PC: German (HRE or Prussian) "Generalplan Ost" launched any time between 1400 and 1900 AD?

PC: A German (HRE or Prussian) Generalplan Ost launched between 1400 and 1900?

  • a) Could plausibly become a “German” objective and could plausibly succeed

    Votes: 5 22.7%
  • b) Ruling classes would oppose this idea to avoid socially elevating peasants & rural laborers

    Votes: 6 27.3%
  • c) Could plausibly become a “German” objective, but would absolutely fail

    Votes: 11 50.0%

  • Total voters
    22

raharris1973

Gone Fishin'
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Monthly Donor
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.
 
Too much Slavs/Baltics and not enough Germans to settle or technology to genocide the natives, plus even the most basic "Drang nach osten" thinkers during the 19th century never considered such thing feasible.
 

raharris1973

Gone Fishin'
Donor
Monthly Donor
even the most basic "Drang nach osten" thinkers during the 19th century never considered such thing feasible.

What did those thinkers consider feasible in the 19th century? Political annexation of Baltic coast or something?
 
Whether it was or not, how could this process be kept going?
Well they stopped for 3 reasons: 1) no easily accessible pagan populations to conquer 2) Novgorod ended up being too tough a nut too crack and 3) the Protestant Reformation giving the Pope secularizing the Teutonic Order. If Lithuania remains pagan, or if the Mongols manage to establish a lasting pagan presence in Eastern Europe, that could get the Germans to keep going east 'by sword and cross'. Couple it with a growing German population (keep the wars of the reformation from happening for this) and you could get a culturally Germanic east. That said, not everywhere is going to take this. Poland, which had a long established Christian tradition and national pride would likely remain an idea even if the Germans conquered it, and there would be too many Poles to integrate- the best the Germans could hope for would be for them to end up like the Czech, as non-Germans with heavy cultural ties to the Germans of the HRE.
 
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