Karl Haushofer
Karl Ernst Haushofer was a German general, professor, geographer, and diplomat. Haushofer's concept of Geopolitik influenced the ideological development of Adolf Hitler and Rudolf Hess. During Hess and Hitler's incarceration by the Weimar Republic after the Beer Hall Putsch, Haushofer visited Landsberg Prison to teach and mentor both Hess and Hitler. Haushofer also coined the political use of the term Lebensraum, which Hitler also used to justify both crimes against peace and genocide. At the same time, however, Gen. Haushofer's half-Jewish wife and their children were categorized as Mischlinge under the Nuremberg Laws. Their son, Albrecht Haushofer, was issued a German Blood Certificate through the influence of Rudolf Hess, but was arrested in 1944 over his involvement with the July 20th plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler and overthrow the Nazi Party. During the last days of the war, Albrecht Haushofer was summarily executed by the SS for his role in the German Resistance.
After being interrogated by Fr. Edmund A. Walsh, who recommended to Robert H. Jackson that Haushofer be prosecuted at the Nuremberg Trials for complicity in Nazi war crimes, Karl and Martha Haushofer died together in a suicide pact outside of their home in the American Zone of Occupied Germany.
Life and early career
Haushofer belonged to a family of artists and scholars. He was born in Munich to Max Haushofer Jr, a well-known professor of economics, politician and author of both academic and literary works, and Adele Haushofer. His grandfather was the landscape painter Max Haushofer Sr. On his graduation from the Munich Gymnasium, in 1887, Haushofer entered the 1st Field Artillery regiment "Prinzregent Luitpold" of the Bavarian Army and completed Kriegsschule, Artillerieschule and War Academy . In 1896, he married Martha Mayer-Doss whose father was Jewish. They had two sons, Albrecht Haushofer and Heinz Haushofer. In 1903, he accepted a teaching position at the Bavarian War Academy.In November 1908, Haushofer was ordered to Tokyo as a military attaché to study the Imperial Japanese Army and as a military advisor in artillery instruction. He travelled with his wife via India and South East Asia and arrived in February 1909. He was received by Emperor Meiji and became acquainted with many important people in politics and the armed forces. In autumn 1909, he travelled with his wife for a month to Korea and Manchuria on the occasion of a railway construction. In June 1910, they returned to Germany via Russia and arrived one month later. However, shortly after returning to Bavaria, he began to suffer from a severe lung disease and was given a leave from the army for three years.
During his convalescence, from 1911 to 1913, Haushofer would work on his doctorate of philosophy from Munich University for a thesis on Japan titled Dai Nihon, Betrachtungen über Groß-Japans Wehrkraft, Weltstellung und Zukunft. He established himself as one of Germany’s foremost experts regarding the Far East, and co-founded the geopolitical monthly Zeitschrift für Geopolitik, which he would co-edit until it was suspended towards the end of World War II.
Haushofer continued his career as a professional soldier after the annexation of Bavaria by Germany, serving in the army of Imperial Germany and returning to teach War History at the Military Academy in Munich.
During World War I, he commanded a brigade on the Western Front. But he was disillusioned with Germany's readiness for the tests of warfare.
When the United States entered the war, it cemented two especially bitter hatreds for Haushofer. The first was for the U.S. America was a "deceitful, ravenous, hypocritical, shameless beast of prey," he wrote. "Americans are truly the only people on this world that I regard with a deep, instinctive hatred."
At the same time, Haushofer developed an especially virulent strain of anti-semitic feeling. In letters to his wife Martha, whose own father was Jewish, Haushofer wrote of Jewish "treason against Volk, race and country." He repeated false but common slanders alleging that Jews declined to fight for their country of citizenship, and were guilty of war profiteering.
The solution to these ills besetting Germany, he declared, would be a powerful and charismatic leader. "A man! A kingdom, an imperial crown for a man worthy of the name!" "You see how ready for a Caesar I am," he wrote in another letter to Martha, "and what kind of a good instrument I would be for a Caesar, if we had one and if he knew how to make use of me."
Haushofer would both identify and influence Germany's contemporary autocracy. After retiring from the army with the rank of Generalmajor in 1919, he forged a friendship with the young Rudolf Hess, who became his scientific assistant and later rose to be the deputy leader of the Nazi Party, second in authority only to Hitler.
In 1919, Haushofer successfully defended his second dissertation, and became Privatdozent for political geography at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and was made a professor in 1933, although he declined a formal position and salary, because that would have affected his military pension.
''Geopolitik'' and relationship with Hitler
Haushofer entered academia with the aim of restoring and regenerating Germany. He believed the Germans' lack of geographical knowledge and geopolitical awareness to be a major cause of Germany’s defeat in World War I, because Germany had found itself with a disadvantageous alignment of allies and enemies. His specialty was to combine the fields of geography, history, economics, demography, political science, and anthropology into a new discipline that came to be called Geopolitik. Haushofer himself could not plainly describe this "new science," but its principal thrust was to view the state as a person or organism, shaped over time by its unique geography and history into a specific national character. In this context he coined the term Lebensraum - "room to live" - to describe the territory that a healthy and expanding state needed to sustain its population. This notion would be adopted by Hitler and the Nazi party in its most aggressive and militaristic interpretation.In 1923, Hitler was jailed following his failed "Beer Hall Putsch," and Rudolf Hess surrendered to be imprisoned alongside his leader in Landsberg Prison.
Haushofer became a teacher of politics and philosophy to both Hess and Hitler. According to scholar Holger Herwig, "Like a dry sponge, Hitler soaked up what Haushofer offered."
Haushofer's son Albrecht considered that his father's most powerful contribution to Hess and Hitler was his own substantial credibility as a soldier and scholar: "One has to imagine what it meant in the Bavaria of that time," he wrote, "when a man of my father’s stature and popularity constantly traveled out to Landsberg."
From 1925 to 1931 and from 1933 to 1939, Haushofer broadcast monthly radio lectures on the international political situation. That Weltpolitischer Monatsbericht made him a household name in contemporary Germany, and he came to be known in circles far removed from academia. He was a founding member of the Deutsche Akademie, of which he served as president from 1934 to 1937. He was a prolific writer, publishing hundreds of articles, reviews, commentaries, obituaries and books, many of which were on Asian topics, and he arranged for many leaders in the Nazi party and in the German military to receive copies of his works.
After the establishment of the German Nazi government, Haushofer remained friendly with Hess, who protected Haushofer's wife from the racial laws of the Nazis, which deemed her a "half-Jew". During the prewar years, Haushofer was instrumental in linking Japan to the Axis powers, acting in accordance with the theories in his book Geopolitics of the Pacific Ocean.
Under Hitler's regime, Haushofer became both rich and immensely influential, but his influence and his public profile shrank abruptly after his patron, Rudolf Hess, flew to Scotland in May 1941 in a doomed effort to make peace with the United Kingdom. Hess was purged from the Nazi Party, and the Haushofer family, with its close relationship with Hess and its Jewish background, once again came under suspicion.
In 1944 Haushofer's son Albrecht was implicated in the July 20 Plot to assassinate Hitler. Karl was arrested on 28 July 1944, and imprisoned for a month at Dachau before he was released.
Albrecht went into hiding but was arrested on 7 December 1944 and put into the Moabit prison in Berlin. Karl wrote a personal letter to Hitler pleading for mercy for his son, but never sent it. During the night of 22–23 April 1945, with only days remaining in the war, he and other prisoners, among them Klaus Bonhoeffer, were walked out of the prison by an SS death squad and shot on the orders of Joseph Goebbels. When his brother Heinz found his body, Albrecht was still clutching a sheaf of papers on which he had written dozens of poems in his last days trying to make sense of his life, his father's work, and the war. Those eighty poems were eventually published as The Moabit Sonnets. In the thirty-eighth sonnet, titled "The Father," Albrecht indicts his father for helping to unleash the horrors of Nazi brutality:
Karl Haushofer was devastated by Albrecht's death, yet even though the Nazis had murdered his son and their war had left Germany in ruins around him, Haushofer continued to blame "New York's finance Jews" for the destruction of his beloved Munich.
He was repeatedly arrested by the American forces he so detested. Beginning on 24 September 1945, Karl Haushofer was informally interrogated by Fr. Edmund A. Walsh on behalf of Nuremberg Trials prosecutor Robert H. Jackson to determine whether Haushofer should also stand trial. Fr. Walsh ultimately reported to Jackson that Haushofer was both legally and morally guilty of complicity in Nazi war crimes. Citing "the role of geopolitics in corrupting education into a preparation for war", Walsh accused Haushofer and his associates of being "basically as guilty as the better-known war criminals." In his later memoir of the Nuremberg Trials, Walsh further alleged that "The tragedy of Karl Haushofer" was his participation in the "nationalizing" of academic scholarship and of turning Geopolitik into a weapon supplying "an allegedly scientific basis and justification for international brigandage."