To understand how and why Germans imagined the most radical vision of illiberal permanent security, this chapter suggests that the “political imaginary” offers historians a fruitful way to integrate human agency with historical processes. It shows how an imperialist political imaginary functioned in sections of the German political class between the 1890s and 1930s. Then it examines how Adolf Hitler utilized this imaginary for his own purposes: his raiding of the imperial archive to construct permanent security for Germans. Fearing Germany’s destruction due to its catastrophic territorial and biopolitical losses after the First World War, he concluded that exploitation and genocide had attended European imperial expansion over the centuries. Jews figured as the ultimate enemy in his and Nazi thinking. We will also see that, as a project of imperial conquest, the Nazi empire entailed a consciously radical combination of imperial conquest and settler colonialism.