Lebensraum

In the event, Friedrich Ratzel's metaphoric concept of society as an organism—which grows and shrinks in logical relation to its Lebensraum (habitat)—proved especially influential upon the Swedish political scientist and conservative politician Johan Rudolf Kjellén (1864–1922) who interpreted that biological metaphor as a geopolitical natural-law.[18] In the political monograph Schweden (1917; Sweden), Kjellén coined the terms geopolitik (the conditions and problems of a state that arise from its geographic territory), œcopolitik (the economic factors that affect the power of the state), and demopolitik (the social problems that arise from the racial composition of the state) to explain the political particulars to be considered for the successful administration and governing of a state. Moreover, he had great intellectual influence upon the politics of Imperial Germany, especially with Staten som livsform (1916; The State as a Life-form) an earlier political-science book read by the society of Imperial Germany, for whom the concept of geopolitik acquired an ideological definition unlike the original, human-geography definition.[19]

Kjellén's geopolitical interpretation of the Lebensraum concept was adopted, expanded, and adapted to the politics of Germany by publicists of imperialism such as the militarist General Friedrich von Bernhardi (1849–1930) and the political geographer and proponent of geopolitics Karl Haushofer (1869–1946). In Deutschland und der Nächste Krieg (1911; Germany and the Next War), General von Bernhardi developed Friedrich Ratzel's Lebensraum concept as a racial struggle for living space; explicitly identified Eastern Europe as the source of a new, national habitat for the German people; and said that the next war would be expressly for acquiring Lebensraum—all in fulfillment of the "biological necessity" to protect German racial supremacy. That vanquishing the Slavic and the Latin races was necessary, because "without war, inferior or decaying races would easily choke the growth of healthy, budding elements" of the German race—thus, the war for Lebensraum was a necessary means of defending Germany against cultural stagnation and the racial degeneracy of miscegenation.[20]

In the national politics of Weimar Germany, the geopolitical usage of Lebensraum is credited to Karl Ernst Haushofer and his Institute of Geopolitics, in Munich, especially the ultra-nationalist interpretation to avenge military defeat in the First World War (1914–18), and reverse the dictates of the Treaty of Versailles (1919), which reduced Germany geographically, economically, and militarily. The politician Adolf Hitler said that the National Socialist (Nazi) geopolitics of "inevitable expansion" would reverse overpopulation, provide natural resources, and uphold German national honor.[21] In Mein Kampf (1925; My Struggle), Hitler presented his conception of Lebensraum as the philosophic basis for the Greater Germanic Reich who were 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.[22][23]

The Nazi usages of the term Lebensraum were explicitly racial, to justify the mystical right of the racially superior Germanic peoples (Herrenvolk) to fulfil their cultural destiny at the expense of racially inferior peoples (Untermenschen), such as the Slavs of Poland, Russia, Ukraine, and the other non–Germanic peoples of "the East".[3] Based upon Johan Rudolf Kjellén's geopolitical interpretation of Friedrich Ratzel's human-geography term, the Nazi régime (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 effort to realise the Greater Germanic Reich at the expense of the societies of Eastern Europe.[19]

Mein Kampf (1926–28), Hitler's political autobiography presented the racist philosophy of Lebensraum advocated for Germany by the National Socialists.

In Mein Kampf (1925), Hitler dedicated a full chapter titled "Eastern Orientation or Eastern Policy", outlining the need for the new 'living space' for Germany. He claimed that achieving Lebensraum required political will, and that the National Socialist Movement ought to strive to expand population area for the German people, and acquire new sources of food as well.[40] Lebensraum became the principal foreign-policy goal of the Nazi Party and the government of Nazi Germany (1933–45). Hitler rejected the restoration of the pre-war borders of Germany as an inadequate half-measure towards reducing purported national overpopulation.[41] From that perspective, he opined that the nature of national borders is always unfinished and momentary, and that their redrawing must continue as Germany's political goal.[42] Hence, Hitler identified the geopolitics of Lebensraum as the ultimate political will of his Party:

And so, we National Socialists consciously draw a line beneath the foreign policy tendency of our pre–War period. We take up where we broke off six hundred years ago. We stop the endless German movement to the south and west, and turn our gaze toward the land in the East. At long last, we break off the colonial and commercial policy of the pre–War period and shift to the soil policy of the future.[43]

The ideologies found at the root of Hitler's implementation of Lebensraum modeled that of German colonialism of the New Imperialism period as well as the American ideology of Manifest destiny. Hitler had great admiration for the United States' territorial evolution and was fascinated by the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans that took place during the United States' westward expansion and used this in part for justification of German expansion. He believed that in order to transform the German nation into a world superpower, Germany had to expand their geopolitical presence and act only in the interest of the German people. Hitler had also viewed with dismay the German reliance of food exports by sea during the First World War, believing it to be a contributing factor to Germany's defeat in the war. He believed that only through Lebensraum could Germany shift " its dependence for food... to its own imperial hinterland".[44]

"There is only one task: Germanization through the introduction of Germans [to the area] and to treat the original inhabitants like Indians. … I intend to stay this course with ice-cold determination. I feel myself to be the executor of the will of History. What people think of me at present is all of no consequence. Never have I heard a German who has bread to eat express concern that the ground where the grain was grown had to be conquered by the sword. We eat Canadian wheat and never think of the Indians."[45]

In the unpublished sequel to Mein Kampf, the Zweites Buch (1928, Second Book), Hitler further presents the ideology of Nazi Lebensraum, in accordance to the then-future foreign policy of the National Socialist Party. 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. It knows no Germanising or Teutonising, as in the case of the national bourgeoisie, but only the spread of its own Folk. It will never see in the subjugated, so called Germanised, Czechs or Poles a national, let alone Folkish, strengthening, but only the racial weakening of our Folk.[46]

Therefore, the non-Germanic peoples of the annexed foreign territories would never be Germanised:

The völkisch State, conversely, must under no conditions annex Poles with the intention of wanting to make Germans out of them some day. 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.[47]

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.

The conquest of living space for Germany was the foremost foreign-policy goal of the Nazis towards establishing the Greater Germanic Reich that was to last a thousand years.[48] 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.[49][50] The USSR was the country to provide sufficient Lebensraum for the Germans, because it possessed much agricultural land, and was inhabited by Slavic Untermenschen (sub-humans) ruled by Jewish Bolshevism.[51] The racism of Hitler's Lebensraum philosophy allowed only the Germanisation of the soil and the land, but not of the native peoples, who were to be destroyed, by slave labour and starvation.[52]

In the worldview of Adolf Hitler, the idea of restoring the 1914 borders of the German Reich (Imperial Germany, 1871–1918) was absurd, because those national borders did not provide sufficient Lebensraum for the German population; that only a foreign policy for the geopolitical conquest of the proper amount of Lebensraum would justify the necessary sacrifices entailed by war.[53] That history was dominated by a merciless struggle for survival among the different races of mankind; and that the races who possessed a great national territory were innately stronger than those races who possessed a small national territory—which the Germanic Aryan race can take by natural right.[54] 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.[55] Although in the 1920s Hitler openly spoke about the need for living space, during his first years in power, he never publicly spoke about it. It was not until 1937 with the German rearmament program well under way that he began to publicly speak about the need for living space again.[56]

The Deutsche Volksliste was split into four categories.[70] Men in the first two categories were required to enlist for compulsory military service.[70] Membership in the SS was reserved for the Category I only:

Hitler who was born in the ethnically diverse Austrian-Hungarian Empire, avowed in Mein Kampf (1926), that Germanising Austrian Slavs by language in the age of Partitions could not have turned them into fully fledged Germans, because no 'Negro' nor a 'Chinaman' would ever 'become German' just because he has learned to speak German. He believed that no visible differences between peoples could be bridged by the use of a common language. Any such attempts would lead to the 'bastardization' of the German element, he said.[74] Likewise, Hitler criticized the previous attempts at Germanisation of the Poles in the Prussian Partition as an erroneous idea, based on the same false reasoning. The Polish people could not possibly be Germanised by being compelled to speak German because they belonged to a different race, he said. "The result would have been fatal" for the purity of the German nation because the foreigners would 'compromise' by their inferiority "the dignity and nobility" of the German nation.[74] During the war, Hitler remarked in his "Table Talk" recorded at the headquarters that people should only be Germanized if they were to improve the German blood line:

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. – The Nazi propaganda poster, superimposed with the red outline of Poland missing entirely from the original German print.[75]

There is one cardinal principle. This question of the Germanisation of certain peoples must not be examined in the light of abstract ideas and theory. We must examine each particular case. The only problem is to make sure whether the offspring of any race will mingle well with the German population and will improve it, or whether, on the contrary (as is the case when Jew blood is mixed with German blood), negative results will arise. Unless one is completely convinced that the foreigners whom one proposes to introduce into the German community will have a beneficial effect, well, I think it's better to abstain, however strong the sentimental reasons may be which urge such a course on us. There are plenty of Jews with blue eyes and blond hair, and not a few of them have the appearance which strikingly supports the idea of the Germanisation of their kind. It has, however, been indisputably established that, in the case of Jews, if the physical characteristics of the race are sometimes absent for a generation or two, they will inevitably reappear in the next generation.[76]

Informed by the blood and soil (Blut und Boden) beliefs of ethnic identity—a philosophic basis of Lebensraum—Nazi policy required destroying the USSR for the lands of Russia to become the granary of Germany. The Germanisation of Russia required the destruction of the cities, in effort to vanquish Russianness, Communism, and Jewish Bolshevism.[77] To that effect, Hitler ordered the Siege of Leningrad (September 1941 – January 1944), to raze the city and destroy the native Russian population.[78] Geopolitically, the establishment of German Lebensraum in the east of Europe would thwart blockades, like those occurred in the First World War, which starved the people of Germany.[79] Moreover, using Eastern Europe to feed Germany also was intended to exterminate millions of Slavs, by slave labour and starvation.[80] When deprived of producers, a workforce, and customers, native industry would cease and disappear from the Germanised region, which then became agricultural land for settlers from Nazi Germany.[80]

The Germanised lands of Eastern Europe would be settled by the Wehrbauer, a soldier–peasant who was to maintain a fortified line of defence, which would prevent any non–German civilisation from arising to threaten the Greater Germanic Reich.[81] Plans for the Germanisation of western Europe were less severe, as the Nazis needed the collaboration of the local political and business establishments, especially that of local industry and their skilled workers. Moreover, Nazi racial policies considered the populations of western Europe more racially acceptable to Aryan standards of "racial purity". In practice, the number and assortment of Nazi racial categories indicated that "East is bad and West is acceptable"; thus, a person's "race" was a matter of life or death in a country under Nazi occupation.[82]

The racist ideology of Lebensraum also comprised the North German racial stock of the northern-European peoples of Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway, Sweden); and the continental-European peoples of Alsace and Lorraine, Belgium and northern France; whilst the United Kingdom would either be annexed or be made a puppet state.[83] Moreover, the poor military performance of the Italian armed forces forced Fascist Italy's withdrawal from the war in 1943, which then made northern Italy a territory to be annexed to the Greater Germanic Reich.[83]

Collaborationism

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.

For political expediency, the Nazis continually modified their racist politics towards non–Germanic peoples, and so continually redefined the ideological meaning of Lebensraum, in order to collaborate with other peoples, in service to Reich foreign policy. 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), which made possible the restoration of Russo–German diplomatic relations.[84]

In the 1921–22 period, Hitler said that German Lebensraum might be achieved with a smaller USSR, created by sponsoring anti-communist Russians in deposing the Communist government of the Bolsheviks; however, by the end of 1922, Hitler changed his opinion when there arose the possibility of an Anglo–German geopolitical alliance to destroy the USSR.[84] Yet, once Operation Barbarossa (1941) launched the invasion of the USSR, the strategic stance of the Nazi régime towards a smaller, independent Russia was affected by political pressure from the German Army, who asked Hitler, the supreme military commander, to endorse the creation and integration, to Wehrmacht operations in Russia, of the anti–Communist Russian Liberation Army (ROA); an organisation of defectors, led by General Andrey Vlasov, who meant to depose the régime of Josef Stalin and the Russian Communist Party.[85]

Initially, Hitler rejected the idea of collaborating with the peoples in the East.[86] However, Nazis such as Joseph Goebbels and Alfred Rosenberg were in favour of collaboration against Bolshevism and offering some independence to the peoples of the East.[87][88] In 1940, Himmler opened up membership for people he regarded as being of "related stock", which resulted in a number of right wing Scandinavians signing up to fight in the Waffen-SS. When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, further volunteers from France, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, and the Croatia signed up to fight for the Nazi cause.[89] After 1942, when the war turned decisively against Nazi Germany, further recruits from the occupied territories signed up to fight for the Nazis.[89] Hitler was worried about the foreign legions on the Eastern Front; he remarked that "One mustn't forget that, unless he is convinced of his racial membership of the Germanic Reich, the foreign legionary is bound to feel that he's betraying his country."[90]

After further losses of manpower, the Nazis tried to persuade the forced foreign laborers in the Reich to fight against Bolshevism, Martin Bormann issued a memorandum on 5 May 1943:

It impossible to win someone over to a new idea while insulting his inner sense of worth at the same time. One cannot expect the highest level of performance from people who are called beasts, barbarians, and subhuman. Instead, positive qualities such as the will to fight Bolshevism, the desire to safeguard one's own existence and that of one's country, commitment and willingness to work are to be encouraged and promoted. Moreover, everything must be done to encourage the necessary cooperation of the European peoples in the fight against Bolshevism.[91]

In 1944, as the German army continually lost battles and territory to the Red Army, the leaders of Nazi Germany, especially Reichsfuhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler, recognised the political, ideological, and military value of the collaborationist Russian Liberation Army in fighting Jewish Bolshevism.[92] Secretly, Himmler in his Posen speeches remarked: "I wouldn't have had any objections, if we had hired Mr. Vlasov and every other Slavic subject wearing a Russian general's uniform, to make propaganda against the Russians. I wouldn't have any objections at all. Wonderful."[61]

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 Polish Campaign (1 September 1939) was Adolf Hitler's first attempt to achieve Lebensraum for the Germans. The Nazi invasion of Eastern Europe consisted of atrocities committed against Polish men, women, and children. Popular German acceptance of the atrocities was achieved by way of Nazi propaganda (print, radio, cinema), a key factor behind the manufactured consent that justified German brutality towards civilians; by continually manipulating the national psychology, the Nazis convinced the German people to believe that Jews and Slavs were Untermenschen (subhumans).[93]

In autumn 1939, Nazi Germany's implementation of Lebensraum policy began with the Occupation of Poland (1939-1945); in October 1939, Heinrich Himmler became the Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Nationhood tasked with returning all ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) to the Reich; preventing harmful foreign influences upon the German people; and to create new settlement areas (especially for returning Volksdeutsche).[94] 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. In four years of Germanisation (1940–44), the Nazis forcibly removed some 50,000 ethnic Poles from the Polish territories annexed to the Greater German Reich, notably some 18,000–20,000 ethnic Poles from Żywiec County, in Polish Silesia, effected in Action Saybusch.[95][96]

The German population's psychological acceptance of extermination-for-Lebensraum was achieved with propaganda; the leaders of the Hitler Youth were issued pamphlets (e.g. On the German People and its Territory) meant to influence the rank-and-file Hitler Youth about the necessity of Nazi racist practices in obtaining Lebensraum for the German people.[97] Likewise, in the Reich proper, schoolchildren were given propaganda pamphlets (e.g. You and Your People) explaining the importance of Lebensraum for the future of Germany and the German people.[98]

Concerning the geographic extent of the Greater Germanic Reich, Adolf Hitler rejected the Ural Mountains as an adequate, eastern border for Germany, that such mid-sized mountains would not make do as the boundary between the "European and Asiatic worlds"; that only a living wall of racially pure Aryans would make do as a border; and that permanent war in the East would "preserve the vitality of the race":

The real frontier is the one that separates the Germanic world from the Slav world. It is our duty to place it where we want it to be. If anyone asks where we obtain the right to extend the Germanic space to the east, we reply that, for a nation, its awareness of what it represents carries this right with it. It is success that justifies everything. The reply to such questions can only be of an empirical nature. It is inconceivable that a higher people should painfully exist on a soil too narrow for it, while amorphous masses, which contribute nothing to civilization, occupy infinite tracts of a soil that is one of the richest in the world ...

We must create conditions for our people that favour its multiplication, and we must, at the same time, build a dike against the Russian flood ... Since there is no natural protection against such a flood, we must meet it with a living wall. A permanent war on the eastern front will help form a sound race of men, and will prevent us from relapsing into the softness of a Europe thrown back upon itself. It should be possible for us to control this region to the east with two hundred and fifty thousand men, plus a cadre of good administrators ...

This space in Russia must always be dominated by Germans.[99]

In 1941, the Reich decided that within two decades, by the year 1961, Poland would have been emptied of Poles and re-populated with ethnic-German colonists from Bukovina, Eastern Galicia, and Volhynia.[100] The ruthless Germanisation Hitler required for Lebensraum was attested in the reports of Wehrbauer (soldier–peasant) colonists' assigned to ethnically cleansed Poland – of finding half-eaten meals at table and unmade beds in the houses given them by the Nazis.[101] Baltic Germans from Estonia and Latvia were evaluated for racial purity; those classified to the highest category, Ost-Falle, were resettled in the Eastern Wall.[102]

Moreover, the Germanisation of Russia began with Operation Barbarossa (June–September 1941) meant to conquer and colonise European Russia as the granary of Germany.[105] 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.[61] That the Germanic race would gradually expand to that eastern border, so that, in several generations' time, the German Herrenvolk, as the leading people of Europe, would be ready to "resume the battles of destiny against Asia", which were "sure to break out again"; and that the defeat of Europe would mean "the destruction of the creative power of the Earth";[61] nonetheless, the Ural Mountains were a secondary objective of the secret Generalplan Ost (Master Plan East) for the colonisation of Eastern Europe.[106] 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, with a "living wall" said to be "defending" the easternmost Lebensraum lands, while simultaneously "elevating" higher social class Chinese and nearly all Japanese-ethnicity populations as "honorary Aryans", partly to Hitler's own stated respect in Mein Kampf towards those specific East Asian ethnicities.

The early stages of Lebensraum im Osten (Lebensraum in the East) featured the ethnic-cleansing of Russians and other Slavs (Galicians, Karelians, Ukrainians, et al.) from their lands, and the consolidation of their countries into the Reichskommissariat administration that extended to the Ural Mountains, the geographic frontier of Europe and Asia. 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). Nonetheless, despite the initial, strategic successes of Operation Barbarossa, in counterattack, the Red Army's defeats of the German Army at the Battle of Stalingrad (August 1942 – February 1943) and at the Battle of Kursk (July – August 1943) in Russia, added to the Allied Operation Husky (July – August 1943) in Sicily, thwarted the full implementation of Nazi Lebensraum in the east of Europe.

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.

The scope of the enterprise and the scale of the territories invaded and conquered for Germanisation by the Nazis indicated two ideological purposes for Lebensraum, and their relation to the geopolitical purposes of the Nazis: (i) a program of global conquest, begun in Central Europe; and (ii) a program of continental European conquest, limited to Eastern Europe. From the strategic perspectives of the Stufenplan ("Plan in Stages"), the global- and continental- interpretations of Nazi Lebensraum are feasible, and neither exclusive of each other, nor counter to Hitler's foreign-policy goals for Germany.[107]

Among themselves, within the Reich régime proper, the Nazis held different definitions of Lebensraum, such as the idyllic, agrarian society that required much arable land, advocated by the blood-and-soil ideologist Richard Walther Darré and Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler; and the urban, industrial state, that required raw materials and slaves, advocated by Adolf Hitler.[108] Operation Barbarossa—the invasion of the Soviet Union in summer 1941—required a compromise of concept, purpose, and execution to realize Hitler's conception of Lebensraum in the Slavic lands of Eastern Europe.[107]

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. What happens to a Russian, to a Czech, does not interest me in the slightest. What other nations can offer in the way of good blood of our type, we will take, if necessary, by kidnapping their children and raising them here with us. Whether nations live in prosperity or starve to death interests me only so far as we need them as slaves for our culture; otherwise, it is of no interest to me. Whether 10,000 Russian females fall down from exhaustion while digging an anti-tank ditch interests me only insofar as the anti-tank ditch for Germany is finished.[61]

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. Nonetheless, National Socialism (Nazism), the ideology of the Nazi Party established racism as a philosophic basis of Lebensraum-as-geopolitics; which Adolf Hitler presented as Nazi racist ideology in his political autobiography Mein Kampf (1926–28).

Moreover, the geopolitical interpretations of national living-space of the academic Karl Haushofer (a teacher of Rudolf Hess, Hitler's deputy), provided Adolf Hitler with the intellectual, academic, and scientific rationalisations that justified the territorial expansion of Germany, by the natural right of the German Aryan race, to expand into, occupy, and exploit the lands of other countries, regardless of the native populations.[109] 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.[110] 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.[111] 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.[112]