Hitler’s Geographies aims to respond to the growing interest in the current academic literature for a comprehensive investigation of the spatial imaginations of the Nazi regime and of the actual geographies that it designed and implemented through its thirteen years of grand plans, colonization, exploitation and genocide. Geographers and spatial planners played a key role in the Nazi project, and Nazi ideology was permeated by a broad spatial vision of the Reich and its territories, supported by a number of key spatial concepts, like those of Lebensraum, Grossraum, Farther East and Geopolitik, ... More

Hitler’s Geographies aims to respond to the growing interest in the current academic literature for a comprehensive investigation of the spatial imaginations of the Nazi regime and of the actual geographies that it designed and implemented through its thirteen years of grand plans, colonization, exploitation and genocide. Geographers and spatial planners played a key role in the Nazi project, and Nazi ideology was permeated by a broad spatial vision of the Reich and its territories, supported by a number of key spatial concepts, like those of Lebensraum, Grossraum, Farther East and Geopolitik, to name but a few. This book thus intends to provide an overview of how recent research in geography and related disciplines has approached the question of the spatialities of Hitlerism and how these have affected geopolitical projections and biopolitical practices ‘in place’. A geographical perspective on the spatialities of the Third Reich is much needed: this book aims at illustrating this perspective in an accessible way for an interdisciplinary audience of scholars of the Third Reich, while at the same proposing a theoretical approach to ‘space’ that is well established in the discipline of human geography and widely recognized in interdisciplinary debates. In addition, this book, while providing a broader geographical analysis of some key Nazi spatial projections and fantasies, at the same time insists in many of its chapters on the links between these and Nazi biopolitics.