Fortress Europe (German: Festung Europa) was a military propaganda term from the Second World War which referred to the areas of Continental Europe occupied by Nazi Germany, as opposed to the free United Kingdom across the Channel. The term was used by both sides but, due to their respective geographic locations, in a very different sense.
In British phraseology, Fortress Europe meant the Battle honour accorded to Royal Air Force and allied squadrons during the Second World War, but to qualify, operations had to be made by aircraft based in the British Isles against targets in Germany, Italy and other parts of Nazi-occupied Europe, in the period from the fall of France to the Normandy invasion.
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Simultaneously, the term Festung Europa was being used by Nazi propaganda, namely to refer to Hitler's and the Wehrmacht's plans to fortify the whole of occupied Europe to prevent invasion from the British Isles. These measures included the construction of the Atlantic wall, along with reorganization of the Luftwaffe for air defense. This use of the term Fortress Europe was subsequently adopted by correspondents and historians in the English language to describe the military efforts of the Axis powers at defending the continent from the Allies.
Currently, within Europe, the most common use of the term is as a pejorative description of the state of immigration into the European Union. This can be in reference either to attitudes toward immigration, or to the system of border patrols and detention centers that are used to make illegal immigration into the European Union more difficult.[1]
Since would-be immigrants are most often of non-European ethnicity, the phrase Fortress Europe is frequently used by proponents of increased immigration as a polemic reference to Nazi racial ideology and the history of extreme or violent nationalism in European politics.[2]