Roubinek, Eric2019-03-132019-03-132014-12https://hdl.handle.net/11299/202148University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. December 2014. Major: History. Advisors: Eric Weitz, Mary Jo Maynes. 1 computer file (PDF); iv, 248 pages.The rise of National Socialism in 1933 offered a new opportunity to the German colonial movement whose demands for a restored overseas empire had remained at the margins of nationalist politics throughout the Weimar Republic. Profiting from the broader political revisionism of National Socialism, colonial revisionists sought to meld their ambitions overseas with the racial, national, and expansionist politics of Nazism, while the regime sought to benefit from the popular support for colonialism. Using a biographical approach, I move beyond a strictly diplomatic history of National Socialist overseas empire to explore the experiences of members of the German colonial movement - from mid-level, Party functionaries, to women journalists, and even opponents of the regime - to demonstrate the contentiousness of ideas of race, space, and nation under the Third Reich. Viewing race and nation through the lens of overseas empire, I argue that not only were these ideas highly variable and mobile within a national context, but also that contestations over these terms allowed for the creation of new racial and national communities that transcended the borders of the nation-state. When it became apparent to the German colonial movement that the National Socialist leadership was more interested in expansion on the continent than overseas, the movement looked increasingly to Fascist Italian colonialism for inspiration and collaboration. This transnational cooperation provided an alternative to the formal political and military alliances between the two states and posited a German and Italian fascism as the defender of a "new Europe." My research draws on a broad variety of secondary sources and primary and archival source collections of the Bundesarchiv Berlin, Bundesarchiv Koblenz, Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv Freiburg, Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Politsches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes, Staatsbibliothek Berlin, and the Archivio Centrale dello Stato.enColonialismFascismNational SocialismThesis or Dissertation