There were many areas annexed by Nazi Germany both immediately before and throughout the course of World War II . Territories that were part of Germany before the annexations were known as the "Altreich" (Old Reich).
80-429: A Reichsgau (plural Reichsgaue ) was an administrative subdivision created in a number of areas annexed by Nazi Germany between 1938 and 1945. The term was formed from the words Reich (realm, empire) and Gau , the latter a deliberately medieval-sounding word with a meaning approximately equivalent to shire . The Reichsgaue were an attempt to resolve the administrative chaos resulting from
160-552: 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. Twenty-five years later, Nazi foreign policy resumed the cultural goal of the pursuit and realisation of German living-space at the expense of non-German peoples in Eastern Europe with
240-454: 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. Such a view can be true or false: it is the starting point for every opinion on the appearance and events of life, and is therefore a binding and obligating law for every act. The more such an opinion covers
320-458: A German professor Fritz Fischer reported the results of his investigations into German war aims. These were indeed a "blueprint for aggression", or, as the professor called them, "a grasp at world power": Belgium under German control, the French iron-fields annexed to Germany, and, what is more, Poland and Ukraine to be cleared of their inhabitants and resettled with Germans. These plans were not merely
400-737: A core tenet of Nazism that Germany needed "living space" ( Lebensraum ), creating a "pull towards the East" ( Drang nach Osten ) where that could be found and colonized . North-East Italy was also eventually to be annexed, including both the Operational Zone of the Adriatic Littoral and the Operational Zone of the Alpine Foothills , but also the Venice region . Goebbels went as far as to suggest taking control of Lombardy as well: Whatever
480-656: 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. As six hundred years ago, the German peasant's destiny must be to preserve and increase
560-809: A society. In 1901, Ratzel extended his thesis in his essay titled " Lebensraum ". Ratzel pointed to historical precedent in the Middle Ages, when the social and economic pressures of rapid population growth in the German states had led to a steady colonization of Germanic peoples in Eastern Europe. During the First World War , the Allied naval blockade of the Central Powers caused food shortages in Germany, and resources from German colonies in Africa were unable to slip past
640-467: A thousand years. 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. The USSR was the country to provide sufficient Lebensraum for the Germans, because it possessed much agricultural land, and
720-518: Is a German concept of expansionism and Völkisch nationalism , the philosophy and policies of which were common to German politics from the 1890s to the 1940s. First popularized around 1901, Lebensraum became a geopolitical goal of Imperial Germany in World War I (1914–1918), as the core element of the Septemberprogramm of territorial expansion. The most extreme form of this ideology
800-602: Is credited to Karl Ernst Haushofer and his Institute of Geopolitics, in Munich, especially the ultra-nationalist interpretation of it, which was used as a justification for the desire to avenge Germany's military defeat at the end of the First World War (1914–18) and the desire to reverse the dictates of the Treaty of Versailles (1919), which reduced Germany geographically, economically, and militarily. The politician Adolf Hitler said that
880-588: Is to say, resettlement of nationalities". On 20 October 1939, Hitler told General Wilhelm Keitel that the war would be a difficult "racial struggle" and that the General Government was to "purify the Reich territory from Jews and Polacks, too." Likewise, in October 1939, Nazi propaganda instructed Germans to view Poles, Jews, and Gypsies as Untermenschen . Nazi Germany's pursuit of its bio-geo-political ambitions
SECTION 10
#1732841386241960-512: The Reichsgaue were the result: the borders of party Gaue and those of the federal states were to be identical, and the party Gauleiter also occupied the post of Reichsstatthalter . Rival interests and the influence the Gauleiter wielded with Hitler prevented any reform from being undertaken in the " Old Reich " ( German : Altreich ), which meant Germany in its borders of 1937 before
1040-536: The Septemberprogramm was unsuccessful due to its infeasibility, with too few soldiers to realise the plans during a two-front war. 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. Nationally, the annexation and ethnic cleansing of Poland for German Lebensraum
1120-495: The zone of intended German settlement in north-eastern France , where a Gau or a Reichskommissariat centred on Burgundy was intended for creation, and which Heinrich Himmler wanted to turn into the SS 's very own fiefdom. The goal was to unite all or as many as possible ethnic Germans and Germanic peoples , including non-Germanic speaking ones considered "Aryans" , in a Greater Germanic Reich . The eastern Reichskommissariats in
1200-583: The "eternal Jewish threat" ( Der ewige Jude , 1937). Emphasis was put on the need for rearmament and the pseudoscience of superior races in the pursuit of " blood and soil " ( Blut und Boden ). During the twenty-one-year inter-war period between the First (1914–18) and the Second (1939–45) World War, Lebensraum for Germany was the principal tenet of the extremist nationalism that characterised German party politics. The Nazis, led by Adolf Hitler, demanded not only
1280-769: The Baltic governorates , Belarus , Ukraine , and the Caucasus region. Despite such an extensive geopolitical victory, tactical defeat in the Western Front, strategic over-extension, and factional division in government compelled Imperial Germany to abandon the Eastern European Lebensraum gained with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in favour of the peace-terms of the Treaty of Versailles (1919), and yielded those Russian lands to Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine. As
1360-721: The Crimea , and were stationed, in smaller numbers, in Transcaucasia . Even the unoccupied "rump" Russia appeared—with the conclusion of the German–Soviet Supplementary Treaty, on 28 August 1918—to be in firm, though indirect, dependency on the Reich . Thus, Hitler's long-range aim, fixed in the 1920s, of erecting a German Eastern Imperium on the ruins of the Soviet Union was not simply a vision emanating from an abstract wish. In
1440-586: The Kingdom of Bulgaria ). 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 result, Russia yielded to Germany much of the arable land of European Russia ,
1520-644: The Nazi geopolitics of "inevitable expansion" would reverse overpopulation, provide natural resources, and uphold German national honor. 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
1600-653: The Nordic people . This combination of biopolitical and geo-political agenda of the Nazi Reich became the basis for its Germanization policies, the mission of what it regarded as the "purification of the Volksgemeinschaft ", as well as its state-sponsored genocidal apparatus. On 6 October 1939, Hitler told the Reichstag that after the fall of Poland the most important matter was "a new order of ethnographic relations, that
1680-1073: The Polish decrees (8 March 1940), the Nazis ensured that the racial inferiority of the Poles was legally recognized in the German Reich, and regulated the working and living conditions of Polish laborers ( Zivilarbeiter ). The Polish decrees also established that any Pole "who has sexual relations with a German man or woman, or approaches them in any other improper manner, will be punished by death." The Gestapo were vigilant of sexual relations between Germans and Poles, and pursued anyone suspected of race defilement ( Rassenschande ); likewise, there were proscriptions of sexual relations between Germans and other ethnic groups brought in from Eastern Europe. "Hitler's ideas of Lebensraum , also elaborated in Mein Kampf , meant that his desire to expand German power and control to
SECTION 20
#17328413862411760-490: The Prussian government had already allocated 200,000,000 ℳ︁ for purposes of German colonization of Polish portions of eastern Prussia. These funds were intended to support the creation of settlements by acquiring Polish estates. By 1907, Prussian Chancellor Bülow was promoting bills that explicitly called for the forced sale of Polish estates. A bill in late 1907 asked for another $ 100,000,000 for expropriations. In 1903,
1840-801: The September Campaign (1 September – 6 October 1939) that began the Second World War in Europe. In Germany and the Two World Wars , the German historian Andreas Hillgruber said that the territorial gains of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (1918) were the imperial prototype for Adolf Hitler's Greater German Empire in Eastern Europe: At the moment of the November 1918 ceasefire in the West, newspaper maps of
1920-761: The Treaty of Versailles , the Territory of the Saar Basin was split from Germany for at least 15 years. In 1935, the Saarland rejoined Germany in a lawful way after a plebiscite. The territories listed below are those that were fully annexed into Germany proper. The territories listed below are those that were partially incorporated into the Greater German Reich . In the coming Nazi New Order , other lands were considered for annexation sooner or later, for instance North Schleswig , German-speaking Switzerland , and
2000-454: The eastward expansion of German territories . 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; only a foreign policy for the geopolitical conquest of the proper amount of Lebensraum would justify
2080-528: 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
2160-426: The 19th century, the term Lebensraum was used by the German geographer and biologist Oscar Peschel in his 1860 review of Charles Darwin 's Origins of Species (1859). In 1897, the geographer and ethnographer Friedrich Ratzel in his book Politische Geographie applied the word Lebensraum ("living space") to describe physical geography as a factor that influences human activities in developing into
2240-713: The Allies at Versailles . Ratzel said that the development of a people into a society was primarily influenced by their geographic situation (habitat) and that a society that successfully adapted to one geographic territory would naturally and logically expand the boundaries of their nation into another territory. Yet, to resolve German overpopulation , Ratzel pointed out that Imperial Germany (1871–1918) required overseas colonies to which surplus Germans ought to emigrate. 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
2320-485: The East ' ) was based on its tenets. 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 . The Nazi government aimed at repopulating these lands with Germanic colonists in
2400-611: The East ". 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. Some Prussian politicians were increasingly thinking in terms of Lebensraum by 1907. In 1902,
2480-488: The Eastern sphere, established in 1918, this goal had a concrete point of departure. The German Eastern Imperium had already been—if only for a short time—a reality. The Septemberprogramm (1914) documents " Lebensraum in the East" as philosophically integral to Germanic culture throughout the history of Germany; and that Lebensraum is not a racialist philosophy particular to the 20th century. As military strategy,
Reichsgau - Misplaced Pages Continue
2560-522: The European states had to accede to his geopolitical demands. The Nazi Party's usages of the term Lebensraum were explicitly racial, to justify the mystical right of the racially superior Germanic peoples ( Herrenvolk ) to fulfill 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 "
2640-504: The German empire's alliance with Austria-Hungary during World War I. In his works such as Mein Kampf and Zweites Buch , Hitler viewed the Slavs as lacking the capability to form a state. Although Hitler openly spoke about the need for living space in the 1920s, he never publicly spoke about it during his first years in power. It was not until 1937, with the German rearmament program well under way, that he began again to publicly speak about
2720-522: The German people's patrimony in their holy mother earth battle against the Slav race. In Mein Kampf (1925), Hitler dedicated a full chapter—titled "Eastern Orientation or Eastern Policy"—to outlining the need for the new "living space" for Germany. He claimed that achieving Lebensraum required political will, and that the Nazi movement ought to strive to expand population area for the German people and acquire new sources of food. Lebensraum became
2800-436: The German reliance on food imports 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". Hitler's bio-geo-political doctrine of Lebensraum consisted of two components existing in tension: the materialist endeavour to expand Germanic territories and
2880-698: The Germanisation of Eastern Europe would be complete when "in the East dwell only men with truly German [and] Germanic blood". In the secret memorandum Reflections on the Treatment of Peoples of Alien Races in the East (25 May 1940), Himmler outlined the future of the Eastern European peoples: (i) division of native ethnic groups found in the new living-space; (ii) limited, formal education of four years of elementary school (to teach them only how to write their names and to count to five hundred); and (iii) obedience of
2960-454: 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. Vanquishing
3040-577: The Prussian authorities tried a Polish countess for "presenting a false heir" for an estate near Wróblewo . The case, tried in Berlin , generated crowds of people and police. Observers expressed concern that Prussian "race partiality" would result in a guilty verdict. In September 1914, when the German victory in the First World War appeared feasible, the German government introduced the Septemberprogramm as an official war aim ( Kriegsziel ), which
3120-516: The Slavic and the Latin races was deemed 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 . In the national politics of Weimar Germany , the geopolitical usage of Lebensraum
3200-497: The Slavs is based on a sub-race with a few drops of our blood, the blood of a leading race; the Slav is unable to control himself and create order." 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. With
3280-451: The Swedish political scientist and conservative politician Johan Rudolf Kjellén (1864–1922), who interpreted that biological metaphor as a geopolitical natural-law. 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
Reichsgau - Misplaced Pages Continue
3360-487: The United States' territorial expansion and saw the destruction of Native American peoples and their cultures that took place during the United States' westward expansion as a template for 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
3440-532: The annexation of other territories like Austria, the Sudetenland , and Bohemia, and the Reichsgau scheme was therefore implemented only in newly-acquired territories. There were several Reichsgaue : The East March was subsequently subdivided into seven smaller Reichsgaue , generally coterminous with the former Austrian Länder (federal provinces). Areas annexed by Nazi Germany According to
3520-558: The blockade; this caused support to rise during the war for a Lebensraum that would expand Germany eastward into Russia to gain control of their resources to prevent such a situation from occurring in the future. In the period between the First and the Second World Wars, German nationalists adopted the term Lebensraum in their political demands for the re-establishment of the German colonial empire , which had been dismembered by
3600-573: The colonial and commercial policy of the pre–War period and shift to the soil policy of the future. But when we speak of new territory in Europe today we must principally think of Russia and the border States subject to her. 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
3680-407: 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. 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
3760-408: The declining German birth rate (since the 1880s) and contradicted the popular belief that the "German race" was a vigorous and growing people. Despite each slogan (political and racial) being contradicted by the reality of such demographic facts, the nationalists' demands for Lebensraum proved to be ideologically valid politics in Weimar Germany. In the lead-up to Anschluss (1938) and
3840-446: The destruction of the Soviet Union would have led to the exploitation of millions of peoples as slave labor in the occupied territories and the eventual re-population of the areas with Germans. Nazi Germany's initiation of Operation Barbarossa was motivated by the racial theories and bio-political doctrines of the NSDAP , which were fervently anti-Slavic , anti-communist and anti-semitic . The Nazi party's doctrine of Lebensraum
3920-401: 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. 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
4000-661: The east with the intention of colonising this territory with German settlers would involve the expulsion, enslavement and death of the Slavs who lived there.. 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. Genocidal actions against those peoples would have been completed." — Historian Norman Naimark As official policy, Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler said that no drop of German blood would be lost or left behind to mingle with any alien races; and that
4080-541: 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 . Nazi propaganda depicted Eastern Europe as historically Germanic territories, promoting the myth that these regions were stolen from Aryan races by Hunnic and Avar tribes. Hitler viewed Slavs as primitive subhumans, and he detested
SECTION 50
#17328413862414160-415: The geographic reversion of Germany's post-war borders (to recuperate territory lost by the Treaty of Versailles), but also the German conquest and colonisation of Eastern Europe (whether or not those lands were German before 1918). To that end, Hitler said that flouting the Treaty of Versailles was required for Germany to obtain needed Lebensraum in Eastern Europe. During the 1920s, Heinrich Himmler —as
4240-436: The impulsive nature of Hitlerism. In 1941, in a speech to the Eastern Front Battle Group Nord, Himmler said that the war against the Soviet Union was a war of ideologies and races, between Nazism and Jewish Bolshevism and between the Germanic (Nordic) peoples and the Untermenschen peoples of the East. Moreover, in one of the secret Posen speeches to the SS-Gruppenführer at Posen, Himmler said: "the mixed race of
4320-472: The inhabitants of German-occupied territories into categories of desirability according to criteria. In the same memorandum, Himmler advocated the kidnapping of children who appeared to be Nordic because it would "remove the danger that this subhuman people ( Untermenschenvolk ) of the East through such children might acquire a leader class from such people of good blood, which would be dangerous for us because they would be our equals." According to Himmler,
4400-436: The military situation showed German troops in Finland, holding a line from the Finnish fjords near Narva , down through Pskov – Orsha – Mogilev and the area south of Kursk , to the Don east of Rostov . Germany had thus secured Ukraine. The Russian recognition of Ukraine's separation, exacted at Brest–Litovsk, represented the key element in German efforts to keep Russia perpetually subservient. In addition, German troops held
4480-422: The mutually overlapping jurisdictions and different boundaries of the NSDAP Party Gaue , placed under a Party Gauleiter , and the federal states , under a Reichsstatthalter responsible to the Ministry of the Interior (in the Prussian provinces , the equivalent post was that of Oberpräsident ). Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick had long desired to streamline the German administration, and
4560-531: The mystical quest to revive what the Nazis viewed as the "idealized German medieval past". The explicit embrace of these contradictions was evident in the promulgation of Nazi slogans such as " Blut und Boden " (blood and soil). National Socialism was presented by its ideologues as an organic world-view (" Weltanschauung ") that subordinated all aspects of life—physical bodies, soul, mind, culture, government, religion, education, economy, etc.—into an "organic totality" existing within Lebensraum . Defining Nazism as
4640-443: The name of Lebensraum during and following World War II . Entire populations were ravaged by starvation; any agricultural surplus was used to feed Germany. The Jewish population was to be exterminated outright . Hitler's strategic program for Greater Germany was based on the belief in the power of Lebensraum , especially when pursued by a racially superior society. People deemed to be part of non-Aryan races, within
4720-474: The natural law of organic life, the better its conscious utility can be applied for the sake of the people's life." In the unpublished sequel to Mein Kampf , the Zweites Buch (1928, Second Book ), Hitler further presents the ideology of Nazi Lebensraum , in accordance with the then-future foreign policy of the Nazi Party. To further German population growth, Hitler rejected the ideas of birth control and emigration, arguing that such practices weakened
4800-427: The necessary sacrifices entailed by war. Hitler thought 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 could take by what he viewed as their natural right . Such official racist perspectives for
4880-405: The need for living space. The bio-geo-political nature of Nazi Weltanschauung was the core ideological force that instigated Nazi Germany to launch its violent project in pursuit of a new global order . This scheme aimed to dissolve the contradictions between the Nazi conceptualizations of "race" and "space" through the creation of a Germanic Lebensraum and achievement of world domination by
SECTION 60
#17328413862414960-413: The orders of Germans. Despite Nazi Germany's official racism, the extermination of Eastern European native populations was not always necessary because the racial policy of Nazi Germany regarded some Eastern European peoples as being of Aryan-Nordic stock, especially the local leaders. On March 4, 1941, Himmler introduced the German People's List ( Deutsche Volksliste ), which intended to segregate
5040-430: 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
5120-439: 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 a 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
5200-434: 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. 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. Identifying
5280-540: The society of Imperial Germany, for whom the concept of geopolitik acquired an ideological definition unlike the original, human-geography definition. 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
5360-418: The subjugated, so called Germanised, Czechs or Poles a national, let alone Folkish, strengthening, but only the racial weakening of our Folk. 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
5440-463: The subsequent repopulation of the border strip with ethnic-German colonists; likewise, the colonisations of Lithuania and Ukraine. However, military over-extension lost the war for Imperial Germany, and the Septemberprogramm went unrealised. 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
5520-630: The territory of Lebensraum expansion, were subjected to expulsion or destruction. The eugenics of Lebensraum assumed it to be the right of the German Aryan master race ( Herrenvolk ) to remove the indigenous people in the name of their own living space. They took inspiration for this concept from outside Germany. Hitler and Nazi officials took a particular interest in manifest destiny , and attempted to replicate it in occupied Europe. Nazi Germany also supported other Axis Powers ' expansionist ideologies such as Fascist Italy 's spazio vitale and Imperial Japan 's hakkō ichiu . In
5600-400: The time. Volk ohne Raum ( People Without Space ), for instance, by Hans Grimm sold much better than Mein Kampf when it was published in 1925. For that matter, plans for acquiring new territory were much aired in Germany during the First World War. It used to be thought that these were the plans of a few crack-pot theorisers or of extremist organisations. Now we know better. In 1961,
5680-399: The vast stretches of Ukraine and Russia were also intended for future integration into that Reich, with plans for them stretching to the Volga or even beyond the Urals , where the potential westernmost reaches of Imperial Japanese influence would have existed, following an Axis victory in World War II . They were deemed of vital interest for the survival of the German nation, as it was
5760-755: The war. The decisive campaigns of Imperial Germany almost realised Lebensraum in the East, especially when Bolshevik Russia unilaterally withdrew as a combatant in the "Great War" among the European great powers —the Triple Entente (the Russian Empire , the French Third Republic , and the United Kingdom ) and the Central Powers (the German Empire , Austria-Hungary , the Ottoman Empire , and
5840-591: The work of the German General Staff. They were endorsed by the German Foreign Office and by the "Good German", Bethmann–Hollweg. In the national politics of the Weimar Republic (1919–33), the German eugenicists took up the nationalist political slogan of Volk ohne Raum , and matched it with the racial slogan Volk ohne Jugend (a People without Youth), a cultural proposition that ignored
5920-531: Was an official and a popular subject of "nationalism-as-national-security" endorsed by German society, including the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SDP). In The Origins of the Second World War , the British historian A. J. P. Taylor wrote: It is equally obvious that Lebensraum always appeared as one element in these blueprints. This was not an original idea of Hitler's. It was commonplace at
6000-651: Was carried out through fanatical perpetration of a racist war of annihilation ( Vernichtungskrieg ) which inflicted industrial-scale terrorism against entire populations. These policies resulted in the genocide of numerous ethnic groups in German-occupied territories, including the Jews, Poles, Russians , Romani people , etc. and also contributed to the failure of German war aims. Nazi policies in German-occupied territories were marked by spontaneous adaptation, on-the-fly modifications, and bureaucratic competition, underscoring
6080-453: Was central to its programme of waging a racial war against Russia, a geopolitical agenda advanced by Hitler since the 1920s. During the final months of the Second World War , Nazi Germany intensified its anti-Semitic , anti-Slavic , and anti-communist propaganda. Hitler fanatically reiterated the core ideological tenets of Nazism, such as his goal of expanding German territories eastwards in pursuit of Lebensraum . He continued to advocate
6160-490: Was inhabited by Slavic Untermenschen ruled by Jewish Bolshevism . 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. 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
6240-451: Was once an Austrian possession we must get back into our own hands. The Italians by their infidelity and treachery have lost any claim to a national state of the modern type. — Joseph Goebbels , September 1943 The annexation of the entire North Italy was also suggested in the long run. Lebensraum Final solution Parties Lebensraum ( German pronunciation: [ˈleːbənsˌʁaʊm] , living space )
6320-470: Was secretly ordered by Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg (1909–17), whereby, upon achieving battlefield victory, Germany would annex territories from western Poland to form the Polish Border Strip ( Polnischer Grenzstreifen , c. 30,000 km ). Lebensraum would be realised by way of ethnic cleansing , the forcible removal of the native Slavic and Jewish populations, and
6400-487: Was supported by the Nazi Party and Nazi Germany . Lebensraum was a leading motivation of Nazi Germany to initiate World War II , and it would continue this policy until the end of the conflict . Following Adolf Hitler's rise to power , Lebensraum became an ideological principle of Nazism and provided justification for the German territorial expansion into Central and Eastern Europe . The Nazi policy Generalplan Ost ( lit. ' Master Plan for
#240759