatthalter Epp, 9, Fiche 3.









was 10 years his senior – as his ‘esteemed colleague and friend’.123 As the Germans

saw it, Tassinari merited admiration not only for his writings on colonization.

The Germans were particularly impressed with his ideas about the role of science

in the Fascist regime. When Tassinari later received an honorary doctorate from

the University of Berlin, the laudation referred to the ‘affinity between his ideals

and goals and what we are striving to achieve’.124 Tassinari had shown the ‘true

sense’ of what ‘we in National Socialism and Fascism consider to be political

science’. In fact, after Mussolini was deposed in July 1943, the Germans briefly

considered making Tassinari his successor.125

As the German technocrats looked closer at Italian colonization, they became aware

of weaknesses in their own plans for the East. The Germans realized that they had

neglected one important aspect: the strengthening of the village community – thevery feature they had found exemplary in Italian settlements.126 This touches upon a

crucial element of Nazi hegemony: A key aim was to inculcate National Socialist

ideology in the populace at a local level. Clearly, the effort to direct and control

practices and ways of being at the communal level was a specific technique of rule,

and its aim was to bind subjects at the periphery of the regime to its centre.

Meyer’s Planning Department saw this missing bond as one of the ‘most serious

mistakes of our settlement activity so far.’127 Other settlement experts were even

more critical, sharply indicting the deficits of German settlements in comparison to

the achievements of the Italians. ‘Many setbacks could have been avoided earlier’ if the need to ‘give a feeling of the homeland on new soil’ had been recognized and

provided for with appropriate urban infrastructure. The experts additionally

attested that when colonizing Libya the Italians:

had in recognition of this fact established communal facilities in the settlement areas

that offered the new arrivals everything needed for their moral and material preser-

vation – and, indeed, in a manner that was the same or better than that known at

home.128

In this way, Meyer concluded that ‘comprehensive support’ had to be given to

German settlers as well, in order to ‘consolidate German traditions in the new

123 Letter from Konrad Meyer to Giuseppe Tassinari, 27 March 1943, Archivio Storicodell’Accademia dei Georgofili in Florence (ASAG), series Carte Tassinari, busta 10, fasc. 10.16–10.20.124 Speech of the Dean of the Faculty of Agriculture at the University of Berlin on the occasion of theaward of honorary doctorate to Giuseppe Tassinari on March 1943, ibid.125 See M. Zaganella, ‘La figura di Giuseppe Tassinari’, in Angelo Mo’ioli (ed.), Con la vanga e col moschetto. Ruralita `, ruralismo e vita quotidiana nella RSI (Venice 2005), 131–58.126 Karl-Heinz Roth has shown that German officials were remarkably candid about the shortcom-

ings of their planning activities. See K.H. Roth, ‘‘Generalplan Ost’ – ‘Gesamtplan Ost’:Forschungsstand, Quellenprobleme, neue Ergebnisse’, in M. Ro ¨ ssler and S. Schleiermacher (eds), Der‘Generalplan Ost’: Hauptprobleme der nationalsozialistischen Planungs- und Vernichtungspolitik (Berlin1993), 91.127 H. Priebe, ‘Der neue Hof im neuen Dorf’, Neues Bauerntum, 32 (1940), 220.128 E. Zimmerle, ‘Libysche Kolonisation’, Monatshefte fu ¨ r Baukunst und Sta ¨ dtebau, 23 (1939), 314.

Bernhard 81








eastern territories’. The colonists would not only stand at the frontier of the

Reich in an ‘ethnic fight for survival’ against Poles and Russians; they had

to live in what Meyer described as a ‘barren’ landscape (the implication being

that Eastern Europe was a desert).129 To develop a ‘lively community spirit’ in

such hostile terrain, future German settlements in the East needed appropriate

infrastructure.

Based on Meyer’s concerns, officials at the Reich Commissariat took immediateaction. In 1940 Himmler issued a standing order to serve as the basis for subse-

quent planning.130 It listed a set of institutions that had to be present in any village

in the East. The list is striking in its similarity to the descriptions of Fascist colonial

settlements: as can be seen from the blueprint for a German model town shown

here (Figure 1) every future settlement in the East was to have administrative

buildings, a cinema, a medical facility, a hotel, and, in particular, a party building

Figure 1. sketch for a small town in Eastern Europe.

Source: Raumforschung und Raumordnung. Monatsschrift der Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft fur

Raumforschung, 5 (1941), 213.

129 Quoted in I. Stoehr, ‘Von Max Sering zu Konrad Meyer – ein ‘machtergreifender’

Generationswechsel in der Agrar- und Siedlungswissenschaft’, in S. Heim (ed.), Autarkie und Ostexpansion: Pflanzenzucht und Agrarforschung im Nationalsozialismus (Go ¨ ttingen 2002), 81.130 See ‘Allgemeine Anordnung No. 7/II des Reichsfu ¨ hrers SS Reichskommissar zur Festigungdeutschen Volkstums’, 26 November 1940, reprinted in: Hartenstein, Neue Dorflandschaften, 93–6.On the significance of the standing order, see B. Wasser, Himmlers Raumplanung im Osten: DerGeneralplan in Polen 1940–1944 (Basel 1993), 39 and 41.









with a bell tower, just like in Fascist Italy.131 As one of Darre ´ ’s men explained,

previous plans for strengthening communal spirit were inadequate. Relying on

traditional facilities such as the local school or pub was simply not sufficient, it

was said.132 What was needed now was a major ‘rearmament’ of rural infrastruc-

ture, as Darre ´ himself argued in 1940, just a few months after he had publicly

lauded the modern character of Fascist Italy’s colonial policies.133

The most obvious similarity between German and Italian settlement schemes was

that all community buildings such as the party building of the NSDAP were to be

placed on a central square, again just as in Africa italiana.134 This is notable, as the

village square had previously played a subordinate role in German planning.135 In the

past German urban planners had not grouped public buildings around a central

square, but had instead distributed them throughout the village. This segmentation

had a functional reason: The Hitler Youth headquarters, for instance, had beenplaced close to local sports grounds at the edge of the village. This allowed youths

to easily visit the headquarters following sports activities. In 1940, this was seen as a

‘wrong’ decision, as one of Meyer’s collaborators admitted.136 The ‘right solution’

was to concentrate the public buildings in the middle of the village, around the central

square. In short: The Italian settlements had demonstrated to the Germans that in

their efforts to develop the most rational and practical settlement schemes, they had

overlooked a central factor: the social glue that was to hold the settlement community

together. Ultimately, the new ideas for settlement organization had a strong racial

component: The advantage in German eyes was that in areas where different ethni-cities lived close to one another, the public buildings, now concentrated in the village

centre, would serve as ‘bulwarks’ of Germandom.137 Thus, we find that Himmler’s

men had engaged in an abrupt volte-face when it came to the settlement design: Now

the village square appeared front and centre. As the community’s focal point, the

village square would give settlers ‘support’138 – exactly as German reports had

described the Fascist piazza in Libya.

There were just two differences between the Nazi and Fascist concepts of village

organization. First, the German settlement plans did not include a place of religious

worship, while in the Italian colonies the piazza generally included a church.139

This

131 Ibid.132 E. Kulke, ‘Das Dorfhaus. Eine Zukunftsaufgabe des do ¨ rflichen Gemeinschaftslebens’, Odal (March 1938), 186–92, here: 186.133 R.W. Darre ´ , ‘Zur Aufru ¨ stung des Dorfes 1940’, in K. Meyer (ed.), Landvolk im Werden: Material zum la ¨ ndlichen Aufbau in den neuen Ostgebieten und zur Gestaltung des do ¨ rflichen Lebens (Berlin 1942),271.134 See Himmler’s letter, 13 December 1940, Akten der Partei-Kanzlei der NSDAP, Teil 1, No. 13202476-88, Regesten-No. 25083.135 W. Gebert, ‘Dorfumbau in den eingegliederten Ostgebieten’, Neues Bauerntum, 34 (1942), 95–9,

here: 98. See also Hartenstein, Neue Dorflandschaften, 42–7.136 Schroth, ‘Das HJ-Heim in der Raumplanung’, Raumforschung und Raumordnung, 4 (1940),418–19.137 Ibid.138 J. Mu ¨ ller, ‘Das Gemeinschaftsleben in den Ostdo ¨ rfern’, Neues Bauerntum, 32 (1940), 344–5.139 Wasser, Himmlers Raumplanung im Osten, 41.

Bernhard 83








points once again to a basic difference between the two regimes: Mussolini’s rule was

dependent from the outset on the support of the Catholic Church. In coming to power

the Nazi regime did not have to rely as much on traditional elites as Mussolini had, so

it could afford to exclude churches from the new villages. The second difference was

that the Germans planned to settle colonists from the same regions. Yet this was not a

conscious decision against the Italian model. The idea of settling colonists from

various places in one location ran aground for more basic reasons: many settlers

did not want to be mixed randomly with people from various places, but instead

expressed the strong desire to live alongside individuals from their home region.140

On this question the German dictatorship became acutely aware of the limits of its

influence, and was forced to change course. In this respect, the Nazi state could

perhaps be viewed as less radical than Fascist Italy, which saw the mixing of settlers

as a way of bettering the Italian ‘race’.This means that the reorganization of rural regions touched upon the core of

National Socialism: Colonial experience with methods of rule that had been

acquired in a racist context and which possessed racist goals were applied to a

new environment in which racism was even more pronounced and – above all –

extremely violent. The Generalplan Ost was in fact partially implemented. After

invading Poland and the Soviet Union, the Germans began a programme of ethnic

cleansing to prepare for the new settlements: they murdered Eastern European

Jews and expelled millions of people, including 800,000 Poles.141 Figure 2 shows

a reproduction of a post card showing one of these new structures, a communitybuilding of the Nazi Party in occupied Poland. Even in its architectonical outlook,

the German building very much resembled Italian settlements in Libya; a drawing

of one of Libya’s centri rurali has been reproduced here as well for comparison

(Figure 3). However, because of the steadily worsening military situation,

Himmler’s and Meyer’s megalomaniac vision of a German East with millions of

settlers living in new towns and villages did not become a reality. Nevertheless,

dozens of new settlements were founded and many existing Polish towns were

reconstructed and outfitted with new central squares.

Yet the fact that the Germans failed to realize many of their ambitions for thesettlement of the East does not mean that their plans were insignificant, or that the

transfer of know-how from the Italian colonial experience in Africa was minimal.

The very opposite is true. The leadership in Berlin could not know in 1940 that

their plans for the East would not come to fruition. Decisive in this context is the

fact that in planning the German settlements, they chose solutions that appeared to

have the greatest prospects for success. And in the settlement strategies they devel-

oped, the manufacture of a sense of community – a point of emphasis adopted

from the Italian experience in Africa – played a prominent role. The Italian model

shaped the fundamental contours of German planning: A specific set of urban

140 U. Mai, ‘Rasse und Raum’: Agrarpolitik, Sozial- und Raumplanung im NS-Staat (Paderborn 2002),70–1.141 Heinemann and Wagner, ‘Introduction’, in Heinemann and Wagner (ed.), Wissenschaft, Planung,Vertreibung, 17.









Figure 3. A drawing of the Villaggio D’Annunzio, a so called Rural Centre built in 1938 in

Libya, Province of Bengasi, nowadays part of Al Bayyadah. The village still exists, but has been

abandoned.

Sources: V. Capresi, L’utopia costruita: I centri rurali di fondazione in Libia, 1934–1940 (Bologna

2009), 265.

Figure 2. A drawing of the NSDAP’s Community Centre in Tiegenhof in occupied Poland

(Gau Danzig-Westpreussen), nowadays Nowy Dwor Gdanski. The complex, built until 1942, is

used again as a community cultural centre, now for the Polish population.

Bernhard 85








infrastructure was now prescribed for all towns and villages in the East. Here we

find a key aspect of the historical significance of German borrowing. The urban

planning models that were developed were anything but a peripheral issue in settle-

ment policy, but were instead informed by the desire to propagate fascist ideology

and bind the settlement to the regime. Clearly, the National Socialist state engaged

in very specific and intensive efforts to furnish a built environment that would

create settlers who strongly identified with and perpetuated the racist

Weltanschauung of the regime.

This topic touches upon a key issue in National Socialist rule that has been exten-

sively discussed of late – namely, how should we interpret the efforts of the regime

to generate a Volksgemeinschaft (roughly, ‘national community’)?142 Did the

regime manage to create a common sense of community that was genuinelyNational Socialist – in other words, did it manage to win the wholehearted alle-

giance of individuals for its racist and imperialist goals? Or was the

Volksgemeinschaft ultimately a hollow propaganda phrase in which even the lead-

ership in Berlin did not believe?143 I would suggest that my study can make a

contribution to answering the last question. My research shows that the leadership

was extremely serious about generating a spirit of community in the new territories.

They did not merely pay lip service to this aim, but were genuinely concerned about

helping the ostensibly superior German people to prevail in the ‘struggle for exist-

ence’ against other races. Against this backdrop the German planners undertookextensive efforts to continually improve their conceptions of community, as well as

to adapt them to new conditions in the Eastern territories. Indeed, in sharp contrast

to conditions in Germany, the settlers were to live in regions that had been inhab-

ited by other peoples, and that were to be helotized like the Poles.

To this end the Nazis drew significantly on scientific expertise that had not been

developed in Germany. As German planners and Hitler were unable and also

unwilling to draw on German experience, a crucial role was played by foreign

knowledge, particularly that generated by Italy. The focus on Italy was under-

standable, as the Italians had already developed very specific expertise concerningsettlement policy in a fascist context. Although Africa and Eastern Europe were

ultimately quite different in terms of both human culture and their natural envir-

onments, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that the German leadership viewed the

experiences gathered by the Italians as fundamentally applicable to questions they

were confronting in Eastern Europe. The high importance ascribed to the Italian

experience is evident based on how much information concerning Italian Africa

142 On this discussion see I. Kershaw, ‘‘‘Volksgemeinschaft’’: Potenzial und Grenzen eines neuenForschungskonzepts’, Vierteljahrshefte fu ¨ r Zeitgeschichte, 59 (2011), 1–18, and M. Wildt,

‘‘‘Volksgemeinschaft’’. Eine Antwort auf Ian Kershaw’, Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies inContemporary History, Online-Ausgabe, 8 (2011), H. 1, available at: http://www.zeithistorische-for-schungen.de/16126041-Wildt-1-2011 (accessed 1 December 2014).143 G. Clemens, review of D. Schmiechen-Ackermann, ‘Volksgemeinschaft’: Mythos, wirkungsma ¨ ch-tige soziale Verheißung oder soziale Realita ¨ t im ‘Dritten Reich’? (Paderborn 2012), in FrankfurterAllgemeine Zeitung (19 November 2012).



http://www.zeithistorische-forschungen.de/16126041-Wildt-1-2011










was accumulated. Berlin’s ‘colonial archive’ – a term used to refer to knowledge

that a society collects concerning colonial rule and that can exist in various forms,

including ways of interacting, rituals, or even ideas – was considerably

expanded.144 The efforts undertaken to assemble this knowledge required a

considerable commitment in terms of funding and personnel. For example,

the planners in Berlin went on expensive research trips to various locations, includ-

ing North Africa, where they sought solutions for optimizing the techniques of

dictatorship. Yet ultimately, the German interest in Italy hardly seems surprising in

light of the strong international reputation that Mussolini’s regime enjoyed: It was

considered one of the world’s most modern nations, not least because its social

planning was purportedly based on scientific principles.

Thus while ethnic prejudice against Italy is now almost cited reflexively when

discussing Axis relations, we find almost no trace of such sentiments in the writingsof German colonization experts. Many Germans apparently drew a clear distinc-

tion between the many Italians employed as Fremdarbeiter (‘foreign workers’) in

Germany, and ‘true fascists’. While the former were viewed with great disdain by

many Germans, the latter were perceived as ideological cousins, and as the ener-

getic avant-garde of a broader movement to create a racially superior society.

There is a need to devote greater attention to such distinctions when

researching the perceptions of historical actors, for existing studies are very

one-sided in this regard, focusing excessively on cultural prejudice (which undoubt-

edly did exist).This leads to my next point: My research is not aimed solely at illuminating the

specific techniques of social engineering that were transferred. As discussed in the

article, the borrowing of such techniques was inextricably interconnected with

the racist ideologies and practices of both regimes. Clearly, aesthetic considerations

did not motivate the German interest in the urban planning of Italian colonial

settlements. Rather, the Germans were interested in the racist goals pursued by

the Italians with the help of urban planning, goals that corresponded at least par-

tially to their own aims in Eastern Europe – namely, the creation of a racially pure

new society in occupied territories. The crucial difference in the German case wasthat such occupation involved the systematic extermination of a biologically

defined group: the Jews. While indigenous populations in North Africa also suf-

fered heavily as a result of occupation, the mass atrocities committed by the

Italians were not aimed at the total extermination of a ‘racial enemy’. In other

words: The Holocaust marked a fundamental point of difference between

the German and Italian regimes, yet the settlement programme that was

planned and partially realized by the Germans in the shadow of the

Holocaust did not.145 Indeed, in terms of settlement policy, the commonalities

and points of intersection between the two regimes are striking. But the German

144 S. Conrad, Deutsche Kolonialgeschichte, 103.145 See also T. Kuu ¨ hne, ‘Colonialism and the Holocaust: Continuities, Causations, andComplexities’, Journal of Genocide Research, 15, 3 (2013), 339–62.

Bernhard 87








interest in Italy of course went beyond settlement policy: In their effort to fashion

the ‘new German man’, the Nazi regime had a close look at Italy’s attempts to

create a ‘new Italian man’.

These entanglements ultimately expressed themselves on the level of ideology. As

this article has discussed, the cooperation between Italian and German experts led to

an intensive exchange of ideas concerning the expansionist policies of fascism. The

Italians were highly praised by the Germans for their settlement policies – and not

just in propagandistic contexts. In a great many instances this praise was undoubt-

edly genuine. And positive opinions concerning the Italians were expressed at all

levels: from the planning officials who were to realize the settlement of Eastern

Europe on a practical level to individuals such as Himmler who were responsible

for the conceptualization of settlement plans. Even Hitler praised the Italians on a

regular basis. In his most intimate moments in the circle of his closest advisors, theGerman dictator regularly mentioned Italy when speaking about the past, present,

and future. When Hitler drew direct parallels between the German occupation policy

in Russia and Italian policy in Egypt, and lauded the Italians as excellent colonizers,

these sentiments were not an exception, but rather the product of many years of

intellectual engagement with Italian fascism, for which he had genuine admiration

and envy. Hitler’s statements concerning Italian expansionism were part of a much

wider dialogue about Italian fascism in general. Indeed, whenever Hitler spoke

about the rise of his movement, he almost always drew parallels to Italy.

Furthermore, Hitler even viewed the example provided by Italy as prerequisite forhis own seizure of power. Hitler admitted this in no uncertain terms, stating that his

brown shirts could not have existed without Italy’s black shirts. The success of

Italian fascism was decisive for the success of National Socialism, Hitler said.

Recollecting on his early political years, when National Socialism was just a ‘fragile

sprout’, Hitler stated that that his movement might not have survived had Mussolini

been ‘overrun’ by Marxism.146 These comments were made in 1941, after the Italian

military had suffered a series of defeats, which enraged Hitler. Yet these defeats

apparently did little to change Hitler’s fundamentally positive view of Italian fas-

cism. In fact, Hitler continued to believe in the future of Italian fascism even afterMussolini was captured in 1943, at least in part because he considered the fate of

both Italian fascism and National Socialism as closely interlinked. As early as the

1920s Hitler viewed both movements as part of a much larger and necessary histor-

ical development – namely, the inexorable rise of fascist ideology, which expressed

itself first and foremost in war and expansionism.

But colonialism was not the only domain in which both regimes intersected.

It appears that there was similarly intensive contact in other areas, as new research

into cultural relations, women’s international networks and police cooperation

show.

147

These studies demonstrate that actors in these areas virtually developed

146 Entry of 21–2 July 1941, in Jochmann (ed.), Adolf Hitler, 43–4.147 B. Martin ‘‘‘European Literature’’ in the Nazi New Order: The Cultural Politics of the EuropeanWriters’ Union, 1941–3’, Journal of Contemporary History, 48 (2013), 486–508; E. Harvey,‘International Networks and Cross-Border Cooperation: National Socialist Women and the Vision of









their own diplomatic policy, independent of their respective foreign affairs

offices.148 This can be seen as a manifestation of the tendency in both regimes to

develop parallel organizational structures. Party and para-governmental

organizations were often established alongside their government counterparts.

In this context the question thus arises as to whether contact between German

and Italian experts perhaps created a more solid underpinning to the Axis part-

nership that helped to generally stabilize relations, which were undoubtedly

marked by ups and downs when it came to official diplomatic channels.149

Various forms of institutional exchange, such as the numerous German–Italian

cultural societies, were likely to have furnished a certain level of consistency to

Axis relations. However, the role played by these societies has been solely neglected

in research conducted to date. With regard to these forms of cross-cultural

entanglement, the important factor is that contact no longer relied on the initiativeof individuals, but rather was enabled by institutional frameworks, which lent it

stability. In this connection, academics and their institutional networks ultimately

played a large role. Ties to Italian academics helped to strengthen Germany’s sci-

entific community, for it gave German academics privileged access to the know-

ledge amassed by the Italians in the area of colonial social engineering, which was

leveraged by the Germans to further their own hegemonic aspirations. It was not a

coincidence that German observers used metaphors drawn from the realm of sci-

ence, describing Italian Africa as an immense laboratory for social experimenta-

tion. In this respect we can only affirm Hannah Arendt’s view that the racialpopulation management of the Third Reich was one of the most catastrophic

repercussions of modern colonialism.150

Biographical Note

Patrick Bernhard is Assistant Professor of European History at Trinity College

Dublin. His work covers a broad range of topics, ranging from European fascism

to colonialism, from war and genocide to peace movements and Cold War cultures.

He is currently writing a major book on the transnational interrelationships thatshaped racist social engineering in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Among his

publications are Zivildienst zwischen Reform und Revolte: Eine bundesdeutsche

Institution im gesellschaftlichen Wandel, 1961–1982 (Munich 2005); Den Kalten

Krieg denken. Beitra ¨ ge zur sozialen Ideengeschichte seit 1945 (Essen 2013, edited

with Holger Nehring); ‘Behind the Battle Lines: Italian Atrocities and the

Persecution of Arabs, Berbers, and Jews in North Africa during World War II’,

a ‘‘New Order’’ in Europe’, Politics, Religion & Ideology, 13, 2 (2012), 141–58; Bernhard, ‘Konzertierte

Gegnerbeka ¨ mpfung’.148 M. Herren, ‘‘‘Outwardly. . . an Innocuous Conference Authority’’: National Socialism and theLogistics of International Information Management’, German History, 20 (2002), 67–92.149 Martin, ‘European Literature’, 488.150 See also R.H. King and D. Stone (eds), Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History: Imperialism,Nation, Race, and Genocide (Oxford and New York, NY 2007).

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Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 26, 3 (2012), 425–46; ‘Konzertierte

Gegnerbeka ¨ mpfung im Achsenbu ¨ ndnis: Die Polizei im Dritten Reich und im fas-

chistischen Italien 1933 bis 1943’, Vierteljahrshefte fu ¨ r Zeitgeschichte, 59 (2011),

229–62 and ‘The Gestapo in Spain: German Police Collaboration with Franco’s

Regime and the Persecution of Jews, 1936–1944’, (under revision by the Journal of

Modern History).


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