German Plans
The short-term political objectives for Ostland differed from those for the Ukraine, the Caucasus or the Moscow regions. The Baltic lands, which were to be joined together with Belarus (to serve as a spacious hinterland of the coastal areas), would be organised as one Germanized protectorate prior to union with Germany itself in the near future. Rosenberg said that these lands had a fundamentally "European" character, resulting from 700 years of history under Swedish, Danish, and German rule, and should therefore provide Germany with "Lebensraum", an opinion shared by Hitler and other leading Nazis. The Belorussians, however, were considered by the scholars of the RMfdbO as "little and weak peasant people" dwelling in "folkish indifference", but also "the most harmless and because of this the least dangerous for us of all the peoples in the Eastern Space" and an ideal object of exploitation. Rosenberg suggested that Belarus will be in the future an appropriate reception area of various undesirable population elements from the Baltic part of Ostland and German-occupied Poland. He also toyed with the idea of turning the country into a huge nature reserve.
The regime planned to encourage the post-war settlement of Germans to the region, seeing it as a region traditionally inhabited by Germans (see the Teutonic Order and the Northern Crusades) that had been overrun by Slavs. During the war itself in Pskov province ethnic Germans were resettled from Romania with some Dutch. The settlement of Dutch settlers was encouraged by the Nederlandsche Oost-Compagnie, a Dutch-German organisation.
Historical German and Germanic-sounding placenames were also retained (or introduced) for many Baltic cities, such as Reval (Tallinn), Kauen (Kaunas), and Dünaburg (Daugavpils), among many others. To underscore the region's planned incorporation into Germany some Nazi ideologists further suggested the future use of the names Peipusland for Estonia and Dünaland for Latvia once they had become part of Germany. The ancient Russian city of Novgorod, the easternmost foreign trading post of the Hanseatic League, was to be renamed Holmgard.
During the occupation, the Germans also published a "local" German-language newspaper, the Deutsche Zeitung im Ostland.
Read more about this topic: Reichskommissariat Ostland
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