(Mirror.)

Anglo‐American imperialism was one of the inspirations, as you should know, but it is possible that the Kingdom of Italy was the most influential:

A good example is the Reich’s Office for Spatial Planning, which was founded in 1935 and headed by Hanns Kerrl. […] As he explained in a letter to the Foreign Office (which was to help him in establishing international contacts), he and his men were interested in specific countries, ‘in particular Italy (including Abyssinia), England and the USA, but also the Netherlands’. These countries were sent a questionnaire asking for detailed information regarding the organization of their planning activities, its legal basis, problems of financing, urbanism, and their most recent settlement projects. The data from these countries were immediately made accessible to other planning bodies that were being created by the new state, such as the Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft für Raumforschung and the Forschungsdienst der Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft der Landwirtschaft, both headed since the mid 1930s by Konrad Meyer, an agronomist who subsequently became the main architect of the SS settlement plans for eastern Europe. In this context, Meyer and his colleague Paul Ritterbusch specifically referred to Italy as a leading country when it came to modern techniques of colonialism.

(Emphasis added.)