Franz L. Neumann was among the first to highlight the theoretical context of attempts to reconceptualize international law during National Socialism, as well as German ideas of geopolitics and of Volksgruppenrecht (“folk-or ethnic-group legal frameworks” based on ethnic group membership) in regards to Europe's political order. In his trailblazing study from the early 1940s, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism 1933– 1944, Neumann was already describing this theoretical triad as a kind of “German Monroe Doctrine,” thereby recognizing that beyond a political expansionist ideology, there was an attempt to establish a new international law framework in which objective rationalism and state sovereignty would give way to an ethnoterritorial conception of Grossraum (a “greater area” in geopolitics) characterized by dominance through force and power politics (Neumann 1942, 110ff.).

At the theoretical core of National Socialist thought, legal frameworks were closely tied to the categories of Volk (“folk/people” in the sense of ethnonation) and Raum (“room/space/area”), or “Blut und Boden” (“blood and soil”). In diametric opposition to minorities protections anchored in international law, the National Socialist goal was to create a legal order emanating from Staatsrecht (“state rights” or “state law”), forming a new international law framework in which the sovereignty of nation-states is to be abrogated (Neumann 1942, 127 ff.; see also Dreier 2001). The system of minorities protections, along with Europe's entire international law framework, was to be rejected, as Germany also demonstrated through its withdrawal from the League of Nations shortly after the Nazi takeover. The League's policies and the protection of minorities in international law were called an “extermination campaign against the Volksgruppen” (“folk/ethnonational groups,” sing. Volksgruppe), and even a “war of extermination” (Klauss 1937, 96).

In the National Socialist view, the necessary foundation for a wellfunctioning international law framework was not to be found in the generally accepted formula of rationalism plus sovereignty, but rather in a “shared political-ideological basic approach” grounded in a “general recognition of the völkisch principle” (völkisch meaning “Volk-centric” or “ethnonationalist”) (ibid., 107). Here, the starting point was to be found in a völkisch-defined Europe and not a “liberal-democratic-statist” one (ibid., emphasis in original).