Wehrbauer
In the 20th century, the term re-emerged and was used by the Nazi SS to refer to soldiers designated as settlers for the lands that were conquered during the German invasions of Poland and the Soviet Union.
[2] The Nazis intended to colonise the conquered Eastern European lands in accordance with Adolf Hitler's Lebensraum ideology through such soldier peasants.
Plans envisaged them acting both as colonists and as soldiers, defending the new German colonies from the surrounding Slavic population in the event of an insurgency.
[3] Beginning in 1938, the SS intensified the ideological indoctrination of the Hitler Youth Land Service (HJ-Landdienst) and promulgated its ideal of the German Wehrbauer.
Special secondary schools were created under SS control to form a Nazi agrarian elite trained according to the principle of "blood and soil".
[3][need quotation to verify] The German Foreign Ministry, however, suggested the alternative of moving the racially-unwanted population to Madagascar and Central Africa as soon as Germany had recovered its colonies, which had been lost by the 1919 Treaty of Versailles.
When he has accomplished that, the name of Adolf Hitler will be the greatest in Germanic history — and he has commissioned me to carry out the task.From a historical perspective, the SS Wehrbauer concept deliberately referenced the model of the military frontier held by the Habsburg monarchy against the incursions of the Ottoman Empire.
[10] The settlement marches were to be separated from the civil administration of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories and Reichskommissariats and given to the custody of the Reichsführer-SS, who was to name an SS and Police Leader (German: SS- und Polizeiführer) for the region and also to distribute temporary and inheritable fiefs and even permanent land ownership for the settlers.
[10][11] A major autobahn system would connect the settlement strings, with new German cities planned for construction along the roadbeds of roughly every 100 km.
[17] Himmler stated that if the clergy were to acquire money to construct churches on their own in the settlements, the SS would later take the buildings over and transform them into "Germanic holy places".
[21] The design was also to be used for defence purposes on Germany's "ultimate eastern border deep within Russia",[21] where the easternmost Wehrbauer "settlement-pearl" villages would likely have grown up if the Axis powers had completely defeated the Soviets.
There might have been the possibility either of remnant Soviet forces or of troops of the northwestern Siberian extremities of Imperial Japan's Co-Prosperity Sphere territories on the eastern side of such a frontier.
