The German Reich preached a new racialist religion

[samiaseo222]

Which extolled the virtues of the blood and soil of the Heimat yet planned imperial conquest (admittedly as it had to, given its acute need for living space). Hitler's aim was to combine the organic communalism of nationhood with the universalism of an imperial vision. His national- socialist race religion of Aryan supremecy taught that cosmopolitanism was mortal sin, and exploited fully the tribal distrust of the street hawker, the errant, the stranger, the man of no fixed abode or dubious profession.

On such people by contrast, the empire thrives, indeed they are the creators of empires); at the same time it appealed to providence, to science, to laws of nature, to the absolute, to an objective view job function email list of the universe in a way which is alien to nationalism. The extreme nationalist veneration of all things German in the early years of the Third Reich sat uneasily with later imperialist appeals for a "crusade against Bolshevism". Crusades are never nationalistic, always imperial-religious and the SS appeal by 1944, "no more brothers' wars", was incompatible with the German national chauvinism of the thirties.

National loyalties were also evoked by the Allies to destroy Hitler's Thousand Year Empire. The defence of an empire, whether British or German, has little mass appeal, unlike the defence of a nation, especially to women, who can be wildly enthusiastic patriots, but rarely show enthusiasm for imperial adventure. The war propaganda of all protagonists in the last world war was well aware of this and harped on a sentimental patriotism in order to stiffen morale, although the leadership of all sides was consciously striving for much more than "national defence".