What were the Nazis' colonial plans for Africa? - study

While much focus is placed on the Nazis’ geographic conquest to take over Europe, their plans extended far beyond, as detailed by a new article published in September 2023.

The peer-reviewed study, published in The Journal of Modern History, argues that World War II had started four years prior then the internationally recognized date of 1939. The study makes this claim based on the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, which the authors perceived as one of the major sources of tension that enabled the war to spread. 

Ethiopia, which was known as Abyssinia, was subjected to Italian rule for about 5 years until the British Allied Forces took control. Ethiopia’s sovereignty was later restored in 1944.

"This introduced fascism's threat to European peace and order by threatening the colonial balance of power in Africa," said Andrew Denning, an associate professor of history at the University of Kansas.

What were the Nazis’ plans for African countries?

The Nazis had envisioned an Africa that would enable the resources of the countries would bolster the Nazi empire. The author explained that professionals in Nazi society, like engineers and chemists, saw the expansion of colonialism in Africa as rational forms of colonial development.

The Nazis planned to build infrastructure in Africa like railways and roads which, although not the motivation of the project, would have transformed the lives of the 130 million indigenous people living there. This was not too dissimilar from other ruling colonial powers at the time. 

"German plans to ground colonialism in infrastructure development were quite similar to those produced not only in Italy by the fascists at the same time, but by the British, French, and Belgians of the 1920s and 30s as well," Denning explained. , "This is an area in which their ideas are very much inspired by, in conversation with and often running in parallel to what their eventual enemies in World War II thought and did."

"German planners occasionally mentioned African residents as needed laborers for their grandiose projects but rarely described how they might be affected by this, let alone how these developments might benefit Africans. That's where we really see the extremity of some of these plans," the author said. 

"It's important we study plans that never come to be," Denning said. "There are lots of things we can learn about the way societies function—and the ideologies and mentalities that operate within them—if we look at the kinds of utopias they imagine. For all of the Nazi movement's dystopian outcomes, we have to recognize that many Germans thought they were constructing utopia."

"The scramble for Africa produced a checkerboard of different European colonies. What Nazi and Italian Fascist officials wanted was not necessarily to conquer all of these areas but redistribute them to better represent the balance of power in the 1930s. This would obviously leave Germany and Italy in possession of much larger territories. But also, interestingly, they believed that this unscrambling would lead to much more European cooperation," Denning said. 

"Although historians are loath to engage in counterfactual history, the idea was that the Germans and their Italian allies would operate Africa collaboratively to develop massive, continent-spanning infrastructures not stopped or divided by territorial borders," Denning concluded. "They were thinking about a way of ruling in Africa that would benefit Europeans of all kinds of nationalities … but certainly not benefit Africans."