Lebensraum

Lebensraum was one of the major political ideas of Adolf Hitler, and an important component of Nazi ideology. It served as the motivation for the expansionist policies of Nazi Germany, aiming to provide extra space for the growth of the German population. In Hitler's book Mein Kampf, he detailed his belief that the German people needed Lebensraum ("living space", i.e. land and raw materials), and that it should be found in the East. It was the stated policy of the Nazis to kill, deport, or enslave the Russian and other Slavic populations, whom they considered inferior, and to repopulate the land with 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.

Lebensraum is the German term for "habitat"; used both in ecological and sociological contexts, its literal meaning is "living space."

Origins and implementation

The idea of a Germanic people without sufficient space dates back long before Adolf Hitler brought it to prominence. The term Lebensraum in this sense was coined by Friedrich Ratzel in 1897, used as a slogan in Germany referring to the unification of the country and the acquisition of colonies, as per the English and French models. It was adapted from Darwinian and other scientific ideas of the day about how ecological niches are filled. Similar concepts are still used today in geography and biology.

Ratzel believed the development of a people is primarily influenced by their geographical situation and that a people that successfully adapted to one location would proceed naturally to another. This expansion to fill available space, he claimed, was a natural and necessary feature of any healthy species.

These beliefs were furthered by scholars of the day, including Karl Haushofer and 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.

The Lebensraum ideology was 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.

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:

• Ostland (Baltic States, Belarus and eastern Poland),
• Ukraine (Ukraine and adjacent territories),
• Kaukasus (Caucasus area),
• Moskau (the Moscow metropolitan area and adjacent European Russia)

The Reichskommissariat territories would extend up to the European frontier at the Urals. These administrative entities were to have been early stages in the displacement and dispossession of Russian and other Slav peoples and their replacement with German settlers, following the Nazi "Lebensraum im Osten" plans.

Rosenberg also feared the danger of "Grossrussische Expansion" (Russian/Soviet expansionist policy), and advocated "preventive armed action" to protect the German nation against this alleged threat.

When German forces entered Soviet territory, they promptly organized occupation regimes - the Reichskomissariats of Ostland and Ukraine. The biggest obstacle to implementing Lebensraum further was the defeat of the Sixth Army at the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942. After the second major German defeat in the Battle of Kursk in July 1943 and the Allied landings in Sicily, all further Lebensraum plans came to a halt.

Hitler on Lebensraum

In his book "Mein Kampf", Hitler expressed his view that history was an open-ended struggle to the death between races. His plan to conquer Lebensraum is closely connected with his racism and social darwinism. Racism is not a necessary aspect of expansionist politics in general; the term Lebensraum signifies this specific, racist kind of expansionism.

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. — Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971, page 644.

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. — Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, page 646.

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 total area those advantages which lie in its unified magnitude. — Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, page 653.

Lebensraum in fiction

Lebensraum is also the name of a contemporary play by playwright Israel Horovitz, in which the chancellor of Germany wakes up one night after a nightmare and decides to invite 6 million Jews to come and live in Germany as restitution for the Holocaust.

See also

Expansionist movements in other countries

• Manifest Destiny (United States)
• Akhand Bharat (India)
• Greater Israel
• Greater Albania
• Greater Hungary
• Greater Morocco
• Greater Somalia
• Greater Croatia
• Greater Serbia
• Greater Syria
• Transmigration program
• Virgin Lands Campaign
• Green March
• Megali Idea

External links

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

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