6 - Vectors of Indoctrination

Summary

While the National Socialists made a concerted effort to harness the emigrant nation wherever its members might be, they had no more success outside their areas of conquest than had previous regimes. In some ways, they had less. Moreover, their efforts to replace an inclusive notion of German cultural community with a racially exclusive one ultimately undermined Germans’ positions in other countries even more than the events of World War I. Those efforts within Europe also exposed the degree to which Germanness continued to be defined by its aggregate character even under their auspices.Their notion of the Volksgemeinschaft was defined more by its exclusions than its inclusions. The striking ways in which that fell short outside of Europe underscore the varieties of ways in which Germanness continued to be defined and performed abroad during the period of the war and the degree to which Germans’ fates outside of Europe were contingent on the states in which they lived. Geopolitics played important roles in recasting notions of belonging during this period of crisis, much as it had during earlier ones.Nevertheless, older notions of belonging persisted during and after the war.