Lebensraum

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 (either through mass deportation to Siberia, extermination, or enslavement), including Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Czech, and other Slavic nations considered non-Aryan.

[23] In Mein Kampf (1925; My Struggle), 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.

[5] Based upon Johan Rudolf Kjellén's geopolitical interpretation of Friedrich Ratzel's human-geography term, the Nazi regime (1933–45) 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.

Lebensraum would be realised by way of ethnic cleansing, the forcible removal of the native Slavic and Jewish populations, and the subsequent repopulation of the border strip with ethnic-German colonists; likewise, the colonisations of Lithuania and Ukraine.

[30] 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.

[32] In March 1918, in an effort to reform and modernise the Russian Empire (1721–1917) into a soviet republic, the Bolshevik government agreed to the strategically onerous territorial cessions stipulated in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (33% of arable land, 30% of industry, and 90% of the coal mines of Russia).

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.

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.

[40][41] In the lead-up to Anschluss (1938) and the invasion of Poland (1939), the propaganda of the Nazi Party in Germany used popular feelings of wounded national identity aroused in the aftermath of the First World War to promote policies of Lebensraum.

Studies of the homeland focused on the lost colonies after the establishment of the Second Polish Republic, which was ratified by the Treaty of Versailles (Volk ohne Raum), as well as the "eternal Jewish threat" (Der ewige Jude, 1937).

[44] During the 1920s, Heinrich Himmler—as a member of the Artaman League, an anti-Slav, anti-urban, and anti-Semitic organisation of "blood and soil" ideology—developed the Völkisch ideas that advocated Lebensraum, for the realisation of which he said that the: Increase [of] our peasant population is the only effective defense against the influx of the Slav working-class masses from the East.

[48] Identifying the conquest of Lebensraum as a major ideological goal of his party, Hitler wrote in "Mein Kampf": And so, we National Socialists consciously draw a line beneath the foreign policy tendency of our pre–War period.

[51][52] Defining Nazism as a "Weltanschauung" during his speech at the 1933 Nuremberg rally, Hitler stated: "Already in the word 'Weltanschauung' lies the solemn proclamation of a decision that all acts are based upon a certain point of view and a visible tendency.

To further German population growth, Hitler rejected the ideas of birth control and emigration, arguing that such practices weakened the people and culture of Germany, and that military conquest was the only means for obtaining Lebensraum: The National Socialist Movement, on the contrary, will always let its foreign policy be determined by the necessity to secure the space necessary to the life of our Folk.

On the contrary, it must muster the determination either to seal off these alien racial elements, so that the blood of its own Folk will not be corrupted again, or it must, without further ado, remove them and hand over the vacated territory to its own National Comrades.

[55] On 3 February 1933, at his initial meeting with the generals and admirals of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler said that the conquest of Lebensraum in Eastern Europe and its "ruthless Germanisation" were the ultimate geopolitical objectives of Reich foreign policy.

[59] Anti-Slavism was a central component of the NSDAP's racist ideology, and a driving force behind Nazi Germany's irredentist schemes to seize "Lebensraum" through the eastward expansion of German territories.

[62] Such official racist perspectives for the establishment of German Lebensraum allowed the Nazis to unilaterally launch a war of aggression (blitzkrieg) against the countries of Eastern Europe, ideologically justified as historical recuperation of the Oium (lands) that the Slavs had conquered from the native Ostrogoths.

"[74] In that vein, Himmler published the pamphlet Der Untermensch, which featured photographs of ideal racial types, Aryans, contrasted with the barbarian races, descended from Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan, to the massacres committed in the Soviet Union dominated by Jewish Bolshevism.

If the awful counterfactual of a Nazi victory had come to pass... Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians would surely have shared the fate of the Poles and been eliminated culturally and ethnically as distinct peoples and nations.

Early in his career as leader of the Nazis, Adolf Hitler said he would accept friendly relations with the USSR, on condition that the Soviet government re-establish the disadvantageous borders of European Russia, which were demarcated in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (1918).

[112] From mid–1940, the ethnic cleansing (forcible removal) of Poles from the Reichsgau Wartheland initially occurred across the border, to the General Government (a colonial political entity ostensibly autonomous of the Reich); then, after the invasion of the USSR, the displaced Polish populations were jailed in Polenlager (Pole-storage camps) in Silesia and sent to villages designated as ghettoes.

[121] The ruthless Germanisation that Hitler enacted for Lebensraum was attested in the reports of Wehrbauer (soldier–peasant) colonists assigned to ethnically-cleansed Poland—of finding half-eaten meals on the table and unmade beds in the houses given them by the Nazis.

[126] For those Slavic lands, the Nazi theorist and ideologue Alfred Rosenberg proposed administrative organisation by the Reichskommissariate—countries consolidated into colonial realms ruled by a commissar: In 1943, in the secret Posen speeches, Heinrich Himmler spoke of the Ural Mountains as the eastern border of the Greater Germanic Reich.

[127] The never-established Reichskommissariat Turkestan would have been the closest territory to Imperial Japan's north-westernmost extents of its own Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, as a "living wall" said to be defending the easternmost Lebensraum lands.

To manage the ethnic, racial, and political populations of the USSR, the German Army promptly organized collaborationist, anti-Communist, puppet governments in the Reichskomissariat Ostland (1941–45) and the Reichskommissariat Ukraine (1941–44).

[128] During the Posen speeches, Himmler spoke about the deaths of millions of Soviet prisoners of war and foreign labourers: One basic principle must be the absolute rule for the SS men: We must be honest, decent, loyal and comradely to members of our own blood and to nobody else.

[74]Racism usually is not a concept integral to the ideology of territorial expansionism; nor to the original meaning of the term Lebensraum ("biological habitat"), as defined by the ethnographer and geographer Friedrich Ratzel.

[130] In Mein Kampf, Hitler explained the living-space "required" by Nazi Germany: 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 kilometres.

"Since the end of World War II, the term Lebensraum has been used in relation to different countries, including China,[137][138] Egypt,[139][140] Israel,[141][142][143][144][145] Turkey,[146][147][148] Poland,[149] and the United States.

Boundaries of the planned "Greater Germanic Reich," including planned post-war eastward expansions of Reichskomissariats [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ]
Greater Germanic Reich
Poster from the Wochenspruch der NSDAP series, 17 December 1939. Hitler's quote reads: "We are fighting for the security of our people and for our living space."
Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, Chancellor of Germany from 1909 until 1917, was a proponent of German Lebensraum as a natural right of Imperial Germany.
Mein Kampf (1926–28), Hitler's political autobiography, presented the racist philosophy of Lebensraum advocated for Germany by the Nazi Party.
The Nuremberg Laws (1935) of Nazi Germany employed scientific racism to exclude Jews from mainstream society. People with four German grandparents (white circles) were classified as of "German blood," those with one or two Jewish grandparents (black circles) were considered to be Mischling , of "Mixed blood", while those with three or more Jewish grandparents were deemed to be Jews.
Poster (in German and Polish): Obligations of Polish Workers in Germany , which included the death penalty for sexual relations with a German.
Nazi Germany in 1940 (dark grey) after the conquest of Poland together with the USSR , showing pockets of German colonists resettled into the annexed territories of Poland from the Soviet "sphere of influence" during the Heim ins Reich action. A red outline of pre-war Poland is superimposed here over the original Nazi propaganda poster; the original German print made no mention of Poland. [ 92 ]
Borders of Greater Germanic Reich envisaged in the Nazi-era propaganda map " Das Grossdeutschland in der Zukunft " (1943). The map depicts occupied Eastern Europe as a settler-colonial territory of Nazi Germany. [ 94 ]
To achieve Lebensraum in Eastern Europe, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler and Gen. Andrey Vlasov, of the Russian Liberation Army, joined forces to rid Russia of Communism and supposed Jewish Bolshevism.
The Nazi establishment of German Lebensraum required the expulsion of the Poles from Poland, such as their expulsion from the Reichsgau Wartheland in 1939.
Germanisation of Poland: SS Obergruppenführer Arthur Greiser welcomes the millionth Eastern European Volksdeutscher to be resettled in annexed Polish territories, March 1944.
The geopolitician Karl Haushofer (left) provided the Nazis with intellectual, academic, scientific rationalisations for Lebensraum , transmitted to Chancellor Adolf Hitler, by way of Rudolf Hess (right), who was Haushofer's student.