2 PARIS, 1937: COLONIAL QUESTIONS AND PEACE 169which was ‘to link men to the national soil,’ opposed itself to the inter-
national orientation of Germany’s pre-war commercial policy of which
the old colonial policy was an aspect.^287 Maroger observed that the
manifestations of these views, which were numerous, betrayed the pro-
found opposition in National Socialist philosophy between ‘the cult of
“vital energy” and intellectualism, between Germanic nationalism and
universalism.’^288
The new tendencies abroad in Germany demanded a new German
colonial theory and, according to Maroger, it was above all the Academic
Colonial League, (Akademischer Kolonialbund), a body founded in
1925 and which grouped together professors and students, that was
responsible for its elaboration. Maroger observed that in the years 1935
and 1936, the Academic Colonial League was particularly active in mod-
ifying the object and methods of the traditional German colonial policy.
A leading member of this group was Diedrich Westermann, an ethnogra-
pher who advised the National Socialist Party on racial politics. The edi-
tor of a monograph submitted to the conference on peaceful change for
which Berber wrote the preface, Westermann had elaborated a colonial
theory for the Third Reich according to the racial principles espoused by
the regime. Another leading member was Carl Troll, a geographer who
directed the Institute of Colonial and Overseas Geography in Berlin, a
professor in the Department of Economic Geography at the Institute
and Museum of Ocean Science at the University of Berlin and editor
in chief of Kolonial Rundschau. The school of thought associated with
Troll pointed to the economic and demographic obstacles to mass emi-
gration to colonies.^289 Maroger summarised the new German colonial
thinking as developed by the various members of the Academic Colonial
League as follows:
(^287) Ibid.
(^288) Ibid.
(^289) Maroger, La question des matières premières et les revendications coloniales, 23–4.
For interesting portraits of Diedrich Westermann and Carl Troll, see respectively Peter
Keillaway, ‘Diedrich Westermann and the Ambiguities of Colonial Science in the Inter-War
Era,’ Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 45, no. 6 (2017): 871–93, and K. W.
Butzer, ‘Practicing geography in a totalitarian state: (Re)casting Carl Troll as a Nazi collab-
orator?,’ Erde 135, no. 2 (2004): 223–31.