Drang nach Osten
German nationalists of the 19th and 20th centuries used the term Drang nach Osten ("Striving towards the East") to express the expansion of Germany, German states and German settlement, that led to the conquest of former Slavic and Baltic areas by Germany from the Middle Ages to 1943.
They saw this movement towards the East (questionably) as a proof of German vitality.
However, Slavic people, who also used the German language and learned German concepts at the time, perceived the idea as the major threat to their national security. The idea, as put into practice, diverged from its historical roots.
A definitive halt to the idea of the Drang nach Osten came during World War II, after Nazi Germany had invaded the Soviet Union in 1941.
Nevertheless, the Nazi officials used it as ground for the expulsions of 800,000 Poles from Warsaw to concentration camps after defeat of Warsaw Uprising 1944, caused 200,000 deaths. The milion city of Warsaw was ordered to be completely demolished on the personal order of Hitler, completed in 80%. Himmler stated that the Poles had been an obstacle for German Eastern expansion for the last 700 years, and that the aim was to remove that obstacle permanently.
Decisions made at the Potsdam conference in 1945, especially as relating to the Oder-Neisse line, rolled back the Drang nach Osten and redesignated German territories within the approximate Germanic borders of the year Generalplan Ost
Drang Nach Osten! (1974) was the first publication of Game Designers' Workshop (GDW), a wargame/simulation of Operation Barbarossa, Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II. The title was inspired by the concept described above, and can also be interpreted more literally as the "Eastward rush" of unleashing the Blitzkrieg upon the USSR.
Originally conceived as the first of a trilogy of games covering the entire war between Germany and the USSR, the game ultimately inspired an attempt to model all of World War II on a grand scale, called the Europa series. (That endeavor is still in progress after three decades, but far from complete.) Drang Nach Osten! (often abbreviated as DNO) was superseded in 1984 by a greatly revised and expanded edition renamed to Fire in the East (FitE). As of this writing a third edition tentatively renamed yet again to Total War (TW) is in development by GRD Games under a license from
