Lebensraum
Lebensraum 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, Lebensraum became a geopolitical goal of the German Empire in World War I, as the core element of the Septemberprogramm 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. Lebensraum was a leading motivation of Nazi Germany to initiate World War II, and it would continue this policy until the end of the conflict.
Following Adolf Hitler's rise to power, Lebensraum became an ideological principle of Nazism and provided justification for the German territorial expansion into Central and Eastern Europe. The Nazi policy Generalplan Ost was based on its tenets. It stipulated that Germany required a Lebensraum necessary for its survival and that most of the populations of Central and Eastern Europe would have to be removed permanently, 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 Lebensraum 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 Lebensraum, especially when pursued by a racially superior society. People deemed to be part of non-Aryan races, within the territory of Lebensraum expansion, were subjected to expulsion or destruction. The eugenics of Lebensraum 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 spazio vitale and the Empire of Japan's hakkō ichiu.
Origins
In the 19th century, the term Lebensraum was used by the German geographer and biologist Oscar Peschel in his 1860 review of Charles Darwin's Origins of Species. In 1897, the geographer and ethnographer Friedrich Ratzel in his book Politische Geographie applied the word Lebensraum to describe physical geography as a factor that influences human activities in developing into a society. In 1901, Ratzel extended his thesis in his essay titled Lebensraum: A Biogeographical Study. Ratzel wrote in the time when the overseas space for colonial expansion almost ended leaving few sovereign void. The event was emphasized by the contemporary observers and later called by Michael Heffernan "global closure." 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 Lebensraum became increasingly used as a justification for the German colonization of Africa; and was an influential factor during the Herero and Nama genocide in German South West Africa, from 1904 to 1908. The ethnic cleansing of Herero and Nama people justified by claiming to be a response to an attack on German settlers and soldiers on 12 January 1904.
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 Lebensraum 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 the Second World Wars, German nationalists adopted the term Lebensraum in their political demands for the re-establishment of the German colonial empire, which had been dismembered by the Allies at Versailles. Ratzel said that the development of a people into a society was primarily influenced by their geographic situation 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 required overseas colonies to which surplus Germans ought to emigrate.
Geopolitics
Friedrich Ratzel's metaphoric concept of society as an organism—which grows and shrinks in logical relation to its Lebensraum —proved especially influential upon the Swedish political scientist and conservative politician Johan Rudolf Kjellén, who interpreted that biological metaphor as a geopolitical natural-law. In the political monograph Schweden, Kjellén coined the terms geopolitik, œcopolitik, and demopolitik 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 Staten som livsform, an earlier political-science book read by the society of Imperial Germany, for whom the concept of geopolitik acquired an ideological definition unlike the original, human-geography definition.Kjellén's geopolitical interpretation of the Lebensraum concept was adopted, expanded, and adapted to the politics of Germany by publicists of imperialism such as the militarist General Friedrich von Bernhardi and the political geographer and proponent of geopolitics Karl Haushofer. In Deutschland und der Nächste Krieg, General von Bernhardi developed Friedrich Ratzel's Lebensraum 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 Lebensraum—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 Lebensraum was a necessary means of defending Germany against cultural stagnation and the racial degeneracy of miscegenation.
Racial ideology
In the national politics of Weimar Germany, the geopolitical usage of Lebensraum 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 and the desire to reverse the dictates of the Treaty of Versailles, 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. In Mein Kampf, Hitler presented his conception of Lebensraum 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 Lebensraum 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 established Lebensraum 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. 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
In September 1914, when the German victory in the First World War appeared feasible, the German government introduced the Septemberprogramm as an official war aim, which was secretly ordered by Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, whereby, upon achieving battlefield victory, Germany would annex territories from western Poland to form the Polish Border Strip. Lebensraum would be realised by way of ethnic cleansing, the forcible removal of the local Slavic and Jewish populations, and the subsequent repopulation of the border strip with ethnic German colonists; likewise, the colonisations of Lithuania and Ukraine. However, military over-extension lost the war for Imperial Germany, and the Septemberprogramm went unrealised.In April 1915, Chancellor von Bethmann Hollweg authorised the Polish Border Strip plans in order to take advantage of the extensive territories in Eastern Europe that Germany had conquered and held since early in the war. The decisive campaigns of Imperial Germany almost realised Lebensraum in the East, especially when Bolshevik Russia unilaterally withdrew as a combatant in the "Great War" among the European great powers—the Triple Entente and the Central Powers.
In March 1918, in an effort to reform and modernise the Russian Empire into a soviet republic, the Bolshevik government agreed to the strategically onerous territorial cessions stipulated in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. As a result, Russia yielded to Germany much of the arable land of European Russia, the Baltic governorates, Belarus, Ukraine, and the Caucasus region. Despite such an extensive geopolitical victory, tactical defeat in the Western Front, strategic over-extension, and factional division in government compelled Imperial Germany to abandon the Eastern European Lebensraum gained with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in favour of the peace-terms of the Treaty of Versailles, and yielded those Russian lands to Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine.
As a casus belli for the conquest and colonisation of Polish territories as living-space and defensive-border for Imperial Germany, the Septemberprogramm derived from a foreign policy initially proposed by General Erich Ludendorff in 1914. Twenty-five years later, Nazi foreign policy resumed the cultural goal of the pursuit and realisation of German living-space at the expense of non-German peoples in Eastern Europe with the September Campaign that began the Second World War in Europe. In Germany and the Two World Wars, the German historian Andreas Hillgruber said that the territorial gains of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk were the imperial prototype for Adolf Hitler's Greater German Empire in Eastern Europe:
The Septemberprogramm documents "Lebensraum in the East" as philosophically integral to Germanic culture throughout the history of Germany; and that Lebensraum is not a racialist philosophy particular to the 20th century. As military strategy, the Septemberprogramm was unsuccessful due to its infeasibility, with too few soldiers to realise the plans during a two-front war. Politically, the Programm allowed the Imperial Government to learn the opinions of the nationalist, economic, and military elites of the German ruling class who financed and facilitated geopolitics. Nationally, the annexation and ethnic cleansing of Poland for German Lebensraum was an official and a popular subject of "nationalism-as-national-security" endorsed by German society, including the Social Democratic Party of Germany. In The Origins of the Second World War, the British historian A. J. P. Taylor wrote: