“Desk Killers”: Walter Christaller, Central Place Theory, and the Nazis

Abstract

In his novel The Screwtape Letters (1942), C. S. Lewis wrote that “the greatest evil is … conceived and ordered … by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices.” This chapter is about one of those men, the geographer Walter Christaller. He was employed by the Nazi SS and worked under Konrad Meyer in an office in Berlin’s Dahlem district as part of the Planning and Soil Department (Hauptabteilung Planung und Boden). Christaller’s task was to plan the newly Nazi-annexed territory of western Poland in conformance with his central place theory, which he set out in his doctoral thesis in the early 1930s at the University of Erlangen. For western Poland to be transformed into Christaller’s central place model, most of the region’s residents, primarily Jews and Slavs, were forced to leave; many of them were sent to their death. The now “empty space” of western Poland was “reterritorialized” as a German central place by importing Volksdeutsch immigrants. Although Christaller was not a “desk killer” in the same sense as Adolf Eichmann, he clearly played a crucial role in a project that resulted in the death of enormous numbers of innocent people.