Historians have recently engaged in a heated debate about the reach and analytical value of the notion of the National Socialist Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community). The fact that the ideal of an ethnically and politically homogenous community was largely popular with Germans between 1933 and 1945 remains as uncontested as the fact that the energies released by this imaginary entity crucially contributed to an unfolding of the destructive potential of the NS regime. Past research has investigated this issue largely in terms of processes of inclusion and exclusion within the German Reich, thus risking a marginalisation of the radicalising impulses vital to German occupation and Germanisation policies, above all in Eastern Europe. This workshop starts from the premise that the National Socialist quest for Lebensraum had always involved a concrete ideal of community that cannot be analysed apart from it. The contributions focus on actors crucial for expanding the Volksgemeinschaft beyond the borders of the Reich.