(, ) is a German concept of expansionism and Völkisch nationalism, the philosophy and policies of which were common to German politics from the 1890s to the 1940s. First popularized around 1901, [Also in:] became a geopolitical goal of the German Empire in World War I (1914–1918), as the core element of the of territorial expansion. The most extreme form of this ideology was promoted and initiated by the Nazi Party, that had ruled Nazi Germany, whose ultimate goal of which was to establish a Greater German Reich. was a leading motivation of Nazi Germany to initiate World War II, and it would continue this policy until the end of the conflict.Woodruff D. Smith. The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism. Oxford University Press. p. 84.
Following Adolf Hitler's rise to power, became an ideological principle of Nazism and provided justification for the German territorial expansion into Central and Eastern Europe.Allan Bullock & Stephen Trombley, ed. "Lebensraum." The New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought (1999), p. 473. The Nazi policy () was based on its tenets. It stipulated that Germany required a necessary for its survival and that most of the populations of Central and Eastern Europe would have to be removed permanently (either through mass deportation to Siberia, extermination, or enslavement), including Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Belarusian, Czech, and other Slavic nations considered non-Aryan. The Nazi government aimed at repopulating these lands with Germanic colonists in the name of during and following World War II. Entire populations were ravaged by starvation; any agricultural surplus was used to feed Germany. The Jewish population was to be exterminated outright.
Hitler's strategic program for Greater Germany was based on the belief in the power of , especially when pursued by a racially superior society. People deemed to be part of non-Aryan races, within the territory of expansion, were subjected to expulsion or destruction. The eugenics of assumed it to be the right of the German Aryan master race () to remove the indigenous people in the name of their own living space. They took inspiration for this concept from outside Germany, particularly the European colonization of North America. Hitler and Nazi officials took a particular interest in manifest destiny, and attempted to replicate it in occupied Europe. Nazi Germany also supported other Axis powers' expansionist ideologies such as Fascist Italy's and the Empire of Japan's .
Origins
In the 19th century, the term was used by the German geographer and biologist Oscar Peschel in his 1860 review of Charles Darwin's Origins of Species (1859), which had recently been published in Germany. In this context, Peschel employed the term to describe the specific natural region or habitat in which a particular species—or, by extension, a people—emerged and developed.Michael Heffernan, " On the Origins of European Geopolitics; 1890–1920", Geopolitical Traditions: A Century of Geopolitical Thought, (eds. Klaus Dodds, & David A. Atkinson, London & New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 45. In 1897, the geographer and ethnographer Friedrich Ratzel in his book applied the word ("living space") to describe physical geography as a factor that influences human activities in developing into a society.Holger H. Herwig, "Geopolitik: Haushofer, Hitler and Lebensraum", Geopolitics, Geography and Strategy (eds. Colin Gray & Geoffrey Sloan, London & Portland: Frank Cass, 1999), p. 220. In 1901, Ratzel extended his thesis in his essay titled Lebensraum: A Biogeographical Study.The Columbia Encyclopedia, 5th Ed., (1993). pp. 2282–2283. Ratzel wrote at a time when the overseas space for colonial expansion almost ended, leaving few sovereign void, a situation which was emphasized by contemporary observers,Halford J. Mackinder, (1904). "The Geographical Pivot of History." (London: J. Murray).Turner, Frederick Jackson (1893). The Significance of the Frontier in American History (Annual Report of the American Historical Association). and later referred to as "global closure" by Michael Heffernan.Heffernan, Michael (2002). "The Politics of the Map in the Early Twentieth Century", Cartography and Geographic Information Science, vol 29 (3): p 207. The latter concept is reflected in the main point of the work:
The same, Ratzel continued, applies to "the struggle of nations that we call battles" and "in a narrow space the struggle becomes desperate." Ratzel pointed to historical precedent of drang nach osten in the Middle Ages, when the social and economic pressures of rapid population growth in the German states had led to a steady colonization of Germanic peoples in Eastern Europe.
Between 1886 and 1914, became increasingly used as a justification for the German colonization of Africa, and was an influential factor in the causing of the Herero and Nama genocide in German South West Africa, from 1904 to 1908.
During the First World War, the Allied naval blockade of the Central Powers caused food shortages in Germany, and resources from German colonies in Africa were unable to slip past the blockade; this caused support to rise during the war for a that would expand Germany eastward into Russia to gain control of their resources to prevent such a situation from occurring in the future. In the period between the First and Second World Wars, German nationalists adopted the term in their political demands for the re-establishment of the German colonial empire, which had been dismembered by the Allies at Versailles.Vincent, C. Paul (1997). A Historical Dictionary Of Germany's Weimar Republic, 1918–1933. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. 511–513. Ratzel said that the development of a people into a society was primarily influenced by their geographic situation (habitat) and that a society that successfully adapted to one geographic territory would naturally and logically expand the boundaries of their nation into another territory. Yet, to resolve German overpopulation, Ratzel pointed out that Imperial Germany (1871–1918) required overseas colonies to which surplus Germans ought to emigrate.Wanklyn, Harriet. Friedrich Ratzel: A Biographical Memoir and Bibliography. London: Cambridge University Press. (1961) pp. 36–40.
Geopolitics Friedrich Ratzel's metaphoric concept of society as an organism—which grows and shrinks in logical relation to its (habitat)—proved especially influential upon the Swedish political scientist and conservative politician Johan Rudolf Kjellén (1864–1922), who interpreted that biological metaphor as a geopolitical natural-law.Encyclopædia Britannica, 15th Ed., vol. 9, p. 955. In the political monograph (1917; Sweden), Kjellén coined the terms (the conditions and problems of a state that arise from its geographic territory), (the economic factors that affect the power of the state), and (the social problems that arise from the racial composition of the state) to explain the political particulars to be considered for the successful administration and governing of a state. Moreover, he had a great intellectual influence upon the politics of Imperial Germany, especially with (1916; The State as a Life-form), an earlier political-science book read by the society of Imperial Germany, for whom the concept of acquired an ideological definition unlike the original, human-geography definition.Encyclopædia Britannica, 15th Ed., vol. 6, p. 901.
Kjellén's geopolitical interpretation of the concept was adopted, expanded, and adapted to the politics of Germany by publicists of imperialism such as the militarist General Friedrich von Bernhardi (1849–1930) and the political geographer and proponent of geopolitics Karl Haushofer (1869–1946). In (1911; Germany and the Next War), General von Bernhardi developed Friedrich Ratzel's concept as a racial struggle for living space, explicitly identified Eastern Europe as the source of a new, national habitat for the German people, and said that the next war would be expressly for acquiring —all in fulfillment of the "biological necessity" to protect German racial supremacy. Vanquishing the Slavic and the Latin races was deemed necessary because "without war, inferior or decaying races would easily choke the growth of healthy, budding elements" of the German race—thus, the war for was a necessary means of defending Germany against cultural stagnation and the racial degeneracy of miscegenation.Evans, Richard J. The Coming of the Third Reich (2004) p. 35. .
Racial ideology
In the national politics of Weimar Germany, the geopolitical usage of is credited to Karl Ernst Haushofer and his Institute of Geopolitics, in Munich, especially the ultra-nationalist interpretation of it, which was used as a justification for the desire to avenge Germany's military defeat at the end of the First World War (1914–18) and the desire to reverse the dictates of the Treaty of Versailles (1919), which reduced Germany geographically, economically, and militarily. Hitler said that the Nazi geopolitics of "inevitable expansion" would reverse overpopulation, provide natural resources, and uphold German national honor.Stephen J. Lee. Europe, 1890–1945. p. 237. In (1925; My Struggle), Hitler presented his conception of as the philosophic basis for the Greater Germanic Reich that was destined to colonize Eastern Europe—especially Ukraine in the Soviet Union—and so resolve the problems of overpopulation, and that the European states had to accede to his geopolitical demands.
The Nazi Party's usages of the term were explicitly racial, to justify the mystical right of the racially superior Germanic peoples () to fulfill their cultural destiny at the expense of racially inferior peoples (), such as the Slavs of Poland, Russia, Ukraine, and the other non–Germanic peoples of "the East". Based upon Johan Rudolf Kjellén's geopolitical interpretation of Friedrich Ratzel's human-geography term, the Nazi regime (1933–45) established as the racist rationale of the foreign policy by which they began the Second World War, on 1 September 1939, in an effort to realise the Greater Germanic Reich at the expense of the societies of Eastern Europe.
Prussian policy Some Prussian politicians were increasingly thinking in terms of Lebensraum by 1907.Woodruff D. Smith, Professor of History, University of Texas, S.A. (1989). The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism. United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. p. 126. In 1902, the Prussian government had already allocated 200,000,000 ℳ︁ for purposes of German colonization of Polish portions of eastern Prussia. These funds were intended to support the creation of settlements by acquiring Polish estates. By 1907, Prussian Chancellor Bülow was promoting bills that explicitly called for the forced sale of Polish estates. A bill in late 1907 asked for another $100,000,000 for expropriations.
In 1903, the Prussian authorities tried a Polish countess for "presenting a false heir" for an estate near Wróblewo. The case, tried in Berlin, generated crowds of people and police. Observers expressed concern that Prussian "race partiality" would result in a guilty verdict.
First World War nationalist premise