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Last week, Critical State took a deep dive into research on how states difficulties with extending power into borderlands changes how they make and implement policies for those areas. This week looks at research on what happens when a state makes a major effort to incorporate borderland residents into the core state identity.
During World War II, Nazi Germany added much of the land around Germany to its Reich. The idea that the concept of Germanness extended beyond the geographical bounds of Germany was core to Nazi ideology. When new countries or regions were added to the Reich, part of the Nazi political and ethnic project in those territories was Germanization making new members of the Reich feel German. This involved extending the Holocaust into those areas as a means of brutal ethnic cleansing, but it also meant education programs on Germanness for those who were not killed or imprisoned. Among these education programs, few were more fundamental than the Hitler Youth, w