Cambridge Encyclopedia :: Cambridge Encyclopedia Vol. 45

Lebensraum

A slogan adopted by German nationalists (especially Nazis) in the 1920s and 1930s to justify the need for German territorial expansion into E Europe. They argued that Germany was overpopulated, and needed more agriculturally productive land to guarantee future food supplies for an expanded German population. The slogan Drang nach Osten (‘drive towards the East’) was used to convey the same message.

Nazism
Nazi organizations
Nazi Party
Sturmabteilung
Schutzstaffel
Hitler Youth
Lebensborn
Nazism in history
Early Nazi Timeline
Hitler's rise to power
Nazi Germany
Night of the Long Knives
Nuremberg Rallies
Kristallnacht
The Holocaust
Nuremberg Trials
Ex-Nazis and Neo-Nazism
Nazi concepts
Glossary of the Third Reich
Hitler's political beliefs
Gleichschaltung
Racial policy of Nazi Germany
Führerprinzip
Lebensraum
Positive Christianity
Volk
Nazi political parties and movements outside Germany
Canadian National Socialist Unity Party
German-American Bund
Nasjonal Samling
Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging
National Socialist Bloc
National Socialist League
Nazi Eugenics
Nazi eugenics
Aryan race
Doctors' Trial
German Blood Certificate
Lebensborn
Life unworthy of life
Mischling
Nazi physicians
Nazi human experimentation
Nazism and race
Nordic theory
Nur für Deutsche
Nuremberg Trials
Racial policy of Nazi Germany
Racial purity
Reich Citizenship Law
Scientific racism
T-4 Euthanasia Program
Related subjects
Nazism and religion
Nazi propaganda
Nazi mysticism
Nazi architecture
Hitler salute
Mein Kampf
Swastika
Völkisch movement
Anti-Semitism
Führer
Neo-Nazism
Fascism
Lists
Nazi Party leaders and officials
Fascists
Adolf Hitler books
Adolf Hitler speeches
SS personnel
Living Nazis
Former Nazis influential after 1945
Politics Portal   v • d • e 

Lebensraum was one of the major political ideas of Adolf Hitler, and an important component of Nazi ideology.

Developing these ideas, Nazi theorist Alfred Rosenberg, proposed that the Nazi administrative organization in lands to be conquered from the Soviets be based upon the following Reichskommissariats:

Ostland (Baltic States, Belarus and eastern Poland), Ukraine (Ukraine and adjacent territories), Kaukasus (Caucasus area), Moskau (the Moscow metropolitan area and adjacent European Russia)

The Reichskommissariat territories would extend up to the European frontier at the Urals.

Hitler on Lebensraum

In his book "Mein Kampf", Hitler expressed his view that history was an open-ended struggle to the death between races.

Without consideration of traditions and prejudices, Germany must find the courage to gather our people and their strength for an advance along the road that will lead this people from its present restricted living space to new land and soil, and hence also free it from the danger of vanishing from the earth or of serving others as a slave nation. — Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, page 646.

For it is not in colonial acquisitions that we must see the solution of this problem, but exclusively in the acquisition of a territory for settlement, which will enhance the area of the mother country, and hence not only keep the new settlers in the most intimate community with the land of their origin, but secure for the total area those advantages which lie in its unified magnitude. — Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, page 653.

Expansionist movements in other countries

Manifest Destiny (United States) Akhand Bharat (India) Greater Israel Greater Albania Greater Hungary Greater Morocco Greater Somalia Greater Croatia Greater Serbia Greater Syria Transmigration program Virgin Lands Campaign Green March Megali Idea

User Comments Add a comment…

LED printer - Sources [next] [back] Lebanon (Connecticut) - Etymology, Geography and climate, Administrative divisions, Demographics, Economy, Education, Culture, People, Politics, History, Recent events