Third Reich

Lebensraum

‘Living space’: the Nazi idea of winning land in eastern Europe for the Germans at the expense of Poland and the Soviet Union, through conquest, the expulsion or destruction of its people, and German settlement.

The idea was popularised in the early twentieth century by the geographer Friedrich Ratzel, who argued that nations, like organisms, need territory to survive. Hitler made it one of the pillars of his programme: in Mein Kampf he called for land in the East, at the expense of Russia and the countries bordering it, rather than colonies overseas.

Living space went hand in hand with Nazi racism: the Slavs were to be expelled, reduced to slave labour or destroyed, and the Jews removed. The Poles were the first victims, expelled from the lands annexed to the Reich as early as 1939. Planning for the invasion of the Soviet Union assumed the starvation of tens of millions of people, and settlement plans were to change the face of eastern Europe for good.