Hitler's plans for Africa: there were none, the target was the USSR

Hitler had no plan for Africa: his target was the USSR

Hitler left behind no colonial project for Africa. No administration, no governors, no maps drawn up for partition. The doctrine he did put in writing —in Mein Kampf and in the so-called Second Book— pointed in exactly the opposite direction: a continental empire in Eastern Europe, reaching to the Urals, not a network of overseas trading posts.

Why the Second Reich was the bad example

The argument made most often is that the regime itself saw the Second Reich's colonial empire as a strategic mistake: it scattered resources and population across territories where mixing clashed head-on with its racial ideology. Germany's destiny lay in Europe, in reclaiming living space. That is why, when the Wehrmacht occupied France in 1940, the French African colonies did not pass into German hands: they remained under the administration of Vichy France.

Trade as a trap

Another key piece: Hitler rejected obtaining raw materials through trade. In his logic, trade developed underdeveloped countries, which stopped being a source of resources and became industrial competitors. Hence the sequence: Czechia, Poland and the USSR up to the Urals. The "Greater Germanic Reich" was just as elastic —it included Scandinavians, Flemings and Dutch, and excluded Slavs— but it never translated into an administrative structure.

With the documentation available, the question remains unresolved. There was no official plan, and the scattered projects attributed to various departments of the regime still lack any record to support them. When the conversation turns to the economic policy of the Third Reich, the archive runs out before curiosity does. And no, Africa was never on that map.