Aryan Eurasianism vs. White Supremacy

The Geopolitical Outlook of the Third Reich

Karl Haushofer’s book World Politics of Today

Contrary to modern Hollywood fiction, Hitler’s idea of an “Aryan master race” had nothing to do with “White supremacy”. The two are to be treated as separate concepts. The British-American world first sought to project itself as a global sea power (Manifest Destiny) through the spread of White supremacy. The Germans later sought to counter this power with a Eurasian land power of their own, spanning from Ireland to the Ural Mountains. To unify Eurasia, Hitler adopted the Thulean myth of a Eurasian master race (now known as the Yamnaya pastoralists) that once came from the East and settled in Germany. This Germanic Herrenvolk (rather a race of Lords) was then supposed to dominate Russia, rather than to allow Russia to take over Europe.

Nazi world-strategist Karl Haufhofer popularized the term geopolitics in his book Geopolitics of Pan-Ideas. Haushofer conceived a “pan-idea” as a geographic region that could act together as a sort of empire, such as the American-led control over the North-, Middle-, and South Americas. Under Haushofer’s vision, the Germans needed to develop their own pan-idea by combining Europe with the Russian and Central Asian landmass. This was deemed necessary in order to counter the sea power of the Anglo-Saxons (the British and the Americans). Indeed, whenever you hear Russian president Putin call out the “Anglo-Saxons”, he is referring to this century-old game of empires: the Eurasian land versus the anglophone seas.

Karl Haushofer concluded that “a German-led alliance [of Germany, Russia, and Japan] can dominate global politics by controlling Eurasia’s vast resources and landmass”. Had the Germans of the Second World War conquered Russia, the Wehrmacht would have marched all the way on through to India—the idea being to separate India from the British Empire, and include it into Hitler’s new Eurasian empire under German cultural leadership. Hitler’s dreamed empire would have been constructed as a feudal and caste-based society, with different ethnics of people ordered in a hierarchy.