Lebensraum

Lebensraum ('living space'), is a geopolitical concept which was adopted by Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), the leader of Nazi Germany, to justify the military domination of Central and Eastern Europe, and then the USSR. Hitler promised that Lebensraum in the east would gain vast new space and resources and so ensure economic prosperity and autonomy for Germanic peoples.

In addition to economic considerations, Nazi race theory was used to justify foreign conquests since the achievement of Lebensraum would also bring the destruction of the Nazis' main enemies: Communists, Jewish people, and Slavic people, all of whom were regarded as politically or racially inferior to Nazis and Germanic people.

Hitler's Popular Appeal

Adolf Hitler had won popularity amongst the German electorate in the early 1930s by making popular promises. Hitler said he would reverse the harsh settlement terms after the First World War (1914-18), which were embodied in the Treaty of Versailles. Germany had since suffered economic problems, especially after the Great Depression of 1929 onwards. World trade collapsed, and prices fell, badly affecting workers of all kinds as their wages were cut. Around one-third of German workers lost their jobs. Unemployment in 1928 was 1.4 million; in 1932, it was 6 million. Crime, particularly juvenile crime, rocketed. The governments of the Weimar Republic seemed unable to solve any of these problems, but Hitler promised solutions.

Hitler promised the people bread and work. He planned to massively rearm Germany, restoring national pride and creating jobs. He promised business leaders lucrative state contracts such as arms manufacturing. This idea was also popular with the German Army, which had been severely limited in size by the Treaty of Versailles.

Hitler talked of creating a Volksgemeinschaft or people's traditional folk community, a self-sufficient society that has no class distinctions. This community would not only be developed in Germany but in new conquered lands where new natural resources would ensure the prosperity of all. Hitler was selling a dream of a 'Greater Germany', and in post-war Germany, when times were tough, the idea of new lands and new resources to boost the economy appealed to many voters and many large business owners.

The Theory of Lebensraum

The Nazi Party Programme of 1920 included as point three (of 25) the demand for new land "for the nourishment of our people and for settling our excess population" (McDonough, 111). Hitler wrote in more detail about his ambitions for an empire in his 1925 book, Mein Kampf ('My Struggle'), where he described the need for a new living space for the Germanic people, a place where they could spread their wings and live well off the land.

…when we speak of new territory in Europe today, we must think principally of Russia and her border states. Destiny itself seems to wish to point out the way to us here…This colossal empire in the East is ripe for dissolution, and the end of the Jewish domination in Russia will also be the end of Russia as a state.

(Quoted in Shirer, 796)

Rudolf Hess (1894-1987), the deputy leader of the Nazi Party, is sometimes credited with proofreading the Mein Kampf text and adding the idea of Lebensraum to Hitler's vision of an all-powerful Third Reich. Lebensraum, however, was not a new concept. 'Lebensraum' was first coined by the geographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904) in the 19th century. In the years leading up to WWI, the concept began to be used in closer relation to territorial expansion, and so it became popular with conservative nationalist thinkers and political parties in Germany. The German geopolitician Karl Haushofer (1869-1946) was an advocate of Lebensraum in Central and Eastern Europe. Hitler, then, as in so many other cases, drew on Germanic traditions to increase his popularity. After Mein Kampf, the idea of Lebensraum was repeated in Hitler's second book, written in 1928 but never published. The idea was again promoted in 1930, this time by Alfred Rosenberg (1893-1946), the Nazi racial theorist, in his major work, Myth of the Twentieth Century (Der Mythus des Zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts). Hitler was still talking about the concept in such meetings as that recorded by the Hossbach Memorandum of 1934 when he first revealed his foreign policy objectives to his top military commanders. In short, through Nazi public meetings, books, pamphlets, and speeches, Lebensraum would have become a familiar term to a great many Germans by the end of the 1930s.

For Hitler, Lebensraum was a necessity, given the high population density of Germany. The state had a population of around 70 million in 1939, leading Hitler to say that figure was 20 million too many for the space available. Hitler sought a redistribution of the lands to the east and justified this in such simple terms as 'might is right' and racial superiority over others (see below). Additional justifications included his idea that the USSR had much more land than it needed. In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote: "It cannot be God's plan to give one people fifty times more land than another" (Range, 91). Further, he considered current frontiers entirely flexible, as expressed in a speech at Kiel: "Land has been in a constant state of redistribution for millennia. It would be insane to suggest that this game is suddenly over – and that the current state of distribution is set forever" (Range, 182).

Although Mein Kampf is clear about Hitler's ambitions for world domination, some historians, nevertheless, suggest that the Nazi leader, in reality, simply leapt from one international crisis to another through the 1930s, taking advantage each time of the weaknesses of the leaders of other states. The historian A. J. P. Taylor also notes that Lebensraum "did not drive Germany to war. Rather war, or a warlike policy, produced the demand for Lebensraum" (140). In other words, the resources needed for war and the desire for war to gain resources became inseparable objectives.

Although Hitler may have had a plan for Lebensraum going back to the 1920s; certainly, this plan was a vague one, even when WWII started in 1939. As with so many aspects of Hitler's foreign policy, he was often in love with an idea but left the details to subordinates or to such a day as he could devote more attention to it, in this case, when WWII was won. As Taylor notes:

There was no study of the resources in the territories that were to be conquered…there was no recruitment of a staff to carry out these 'plans', no survey of Germans who could be moved, let alone any enrolment.

(24)

What Resources Did Hitler Want?

The rearmament of Germany had necessitated huge imports of raw materials, and these could not be bought for much longer as Germany's balance of payments went into tilt from 1939. Occupying territories where these resources could be found seemed a simple solution to the problem. Hitler reminded his closest Nazi comrades that, regarding newly conquered territory, the task was: "First, to dominate it; Second, to administer it; Third, to exploit it" (Shirer, 941).

Hitler's motivation for German expansion sprang from a long shopping list of the natural resources and valuable industries he wanted to exploit. There was the heavy industry of Czechoslovakia, very useful for making weapons, aircraft, and tanks. There were the Ploiești oil fields in Romania, necessary for the Nazi war machine. Further afield, there were the oil fields of the Caucasus. There were the oil, wheat, oil refineries, and hydroelectric plants of Ukraine. Russia had valuable mines, such as those producing nickel and other metals needed for weapons. With these resources, Hitler's Third Reich would last a thousand years, he promised.

Lebensraum & Nazi Race Theory

Hitler's ideas on race and international relations were closely tied with that of Lebensraum, in many ways justifying the whole enterprise of foreign conquest. As far as Hitler was concerned, foreign lands and resources belonged to anyone powerful enough to take them. In Mein Kampf, he noted, "right lies in strength alone" (McDonough, 83). Further, the people living in the lands Hitler wanted were regarded as being racially inferior. This double idea was expressed in the Nazi slogan "Blood and Soil".

Hitler and the Nazis had long identified certain groups not only as enemies of Nazism but also as enemies of the German people as a whole and the German state. Jewish people and Communists were identified by Hitler as being essentially the same, both were out to destroy Germany. Moscow, for example, was described by Hitler as being the capital of the "Judaeo-Bolshevist world conspiracy" against Germany (Rees, 14). In another example, at the Nuremberg rally of 1937, Hitler called the leaders of the USSR "an uncivilized Jewish-Bolshevik international guild of criminals" (ibid, 15), which worked tirelessly to undermine not only Germany's economic prosperity but also the good morals of its people. In short, for Hitler, attacking Germany's neighbours was seen as a way to protect Germany.

Hitler wanted to destroy communism, and so he viewed a military campaign against the USSR as nothing less than a crusade. Indeed, the campaign against the USSR, Operation Barbarossa, was named after Frederick Barbarossa, Holy Roman Emperor (r. 1155-90), the man who had led the Third Crusade (1189-92) but drowned in Turkey en route. Legend has it that Barbarossa did not die but only sleeps until the right moment arrives when he will return to ensure Germany is made great again. Influenced by ideas of Social Darwinism (where the theories of evolution in nature are applied to states), the battle between the Third Reich and the USSR was viewed by Hitler as a natural condition of the ever-present competition between nations, where the strongest survived and the weak were destroyed.

Once Hitler had destroyed the USSR, he intended to demolish the major Soviet cities and repopulate the territory with Germanic peoples living in entirely new cities. Albert Speer (1905-1981), Hitler's chief architect and armaments minister, even suggested that major German cities should each sponsor the building of their "twin" in the new territories. Germanic 'soldier-peasants' would be encouraged to live in conquered rural areas, marry local women, and have very large families. Most of the existing Soviet population was to be forcibly moved to the east of the Ural Mountains. Those who were allowed to remain would be given only the minimum education. Speaking of Ukraine as an example, Hitler said: "It is to our interest that the people should know just enough to recognize the signs on the road" (Dimbleby, 207).

Hitler had no qualms about this resettlement policy, even if it required starving millions of people into submission, since he viewed Slavic people, who made up the majority of the population in the lands to the east of Germany, as being racially inferior to Germanic people. For Hitler and the Nazis, these views on 'inferior' races not only justified but necessitated their subjugation as part of the Nazi view of the inevitability of a perpetual struggle between nations and races. Jewish people, who were viewed by the Nazis as being racially inferior to Aryans (non-Jews), would not be simply moved out but would be rounded up and eventually exterminated in the Holocaust that claimed six million lives.

Hitler's Lebensraum, then, was not a plan of colonisation but the complete destruction, repopulation, and rebuilding of newly occupied territories. The project would create a new promised land, which had been racially 'cleansed'. Hitler even promised the creation of new resorts, which would attract holidaying Aryans. The Crimea was to become "our Riviera" and the coast of Croatia a "tourist's paradise" (Dimbleby, 207).

The Practical Consequences of Lebensraum

The massive geographical scope of the Lebensraum project, what the historian J. Dimbleby describes as a "psychotic fantasy" (487), was concisely described in a 1933 speech to rural policy makers by Richard Darré (1895-1953), Hitler's agricultural minister:

The natural area for settlement by the German people is the territory to the east of the Reich's boundaries up to the Urals, bordered in the south by the Caucasus, Caspian Sea, Black Sea and the watershed which divides the Mediterranean basin from the Baltic and the North Sea. We will settle this space, according to the law that a superior people always has the right to conquer and to own the land of an inferior people.

(ibid, 46-7)

Whether directly planned or not, then, as the dramatic international events of the 1930s unfolded, Hitler certainly built up a catalogue of invasions. He took back control of the Saar region (1935), remilitarised the Rhineland (1936), absorbed Austria into the Third Reich with the Anschluss (1938), took over the Czech Sudetenland (1938), and then occupied the remainder of that state (1939). The invasion of Poland in 1939 sparked WWII, and then, more countries quickly fell into the clutches of the Third Reich, notably parts of Scandinavia, the Low Countries, and the northern half of France in 1940. German forces even marched through North Africa. All of this military activity came at a cost. Now, more than ever, Hitler needed the raw materials of the East.

Hitler directed his generals to launch Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941. Hoping for a quick knock-out blow to the Soviet Red Army, the campaign dragged on as the Axis armies (Germany and its allies) lacked reserves and were troubled by the logistical difficulties of waging war in a country of vast spaces with poor transport connections. Nevertheless, vast territorial gains were made. Orders were given for Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing squads) to shoot captured Communist political officers of the Red Army and Jewish civilians. Those Jews not immediately shot were rounded up into ghettos and then, along with others, like the Romani people, transported to concentration and death camps like Auschwitz, where millions were murdered in gas chambers.

The rest of the population in the newly occupied territories could either move to Siberia or be left to starve so that Germanic people could move in and start to benefit from their long-promised Lebensraum. In the siege of Leningrad (1941-4), for example, the city was deliberately shelled and starved to reduce its population, such was Hitler's indifference to existing inhabitants. As Dimbleby notes, "Mass extermination was not an accidental by-product of the invasion but an essential component of it" (207).

The USSR could ultimately draw on much greater resources in men and material than Hitler could ever muster. The German-Soviet War lasted for four years and accounted for at least 25 million military and civilian deaths, perhaps half of the overall WWII death toll. The USSR drove the invaders back and then pushed on into Germany itself, shattering the dream of Lebensraum. Germany was defeated, and with Hitler's suicide, the state surrendered in May 1945.