The German concept of Lebensraum (German pronunciation: [ˈleːbənsˌʁaʊm] (About this sound listen), "living space") comprises policies and practices of settler colonialism which proliferated in Germany from the 1890s to the 1940s. First popularized around 1901,[2] Lebensraum became a geopolitical goal of Imperial Germany in World War I (1914–1918) originally, as the core element of the Septemberprogramm of territorial expansion.[3] The most extreme form of this ideology was supported by the Nazi Party (NSDAP) and Nazi Germany until the end of World War II.[4]
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.[5] The Nazi Generalplan Ost policy (the Master Plan for the East) was based on its tenets. It stipulated that most of the indigenous populations of Central and Eastern Europe would have to be removed permanently (either through mass deportation to Siberia, death, or enslavement) including Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Czech and other Slavic nations considered racially inferior and non-Aryan.
The Nazi government aimed at repopulating these lands with Germanic colonists in the name of Lebensraum during World War II and thereafter.[6][7][8] The entire indigenous populations were to be decimated by starvation, allowing for their own agricultural surplus to feed Germany.[6]
Hitler's strategic program for world domination was based on the belief in the power of Lebensraum, pursued by a racially superior society.[7] People deemed to be part of inferior races, within the territory of Lebensraum expansion, were subjected to expulsion or destruction.[7] The eugenics of Lebensraum assumed the right of the German Aryan master race (Herrenvolk) to remove indigenous people they considered to be of inferior racial stock (Untermenschen) in the name of their own living space.[7] Nazi Germany also supported other "Aryan' nations" pursuing their own Lebensraum, including Fascist Italy's spazio vitale
In Mein Kampf (1925), Hitler dedicated a full chapter titled "Eastern Orientation or Eastern Policy", outlining the need for the new 'living space' for Germany. He claimed that achieving Lebensraum required political will, and that the National Socialist Movement ought to strive to expand population area for the German people, and acquire new sources of food as well.[35] Lebensraum became 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.[36] 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.[37] Hence, Hitler identified the geopolitics of Lebensraum as the ultimate political will of his Party:
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 National Socialism and Jewish Bolshevism and between the Germanic peoples (Nordic) and Untermenschen peoples of the East.[53] Moreover, in one of the secret Posen speeches to the SS-Gruppenführer at Posen, Himmler said: "the mixed race of 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."[54] In that vein, Himmler published the pamphlet Der Untermensch (The Subhuman), 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
