Areas annexed by Nazi Germany
There were many areas annexed by Nazi Germany both immediately before and throughout the course of World War II. Territories that were part of Germany before the annexations were known as the "Altreich".
Adolf Hitler greeted by cheering crowds in Vienna, following the annexation of Austria into the III Reich, 15 March 1938
Execution of local Polish people in the town of Kórnik, after the German invasion of Poland, 20 October 1939
The Generalplan Ost, abbreviated GPO, was Nazi Germany's blueprint for the genocide, extermination and large-scale ethnic cleansing of Slavs, Eastern European Jews, and other indigenous peoples of Eastern Europe categorized as "Untermensch" in Nazi ideology. The campaign was a precursor to Nazi Germany's planned colonisation of Central and Eastern Europe by Germanic settlers, and it was carried out through systematic massacres, mass starvations, chattel labour, mass-rapes, child abductions, and sexual slavery.
Prisoners of the Krychów forced labor camp dig irrigation ditches for the new German latifundia of the General Plan East in 1940. Most of them, Polish Jews and some Roma people, were sent to Sobibór extermination camp afterwards.
Hess and Himmler visit a VoMi display of proposed rural German settlements in the East, March 1941.
Nazi propaganda poster from 1939 (dark grey) after the conquest of Poland. It depicts pockets of German colonists resettling into Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany from Soviet-controlled territories during the Heim ins Reich action. The outline of Poland (here superimposed in red) was missing from the original poster.
Massacre of Polish intellectuals during the mass murders in Piaśnica
