Drang nach Osten

• 1. Introduction

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  Drang nach Osten, a phrase meaning "Drive to the East," began as a 19th-century German nationalist slogan and ended as a justification for some of the worst atrocities of the 20th century. Its first known appearance in writing came in 1849, when the Polish journalist Julian Klaczko used it, though whether he coined the term or was already quoting something familiar is disputed. What is not disputed is the phrase's trajectory: from the pages of nationalist pamphlets to the speeches of Adolf Hitler, who declared in Mein Kampf that eastward expansion was the only direction "nature herself has decreed" for the German people.

  The phrase compressed centuries of history into a single slogan. It gestured at medieval German settlement across Eastern Europe, at the military campaigns of the Teutonic Knights, and at the modern state's ambitions to reshape the continent. How did a term about migration and settlement become the ideological engine of genocide? That question runs through every chapter of this story.

• 2. Medieval Roots and the Ostsiedlung

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  Between the 12th and 13th centuries, a massive shift in population was already underway across the Holy Roman Empire. Peasants, craftsmen, and artisans found themselves displaced by a surge in population during the High Middle Ages. Nobles without inheritance rights to land joined them. Together, they moved eastward from regions such as the Rhineland, Flanders, and Saxony into territories that were sparsely populated by Slavs, Balts, and Finno-Ugric peoples.

  This migration, known as the Ostsiedlung, was not a military conquest in its early stages. Slavic kings and dukes actively supported it, as did the Church. But it carried with it legal, cultural, linguistic, religious, and economic changes that reordered Eastern Europe between the Baltic Sea and the Carpathians for centuries to come.

  The future state of Prussia owes its name and its origins to this period. The region was named for the Old Prussians, a Baltic people who were conquered and gradually assimilated over the following centuries. Their language had disappeared entirely by the 17th or early 18th century. The Teutonic Knights, invited into northern Poland by Konrad of Masovia, assimilated and forcibly converted much of the southern Baltic coastlands as the Middle Ages drew to a close.

  By the late 18th century, the Kingdom of Prussia, Austria, and the Russian Empire had partitioned Poland among themselves. Prussia gained much of western Poland through these partitions and began implementing systematic Germanization policies in Polish territories, a pattern that later German nationalists would retrospectively frame as part of a long eastward drive.

• 3. The Nationalist Slogan Takes Shape

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  Polish and Russian intellectuals began attaching the label Drang nach Osten to the historical Ostsiedlung as romantic nationalism spread through 19th-century Europe. For Polish thinkers, the phrase described programs of Germanization directed against Poland. In Germany, nationalists used it to celebrate medieval eastward settlement and to assert the superiority of German culture over that of Slavic neighbors.

  The term became a formal centerpiece of organized German nationalism in 1891, when the Alldeutscher Verband was founded. The organization's program put it directly: "Der alte Drang nach dem Osten soll wiederbelebt werden," which translates as "The old Drang nach Osten must be revived."

  The German Empire and Austria-Hungary pursued their own versions of this drive in different directions. Germany sought influence in the declining Ottoman Empire through what was called the Eastern Question. Austria-Hungary pushed into the Balkans, acquiring territory including Bosnia and Herzegovina. Meanwhile, inside Germany, the movement ran against a demographic reality it rarely acknowledged: people from the rural, less-developed east were actually flowing westward, drawn to the prospering industrial areas of Germany's interior. This reverse migration had its own German label, Ostflucht, meaning "flight from the East."

  After Germany's defeat in World War I and the loss of eastern territories, German authors began promoting a mirror-image concept. They alleged that Poland was now mounting a Drang nach Westen, a thrust toward the West, to explain Polish territorial gains and population movement into eastern Germany.

• 4. Hitler and Lebensraum

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  Adolf Hitler, who held power in Germany from 1933 to 1945, made Drang nach Osten a central pillar of his vision for Europe. In Mein Kampf, published in 1925-1926, he described eastward expansion as an essential element of his reorganization plans. His words were explicit: "It is eastwards, only and always eastwards, that the veins of our race must expand. It is the direction which nature herself has decreed for the expansion of the German peoples."

  Hitler's framework drew on a specific concept of racial hierarchy. He viewed Slavs as primitive subhumans incapable of forming a state, a position he repeated across works including Mein Kampf and Zweites Buch. Anti-Slavism was a core doctrine of Nazi ideology, which designated Slavic peoples as racially inferior Untermensch. This belief deepened Hitler's contempt for his own country's alliance with Austria-Hungary during World War I, a partnership he saw as contaminating Germany's racial mission.

  Nazi propaganda reshaped the historical record to match this ideology. It depicted Eastern Europe as historically Germanic territory and promoted the claim that these regions had been stolen from Aryan peoples by Hunnic and Avar tribes. By 1938, the phrase Drang nach Osten had achieved enough international recognition that foreign newspapers used it without explanation. That same year, Nazi Germany's occupation of the Sudetenland was accompanied by propaganda describing the Czechs as a "Slav bulwark against the Drang nach Osten."

  Hitler received a report in 1938 analyzing 175 German eastern campaigns conducted between 789 and 1157. A third of those campaigns were successful, a quarter were semi-successful, and the rest failed. Twenty ended in military disaster. The historical record, in other words, was far more complicated than the propaganda suggested.

• 5. Generalplan Ost and Operation Barbarossa

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  When Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa in 1941, the invasion of the Soviet Union, the regime deployed two separate propaganda messages simultaneously. To foreign powers, Axis propaganda described the campaign as a "European crusade against Bolshevism." To German domestic audiences, the same war was presented as a racial struggle of Aryans against "Jewish and Slavic Untermenschen" and a campaign to annihilate "Judeo-Bolshevism." The Reich Security Main Office, under Heinrich Himmler, distributed racist pamphlets carrying these messages across German-occupied territories.

  Behind the propaganda was a concrete administrative plan: Generalplan Ost, or the General Plan for the East. It called for the total domination of Eastern Europe by Germanic peoples, achieved through the genocide of Slavic inhabitants and the forced deportation of the remaining population beyond the Ural Mountains. Those who stayed would be replaced by a new class of settlers called Wehrbauer, or soldier-peasants, who would occupy a fortified line designed to prevent any organized civilization from arising beyond it and threatening Germany.

  The initial military campaigns were successful. Wehrmacht forces conquered Poland, the Baltic countries, Belarus, Ukraine, and much of European Russia. Nazi forces began implementing Generalplan Ost in these territories. But the colonization plan ran immediately into a basic problem: there were not enough Germans willing to settle in the east. The settlements that were established drew not from the Altreich, the pre-war German territory, but mainly from East European Germans resettled from Soviet spheres of influence under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, along with Poles whom Nazis had classified as potentially Germanizable.

  The Soviet Union began reversing the German conquests in 1943. Nazi Germany was defeated by the Allied powers in 1945.

• 6. Reversal and Reckoning

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  The end of World War II brought a reversal of much of what the Ostsiedlung had built over seven centuries. Between 1945 and 1948, Germans were expelled from the territories east of the Oder-Neisse line under decisions reached at the Potsdam Conference. Those who carried out and justified the expulsions framed them explicitly as a rollback of the Drang nach Osten.

  The territory historically called "Eastern Germany" had been the land of the Old Prussians before the Teutonic Knights conquered them in the 13th century. After World War II, it was divided among Poland, Russia, and Lithuania and repopulated with settlers of those respective nationalities. The Old Prussian people, whose language had already vanished by the early 18th century, had no presence left to restore.

  The scholarly afterlife of the phrase itself proved complicated. Henry Cord Meyer, in his book "Drang nach Osten: Fortunes of a Slogan-Concept in German-Slavic Relations, 1849-1990," argued that the slogan originated in the Slavic world rather than the German one, and that it was more widely used outside Germany than within it. That argument reframes the phrase not as Germany's self-description but as a label that Germany's neighbors applied to German behavior, giving it the force to survive across a century and a half of changing political contexts.

  As recently as August 2002, the Polish paper Wprost invoked both Drang nach Osten and Drang nach Westen in the same issue, using the former to describe the German company RWE's takeover of the Polish firm STOEN and the latter to describe Polish migration into eastern Germany. The terms coined to describe medieval migration were still doing rhetorical work in the early 21st century.