NAZI Lebensraum

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.[8] People deemed to be part of non-Aryan races, within the territory of Lebensraum expansion, were subjected to expulsion or destruction.[8] 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, particularly the European colonization of North America.[8] Hitler and Nazi officials took a particular interest in manifest destiny, and attempted to replicate it in occupied Europe.[10] Nazi Germany also supported other Axis powers' expansionist ideologies such as Fascist Italy's spazio vitale and the Empire of Japan's hakkō ichiu.[11] Origins The German geographer and ethnographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904) coined the word Lebensraum (1901) as a term of human geography, which the Nazis adopted as a by-word for the aggressive territorial expansion of Germany into the Greater Germanic Reich. The Swedish political scientist Johan Rudolf Kjellén (1864–1922) interpreted Friedrich Ratzel's ethnogeographic term, Lebensraum, as a geopolitical term, which the Nazis applied to justify German warfare. See also: Ostsiedlung In 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), which had recently been published in Germany. In this context, Peschel employed the term to describe the specific natural region or habitat in which a particular species—or, by extension, a people—emerged and developed.[12] In 1897, the geographer and ethnographer Friedrich Ratzel in his book Politische Geographie applied the word Lebensraum ("living space")[3] to describe physical geography as a factor that influences human activities in developing into a society.[13] In 1901, Ratzel extended his thesis in his essay titled Lebensraum: A Biogeographical Study.[14][15] Ratzel wrote at a time when the overseas space for colonial expansion almost ended, leaving few sovereign void, a situation which was emphasized by contemporary observers,[16][17] and later referred to as "global closure" by Michael Heffernan.[18] The latter concept is reflected in the main point of the work: Everything that wants space on our planet earth must draw on the finite amount of 506 million square kilometres of its surface. This number, therefore, represents the first spatial factor where the history of life is concerned, and it also represents the last. It determines all other factors; it is the yardstick for all other factors; it encompasses the absolute limits of all physical life... There is a tension between the movement of life, which never rests, and the space on earth, which does not change. It is from this tension that the struggle for space is born... The struggle for life... primarily means nothing more than a struggle for space. The same, Ratzel continued, applies to "the struggle of nations that we call battles" and "in a narrow space the struggle becomes desperate."[14] Ratzel pointed to historical precedent of drang nach osten 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