Drang nach Osten
This movement caused legal, cultural, linguistic, religious and economic changes, that had a profound influence on the history of Eastern Europe between the Baltic Sea and the Carpathians.
As the Middle Ages came to a close, the Teutonic Knights, who had been invited to northern Poland by Konrad of Masovia, had assimilated and forcibly converted much of the southern Baltic coastlands.
With the development of romantic nationalism in the 19th century, Polish and Russian intellectuals began referring to the German Ostsiedlung as Drang nach Osten.
[17] Drang nach Westen is also the ironic title of a chapter in Eric Joseph Goldberg's book Struggle for Empire, used to point out the "missing" eastward ambitions of Louis the German who instead expanded his kingdom to the West.
[18] Adolf Hitler, dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933–1945, advocated for a Drang nach Osten to acquire territory for German colonists at the expense of central and eastern European nations (Lebensraum).
[19] Nazi propaganda depicted Eastern Europe as historically Germanic territories, promoting the myth that these regions were stolen from Aryan races by Hunnic and Avar tribes.
Through the Generalplan Ost ("General Plan for the East"), Nazi Germany sought the total domination by Germanic peoples of Eastern Europe by conducting a genocide of Slavic inhabitants and forcibly deporting rest of the population beyond the Urals.
[25] The Reich Security Main Office, under Heinrich Himmler, played an active role in distributing racist propaganda pamphlets on these topics across German-occupied territories.
[29] Settlements established during the war did not receive colonists from the Altreich, but in the main part East European Germans resettled from Soviet "spheres of interest" according to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact,[30] and such Poles as deemed Germanizable by Nazis.
The expulsion of Germans after World War II east of the Oder-Neisse line in 1945–48 on the basis of decisions of the Potsdam Conference were later justified by their beneficiaries as a rollback of the Drang nach Osten.
