Greater Germanic Reich
official state name of the political entity that Nazi Germany tried to establish in Europe during World War II
The Greater Germanic Reich (German: Großgermanisches Reich), fully styled the Greater Germanic Reich of the German Nation (German: Großgermanisches Reich der Deutschen Nation), was the official state name of the political entity that Nazi Germany tried to establish in Europe during World War II. The territorial claims for the Greater Germanic Reich fluctuated over time. As early as the autumn of 1933, Adolf Hitler envisioned annexing such territories as Bohemia, western Poland, and Austria to Germany and the formation of satellite or puppet states without independent economies or policies of their own.
This pan-Germanic Empire was expected to assimilate practically all of continental Germanic Europe into an enormously expanded Reich. Territorially speaking, this encompassed the already-enlarged German Reich itself (consisting of pre-1938 Germany proper, Austria, Bohemia, Moravia, Czech Silesia, Alsace-Lorraine, Eupen-Malmedy, Memel, Lower Styria, Upper Carniola, Southern Carinthia, Danzig, and Poland), the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Liechtenstein, parts of northern and northeastern France, and the German-speaking and French-speaking parts of Switzerland.
The most notable Germanic-speaking exception would have been the United Kingdom: the Nazis' New Order envisaged the role of Britain not as a German province but instead as a German-allied seafaring partner. Another exception was the German-populated territory in South Tyrol, an area which Germany assigned to its fellow-Axis power, Fascist Italy, in 1939. The Reich's western frontiers with France were to revert to those of the earlier Holy Roman Empire, which would have meant the complete German annexation of all of Wallonia, French Switzerland, and large areas of northern and eastern France. Additionally, the policy of Lebensraum required mass expansion of Germany and the settlement of Germans eastwards as far as the Ural Mountains (seizing territory from the Baltic states and the Soviet Union in the process). Hitler originally planned for the deportation of any "surplus" Russian population living west of the Urals to resettlement east of the Urals in Siberia.
Ideological background
Racial theories
Nazi racial theories regarded the Germanic peoples of Europe as belonging to a racially superior Nordic subset of the larger Aryan race, who were regarded as the only true culture-bearers of civilized society.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Greater Germanic Reich” as official state name of the political entity that Nazi Germany tried to establish in Europe during World War II. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as official state name of the political entity that Nazi Germany tried to establish in Europe during World War II. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q14914778. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1933, 1938 and 1939.
Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Greater Germanic Reich” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.