Lebensraum
레벤스라움
Lebensraum was a German nationalist and geopolitical concept holding that a nation should expand its territory to secure survival and resources. Nazism turned it into a racist imperial program that justified conquering Eastern Europe for German settlement and the expulsion, enslavement, and murder of Slavic and Jewish populations.
In depth
German geographer Friedrich Ratzel popularized the term in 1901 by applying the language of biology to competition among societies and states for territory. Radical nationalists in Imperial and Weimar Germany chiefly imagined Eastern Europe as a settlement zone and source of resources for Germans, and the idea appeared in the eastern war aims of the First World War. The Nazis fused Lebensraum with Hitler's eastward orientation and made it a central objective of war and colonization, planning to remove populations classified as racially inferior and replace them with German settlers. The Generalplan Ost pursued during the 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union encompassed mass expulsion, starvation, forced labor, and murder; the concept formed part of the imperial and racist policy complex connected to the Holocaust.
Sources
- Wikipedia (EN) (supports the term's origins in Friedrich Ratzel's 1901 usage, its adoption by Nazism, eastward expansion, and the racial-colonial aims of Generalplan Ost)
- encyclopedia.ushmm.org (supports the concept's role in Nazi imperial and racial policy, resource aims, colonization, mass starvation planning, and its connection to the Holocaust)