Pinning down the Nazis' plans for Western Europe for the long-term future is a bit more difficult than in Eastern Europe because unlike in the case of Poland and the Soviet Union, there was no comprehensive plan akin to the Generalplan Ost, which laid out concrete visions for how Eastern Europe would be settled and treated in the future.

For Western Europe, it is all a bit more hazy but we do have some ideas for potential future plans based upon how occupation and control was organized and what kinds of different form of occupation and control were implemented in Western Europe. While the ideas of a Lebensraum in the East, including Poland and the USSR had been present virtually from the beginning of the Nazi project, countries that were not traditionally seen within this scheme presented an initial problem; like Czechoslovakia for example, when Nazi Germany for the first time occupied a country where they couldn't argue that they were just revising Versailles or bringing Germans "home into the Reich". In this case, they settled on what can be accurately termed a colonial policy. The idea of the protectorate with the upper echelons of both policy and administration comprised of Germans while the lower echelons of administration especially being comprised of Czech people was both a pragmatic as well as a on-the-spot solution for the problem the occupation of the CSR represented in 1939.

The same event and the ideological problems that came with it, prompted influential political and legal theorist Carl Schmitt to formulate an important theory for how the Nazis would later organize Western Europe: The idea of the "völkische Großraumordnung" was born.

Schmitt's original political theory was one inspired by the American Monroe doctrine. He held that the policy of forbidding any kind of intervention by other powers in their sphere of influence they proved that the world was organized in empires who each had their allotted larger space in which they were free to do as they want. Continental Europe was Germany's space in that calculation and the vision Schmitt laid out consisted of Germany ruling Europe, Britain ruling its empire, the US ruling the American continent, and Japan ruling Asia; with none of them interfering in another power's "Großraum".

Schmitt's theory was the final version of this. Rather, it was Werner Best who furthered the theory, gave it a more "völkisch" spin, and – most importantly in this context – proposed a way of how Germany would rule in its Großraum; a way which was pretty closely adopted in further years.

Best, while often overlooked these days in terms of importance outside of academia, was really a figure who had massive influence on shaping the Third Reich as we ex-post know it. A lawyer who during his studies had been very active in the conflict between Germany and France over the Ruhr area in the early 1920s, he was part of the right-wing intellectuals circles in the Weimar Republic (including that around Ernst Jünger) and joined the NSDAP in 1930. He also joined the SS and after the Nazis' take over of power rose through the ranks of the SS and Himmler's SD by, among other things, taking part in the night of the long knives in 1934.

His first really important contribution however, came in the form of writing the new Gestapo law and thereby transforming virtually all of German policing and the role of the Gestapo: According to Best, the police was to be the doctor of an ailing racial body and thus has to take part in what he called "preventive racial crime fighting". In practice this meant that the Gestapo was from 1936 able to do basically whatever they wanted, including using Concentration Camp imprisonment as a preventive measure. It also transformed the understanding of what police men did for themselves. Not merely policing a country but being the avant garde, the spearhead of a racial ideology in the fight against all its enemies, criminal and racial. The villainous Gestapo both from media as well as from historical research of the later years of Nazi rule – that all was Werner Best's doing.

More important in this context however was his contribution to the Nazis' system of occupation in Europe. After the start of the war in 1939 and with Poland not doing too well in the fight against Germany, the question arose again on how to organize Nazi rule and Nazi occupation in Europe. While in the case of Poland, it was pretty clear what would happen, it also made the Nazis realize the problems they would face: A total and centralized control of all of Europe would be impossible. By November 1939 already around 70-80.000 German officials had been posted to govern and administer Poland alone. Germany didn't have the trained manpower to implement such a system in all of Europe but had to limit it to the East, where it was important for the Lebensraum plans, and had to find alternatives for the West.

Enter Werner Best. In the summer of 1940, shortly after the fall of France (where he would be an important person in running the occupation after his fall from grace with the SS in the same year), Best took Schmitt's theory and refined it. He wrote that part of the völkisch greater space were not states but people; that every great space was run by one of them and the involved peoples were not all equal; and that based on their worth, different peoples would occupy different rungs of the hierarchy ladder within one greater space. In practice, he proposed Germany rule Europe with four different types of regimes:

• Associative: The lightest form of rule that was indirect and a bit informal. Denmark under Nazi rule was the perfect example for this where the Nazis basically took over their foreign policy but internally the Danes had a very large autonomy such as having elections in 1943 with the Social Democrats winning.

• Supervisory: Here Germans would rule through a largely intact native civil service, which should be consulted but not given too much autonomy. This was the way it was implemented in Belgium, France and the Netherlands.

• Ruling: Here the Germans would re-shape large parts of the local bureaucracy and take a very direct control of administration and policy, leaving almost no autonomy to the natives – the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia is such a case.

• Colonial where the Germans took over the whole administration and governance for themselves down to the village mayors like in the General Government in Poland.

Of course, where which form was implemented was a question of strong racial considerations with Best: The Danes being good nordic peoples would, according to him, grow to appreciate their new rule only one step below the Germans in the new great space in Europe and thus only a very light touch was required and necessary while in case of the French, they might be Germany's enemy and not totally on par racially but it was undeniable that they were a power where it was more appropriate to control them to some degree but not fully and so forth. Of course, sometimes political realities dictated a different approach than was racially warranted such as in the Netherlands but they too, according to Best, would come around eventually and would enthusiastically join their new German overlords in building the new Nazi order in Europe.

The whole goal of this system and the Großraum idea in general was that all these states in Western Europe might retain some autonomy but would have to work politically and economically towards the goal of their hegemony in form Germany, also delivering wares, goods, and labor to the German economy. Best's plan didn't much cover the time for after the war but the basic idea behind his proposal and the world order suggested by Schmitt lays out a vision of the world in which Western Europe would have been a collection of German vassal political entities with varying degrees of autonomy but all working for the goals of Germany.

While the discussions over how the post-war order would look like did change over time and with how the war was going, this basic idea remained in place for some time. Even when the rest of France was occupied in 1943 following the Italian surrender, some of the basic stayed in place and new Nazi European order would have included these vassal states with varying degrees of autonomy and so forth.

Sources:

• Ulrich Herbert: Best. Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft 1903–1989. Bonn 1996.

• Hitler's Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe, London 2009.

• Michael Wildt: Generation des Unbedingten.