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Lebensraum (helpinfo) (German for "habitat" or "living space") 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, for a Greater Germany. 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 Polish, 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.

Origins and implementation

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, as per the English and French models.

Ratzel believed 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. 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.

Lebensraum almost became a reality in 1918 during World War I. The new communist regime of Russia made peace with the German army which was deep within Russian territory in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. In exchange for peace, Russia sacrificed huge portions of land, including the Baltic territories, Belarus, and Ukraine to Germany in exchange for peace Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. However Germany was in unrest and was compelled to end the war in the western front quickly, and in the Treaty of Versailles agreed to sacrifice the land to new nations such as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and the short-lived Ukrainian republic in 1919.

The desire for revenge over the loss of territory in the Treaty of Versailles was one of the key tenets of a number of nationalist and extremist groups, including the Nazi Party under Adolf Hitler.

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 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 - 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, nor was the original use of the term 'Lebensraum.' However, under Hitler, the term came to signify a 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 entire area those advantages which lie in its unified magnitude. — Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, page 653.

References

See also

• Expansionism
• New Order (political system)

External links

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