Geopolitik
Germany acted as a revisionist state within the international system during both World Wars by attempting to overthrow British domination, and to counter what it saw as rising US and Russian hegemony.
As a latecomer to nationhood proper, lacking colonies or reserved markets for industrial output but also experiencing rapid population growth, Germany desired a more equitable distribution of wealth and territory within the international system.
[7] Geopolitik was in essence a consolidation and codification of older ideas, given a scientific gloss: The key reorientation in each dyad is that the focus is on land-based empire rather than naval imperialism.
Enunciated most forcefully by Friedrich Ratzel and his Swedish student Rudolf Kjellén, they include an organic or anthropomorphized conception of the state, and the need for self-sufficiency through the top-down organisation of society.
[4] The root of uniquely German geopolitik rests in the writings of Karl Ritter who first developed the organic conception of the state that would later be elaborated upon by Ratzel and accepted by Hausfhofer.
While the latter two conceive of geopolitik as the state as an organism in space put to the service of a leader, Haushofer's Munich school specifically studies geography as it relates to war and designs for empire.
[33] Haushofer even held that urbanisation was a symptom of a nation's decline by giving evidence of a decreasing soil mastery, birth rate and effectiveness of centralized rule.
While Hess and Hitler were imprisoned after the Munich Putsch in 1923, Haushofer spent six hours visiting the two, bringing along a copy of Friedrich Ratzel's Political Geography and Carl von Clausewitz's Vom Kriege.
Geopolitical ideas of lebensraum, space for depth of defense, appeals for natural frontiers, balancing land and seapower, and geographic analysis of military strategy entered Hitler's thought between his imprisonment and publishing of Mein Kampf.
Burdened with a burgeoning population, Germany had lagging ability to raise agricultural production to meet food demands, compete in markets for industrial goods, obtain cheap sources of raw materials, and find an acceptable outlet for emigration.
Therefore, land expansion was Hitler's primary goal, eschewing the borders of 1914; he calls them nationally inadequate, militarily unsatisfactory, ethnically impossible, and insane when considered in light of Germany's opposition in Europe.
[65] The world was composed not of states but of competing races of different values,[66] and politics was fundamentally a struggle led by those with the greatest capacity for organization, a characteristic held by Germanic peoples more than any other.
[71] In justifying the need for decisive military action, Hitler cites a lesson from World War I: those that are neutral gain a little in trade but lose their seat at the victor's table and thus their right to decide the structure of the peace to follow.
[73] Lebensraum for Germany required moving beyond the "arbitrary" goal of the border of 1914, expanding into the East and adopting policies toward the Western European nations, Great Powers, and treaty arrangements, which would facilitate this land redistribution.
[81] Lebensraum served to create the economic condition of autarky in which the German people would be self-sufficient, no longer dependent on import or subject to demand shifts in international markets, which had been forcing industry to struggle against other nations.
[89] Still, Hitler maintained faith that if Germany were to make clear its aspirations for space in the inferior East, the Great Powers in Europe would not intervene, with the possible exception of France.
[91][92][93] Endorsing the “prophetic statements” of Homer Lea and Mackinder, the "Haushoferites" proudly proclaim that such a combination of land Powers would certainly “liberate” not only Eurasia but the entire Western Pacific region from “hateful Anglo-American hegemony.”[94] Three famous contemporary observers noted in 1942 that in the past year Hitler had "sharply" departed from Haushofer's doctrine.
[99] A British banker with headquarters in Berlin, Eric Archdeacon, traced down the payments from German industry and discovered that they went to the Munich Institute fur Geopolitik, run by Haushofer.
“At Munich this data was worked out by a staff estimated at 1000 experts and much of it found its way into Institute’s Journal, Zeitschrift fur Geopolitik.”[100] This report led to the famous article in Reader's Digest, “The Thousand Scientists behind Hitler,” published in 1941.
[101] “It is nicely ironic" that the article appeared on virtually the same time that Hitler invaded Russia, a country with which Haushofer in his writings had consistently advocated peace and alliance.
[105] A passage in Mein Kampf states: “This colossal empire in the east is ripe for dissolution … We have been chosen by Fate to be the witnesses of a catastrophe which will be the strongest confirmation of the soundness of the nationalist theory of race.”[106][107] The evidence suggests that Hitler framed his decision to invade Russia not in geopolitik terms but in racial ones.
The “familiar and unbridgeable opposition between race and environment remained dominant.”[120] Hitler paid homage by kissing the hand of a dying racialist Philosopher, Houston Stuart Chamberlain,[121] but he did not even see Haushofer since 1938.
[131] Hitler repeatedly stressed another long term fear, apparently driving his desire for German economic domination of European resources, which was the rise of the United States of America as a great power.
Underlining his lack of faith in the ability to increase agricultural or industrial productivity, he cites America's vast size as the reason that economic policy will fail, and expansionism can be the only route for Germany.
[140] It is clear, however, that what appears as opportunism in the conduct of Nazi foreign policy was actually the result of plans conceived well before Hitler assumed power, in line with his long-term theories of political vitality based on historical experience.
[146] The borders of the Reich were inherently unstable in his opinion, allowing for easy avenues of attack by hostile powers, with no natural geographic barriers for protection and incapable of feeding the German people.
[148] The Weimar government, which could do no good in Hitler's eyes, was centrally responsible for the treasonous act of signing the Treaty of Versailles, which he held crippled Germany and placed it at the mercy of hostile powers.
[149] Hitler's National Socialist foreign policy contained four broad goals (racial unification, agricultural autarky, lebensraum in the East) culminating in a Eurasian land-based empire.
The historical record shows that German geopoliticians, among them chiefly General Karl Haushofer, were in contact with and taught Nazi officials, including Hitler, Rudolf Hess and Konstantin von Neurath.
The ideas of racial organic states, Lebensraum and autarky clearly found their way into Hitler's thinking, and pan-regions and the landpower-seapower dichotomy did not appear prominently, much less correctly, in National Socialist strategy.
