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The areas in light green were the fully annexed territories, while those in dark green were the partially incorporated territories. The territory of Germany before 1938 is shown in blue. 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 ...
An area from the eastern part of West Prussia and the southern part of East Prussia Warmia and Masuria, to Poland (see East Prussian plebiscite); the majority of the Slavic Masurians voted to remain part of Germany. The Saar area was to be under the control of the League of Nations for 15 years, after which a vote between France and Germany ...
Yugoslav [Slovenian] areas annexed Upper Carniola annexation to Reichsgau Kärnten; Lower Styria annexation to Reichsgau Steiermark; German planned annexations Civilian occupation regime of western and northern territories Reichskommissariat Niederlande (implemented in 1940 as planned annexation of Greater Netherlands in the Westland Gau)
Gau is an archaic Germanic term for a region within a country, often a former or actual province, and used in Medieval times as roughly corresponding to an English shire.The term was revived by the Nazi Party in the 1920s as the name given to the regional associations of the party in Weimar Germany, based mainly along state and district lines.
Germany went from a territory of 468,787 km 2 [4] before the 1938 annexation of Austria to 357,022 km 2 [5] after the 1990 reunification of Germany, a loss of 24%. [6] Despite its acquisition of the formerly German territory, the war also saw Poland's territory reduced by about 20% overall because of its losses in the east to the Soviets.
After 1933, when Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany, desire for unification could be identified with the Nazis, for whom it was an integral part of the Nazi "Heim ins Reich" ("back home to the realm") concept, which sought to incorporate as many Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans outside Germany) as possible into a "Greater Germany". [7]
The occupied Rhineland made up 6.5% of Germany's total area and had a population of about seven million. While the negotiations for the Treaty of Versailles were in progress, the region was under a state of siege and the number of occupation troops stood at approximately 240,000 (220,000 French and 20,000 Belgian).
As a result, Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia lost about 38% of their combined area to Germany, with some 3.2 million German and 750,000 Czech inhabitants. Hungary, in turn, received 11,882 km 2 (4,588 sq mi) in southern Slovakia and southern Carpathian Ruthenia; according to a 1941 census, about 86.5% of the population in this territory was Hungarian.