8 - The triumph of Raum

Summary

The experience of the Eastern Front in the First World War and the ambitions expressed in Ober Ost left a fateful legacy for German views of the East after the war. In the Weimar Republic, certain conclusions were drawn from the experience and given durable form in political agitation and propaganda, and after the Nazis seized power in 1933, they put a radicalized myth of the East into violent action as an integral part of their ideology and foreign policy aims.

The front experience of the East and its perceived “lessons” are crucial to any estimation of Germany's loss in the First World War. Most basically, events there touched great numbers of people. Besides 2 or 3 million men at the Eastern Front or working in occupied territories, many more at home participated vicariously through the propaganda of Ober Ost and annexationists. After the war, veterans at local taverns and family gatherings shared their memories with others. In the decades that followed Ober Ost administrators met in Berlin for reunions, often attended by Hindenburg and at first by Ludendorff, remembering their “war work.” Experiences were also reworked in print, as veterans wrestled with the meaning of what had happened to them, producing a whole genre of “soldierly literature.”