"Hitler’s Africa in the East: Italian Colonialism as a Model for German Planning in Eastern Europe"

the Third Reich looked to the undertakings of Fascist Italy in Africa for inspiration.

When planning the ethnic remaking of Eastern Europe, the Germans were especially 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.

For Nazi Germany, Italian practices and experiences in colonial population management served as a model and "best practice" example, crucially informing German plans for the settling and ethnic remaking of Eastern Europe.

Around the world the settlement programme of the Italian Fascists stirred great interest around the world, not just in Nazi Germany.

In Great Britain, it was lauded for supposedly being carried out "on the strictest scientific lines" and having sociopolitical rather than "purely economic" motivations by British agriculturalist and director of the Rothamsted Experimental Station, Edward John Russell.

The American Ruth Sterling Frost put it more bluntly: what made Fascist Italy’s colonization scheme so unique was its "utopian quality" in terms of reshaping the nation, she wrote in Geographical Review, one of the USA’s most renowned geography journals.

This fascination with the massive state-run colonization project of Fascist Italy went so far that British crofters (settlers) who wanted to improve their economic situation, asked for permission to settle in Libya as colonists.

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In Germany, the interest in Italian colonialism was even greater. From its inception 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 presented slideshows of Italy’s genocide at party rallies. The Nazi party sang much praise for the "modern" and "orderly" planning of Italy’s new colonial cities.

The ideology underlying the Italian settlement effort resonated with Nazi party members, who saw it as an example of how their own racist aspirations could be realized. Clearly, Africa italiana served as a prism through which the Germans entertained their own visions of empire.

The beginning of Italy’s massive colonization programme in 1938 was keenly watched in Germany. This attention occurred during a time when, according to conventional historians claim, the Nazis no longer viewed Italy as a role model.

Newspapers and books enthusiastically reported Italian violence in Libya and Abyssinia (Ethiopia). Between 1938 and 1941, more than 20 large monographs were published, including studies by renowned fascist authors such as Louise Diel.

German offices and administrators charged with planning policy for the East started collecting and assessing information about Italy’s colonial activities in Africa. Colonialism was so important to the Reich Commissariat it organized special training programmes for its staff.

The Nazis looked to Italy mainly for three reasons. First, they did not want to pursue "traditional" German colonial policy. The settlement of German southwest Africa and elsewhere was seen as a complete disaster where settlers were left alone by a laissez-faire German state.

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 in the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories.

Second, Nazi planners did not want to adopt the colonial policy of other Western powers. While they collected and assessed information on the British and French presence in Africa, planners voted against these models as they felt that capitalist "democracies" were "anti-models".

Third, the Nazis wished to end old tendencies in German settlement patterns and create new colonies within a larger national community that incorporated the modern structures of Hitler’s economic New Order. Here, Fascist Italy seemed to provide the right model for the future.

German and Italian settlement experts found "so much common ground" they built official channels to supplant what were previously personal ties. The Italians established an Academy for Building Research to match their German counterpart, the Deutsche Akademie für Bauforschung.

Experts from both sides of the Alps also started regular joint meetings known as the Italo–German Study Conference on Agriculture to foster "a common progressive development" of agrarian policy. The meetings went so well that they began 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. It was only the outbreak of the Second World War that prevented these plans from being carried out.

The fact that the Germans failed to realize many of their ambitions for the settlement of the East does not mean that their plans were insignificant. The manufacture of a sense of community—a point of emphasis adopted from the Italian experience in Africa—played a prominent role.

The Nazis engaged in very specific and intensive efforts to furnish a built environment that would create settlers who strongly identified with and perpetuated their brand of white supremacy, and their main inspiration for this came from Italy's wars of colonization in Africa.

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