Lebensraum

Lebensraum, policy of Nazi Germany that involved expanding German territories to the east to provide land and material resources for the German people, while driving out Jewish and Slavic people.

Origins

The idea of Germanic peoples moving into territories in eastern Europe was not without historical precedent. Since the medieval period, people from German states had moved east as their homelands became overpopulated. It was not until the beginning of the 20th century, however, that the concept of Lebensraum, or “living space,” was formally defined. The term was first used by German geographer and ethnographer Friedrich Ratzel. Influenced by Charles Darwin, Ratzel espoused a form of social Darwinism, applying the idea of survival of the fittest to nation-states. He believed that human migration was necessary to gain the territory and resources required for a people to thrive. To Ratzel, the most powerful and fittest civilizations would prevail. Ratzel also believed that new territories should be colonized by peasant farmers. This agricultural ideal contrasted with the economic imperialism of the time, in which a conquering country exploited territories for raw materials to develop industry. The Pan-German League, a group that sought to unite all people who spoke Germanic languages, seized upon Ratzel’s ideas. In his book Germany and the Next War (1911), Friedrich von Bernhardi proposed that Germany use military force to expand into eastern Europe in pursuit of Lebensraum. The treaties of Brest-Litovsk (1918), which concluded the World War I hostilities between the Central Powers (including Germany) and Soviet Russia, ratified the unfolding German occupation and colonization of the Baltic and present-day Belarus, which together constituted a territory the Germans called Ober Ost.

Lebensraum in Hitler’s Germany

The Treaty of Versailles, the peace document signed at the end of World War I, stipulated that Germany compensate the Allies for damages suffered in the war. The country was to repay roughly $33 billion in war damages. The treaty also required a large-scale reduction in German military power, including demilitarization of the Rhineland and restrictions on German armaments production. Finally, the treaty reduced the territory—and, in effect, the population—of Germany by about 10 percent and mandated the evacuation of Germans from Ober Ost. Germans found the terms of the treaty to be humiliating as well as both economically and militarily crippling.

Adolf Hitler railed against these measures. He blamed Germany’s misfortunes on Jews, liberals, and Germans who did not support the country’s aggressions during World War I. Hitler also faulted the British naval blockade, which had cut off supplies as part of a strategy to force German surrender. These arguments all contributed to his embrace of Ratzel’s concept of Lebensraum (especially as filtered through Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kjellén).

While incarcerated in 1924 after the failure of the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler, guided by political geographer and former general Karl Haushofer, read Ratzel’s writings. At the same time he was also writing Mein Kampf, in which he outlined his belief in the superiority of the “Aryan race” and in the German destiny for world domination. He described how Lebensraum would allow the German Volk, or “people,” to fulfill that role. Citing the importance of food, material resources, and room for expansion, he justified seizing territories in eastern Europe. In particular he coveted the raw materials in the Urals and in Siberia and the agricultural riches of Ukraine.

In addition to economic motives, Lebensraum had a racist component. Hitler likened Lebensraum to the American notion of Manifest Destiny. For him, the Slavic and Jewish residents of the East were Untermenschen (“subhumans”), whom he equated with Native Americans. In 1932 Hitler stated:

The settlement of the North American continent was similarly a consequence not of any higher claim in a democratic or international sense, but rather a consciousness of what is right which had its sole roots in the conviction of the superiority and thus the right of the white race.

Hitler also hated the Marxist Bolsheviks of the Soviet Union, whom he considered to be in league with the Jews. Hitler’s plans for the Soviet Union included creating a mass famine in eastern Europe to depopulate the region. Under this policy, tens of millions of inhabitants would either die or relocate to Siberia, allowing the Germans to take over their lands.

Germany’s failed invasion of the Soviet Union

Notwithstanding his ambitions in the East, Hitler negotiated the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact in 1939, intent on subjugating western Europe before turning his attention to the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, wary of Soviet advances in the Baltic states, Bessarabia, and northern Bukovina, he sped up his timetable in the East, and in June 1941 Hitler’s quest for Lebensraum led to the invasion of the Soviet Union, under the name Operation Barbarossa. Some three million men participated in the German campaign, along with about 3,000 tanks and 2,500 aircraft, making the action the largest, most powerful invasion in human history to date. After widespread initial successes and deep penetration into the Soviet Union, however, the invasion eventually was undone by the combination of conflicting strategic objectives among the German general staff, Soviet resistance, and the onset of the Russian winter, for which the German forces were ill-prepared.

Lebensraum and the Holocaust

As the German forces pushed eastward in pursuit of Lebensraum, the count of the people they exterminated multiplied, contributing greatly to the Holocaust and resulting in monumentally tragic consequences. Intent on fulfilling Hitler’s vision of Aryan supremacy, the Nazis targeted not only Jews but also other ethnic, social, political, and religious groups. Their victims included Roma, homosexuals, Poles, and Soviets. An estimated six million European Jews and millions of others lost their lives as a result of the systematic state-sponsored killing and other policies of the Nazi regime, including Lebensraum.