Each colony would also have a shooting range and a distinctive graveyard where the living could honor the dead. It would have buildings to house local branches of the Nazi party, the SS and Hitler Youth, as well as a variety of Nazi women’s organizations. And it would have a Sportplatz, where young men and women in the community could receive physical training in a wide range of sports and gymnastics. Hitler himself had stressed the importance of such training. Sport, he had noted in Mein Kampf, would “make the individual strong, agile and bold” and “toughen him and teach him to bear hardships.” Such training, he further opined, would produce both defiant men and “women who are able to bring men into the world.”

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The colony’s wooden farmhouses would be spacious and solidly built, as befitting homes of a master race. SS planners favored a primeval housing style known as Wohnstallhaus, which dated back at least to the Roman era in Germany—and possibly earlier. One basic design called for a long, narrow building of nearly 9,500 square feet that combined both the family home and barn under one roof. The front half of the spacious building featured a downstairs parlor and a roomy kitchen, where several small children could run about freely, as well as a number of bedrooms upstairs. The back half housed the family’s stable and a barn for chickens, pigs and cattle. But the design was very flexible. SS men could add on more space as new babies arrived.

Everyone in the settlement would be expected to observe SS doctrine. Simply stated, this meant maintaining the purity of their Nordic bloodlines at all costs and producing as many children as possible. To prove the purity of its lineage, each family would be required to keep a detailed genealogical chart of its ancestors, as well as a copy of its Sippenbuch, or clan history. Moreover, settlers would be encouraged to research and display their clan symbols and family coat of arms.

Under Himmler’s direction, the plans rapidly took shape, and in 1937 the SS set to work founding its first model colony in the old, historic village of Mehrow, east of Berlin. It purchased part of a large estate from the daughter of a Berlin industrialist for a reported 1 million Reichsmarks, the equivalent of some $5.2 million today. Officials then proceeded to slice the property up among just 12 SS families. The largest block of land—some 100 acres—was given to an SS doctor. Smaller parcels then went to men of lower ranks. Before long, medieval-looking farmhouses dotted the landscape, each inhabited by an SS family.

But the SS could not hope to buy land enough to settle all its officers and men in rural bliss in Germany and Austria before the war. The costs were simply too steep. Still, Himmler had great hopes for the future, particularly after Germany claimed a stunning victory in Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union in 1941.

During the summer of 1942, senior SS officers were struck by the high spirits of their leader. Himmler had taken great pleasure in the fall of Sevastopol on July 4, which significantly expanded German control of the Crimean Peninsula in the Ukraine. In the glow of victory, he began focusing his energies once again on the massive colonization project that had been turning and evolving in his mind for more than a decade. With its seemingly invincible army, the Third Reich had swallowed up much of Eastern Europe and an impressive swath in the western Soviet Union, and Himmler hoped to transform the richest farmlands in the new territories into feudal estates ruled by SS or Nazi party overlords. After organizing the mobile execution squads in Russia and overseeing the design of the first death camp in Poland, he welcomed the opportunity to turn his attention to the rural paradise he intended to build.

So in late January 1942, Himmler began working closely with a senior planner and agricultural scientist, Konrad Meyer, to develop a detailed blueprint to present to Hitler. The two men proposed planting three large German colonies in the East. One would encompass Leningrad and the lands directly south; the second would straddle northern Poland, Lithuania and southeastern Latvia; and the third would embrace the Crimea and the rich fields of southeastern Ukraine. Himmler estimated that it would take the Reich 20 years to completely “Germanize” those three regions. SS examiners would first have to select individuals living in the regions that they deemed racially valuable. These would be permitted to stay. Security forces would then expel all Slavs and other “racially unwanted” groups, killing most and enslaving the rest as “helots.”

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