Lebensraum [Living space]
Hitler’s Nazi project was fundamentally geographical, with space, place and landscape pressed into horrific service. Consequently, the Nazis managed, planned, organized and contorted geography, making it conform to and realise their larger ideological ends. Partly this was achieved by the Nazis drawing on academic labour, in this case the labor of geographers, urban and rural planners, landscape architects, and agronomists. Each of these academic specialties possessed expert knowledge about geography, as well as theories, concepts and practical methods that could be used to meet the purposes of National Socialism. The British historian of Nazi Germany, Michael Burleigh contends that such “scholars … put their knowledge at the service of the government … willingly and enthusiastically. There was virtually no resistance.”
To the early 20th-century British geographer Sir Halford Mackinder, world history was a story of constant conflict between land and sea powers. At the turn of the 20th century when Mackinder was first writing, as evolving technology, especially the system of railroads, allowed land powers to be nearly as mobile as those of the sea. Because land powers on the World Island had a smaller distance to travel than the sea powers operating on its periphery, any increase in their mobility would tip the balance of power in their favor. These "interior lines" gave the power with the "central position" on the World Island the ability to project power anywhere more rapidly than the sea powers could defend. Thus, who ruled the Heartland would have the possibility of commanding the entire World Island.
A German geopolitician and devotee of Mackinder, Karl Haushofer, spent the interwar period writing extensively about the Heartland and the need for Lebensraum (additional territory deemed essential for continued national well-being) for the German people. One of Haushofer's pupils was Rudolph Hess, who brought his teacher into the inner intellectual circles of the Reich. Haushofer was appointed by Hitler to run the German Academy in Berlin, which was "more a propagandic institution than a true academy in the continental European sense," according to one observer. The actual effect of his teachings upon German policy is open to debate--Haushofer may have had an enormous effect on Hitler through his pupil, or he may have been "a neglected and slighted man who would certainly enjoy learning about the hullabaloo raised by his doctrine" in the United States. It cannot be proven that the Drang nach Osten (eastward push) was affected by a desire to control the Heartland. Here policy may just overlap with, rather than be dictated by, geotheory. But the possibility that there was a secret master plan at work in Berlin created a whole new interest in geopolitics and what Mackinder and geopolitics had to say.
Germany, Italy and Japan were three powerful nations which had insufficient territory to allow of expansion, but, being strong and vigorous peoples with high birthrates, they can no more be permanently kept within fixed boundaries than can increasing volumes of steam be retained within a hermetically sealed vessel. Unless the League of Nations decided to tackle this very difficult but very urgent problem, wars of conquest must come.
Hitler promised the German people to obtain new "Lebensraum" (or "living space") for them in the countries to the East. The word “Lebensraum” appears only a few times in Hitler's original German language text. ""Just as Germany's frontiers are fortuitous frontiers, momentary frontiers in the current political struggle of any period, so are the boundaries of other nations' living space.... an enlargement of our people's living space in Europe. 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.... most especially when not some little negro nation or other is involved, but the Germanic mother of life, which has given the present-day world its cultural picture. Germany will either be a world power or there will be no Germany."
In Mein Kampf, Hitler, an embittered World War I veteran, rejected the terms of the 1919 Versailles Treaty. He referred to Germans as "a master race" and "the highest species of humanity on this earth." He wrote the book in prison, where he was incarcerated for planning a (failed) revolution through his National Socialistic German Wokers' (Nazi) Party. Once freed, Hitler pursued ihs campaign and began winning adherants, eventually gaining enough power--not through violence, but through votes--to become chancellor of Germany on Jan. 30, 1933. Hitler believed that what Germany needed was lebensraum, living space, which meant the occupation of other countries. Germany, Hitler said quite explicitly, must expand to the east -- largely at the expense of Russia.
Hitler aimed to acquire the territories lost by Germany as the result of the World War of 1914-1918, and other territories in Europe asserted to be occupied by so-called "racial Germans." Section I of the Nazi Party Platform gave advance notice of the intentions of the Nazi conspirators to claim territories occupied by so-called racial Germans. It provided : "We demand the unification of all Germans in the Greater Germany on the basis of the right of self-determination of people."
While Rosenberg pointed out in 1922 that it was not possible at that time to designate "such European and nonEuropean territories which would be taken into consideration for colonization" he nevertheless stated that the following could be laid down as a basic objective, namely that "* * * German Foreign Policy must make its most im- portant primary goal the consolidation of all Germans living closely together in Europe in one state and to secure the ter- ritory of what today is the Polish-Czech East."
In his Reichstag speech of 20 February 1928 Hitler said: "The claim, therefore, for German colonial possession will be voiced from year to year with increasing vigor, possessions which Germany did not take away from other countries, and which today are virtually of no value to these powers, but appear indispensable for our own people."
Again, in his Reichstag speech of 30 January 1939 Hitler declared : "The theft of the German colonies was morally unjustified. Economically, it was utter insanity. The political motives advanced were so mean that one is tempted to call them silly. In 1918, after the end of the war, the victorious Powers really would have had the authority to bring about a reasonable settlement of international problems. * * " "The great German colonial possessions, which the Reich once acquired peacefully by treaties and by paying for them, have been stolen-contrary indeed to the solemn assurance given by President Wilson, which was the basic condition on which Germany laid down her arms. The objection that these colonial possessions are of no importance in any case should only lead to their being returned to us with an easy mind."
Hitler also aimed to acquire further territories in colonial Europe and elsewhere claimed to be required by "racial Germans" as "Lebensraum" or living space, at the expense of neighboring and other countries. Hitler made it clear that the objectives of the Nazi conspirators were only preliminary steps in a more ambitious plan of territorial aggrandizement. Thus he stated: "One must take the point of view, cooly and soberly, that it certainly cannot be the intention of Heaven to give one people fifty times as much space (Grund und Boden) on this earth as to another. One should not permit himself to be diverted in this case by political boundaries from the boundaries of eternal justice.
"The boundaries of 1914 do not mean anything for the fu- ture of the German nation. They did not represent either a defense of the past nor would they represent a power in the future. The German people will not obtain either its inner compactness by them, nor will its nutrition be secured by them, nor do these boundaries appear from a military stand- point as appropriate or even satisfactory. * * *"
While the precise limits of German expansion were only vaguely defined by the Nazi conspirators, they clearly indicated that the lebenraum to which they felt they were entitled would be acquired primarily in the East. Rosenberg was particularly insistent in his declarations that Russia would have to "move over" to make way for German living space. He underlined this demand as follows: "The understanding that the German nation, if it is not to perish in the truest sense of the word, needs ground and soil for itself and its future generations, and the second sober perception that this soil can no more be conquered in Africa, but in Europe and first of all in the East-these organically determine the German foreign policy for centuries. "The Russians * * * will have to confine themselves so as to remove their center of gravity to Asia."
A similar view was expressed by Hitler in Mein Kampf: "If one wanted territory in Europe, this could be done on the whole at the expense of Russia, and the new Reich would have to set out to march over the road of the former Knights, in order to give soil to the German plow by means of the German sword, and to give daily bread to the nation." In Mein Kampf Hitler threatened war as a means of attaining additional space : "If this earth really has space (Raum) for all to live in, then we should be given the territory necessary. Of course, one will not do that gladly. Then, however, the right of self- preservation comes into force; that which is denied to kind- ness, the fist will have to take. If our forefathers had made their decisions dependent on the same pacifistic nonsense as the present, then we would possess only a third of our present territory. * *
"In contrast, we, National Socialists, have to hold on steadily to our foreign political goals, namely, to secure on this earth the territory due to the German people. And this action is the only one which will make bloody sacrifice before God and our German posterity appear justified."
While Hitler had no grasp of economics in a conventional sense — and indeed despised - economists — his actions were determined in large riot part by economic considertaations. It is easy (but dangerous) to make Hitler look like a simpleton. Hitler believed, for example, that excessive use of fertilizers would ruin the soil of Germany. The solution, therefore, was more Lebensraum for the German peasant, which meant war against the Soviet Union so that the Ukraine might be settled by an expanding German population. (Ironically, statistics have shown that the German population has been falling since the turn of the century). Hitler knew that Germany was not self-sufficient in military-economic resources; iron ore, manganese, copper, rubber and oil had to be imported if Germany was to have armed quickly. Germany would have had to export more goods to pay for these things. The resumption of a huge German export drive would have led to further intensive industrialization yet Hitler and all the leading Nazis regarded life on the land as "natural" and modern industrialization and life in big cities as undermining a nation's vigor.
Lebensraum in the East would not only make Germany agriculturally independent; the conquest of the Ukraine and other areas would provide the raw materials Germany would otherwise have to purchase from countries she did not control. For this reason, Hitler, unlike most other nationalists, had no interest in overseas colonies. Nor was he worried about Germany's highly unstable economic situation. That his solution was predicated on war did not trouble him; for the true Nazi, war was, after all, the invigoration of the race, a part of that necessary Darwinian process by which the fittest prove their ability to survive.
The Germans failed in their campaign in the East not for lack of military prowess but because of the policies they pursued in the occupied territories. If the Germans had adopted destruction of communism as their primary aim, so the argument goes, and offered a prospect of independence to the Ukrainians, Belorussians, and even Great Russians under a benevolent political system, they would have won enough support among anti-Soviet masses to emerge from the war victorious. Instead, having embarked on the war of conquest to secure Lebensraum for, the Aryan race to be served by Slav Untermenschen, the Germans awakened Russian patriotism that ultimately assured the defeat of the Third Reich.
The power structure in the Third Reich in which the autonomous institutions—the Nazi Party, the Army, the State, the SS, and certain ministries—actively and successfully fought Alfred Rosenberg’s Ministry for Occupied East, the only organization that made an attempt to plan a political solution for Russia, a solution fully favoring the Reich but also aiming at enlisting a degree of cooperation from at least the non-Russian Soviet populace. Hitler himself maintained that such an "elevation" of the lowly Slavs would undermine the morale of the German soldiers; whose great feats had been inspired by the awareness of their infinite superiority. Only after the first defeats did he reluctantly permit a limited propaganda effort directed at the Red Army, suggesting that the New Order was bringing the peoples of Russia liberation from Communist rule.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
