Ural Mountains in Nazi planning

Adolf Hitler and the rest of the Nazi leadership made many references to them as a strategic objective of the Third Reich to follow a decisive victory on the Eastern Front against the Soviet Union.

[4] Hitler also expressed his belief that in ancient times the concept of "Europe" was limited to the southern tip of the Greek peninsula, and was then "brought into confusion" by the expanding borders of the Roman Empire.

[8] A few months later, an army adjutant pointed out to Speer an ordinary pencil line which Hitler had drawn on his globe at the Berghof, running north-south along the Ural mountains, signifying the future boundary of Germany's sphere of influence with that of Japan.

[10] In a discussion with Danish Foreign Minister Erik Scavenius on 2 November 1942, Ribbentrop stated that the Germans expected Asian Russia to eventually split up into several harmless "peasant republics" after Germany had occupied the country's European parts.

[12] In the above-mentioned conference of 16 July 1941, it was codified as policy that in order to "secure the safety of the [Third] Reich" no non-German military power would ever again be allowed west of the Urals (including non-Russian native militias), even if it meant war for the next hundred years.

[4] This was to be done to prevent any western powers hostile to Germany from conspiring against it with its eastern neighbors in the future, like the French had supposedly done with the Turks, and which the British were alleged to be doing with the Soviets.

[15] He explained that only a "living [racial] wall" of Aryan fighters would do as a frontier, and that keeping a permanent state of war present in the east was necessary to "preserve the vitality of the race".

[18] On 10 December 1942 (as the Battle of Stalingrad was turning unfavourably against the Germans), he told Anton Mussert, a Dutch Nazi collaborator, that the "Asiatic waves were threatening to overrun Europe and exterminate the higher races", and that this threat could only be countered by wall-building and long-term fighting.

The administrative planning carried out by Alfred Rosenberg from April to June 1941 in his capacity as Plenipotentiary for the Central Treatment of Questions of the Eastern European Space (basis of the future Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories) for the territories that were to be conquered in the Soviet Union based the envisaged civil districts of the Reichskommissariate to a large extent on the borders of the pre-existing Soviet oblasts and autonomous republics, particularly in Reichskommissariat Moskowien.

[20] The Wehrmacht assumed an eastern boundary at the A-A line (a limit along the Volga river between the cities of Archangelsk and Astrakhan), which was the military objective of Operation Barbarossa.