The Nazi expansionist goal of living space

The Nazi expansionist goal of living space is the territorial ambition Paul Doll labels the first objective of the war. In his private reassessment, it becomes a measure of what Nazi Germany might still claim after military victory has slipped away: an imperial programme reduced to a bargaining position, yet declared accomplished. The concept’s bitter force lies in the gap between its original scale and Doll’s self-serving revision, while the novel places territorial ambition alongside the policies and institutional pressures surrounding mass murder.

Definition and Political Purpose

Doll identifies the objective as acquiring land empire. His formulation makes the goal more than a general desire for influence: it is a project of territorial possession, tied in the novel’s surrounding account to annexations and plans for controlling land and populations. The ambition is also exposed as adaptable. When supremacy no longer seems assured, Doll does not abandon the objective; he changes the terms by which he will count it as achieved.

The novel sets that territorial logic against a bureaucratic conflict over the people living on the desired or controlled lands. At home, Doll broods over pressure from the Economic Administration Head Office to increase the labour force for the munitions industries, while the Reich Central Security Department presses for the disposal of evacuees. The same people appear in these competing demands as both potential workers and targets of removal. Doll objects to an idea that able-bodied mothers be worked until they collapse in a boot factory at Chełmek, imagining the difficulty of separating them from their children at the ramp. His objection does not reject the regime’s racial premise: he repeats the claim that Jews constitute a fifth column. Instead, the passage shows how administrative exploitation and expulsion can pull against one another within the machinery of Nazi rule.

Doll’s Revised War Aims

After declaring that he has been reconsidering the war aims, Doll sets out a hypothetical settlement in which Nazi Germany gives back France, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Norway, Denmark, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine, Belarus, Yugoslavia, and Greece, but keeps Lithuania, the Sudetenland, the rest of the Czech entity, and its half of Poland. He assumes Austria may not even be discussed. These concessions are not presented as an actual agreement or policy; they belong to Doll’s speculative attempt to imagine what might be salvaged.

The scale of the retreat makes his conclusion deliberately grotesque. Having reduced an expansive project to a list of territories he hopes to retain, Doll still marks the first objective as accomplished. The assertion turns defeat into a paper victory: the language of strategic purpose survives by shrinking the purpose until whatever remains can be called success. His dismissal of unconditional surrender as rhetoric further reveals the wishful terms of this mental exercise, not a credible account of the war’s outcome.

Expansion, Deportation, and Extermination

The novel places the struggle over territory within a larger chronology of escalating policy. In a conversation in the Tiergarten, Professor Peters dates what he calls the crime without a name to July 31, 1941, when a letter drafted by Eichmann and Reinhard Heydrich was sent to Goring and returned with his signature. Peters describes the authorization as carrying Adolf Hitler’s wish for a total solution. The account links high-level authorization to the changing circumstances of conquest and occupation rather than presenting mass murder as an isolated administrative technique.

Peters suggests that the initial imagined answer may have been to dump Jews in remote, barren regions beyond the Urals or in the Arctic Circle after a rapid victory over Russia. As that territorial solution receded, pressure mounted among plenipotentiaries in Poland, including complaints that annexations had brought three million more Jews under their responsibility and that the numbers could not be managed. Peters describes a further radicalization by August or September: the killing of women and children as well as men. In this account, expansion and extermination intersect through conquest, annexation, and the failure of schemes for removing populations to distant territory; the evidence does not make the two objectives identical, but shows how the loss of one territorial option coincides with a more murderous policy.

Means and Significance

Peters distinguishes the purpose of killing from the machinery used to carry it out. Gas chambers and crematories, he argues, accelerated the process, economized effort, and spared the killers’ nerves; they were not its indispensable cause. Bullets and pyres could also have served the purpose, because the decisive condition was the will to kill. He invokes the Einsatzgruppen, which had already killed well over a million people with bullets, and asks the listeners to imagine millions of women and children killed that way. His argument makes clear that technological modernity did not create the underlying intention.

Read beside Doll’s shrunken postwar map, this analysis gives the concept a double significance. Living space names an imperial ambition whose territorial calculations implicate entire populations; Doll’s fantasy of retaining fragments of that empire reveals how readily its language can be bent to preserve an image of success. The novel’s juxtaposition of these passages also resists treating mass murder as merely a technical consequence of expansion: territorial schemes, bureaucratic pressure, and an already present willingness to kill converge, while the means of killing remain distinct from the will behind them.