German Rule in Russia, 1941–1945:

Hitler continued, ‘if we speak of new lands, we are bound to think first of Russia and her border states’.²

His favourite analogy in this connection was a comparison of the future German East with British India.³ To him, India provided an object lesson of colonial exploitation and Machiavellian virtuosity; he used it to buttress his conviction that the population of ‘Germany’s India’ — the Soviet Union — was likewise no more than ‘white slaves’ destined to serve the master race. Characteristic of his landlocked outlook, he proclaimed that Germany’s primary colonies were to be found not overseas but in Russia.⁴ Along with its manpower, the resources of the East were to assure the material well‐being of the German people.

Colonial crossovers: Nazi Germany and its entanglements with other empires:

The British empire remained a crucial point of reference and the German press continued to broadly cover India and Britain’s other colonial possessions.³⁷ Yet the ways in which the [Fascists] referred to it have to be scrutinized. While Hitler, among others, admired the size and grandeur of British overseas possessions, the common notion that the Germans took colonial lessons from the British appears flawed. References to British rule in India are few and far between in planning documents for the settlement of Africa and eastern Europe.³⁸

Perhaps most importantly, British colonialism was seen as a venture from the past. As Hitler explained to his inner circle in August 1941, shortly after the Wehrmacht had invaded the Soviet Union, ‘What India was for England, the territories of Russia will be for us.’³⁹ This means that the [Axis] dictator clearly saw Germany as the rightful heir of the British empire — an empire that he wanted to surpass.

Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe, pg. 581:

Hitler would have much preferred to have Britain instead of Japan as his partner in Asia. As a colonial power, the British had few greater admirers than the Führer and he often emphasized the harmony of their and German interests. ‘If today the globe has an English world empire,’ he had written in 1928, ‘then for the time being there is also no Volk which, on the grounds of its overall governing qualities as well as its political clear‐headedness, would be more fitted for it . . . There is no reason why England’s enmity against Germany should last forever.’¹¹

His admiration had been shared by others in Germany before him. The mighty British empire had long set the bar for German imperialists, and their view of the causes of its rise to world power was basically the one articulated by many historians today.

(Emphasis added in all cases.)