WI: Lebensraum in Africa

What if Hitler decided to have his idea of Lebensraum occur in Africa, not Eurasia, as in Germans colonize all of Africa for "living space". In this scenario, any war against the Soviet Union would be to solely destroy the "degenerate Judeo-Bolshevik ideology" of Communism and whatnot over also integrating all of Russia into Germany as "living space".

What would the impact be for the African theatre in the war? What would the impact of this be on Nazi racial theory and how the holocaust is carried out? How long would the war have lasted without a invasion of the USSR then? What would the post-war division/borders be like(assume scenario where Russia is involved, or Russia isn't, what happens)? Would Germany last longer or shorter in this scenario? How would this influence decolonization?
 
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What if Hitler decided to have his idea of Lebensraum occur in Africa, not Eurasia, as in Germans colonize all of Africa for "living space". In this scenario, any war against the Soviet Union would be to destroy the "degenerate Judeo-Bolshevik" ideology of Communism and whatnot.

What would the impact be for the African theatre in the war? How long would the war have lasted without a invasion of the USSR then? What would the post-war division/borders be like? Would Germany last longer or shorter in this scenario? How would this influence decolonization?

Lots of Germans die of Ebola and malaria and other jungle fevers and hate the fuehrer for sending them to the crap hole of africa and rebel ...

Why would the germans want this? no direct link.. and makes no sense..
 
Lots of Germans die of Ebola and malaria and other jungle fevers and hate the fuehrer for sending them to the crap hole of africa and rebel ...

Why would the germans want this? no direct link.. and makes no sense..

Because the belief that Germans missed out on colonizing Africa, and had to give up its colonies established to the French in WWI.
 

Neirdak

Banned
We are in spring 1913, Adolf Hitler is hopeful to study at the Munich Academy. Not only does he expect the perception of his paternal inheritance (819 crowns), but he thinks that Austrian government has forgotten him. After all, he declared himself unfit for military service two years earlier and hadn't get any military convocations. This is an opportunity to cross the border quietly: on may 24, properly dressed, carrying a suitcase and accompanied by a man, the clerk Rudolf Häusler, he leaves home for the train station. In addition to being an art city, Munich seems familiar because of its close natale region.

Once there, they rent a room at 34 Schleissheim street. Häusler shows his Austrian papers, Hitler declares himself apatride. In January 1914, Hitler is ordered to go to the Austrian Consulate as soon as possible to account for his desertion. He explained that it would have presented himself to the town-city of Vienna, where he was registered but that the military call never arrived. Moreover, he only had few resources and was weakened by infection.

The consul doesn't believe the good faith of the individual (POD). On February 5, Hitler is called for conscription before the military commission in Salzbourg. Afraid, he doesn't go there and illegally moves back to Munich. August 2, 1914, after the declaration of war by the Kaiser, thousands of citizens are assembled on the Munich Odeonplatz to applaud the King of Bavaria. A photograph captures the event and Hitler is seen on it. According to his military record he only presented himself at the recruiting office on Aug. 5 . Recognized as an Austrian deserter, Hitler is captured and put in prison. Germany and Austria need soldiers, he is given two possibilities. He can either refuse to serve and stay in prison in Austria either join the Schutztruppe (Colonial troops) in Afrika to defend the German Empire.

Handcuffed, Adolf Hitler is sent to Hamburg. He will soon be shipped to Dar es Salaam and fight under Lieutenant Colonel Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck. East Africa, where his fascination for Africa will grow, alongside his own vision of Lebensraum. According to his book, it's a duty for Aryans to raise Africa from barbarism to an enlightened stage of development. Aryans, by virtue of their superiority, have the right to control the ressources of the continent in order to develop it. Thus African expansion was justified as an inevitable necessity for Germany to pursue in order to end the country's overpopulation within existing confined territory, and provide resources necessary to its people's well-being.

Onwards to Afrika, Elsass-Lotharingen and the lost territories are nothing compared to the vast "unpopulated territories" of Afrika and their ressources. Mittelafrika would provide enough ressources to Germany to regain its worldwide status and to later reconquer what she lost. It would be a step to the political Union of Mitteleuropa.
 
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We are in spring 1913, Adolf Hitler is hopeful to study at the Munich Academy. Not only does he expect the perception of his paternal inheritance (819 crowns), but he thinks that Austrian government has forgotten him. After all, he declared himself unfit for military service two years earlier and hadn't get any military convocations. This is an opportunity to cross the border quietly: on may 24, properly dressed, carrying a suitcase and accompanied by a man, the clerk Rudolf Häusler, he leaves home for the train station. In addition to being an art city, Munich seems familiar because of its close natale region.

Once there, they rent a room at 34 Schleissheim street. Häusler shows his Austrian papers, Hitler declares himself apatride. In January 1914, Hitler is ordered to go to the Austrian Consulate as soon as possible to account for his desertion. He explained that it would have presented himself to the town-city of Vienna, where he was registered but that the military call never arrived. Moreover, he only had few resources and was weakened by infection.

The consul doesn't believe the good faith of the individual (POD). On February 5, Hitler is called for conscription before the military commission in Salzbourg. Afraid, he doesn't go there and illegally moves back to Munich. August 2, 1914, after the declaration of war by the Kaiser, thousands of citizens are assembled on the Munich Odeonplatz to applaud the King of Bavaria. A photograph captures the event and Hitler is seen on it. According to his military record he only presented himself at the recruiting office on Aug. 5 . Recognized as an Austrian deserter, Hitler is captured and put in prison. Germany and Austria need soldiers, he is given two possibilities. He can either refuse to serve and stay in prison in Austria either join the Schutztruppe (Colonial troops) in Afrika to defend the German Empire.

Handcuffed, Adolf Hitler is sent to Hamburg. He will soon be shipped to Dar es Salaam and fight under Lieutenant Colonel Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck. East Africa, where his fascination for Africa will grow, alongside his own vision of Lebensraum. According to his book, it's a duty for Aryans to raise Africa from barbarism to an enlightened stage of development. Aryans, by virtue of their superiority, have the right to control the ressources of the continent in order to develop it. Thus African expansion was justified as an inevitable necessity for Germany to pursue in order to end the country's overpopulation within existing confined territory, and provide resources necessary to its people's well-being.

Onwards to Afrika, Elsass-Lotharingen and the lost territories are nothing compared to the vast "unpopulated territories" of Afrika and their ressources. Mittelafrika would provide enough ressources to Germany to regain its worldwide status and to later reconquer what she lost. It would be a step to the political Union of Mitteleuropa.
Hitler serving under von Lettow-Vorbeck? Very interesting.
 
The whole concept of Lebensraum for Germany was silly anytime after 1900. By that time the German birthrates had begun to decline as the country industrialized. In 1913 only 25,843 Germans emigrated from the country (19,124 to the USA). This was a far lower number of emigrants than many smaller countries in the Balkans were sending.

With industrialization in Germany, there was plentiful employment in the industrial sector, also Germany's social welfare state had begun under Bismarck, giving Germans a sense of economic security. By 1914, Germany actually became a country with net immigration. In 1910, Germany had over 1.2 million foreign residents, mostly Italians, Poles from Galicia and Russian Poland, Lithuanians. There were even 80,000 Jews from Austria-Hungary and Russia who had immigrated to Germany by 1910. If one looks at the rate of Jewish emigration from Germany during the 1900-1914 period, far fewer Jews from Germany emigrated compared with those from the Russian Pale, Galicia and Romania.

As for settling in Africa, with the exception of Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt and South Africa, no country in Africa had more than 30,000 Europeans in 1914.
German Southwest Africa and German East Africa were the only real settler colonies. German Southwest Africa being the most successful with 14,830 Europeans in 1913. With 12,292 Germans and 1,799 British subjects (mostly Boers). German East Africa had 5,336 Europeans (4,107 Germans, most of the rest being Greeks and Boers).

Germany really only needed lebensraum after the Napoleonic Wars when the German population increased dramatically, and as a primarily agricultural society, there was little land to cultivate. Between 1848-1860 1 million Germans emigrated. Again between 1865-1875 another 1 million Germans emigrated. German emigration peaked in 1881 at 220,902 (206,189 to the USA), and it began decreasing rapidly after 1893.

Had Hitler focused on Africa, it would have been an expensive undertaking to send large numbers of colonists from Germany to give them a comfortable lifestyle in Africa before 1950. On the other hand, poor Greeks settled in German East Africa (and later British Tanganyika) on their own and were successful (the same goes with Polish refugees settled in Africa during WW2). However, the average German had it "too good" after 1900 to want to consider settling in Africa. Those who did, tended to be wealthy adventurers with some sort of romantic ideal about the continent, like Baron von Wolf who built a castle in Namibia, the other groups were missionaries and civil servants.

The only group of Germans I could see being attracted to these endeavours were poorer Germans from the Russian Empire (2.4 million in 1914), Germans in the Kingdom of Hungary, especially those from Transylvania (190,000 in 1910). There were Germans from Russia who settled in barren land in isolated parts US, Canada, and Latin America so presumably they could settle in East Africa (like the plateaus of SW Tanganyika, around Mbeya).
 
A great idea keep it going!

A big problem with any African WW2 timeline is that the Axis forces need to get there past the Royal Navy. Therefore an Africa obsessed Hitler is going to want and need a much bigger fleet much as the Kaiser did in the 1900's. But if he builds more ships he has to build less tanks and planes. Getting into bed with Italy earlier helps with this as they already have a reasonable Navy and African colonies and also want more. This could give rise to German joining Italy in the invasion of Abyssinia. Perhaps Germany gets some of old holding held by Italy back in return for their help.

Another possibility is that Hitler keeps relatively quiet about his African dreams until after the conquest of France 1940. Then as part of the armistice agreement demands the returns of the old German territories in Africa along with some of France's. He then throws everything he can at the British in the Middle East in 1941 (instead of Russia). Capturing key areas like Suez, Sudan and Palestine. This could be enough to bring Britain to the negotiating table and if not they would be severely weakened. Then come 1942 he continues after the oil in the Middle East while spreading his forces across Africa. Then if there's still no war with the Russians by this time he launches Barbarossa in 43 to destroy Communism once and for all, but with better raw resources, but with less manpower due to African and western European occupation forces.
 
"Lebensraum in Africa" was one of his vague long term plans after he tied up a few loose ends in Europe.

The most interesting part was the idea for a big Afrikaner state......Draka, anyone? :D
 
iirc, one of the plans behind that whole Atlantropa project was also to evict local populations so that white Europeans could live there instead

in any case, i imagine most of the African lebensraum in this case would be in North Africa since that's where war was waged, but i could also see a victorious Nazi Germany re-annexing former German colonies and using those instead
 

Realpolitik

Banned
Hitler had a hard enough time getting ordinary Germans to want to "leben" as rustic warrior peasants in Russia. No way that Africa would work out.
 
To expand into Africa, Hitler will have to conquer the Med. So let's say Mussolini attacks Hitler over the Austrian Anchluss and loses bigtime. Now Italy is the springboard for a complete Southern Strategy. If the Libyan oilfields were discovered and German scientists and engineers can exploit them, you have at least a reason to sweep North Africa, Egypt, the Middle East and seal the Med at both ends.
Then start building a Cairo to Capetown trans Africa railroad as you move south.
All this while defending your borders from French, English and Russian armies, their navies and air forces.
I'm sure Goebbels and the Ahnenherbe can come up with reasons of the need for the Reich to do this.
 
The whole concept of Lebensraum for Germany was silly anytime after 1900. By that time the German birthrates had begun to decline as the country industrialized. In 1913 only 25,843 Germans emigrated from the country (19,124 to the USA). This was a far lower number of emigrants than many smaller countries in the Balkans were sending.
The model (okay, we all know there was huge gaps in logic regarding the Lebensraum idea) assumed that the acquisition of vast amounts of farmland would provide food and resources to the core Germany, which would in turn cause the birthrate to rise, which would then provide settlers and colonists in the east.

Overall the thinking is rather circular, but mostly Germany would supposedly be self sufficient in agriculture and no longer under threat of blockade.

Lebensraum wasn't literally a concern that Germany was going to literally run out of room due to overpopulation (which is actually not as silly as it sounds, since there's examples of such occurring in 2014, particularly in large metropolises and capital cities). They wanted the German population to grow larger. The concern was that population growth was declining, not overpopulation, and the perceived reason for the population decline was a lack of self sufficiency in food.

And technically speaking (more circular logic) with the Lebensraum colonies, the German settlers would turn from an industrial lifestyle to an agricultural farmer-warrior lifestyle which means more kids, solving the demographic problem of industralized nations.
 
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Lots of Germans die of Ebola and malaria and other jungle fevers and hate the fuehrer for sending them to the crap hole of africa and rebel ...

Why would the germans want this? no direct link.. and makes no sense..

Well that and the ASB's will come up with the German capacity to do it.
Ya.

Why? is the first question. How? is the second.

Really, looking for Lebensraum in Antarctica makes as much sense as Africa. (Environment is about as hostile for Europeans, at least there's no competition.)
 

Saphroneth

Banned
And technically speaking (more circular logic) with the Lebensraum colonies, the German settlers would turn from an industrial lifestyle to an agricultural farmer-warrior lifestyle which means more kids, solving the demographic problem of industralized nations.
It's almost literally a desire to create a version of Sparta. Proud Aryan Spartiates, other German/western European Periokoi, and a vast mass of Slav Helots.
 
It's almost literally a desire to create a version of Sparta. Proud Aryan Spartiates, other German/western European Periokoi, and a vast mass of Slav Helots.
A surprisngly apt comparison I hadn't thought of, that should demonstrate in itself precisely why the whole lebensraum thing was a bag of loonacy and a terrible (in the sense of crime against humanity) idea.
 
Considering how Germany was an urban industrial society, I doubt too many Germans would have been willingly attracted to Africa of their own volition. I can see some adventurers and more die-hard Nazi fanatics wanting to try it out, but unless they were forcibly settled there, the Germans in these territories would probably be few in number. To really succeed they'd have to rely on ethnic Germans from poorer regions (Bessarabia, Transylvania, Volga Germans, etc.). However, with little experience in tropical or even Mediterranean farming it would be interesting to see how many would succeed.

Take the French experience in Africa, very few French settled in their own African territories, due to having a relatively comfortable life in France. The result was that Algeria's European population was only 40% of French origin, and most of these were from Corsica and what was then the poorer south (Languedoc and Rouissilon). In Tunisia, over 2/3 of the Europeans were ethnic Italians. However, the French found no shortage of Spaniards, Italians and Maltese form the poorest regions of those countries wishing to settle in Algeria. However, most were from regions only a few hundred miles away from Algeria, so the climate was largely the same. In the other French colonies, ethnic French tended to be administrators, civil servants and representatives of metropolitan businesses. In French West Africa too the French were outnumbered by Syrians and Lebanese.

In contrast, the Italians had success in settling large numbers of Italians in Libya and Italian East Africa in a short time. The European population in Libya shot up from 66,525 in 1936 to 128,264 in April of 1940. In East Africa the European population went up from 5,819 in Eritrea and Italian Somaliland in 1931 to 151,567 in all of Italian East Africa by March 1940.

However, one has to remember that Italy was much poorer than Germany (especially in the South), Italy's birthrate in 1940 was comparable to that of Germany in 1920. A poor landless Italian farmer from Sicily was probably more likely to be illiterate and willing to take the risk of moving to an unknown area for with the promise of free land. However, the Italian experiment of demographic colonisation in Libya and East Africa lasted less than a decade, so it's hard to evaluate the long term results of the policy. Also, emigration-wise Italy's large emigration until the 1950s was comparable to Germany's situation 40 years before.

Portugal too mimicked experimented with demographic colonisation in Angola and Mozambique beginning in the 1910s on a small scale. However, the large-scale settlement projects were only underway beginning in the 1950s. Portugal was even poorer than Italy, and its birthrate in the late-1960s was the same as Northern Europe's before World War I. Therefore, the country had no shortage in prospective colonists and selected them carefully. However, even though these projects continued right up until 1974, the government found that many of the settlers abandoned the land and moved to the cities and towns where they could obtain wage employment. Most however preferred to become small traders or setup small businesses on their own.

In the end, even with the coercion of the Nazi state, I don't believe they'd have much more success in founding successful agricultural colonies anywhere, much less Africa. Most people want wage labour, and unless the land holdings were very large commercial farms, they simply wouldn't provide enough in income for a former city dweller to be satisfied.

The most successful attempt for ther Germans to colonise would have been emulating the British model in Africa (Kenya, Southern Rhodesia and South Africa). That is attract middle to upper class settlers (many from the armed forces), give those with the capital to develop land large tracts of land where they can employ lots of Africans to grow cash crops.

However, the main attraction of Africa would be attractive "garden cities" like Salisbury in Southern Rhodesia where large numbers of Germans could enjoy a higher standard of living than that found in Europe. That being make Africa's cities and suburbs attractive alternatives to living in Bremen, Frankfurt or Hamburg. To this day large numbers of British still move to Australia due to the better climate and the ability to enjoy a lifestyle that would be much more expensive in Britain itself (though in recent years Australia's real estate costs have made this less attractive). The same was true for Brits moving to South Africa and Southern Rhodesia.

This pattern could have been emulated in the German colonies. Firstly land would be cheaper and homes most likely cheaper to build than in Germany itself, due to low cost labour. A single-family home with a swimming pool, a large garden and automobiles would be the lifestyle offered in German Africa to a middle-class family from the crowded German cities. To top it off, a plentiful pool of cheap domestic labour to cook, clean and tend to the garden exists. For many moving to Kenya, Rhodesia, South Africa (and the Portuguese territories), this was what made Africa attractive, the suburban lifestyle based around the automobile available to middle-class European families. That in my opinion would have been Germany's only shot at attracting a large German population to Africa.
 
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