Heim Ins Reich - History

History

Prior to the Anschluss, a powerful transmitter in Munich bombarded Austria with propaganda of what Hitler had already done for Germany, and what he could do for his native home country Austria. The annexation of Austria was presented as "enter German land as representatives of a general German will to unity, to establish brotherhood with the German people and soldiers there." Similarly, the last chapter of Eugen Hadamovsky's World History on the March glorifies Hitler's obtaining Memel from Lithuania as "the latest stage in the progress of history".

Concurrent with this were the beginnings of attempts to ethnically cleanse non-Germans both from Germany and from the areas intended to be part of a "Greater Germany". Alternately, Hitler also made attempts to Germanize those who were considered ethnically or racially close enough to Germans to be "worth keeping" as part of a future German nation, such as the population of Luxembourg (officially, Germany considered these populations to actually be German, but not part of the Greater German Reich, and were thus the targets of propaganda promoting this view in order to integrate them). These attempts were largely unpopular with the targets of the Germanization, and the citizens of Luxembourg voted in a referendum 97% against becoming citizens of Germany.

Propaganda was also directed to Germans outside the Third Reich, to return as regions, or as individuals from other regions. Hitler hoped to make full use of the "German Diaspora."

As part of an effort to lure ethnic Germans back to Germany, folksy Heimatbriefe or "letters from the homeland" were sent to German immigrants to the United States. The reaction to these was on the whole negative, particularly as they picked up. Goebbels also hoped to use German-Americans to keep America neutral during the war, but this actually produced great hostility to Nazi propagandists.

Newspapers in occupied Ukraine printed articles about antecedents of German rule over Ukraine, such as Catherine the Great and the Goths.

Heim ins Reich in Nazi terminology and propaganda also referred to former territories of the Holy Roman Empire. Joseph Goebbels described in his diary that Belgium and the Holland were Heim im Reich in 1940. Belgium was supposedly lost to France by the Austrian Empire in 1794 and Holland from the Holy Roman Empire in 1648 at the Peace of Westphalia. Other such territories that were occupied and annexed by Germany during the 1940s were Luxembourg, Alsace-Lorraine (German: Elsass-Lothringen), Slovenia, Bohemia, Moravia, and parts of Poland. The policy for German Expansion was planned in Generalplan Ost to continue farther eastwards into Poland, the Baltic states and the Soviet Union, thus creating a Greater Germany from the North Sea to the Urals.