Propaganda cartográfica en la Alemania de Weimar

Abstract

The cartographic representations that were developed in Germany after the First World War offered to Berlin a scientific base to claim the sovereignty of the country on the territories yielded to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Belgium and France. They tried to materialize a serious political speech, conceived to have diplomatic applications. Nazi propaganda, nevertheless, did not accept at all the work of the geographers. Both the linguistic-ethnographic concepts and the geopolitical were not enough to support the New European Order to which Hitler was aspiring. Before National Socialist incorporated it into the array of its propaganda, the criteria used by the cartographers of the immediate postwar were replaced with cultural and racial elements. The concepts that stressed the human factor were recaptured so it was possible to give form to two important slogans: the racial and cultural superiority of the Germans and the imminent threat of a Slavonic invasion. In addition, this manipulation allowed to justify and to legitimize a Foreign Policy that paved the way to the Second World War.