Lebensraum

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Lebensraum (help·info) (German for "habitat" or literally "living space") served as a major motivation for Nazi Germany's territorial aggression. In his book Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler detailed his belief that the German people needed Lebensraum – for a Großdeutschland, land, and raw materials – and that it should be taken in the East. It was the stated policy of the Nazis to kill, deport, Germanize or enslave the Polish, and later also Russian and other Slavic populations, and to repopulate the land with reinrassig (racially pure) Germanic peoples. The entire urban population was to be exterminated by starvation, thus creating an agricultural surplus to feed Germany and allowing their replacement by a German upper class.

Contents 1 Origins 2 Implementation 3 Historical perspective 4 See also 5 Notes 6 External links

[edit] Origins

The idea of a Germanic people without sufficient space dates back to long before Adolf Hitler brought it to prominence. The term Lebensraum in this sense was coined by Friedrich Ratzel in 1897, and was used as a slogan in Germany referring to the unification of the country and the acquisition of colonies, based on the English and French models. Ratzel believed that the development of a people was primarily influenced by their geographical situation and that a people that successfully adapted to one location would proceed naturally to another. These thoughts can be seen in his studies of zoology and the study of adaptation^[1]. This expansion to fill available space, he claimed, was a natural and necessary feature of any healthy species.^[2]

These beliefs were furthered by scholars of the day, including Karl Haushofer and General Friedrich von Bernhardi. In von Bernhardi's 1912 book Germany and the Next War, he expanded upon Ratzel's hypotheses and, for the first time, explicitly identified Eastern Europe as a source of new space. According to him, war, with the express purpose of achieving Lebensraum, was a distinct "biological necessity." As he explained with regard to the Latin and Slavic races, "Without war, inferior or decaying races would easily choke the growth of healthy budding elements." The quest for Lebensraum was more than just an attempt to resolve potential demographic problems: it was a necessary means of defending the German race against stagnation and degeneration."^[3]

In 1914, the concept of Lebensraum was endorsed secretly by the Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg and the rest of the German government as a war aim in World War I. Documents discovered by the German historian Fritz Fischer have established that in the event of a German victory, the policy of the German government was to annex Congress Poland, expel the entire Polish population, both Catholic and Jewish, and in their place settle millions of Germans as a part of a scheme for the German colonization of Eastern Europe^[4][5]. The significance of Fischer's discovery, as the Australian historian John Moses has noted, is that the goal of winning lebensraum was already German policy long before 1933 and thus cannot be seen, as some German historians have argued, as solely Adolf Hitler's personal brain-child^[6]

As the British historian A. J. P. Taylor noted in his 1963 forward "Second Thoughts" to his 1961 book The Origins of the Second World War:

It is equally obvious that Lebensraum always appeared as one element in these bluprints. This was not an original idea of Hitler's. It was commonplace at the time. Volk ohne Raum (People Without Space) for instance, by Hans Grimm sold much better than Mein Kampf when it was published in 1928. For that matter, plans for acquiring new territory were much aired in Germany during the First World War. It used to be thought that these were the plans of a few crack-pot theorisers or of extremist organisations. Now we know better. In 1961 a German professor [Fritz Fischer] reported the results of his investigations into German war aims. These were indeed a "blueprint for aggression" or as the professor called them "a grasp at world power": Belgium under German control, the French iron fields annxed to Germany, and, what is more, Poland and the Ukraine to be cleared of their inhabitants and resettled with Germans. These plans were not merely the work of the German General Staff. They were endorsed by the German Foreign Office and by the "good German", Bethmann Hollweg.^[7]

The German Empire planned to annex territory in both Lithuania and Poland for direct colonization by German colonists after forcible removal of Polish and Lithuanian population. As early as April 1915, the Polish Border Strip plan against Poland, which was first suggested by General Erich Ludendorff in 1914, was approved as a German war aim by the Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg. The German historian Andreas Hillgruber argued that the foreign policy of General Ludendorff, with its demand for lebensraum to be seized for Germany in Eastern Europe during World War I, was the prototype for German policy in World War II^[8]. Lebensraum almost became a reality in 1918 during World War I. The new Communist regime of Russia concluded the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany, ending Russian participation in the war in exchange for the surrender of huge swathes of land, including the Baltic territories, Belarus, Ukraine, and the Caucasus.^[9] However, unrest at home and defeat on the Western Front forced Germany to abandon these favorable terms in favor of the Treaty of Versailles, by which the newly acquired eastern territories were agreed to sacrifice the land to Lithuania, Poland, and new nations such as Estonia or Latvia, and a series of short-lived independent states in Ukraine.

The desire for lebensraum was a key tenet of several nationalist and extremist groups in post-World War I Germany, notably the Nazi Party under Adolf Hitler. As the American historian Gerhard Weinberg noted, German demands for territorial revision went beyond merely regaining land lost under the Treaty of Versailles, and instead embraced calls for the German conquest and colonization of all Eastern Europe, regardless of whatever the land in question had belonged to Germany before 1918 or not^[10] Likewise, the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper argued that the goal of overthrowing Versailles was only a prelude to seizing Lebensraum in Eastern Europe for Germany with no regard as to where Germany's 1914 frontiers had been^[11]. In Mein Kampf, Hitler was to write:

Without consideration of traditions and prejudices, Germany must find the courage to gather our people and their strength for an advance along the road that will lead this people from its present restricted living space to new land and soil, and hence also free it from the danger of vanishing from the earth or of serving others as a slave nation.

The National Socialist Movement must strive to eliminate the disproportion between our population and our area—viewing this latter as a source of food as well as a basis for power politics—between our historical past and the hopelessness of our present impotence.^[12]

The official German history of World War II was to conclude that the conquest of Lebensraum was for Hitler and the rest of the National Socialists the most important German foreign policy goal^[13]. At his first meeting with all of the leading generals and admirals of the Reich on February 3, 1933, Hitler spoke of "conquest of Lebensraum in the East and its ruthless Germanization" as his ultimate foreign policy objectives^[14]. For Hitler, the land which would provide sufficient Lebensraum for Germany was the Soviet Union, which for Hitler was both conveniently a nation that possessed vast and rich agricultural land and was inhabited by Hitler saw as Slavic untermenschen (sub-humans) ruled over by what Hitler regarded as a gang of blood-thirsty, but grossly incompetent Jewish revolutionaries^[15]. In Hitler's view, the idea of restoring the 1914 borders of the Reich was absurd as those borders did not provide sufficient Lebensraum; only an foreign policy that aimed at the conquest of the proper quantity of Lebensraum would justify the necessary sacrifices that war entailed^[16] In Hitler’s view, history was dominated by a merciless struggle between different “races” for survival, and “races” that possessed large amounts of territory were innately stronger then those that did not^[17]. Eberhard Jäckel has expressed a Primat der Außenpolitik (“primacy of foreign policy”) interpration of German foreign policy as opposed to the Primat der Innenpolitik ("primacy of domestic politics") thesis favored by some left-wing historians such as Timothy Mason. Jäckel wrote that since Hitler regarded the conquest of Lebensraum as his most important project, and since that could only be accomplished through war, domestic policy comprised simply preparing the nation for the inevitable struggle for Lebensraum^[18]

There are, however, many historians such as Martin Broszat and Hans Mommsen who dismiss this "intentionalist" approach, and argue that the concept was actually an "ideological metaphor" in the early days of Nazism.^[19]

[edit] Implementation

The practical implementation of the Lebensraum concept began in 1939 with Germany's occupation of Poland. Later, the ideology was also a major factor in Hitler's launching of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941. The Nazis hoped to turn large areas of Soviet territory into German settlement areas as part of Generalplan Ost.^[20] Developing these ideas, Nazi theorist Alfred Rosenberg proposed that the Nazi administrative organization in lands to be conquered from the Soviets be based upon the following Reichskommissariats:

Name	Area
Ostland	Baltic States, Belarus and eastern Poland
Ukraine	Ukraine and adjacent territories
Kaukasus	Kaukasus
Moskau	the Moscow metropolitan area and adjacent European Russia

The Reichskommissariat territories would extend up to the European frontier at the Urals. They were to have been early stages in the displacement and dispossession of Russian and other Slav people and their replacement with German settlers, following the Nazi Lebensraum im Osten plans. When German forces entered Soviet territory, they promptly organized occupation regimes in the first two territories—the Reichskomissariats of Ostland and Ukraine. The defeat of the Sixth Army at the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942, followed by defeat in the Battle of Kursk in July 1943 and the Allied landings in Sicily put an end to the plans' implementation.

[edit] Historical perspective

In his book Mein Kampf, Hitler notes that history is an open-ended struggle, and links the concept of Lebensraum with his own brand of racism and social Darwinism. Nevertheless, historians debate whether Hitler's position on Lebensraum was part of a larger program of world domination (the so-called "globalist" position) or a more modest "continentalist" approach, by which Hitler would have sufficed with the conquest of Eastern Europe. Nor are the two positions necessarily contradictory, given the idea of a broader Stufenplan, or "plan in stages," which many such as Klaus Hildebrand and the late Andreas Hillgruber argue lay behind the regime's actions.^[21] Historian Ian Kershaw suggests just such a compromise, claiming that while the concept was originally abstract and undeveloped, it took on new meaning with the invasion of the Soviet Union.^[22] He goes on to note that even within the Nazi regime, there were differences of opinion about the meaning of Lebensraum, citing Rainer Zitelmann, who distinguishes between the near-mystical fascination with a return to an idyllic agrarian society (for which land was a necessity) as advocated by Darré and Himmler, and an industrial state, envisioned by Hitler, which would be reliant on raw materials and forced labor.^[23]

What seems certain is that echoes of lost territorial opportunities in Europe, such as the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, played an important role in the Hitlerian vision for the distant future:

The acquisition of new soil for the settlement of the excess population possesses an infinite number of advantages, particularly if we turn from the present to the future ... It must be said that such a territorial policy cannot be fulfilled in the Cameroons, but today almost exclusively in Europe.^[24]

Racism is not a necessary aspect of expansionist politics in general, nor was the original use of the term "Lebensraum" However, under Hitler, the term came to signify a specific, racist kind of expansionism. Karl Haushofer was an acquaintance of Rudolf Hess, Hitler's deputy. Haushofer had limited influence on Hitler's ideals. "Haushofer primarily provided the academic and scientific support for the expansion of the Third Reich ^[25]." Haushofer ideas can be described by the expansion of heavily populated countries having the right to expand and gain land from less populated countries. This was his adaptation of Ratzel's Lebensraum ^[26].

In an era when the earth is gradually being divided up among states, some of which embrace almost entire continents, we cannot speak of a world power in connection with a formation whose political mother country is limited to the absurd area of five hundred thousand square kilometers.^[27] ... Without consideration of traditions and prejudices, Germany must find the courage to gather our people and their strength for an advance along the road that will lead this people from its present restricted living space to new land and soil, and hence also free it from the danger of vanishing from the earth or of serving others as a slave nation.^[28] ... For it is not in colonial acquisitions that we must see the solution of this problem, but exclusively in the acquisition of a territory for settlement, which will enhance the area of the mother country, and hence not only keep the new settlers in the most intimate community with the land of their origin, but secure for the entire area those advantages which lie in its unified magnitude.^[29]

Similar racist ideologies were developed by other nations to rationalize the taking of land from weaker neighbors. A prime example is the notion of manifest destiny that was a prevailing 19th Century viewpoint in the United States, an idea that the land occupied by natives was naturally destined to become expansion space supporting the growth of a greater people. Another is the expansion of Russia as the greater nation renamed the USSR, and the pre-war expansion of Japan into the territories of China and Southeast Asia.

[edit] See also

• Expansionism for expansionist ideas in other countries
• New Order (political system)
• Manifest Destiny
• Hakko ichiu

[edit] Notes

[edit] External links

• Utopia: The Greater Germanic Reich of the German Nation — map of Nazi plans
• Hitler and 'Lebensraum' in the East By Jeremy Noakes