Nazi Grand Strategy, Genocide, and Dismantlement of the State System, 1941–1945

This chapter examines the fusion between a geopolitical imaginary rooted in the state system and Nazi Germany’s specific racialized “imperial” imaginary. Here the idea of race war is at its very center. The key historical moment is during the summer and fall of 1941, when the annihilation of the Jews becomes completely conflated with Germany’s long-term strategic goals. A race war, as conceived by Nazi Germany, was the logical consequence of a social imaginary that joined race, biology, and nature and that transcended politically defined boundaries. There was no prioritization of the geopolitical nation-state over the racial enemy, between geopolitical blocs versus the Jewish “internal” racialized enemy or the external “Asiatic hordes.”