DEUTSCHER OSTEN LAND DER ZUKUNFT EIN RUF DES OSTENS AN DIE HEIMAT! – “The German East – Land of the Future: A Call from the East to the Fatherland!” – The conquest of Eastern Europe as the rebirth of the German Reich, edited by Heinrich Hoffmann – Adolf Hitler’s personal photographer. Design: V. R. Marsani. Foreword by Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels. Published by Heinrich Hoffmann Verlag, Munich (Germany), 1942 – First edition. Rare.
“For the first time in German history, the establishment of a new national order and space has begun” – A German propaganda book intended to present the conquest of Eastern Europe (primarily the regions of Silesia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other Slavic territories) as the historical destiny of the German people. Throughout, the book is accompanied by striking photographs, meticulous graphic design, and inspirational texts—intended to evoke national pride and a sense of mission in the Nazi reader. The book is written in a heroic and poetic tone, describing the new life of Germans in the East—a tone typical of publications by Goebbels and Hoffmann. The photographs portray the “new era” of German settlement in the East: confident German farmers on conquered lands, Nazi soldiers entering Poland, German settlers, landscapes of the East, and visual documentation of German “successes” in the occupied territories. All are presented in the aesthetic style characteristic of Hoffmann, with traditional German typography and utopian descriptions of the young Germans—the people of the future—realizing the redemption of the lands for which the German soldier fought with his blood. The book portrays the conquest of the East as the return of ethnic Germans to their own colonies and the reorganization of former German settlement areas in the East. The Generalgouvernement map (the General Government for the occupied Polish territories) featured in the book, designed by Prof. Gustav Hilbert, depicts a vibrant rural and industrial region, fully populated by the German race.
The concept of the “East” as presented by Nazi propagandists was not merely a geographical matter—it was, in essence, a racial vision wrapped in national romanticism: a promise of German renewal upon lands marked as “natural” for the German people and the dawn of a new era. Through the lens of Nazi ideology, the East was perceived as fertile ground, an unrealized expanse awaiting the German hand to bring order, culture, and “noble” blood. It was a worldview that rendered the lands of other peoples—Poles, Russians, Slavs—into a sterile space devoid of independent human content, destined for resettlement by Germans. The idea of Lebensraum—“living space”—was not only about physical expansion, but about a sense of destiny: the right, even the duty, of the German people to expand, to fertilize, and to dominate. The book seeks to cloak this notion in imagery of hope, agricultural renewal, and national reconstruction—yet all of it rests on eradication, dispossession, and ethnic cleansing masked in the language of inspiration. The East, as the book sees it, is not merely a destination—it is a German utopian dream presented as inevitable, a dream that, if fulfilled, would restore the German to his rightful place in the world, and history to what they perceived as its proper order. As described by Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels in the foreword: “The East is our national radiance. It is precisely here that we must awaken and constantly accelerate the flow of our national blood. Here we must harness the brightest minds and the strongest hearts that the homeland has to offer. They are there, and it is their national-political mission to ensure that the pulse of the Reich is felt and heard to its very core. The Nazi program for the German East must be fulfilled through countless individuals and institutions. Years and decades will pass; but one day it will be as we so often dreamed in the past, as we sang in our songs, and as our poets envisioned… for the East is not only our longing, but also the realization of our nation.” Alongside these words by Goebbels appears a photograph captioned: “Ethnic Germans finally returning home to their land.”
Rare. Not listed in the WorldCat global library catalog.
144 pages. 26 cm. Good condition.
