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''Lebensraum'' (Ger.: “Living space”) was a racist ideology that proposed the aggressive, territorial expansion of Germany, especially into Eastern Europe.〔''Historical Dictionary of the Holocaust'' (2010), Jack R. Fischel, Ed., p. 175.〕 Originally a biology term for “habitat”, the publicists for the German Empire (1871–1918) introduced ''Lebensraum'' as a concept of nationalism that became a geopolitical goal of Imperial Germany in the First World War (1914–1918), as the ''Septemberprogramm'' (1914).〔''Penguin Dictionary of International relations'', Graham Evans, Jeffrey Newnham, eds. 1998, p. 301.〕 In the post-war Weimar Republic (1919–1933) the concept and the term were features of German ultra-nationalism; later, during the Third Reich (1933–1945), ''Lebensraum'' was an ideological element of Nazism, which advocated Germany’s territorial expansion into Eastern Europe, justified by the need for agricultural land in order to maintain the town-and-country balance upon which depended the moral health of the German people.〔Lebensraum. ''The New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought'' (1999), Allan Bullock & Stephen Trombley, Editors. p. 473.〕 In ''Mein Kampf'' (1925–26, ''My Struggle''), Hitler justified ''Lebensraum'' as a natural law, by way of which a healthy and vigorous people of superior race, possessed an inherent and mystical right to displace unhealthy and feeble peoples of inferior races; especially when the people of superior race faced overpopulation in their native territories.〔Stephen J. Lee. ''Europe'', 1890–1945. p. 237.〕 In practice, the Nazi policy of ''Lebensraum'' was to kill, deport, or enslave the Polish, Ukrainian, Russian and other Slavic populations and other peoples living there considered racially inferior to the Germans and to repopulate Eastern Europe with Germanic people.〔Operation Barbarossa: Ideology and Ethics against Human Dignity, by André Mineau, (Rodopi, 2004) page 180〕〔Shelley Baranowski. ''Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler''. Cambridge University Press, 2011. P. 141.〕 The populations of cities were to be exterminated by starvation, thus creating an agricultural surplus that would feed Germany, and thereby allow political replacement by and re-population with a German upper class.〔 The eugenics of ''Lebensraum'' explicitly assumed the racial superiority of Germans as an Aryan master race (''Herrenvolk''), who, by virtue of their superiority (physical, mental, genetic) had the right to displace any people they deemed to be ''Untermenschen'' (subhumans) of inferior racial stock.〔Baranowski, Shelley. ''Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler''. Cambridge University Press, 2011. p. 141.〕 Sociologically, the Nazis insisted that the ''Lebensraum'' lands be developed as racially-homogeneous societies, to be realised by avoiding miscegenation, the intermixing of Germans with native peoples of an inferior race.〔 Therefore, in a territory designated as German ''Lebensraum'', the racially inferior natives, by law, were subject either to being killed, deported, or enslaved by the Nazis.〔 In the course of the Second World War in Europe (1939–45), Nazi Germany supported the ''Lebensraum'' politics of officially racist régimes, such as Fascist Italy (1922–43), the Slovak Republic (1939–45), and the Independent State of Croatia (1941–45).〔Mazower, Mark. ''Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe''. Allen Lane. (2008) p. 63.〕 Historically, the concept of the Germans as people without space (''Volk ohne Raum'') predated Adolf Hitler's ideological application of ''Lebensraum'' to the national politics of Germany, about which he said: "We are overpopulated and cannot feed ourselves from our own resources"; hence, the Nazi Party claimed that German territorial expansion was inevitable, because of the critical overpopulation of the Weimar Republic, the smaller, post–WWI Germany designed by the Treaty of Versailles (1919).〔Stephen J. Lee. Europe, 1890–1945. P. 237.〕 Politically, since the 1920s, the Nazi Party had proposed and justified territorial expansion as an inevitable, geopolitical necessity for Germany, which would resolve overpopulation and provide the natural resources required for the well-being of the German people.〔 On 24 February 1920, Hitler announced the National Socialist Program, point three stated: “We demand land and territory () for the sustenance of our people, and colonization for our surplus population”;〔National Socialist Program〕 that is, ''Lebensraum'' specifically from Russia and her vassal states, as noted in ''Mein Kampf''.〔Stachura, Peter D. The Shaping of the Nazi State. p. 31.〕〔Stutthof. Zeszyty Muzeum, 3. PL ISSN 0137-5377. Mirosław Gliński Geneza obozu koncentracyjnego Stutthof na tle hitlerowskich przygotowan w Gdansku do wojny z Polsk〕 Given the improved Russo–German political relations consequent to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (1939), in the pact's three-year period (1939–41), the Germans told the Russians that Nazi Germany had discarded plans to annex territories from the U.S.S.R., and that Germany would seek ''Lebensraum'' in central Africa.〔Stoessinger, John. ''Why Nations Go to War''. Cengage Learning. 2010. p. 38.〕 About the international politics of ''Lebensraum'', Hitler said that Germany sought the diplomatic settlement of claims for living space in Europe, which would require that the European powers cede territories claimed by Nazi Germany.〔Weikart, Richard. ''Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress''. Palgrave Macmillan. 2009. p. 167.〕 Despite the façade of seeking diplomatic settlements to Germany’s claims for living space, the Third Reich prepared war for ''Lebensraum'', because, by the late 1930s, Hitler had realised the militarisation of German society in preparation for Operation Barbarossa (22 June 1941), the eventual and “necessary” war between the peoples of Germany and of Russia.〔Weikart, Richard. ''Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress''. Palgrave Macmillan. 2009. p. 168.〕 In planning the destruction of Poland, by partition and annexation, Nazi Germany told the Polish Government that if war between Germany and the Soviet Union resulted in Germany taking ''Lebensraum'' from the Soviet Union, then Germany would allow Poland the right to annex parts of the Ukraine, whilst Germany annexed more Soviet territory — if Poland were to subordinate herself to Germany, and allow the German annexation of Polish territories. Aware that the proposal would immediately be rejected, the Reich Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, nonetheless proposed that territorial-annexation settlement to the Polish diplomats who sought to forestall the Nazi invasion of Poland (1 September 1939).〔Weinberg, Gerhard L. ''Hitler’s Foreign Policy 1933–1939: The Road to World War II''. Enigma Books. 2013. p. 152.〕〔Kitchen, Martin. ''The Third Reich: Charisma and Community''. p. 296〕〔''The French Yellow Book'', No. 124. M. Coulondre, French Ambassador in Berlin, to M. Georges Bonnet, Minister for Foreign Affairs. Berlin, 7 May 1939.〕 The Third Reich invoked precedents — geopolitical, historical, cultural — to legalistically justify their pursuit of ''Lebensraum'' beyond the borders of Germany.〔Baranowski, Shelley. ''Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler''. Cambridge University Press. p. 141.〕 Besides the historical examples of the British and French colonial empires, Nazi territorial expansion was justified with the cultural example of Manifest Destiny (1845), the ideological justification for the colonisation, by the white people of the United States, of the “American frontier”, the inhabited North-American lands south of Canada and north of Mexico.〔 Hitler said that the geographic size of the European nation-states was “absurdly small in comparison to their weight of colonies, foreign trade, etc.”, which he contrasted to “the American Union, which possesses, at its base, its own continent, and touches the rest of the Earth only with its summit”; and that colonisation of the continental U.S., by the Nordic peoples of Europe, would create a nation possessed of a great, internal market, of a great capacity for material reproduction, and a fertile land fit for great biological reproduction; hence was North America the ideal ''Lebensraum'' proposed by Nazism.〔 ==Origins== ;German settlement in the East Historically, the concept of a Germanic people with insufficient living space (''Volk ohne Raum'') predated Adolf Hitler's ideological application of ''Lebensraum'' to the national politics of Germany. Through the Middle Ages (1100–1453), the social, economic, and political pressures of overpopulation in the German states had led to their practice of ''Ostsiedlung'', the settlement of Germanic peoples in Eastern Europe. In 1901, the ethnographer and geographer Friedrich Ratzel coined the word ''Lebensraum'' (“living space”), as a term of human geography, to describe physical geography, ''habitat'' as a factor that influences the human activities in the course of a people developing into a society.〔''The Columbia Encyclopedia'', Fifth Edition. (1993) pp. 2282–83〕 In the period between the First and the Second world wars (1919–39) German nationalists had adapted and adopted the term ''Lebensraum'' to their politics for the establishment of a Germanic colonial-empire like the British Empire, the French Empire, and the empire that the U.S. established with the west-ward expansion of the “American frontier”, which was advocated and justified by the ideology of Manifest Destiny (1845).〔Smith, Woodruff D. “Friedrich Ratzel and the Origins of Lebensraum”, ''German Studies Review'', vol. 3, No. 1 (February 1980), pp. 51–68 (in JSTOR )〕 Ratzel said that the development of a people into a society was primarily influenced by their geographic situation (habitat), and that a society who 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 said that Imperial Germany (1871–1918) required overseas colonies to which surplus Germans ought to emigrate.〔Wanklyn, Harriet. ''Friedrich Ratzel: A Biographical Memoir and Bibliography''. London: Cambridge University Press. (1961) pp. 36–40. ASIN B000KT4J8K〕 ;Geopolitics In the event, 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 the Swedish political scientist and conservative politician Johan Rudolf Kjellén (1864–1922) who interpreted that biological metaphor as a geopolitical natural-law.〔''Encyclopædia Britannica'', 15th Ed., vol. 9, p. 955.〕 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 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 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 the society of Imperial Germany, for whom the concept of ''geopolitik'' acquired an ideological definition unlike the original, human-geography definition.〔''Encyclopædia Britannica'', 15th Ed., vol. 6, p. 901.〕 Kjellén’s geopolitical interpretation of the ''Lebensraum'' concept was adopted, expanded, and adapted to the politics of Germany, by the publicists of imperialism, such as the militarist General Friedrich von Bernhardi (1849–1930) and the political geographer and proponent of geopolitics Karl Ernst Haushofer (1869–1946). In ''Deutschland und der Nächste Krieg'' (1911; ''Germany and 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 (Second World War ) would be expressly for acquiring ''Lebensraum'' — all in fulfilment of the “biological necessity” to protect German racial supremacy. That vanquishing the Slavic and the Latin races was 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.〔Evans, Richard J. ''The Coming of the Third Reich'' (2004) p. 35. ISBN 1-59420-004-1.〕 ;Racist ideology In the national politics of Weimar Germany, the geopolitical usage of ''Lebensraum'' is credited to Karl Ernst Haushofer and his Institute of Geopolitics, in Munich, especially the ultra-nationalist interpretation to avenge military defeat in the First World War (1914–18), and reverse the dictates of the Treaty of Versailles (1919), which reduced Germany geographically, economically, and militarily. The politician Adolf Hitler said that the National Socialist (Nazi) geopolitics of ″inevitable expansion″ would reverse overpopulation, provide natural resources, and uphold German national honour.〔 In ''Mein Kampf'' (1925; ''My Struggle''), Hitler presented his conception of ''Lebensraum'' as the philosophic basis for the Greater Germanic Reich who were destined to colonise Eastern Europe — especially the Ukraine in Soviet Russia — and so resolve the problems of overpopulation, and that the European states had to accede to his geopolitical demands. The Nazi usages (propaganda, political, and official) of the term ''Lebensraum'' were explicitly racist, to justify the mystical right of the “racially superior” Germanic peoples (''Herrenvolk'') to fulfil their cultural destiny at the expense of “racially inferior” peoples (''Untermenschen''), such as the Slavs of Poland, Russia, the Ukraine, and the other non–Germanic peoples of “the East”.〔''The Penguin Dictionary of International Relations'', Graham Evans & Jeffrey Newnham, Editors. (1998) p. 301.〕 Based upon Johan Rudolf Kjellén’s geopolitical interpretation of Friedrich Ratzel's human-geography term, the Nazi régime (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 effort to realise the Greater Germanic Reich at the expense of the societies of Eastern Europe.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Lebensraum」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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