Not advocating this idea in any way.
A notable thing about the Nazis' plan for eastern Europe was that it was anachronistic and measured German economic security in terms of land and supposed that Germans wanted to expand on the land to farm, even well into the second industrial revolution and beginning of demographic transition.
Germans who wanted to expand over the land to farm had actually done so, not through conquest, but through peaceful emigration to the Russian Empire, the Americas and Australia up through the end of the 19th century.
However, could a German state of any sort, Prussia, Austria, the HRE under Austrian leadership have envisioned and acted on a scheme to conquer and colonize eastern Europe?
I would imagine the pre-20th century version of 'Generalplan Ost' could run anywhere on a spectrum. At its most extreme, an attempt to exterminate the Poles and Russians and resettle their lands with Germans. Or, if not that, an empire with a strict ethnic caste-based social hierarchy, where Slavs are excluded from leadership or nobility and are a "helot" serf or peasant class under German landowners and administrators? Another variant could be a social structure like British India, with ethnic Germans in charge of the commanding heights of the economy and having a separate and unequal legal dominance over slavs?
Could conservative/reactionary/traditional rulers of German states have warmed to a concept where all their peasants are eligible to be warrior-landlords if they fight to dominate the frontier, and any Polish or Russian royalty or nobility is not considered fit to fraternize with its German counterparts?
Or would conservative/reactionary/traditional rulers have recoiled from an idea that allowed peasants and burghers of their own nationality, traditionally below them on the social scale, to lord it over land and serfs and become competitors with "real" nobles?
And, this vision of racial replacement or hierarchy did become policy of any important state, how far could it succeed in implementing the concept.
I'm giving you a wide range of time to work with, so I don't think it impossible, even if it would be quite divergent from OTL.
A notable thing about the Nazis' plan for eastern Europe was that it was anachronistic and measured German economic security in terms of land and supposed that Germans wanted to expand on the land to farm, even well into the second industrial revolution and beginning of demographic transition.
Germans who wanted to expand over the land to farm had actually done so, not through conquest, but through peaceful emigration to the Russian Empire, the Americas and Australia up through the end of the 19th century.
However, could a German state of any sort, Prussia, Austria, the HRE under Austrian leadership have envisioned and acted on a scheme to conquer and colonize eastern Europe?
I would imagine the pre-20th century version of 'Generalplan Ost' could run anywhere on a spectrum. At its most extreme, an attempt to exterminate the Poles and Russians and resettle their lands with Germans. Or, if not that, an empire with a strict ethnic caste-based social hierarchy, where Slavs are excluded from leadership or nobility and are a "helot" serf or peasant class under German landowners and administrators? Another variant could be a social structure like British India, with ethnic Germans in charge of the commanding heights of the economy and having a separate and unequal legal dominance over slavs?
Could conservative/reactionary/traditional rulers of German states have warmed to a concept where all their peasants are eligible to be warrior-landlords if they fight to dominate the frontier, and any Polish or Russian royalty or nobility is not considered fit to fraternize with its German counterparts?
Or would conservative/reactionary/traditional rulers have recoiled from an idea that allowed peasants and burghers of their own nationality, traditionally below them on the social scale, to lord it over land and serfs and become competitors with "real" nobles?
And, this vision of racial replacement or hierarchy did become policy of any important state, how far could it succeed in implementing the concept.
I'm giving you a wide range of time to work with, so I don't think it impossible, even if it would be quite divergent from OTL.