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.Rich 1974, pp. 401–402.Williams 2005, p. 209. ]]
Lebensraum (, ) is a German concept of expansionism and Völkisch nationalism, the philosophy and policies of which were common to German politics from the 1890s to the 1940s. First popularized around 1901, Also Lebensraum became a Geopolitics goal of German Empire in World War I (1914–1918), as the core element of the Septemberprogramm of territorial expansion. The most extreme form of this ideology was supported by the Nazi Party and Nazi Germany, the ultimate goal of which was to establish a Greater German Reich. Lebensraum was a leading motivation of Nazi Germany to initiate World War II, and it would continue this policy until the end of the conflict.Woodruff D. Smith. The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism. Oxford University Press. p. 84.
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.Allan Bullock & Stephen Trombley, ed. "Lebensraum." The New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought (1999), p. 473. The Nazi policy Generalplan Ost () was based on its tenets. It stipulated that Germany required a Lebensraum necessary for its survival and that most of the populations of Central and Eastern Europe would have to be removed permanently (either through mass deportation to Siberia, extermination, or enslavement), including Polish people, Ukrainians, Russians, Belarusians, Czechs, and other Slavs nations considered non-Aryan race. The Nazi government aimed at repopulating these lands with Germanic colonists in the name of Lebensraum during and following World War II. (2025). 9789042016330, Rodopi. ISBN 9789042016330 (2025). 9780521857390, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521857390 Entire populations were ravaged by starvation; any agricultural surplus was used to feed Germany. The European Jews was to be The Holocaust.
Hitler's strategic program for Greater Germany was based on the belief in the power of Lebensraum, especially when pursued by a racially superior society. People deemed to be part of non-Aryan races, within the territory of Lebensraum expansion, were subjected to expulsion or destruction. The eugenics of Lebensraum assumed it to be the right of the German Aryan master race (Herrenvolk) to remove the indigenous people in the name of their own living space. They took inspiration for this concept from outside Germany, particularly the European colonization of North America. Hitler and Nazi officials took a particular interest in manifest destiny, and attempted to replicate it in occupied Europe. Nazi Germany also supported other Axis powers' expansionist ideologies such as Fascist Italy's spazio vitale and Imperial Japan's hakkō ichiu.
The same, Ratzel continued, applies to "the struggle of nations that we call battles" and "in a narrow space the struggle becomes desperate." Ratzel pointed to historical precedent of drang nach osten in the Middle Ages, when the social and economic pressures of rapid population growth in the German states had led to a steady colonization of Germanic peoples in Eastern Europe.
Between 1886 and 1914 Lebensraum became increasingly used as a justification for the German colonization of Africa; and was an influential factor during the Herero and Nama genocide in German South West Africa, from 1904 to 1908. The ethnic cleansing of Herero and Nama people was done in response to an attack on German settlers and soldiers on 12 January 1904.
During the First World War, the Allied naval blockade of the Central Powers caused food shortages in Germany, and resources from German colonies in Africa were unable to slip past the blockade; this caused support to rise during the war for a Lebensraum that would expand Germany eastward into Russian Empire to gain control of their resources to prevent such a situation from occurring in the future. (2025). 9781135970468 ISBN 9781135970468 In the period between the First and the Second World Wars, German nationalists adopted the term Lebensraum in their political demands for the re-establishment of the German colonial empire, which had been dismembered by the Allies at Versailles.Vincent, C. Paul (1997). A Historical Dictionary Of Germany's Weimar Republic, 1918–1933. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. 511–513. Ratzel said that the development of a people into a society was primarily influenced by their geographic situation (habitat) and that a society that 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 pointed out 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.
Kjellén's geopolitical interpretation of the Lebensraum concept was adopted, expanded, and adapted to the politics of Germany by publicists of imperialism such as the militarist General Friedrich von Bernhardi (1849–1930) and the political geographer and proponent of geopolitics Karl 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 would be expressly for acquiring Lebensraum—all in fulfillment of the "biological necessity" to protect German racial supremacy. Vanquishing the Slavic and the Latin races was deemed 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. .
The Nazi Party's usages of the term Lebensraum were explicitly racial, to justify the mystical right of the racially superior Germanic peoples (Herrenvolk) to fulfill their cultural destiny at the expense of racially inferior peoples (Untermenschen), such as the Slavs of Poland, Russia, Ukraine, and the other non–Germanic peoples of "Eastern Europe". Based upon Johan Rudolf Kjellén's geopolitical interpretation of Friedrich Ratzel's human-geography term, the Nazi regime (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 an effort to realise the Greater Germanic Reich at the expense of the societies of Eastern Europe.
In 1903, the Prussian authorities tried a Polish countess for "presenting a false heir" for an estate near Wróblewo. The case, tried in Berlin, generated crowds of people and police. Observers expressed concern that Prussian "race partiality" would result in a guilty verdict.
In April 1915, Chancellor von Bethmann Hollweg authorised the Polish Border Strip plans in order to take advantage of the extensive territories in Eastern Europe that Germany had conquered and held since early in the war.Hillgruber, Andreas. Germany and the Two World Wars, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981 pp. 41–47 The decisive campaigns of Imperial Germany almost realised Lebensraum in the East, especially when Bolshevik Russia unilaterally withdrew as a combatant in the "Great War" among the European —the Triple Entente (the Russian Empire, the French Third Republic, and the United Kingdom) and the Central Powers (the German Empire, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and the Kingdom of Bulgaria).
In March 1918, in an effort to reform and modernise the Russian Empire into a soviet republic, the Bolshevik government agreed to the strategically onerous territorial cessions stipulated in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (33% of arable land, 30% of industry, and 90% of the coal mines of Russia). As a result, Russia yielded to Germany much of the arable land of European Russia, the Baltic governorates, Belarus, Ukraine, and the Caucasus region. Spartacus Educational: Treaty of Brest-Litovsk . Despite such an extensive geopolitical victory, tactical defeat in the Western Front, strategic over-extension, and factional division in government compelled Imperial Germany to abandon the Eastern European Lebensraum gained with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in favour of the peace-terms of the Treaty of Versailles (1919), and yielded those Russian lands to Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine.
As a casus belli for the conquest and colonisation of Polish territories as living-space and defensive-border for Imperial Germany, the Septemberprogramm derived from a foreign policy initially proposed by General Erich Ludendorff in 1914. Twenty-five years later, Nazi foreign policy resumed the cultural goal of the pursuit and realisation of German living-space at the expense of non-German peoples in Eastern Europe with the September Campaign (1 September – 6 October 1939) that began the Second World War in Europe. A Companion to World War I, p. 436. In Germany and the Two World Wars, the German historian Andreas Hillgruber said that the territorial gains of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (1918) were the imperial prototype for Adolf Hitler's Greater German Empire in Eastern Europe:Hillgruber, Andreas. Germany and the Two World Wars, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981, pp. 46–47.
The Septemberprogramm (1914) documents "Lebensraum in the East" as philosophically integral to Germanic culture throughout the history of Germany; and that Lebensraum is not a racialist philosophy particular to the 20th century.Moses, John. "The Fischer Controversy", pp. 328–329, in Modern Germany: An Encyclopedia of History, People and Culture, 1871–1990, Vol. 1, Dieter Buse and Juergen Doerr, eds. Garland Publishing: New York, 1998, p. 328. As military strategy, the Septemberprogramm was unsuccessful due to its infeasibility, with too few soldiers to realise the plans during a two-front war. Politically, the Programm allowed the Imperial Government to learn the opinions of the nationalist, economic, and military elites of the German ruling class who financed and facilitated geopolitics.See Raffael Scheck, Germany 1871–1945: A Concise History (2008) Nationally, the annexation and ethnic cleansing of Poland for German Lebensraum was an official and a popular subject of "nationalism-as-national-security" endorsed by German society, including the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SDP).Immanuel Geiss Tzw. polski pas graniczny 1914–1918. Warszawa (1964). In The Origins of the Second World War, the British historian A. J. P. Taylor wrote:
In the lead-up to Anschluss (1938) and the invasion of Poland (1939), the propaganda of the Nazi Party in Germany used popular feelings of wounded national identity aroused in the aftermath of the First World War to promote policies of Lebensraum. Studies of the homeland focused on the lost colonies after the establishment of the Second Polish Republic, which was ratified by the Treaty of Versailles (Volk ohne Raum), as well as the "eternal Jewish threat" (Der ewige Jude, 1937). Emphasis was put on the need for rearmament and the pseudoscience of superior races in the pursuit of "blood and soil" (Blut und Boden).
During the twenty-one-year inter-war period between the First (1914–18) and the Second (1939–45) World War, Lebensraum for Germany was the principal tenet of the extremist nationalism that characterised German party politics. The Nazis, led by Adolf Hitler, demanded not only the geographic reversion of Germany's post-war borders (to recuperate territory lost by the Treaty of Versailles), but also the German conquest and colonisation of Eastern Europe (whether or not those lands were German before 1918).Weinberg, Gerhard The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany Diplomatic Revolution in Europe 1933–1936, Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1970 pp. 166–168 To that end, Hitler said that flouting the Treaty of Versailles was required for Germany to obtain needed Lebensraum in Eastern Europe.Trevor-Roper, Hugh "Hitler's War Aims" pp. 235–250 in Aspects of the Third Reich, edited by H.W. Koch, Macmillan Press: London, United Kingdom, 1985 pp. 242–245. During the 1920s, Heinrich Himmler—as a member of the Artaman League, an anti-Slav, anti-urban, and anti-Semitic organisation of "blood and soil" ideology—developed the Völkisch ideas that advocated Lebensraum, for the realisation of which he said that the:
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. (2025). 9780062079473, Harper Collins. ISBN 9780062079473 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. (2025). 9780521857390, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521857390 Identifying the conquest of Lebensraum as a major ideological goal of his party, Hitler wrote in " Mein Kampf":
The ideologies found at the root of Hitler's implementation of Lebensraum modeled that of German colonialism of the New Imperialism period as well as the American ideology of manifest destiny. Hitler had great admiration for the United States' territorial expansion and saw the destruction of Native American peoples and their cultures that took place during the United States' westward expansion as a template for German expansion. He believed that in order to transform the German nation into a world superpower, Germany had to expand their geopolitical presence and act only in the interest of the German people. Hitler had also viewed with dismay the German reliance on food imports by sea during the First World War, believing it to be a contributing factor to Germany's defeat in the war. He believed that only through Lebensraum could Germany shift "its dependence for food... to its own imperial hinterland".
Hitler's bio-geo-political doctrine of Lebensraum consisted of two components existing in tension: the materialist endeavour to expand Germanic territories and the mystical quest to revive what the Nazis viewed as the "idealized German medieval past". The explicit embrace of these contradictions was evident in the promulgation of Nazi slogans such as " Blut und Boden" (blood and soil). National Socialism was presented by its ideologues as an organic world-view (" Weltanschauung") that subordinated all aspects of life—physical bodies, soul, mind, culture, government, religion, education, economy, etc.—into an "organic totality" existing within Lebensraum. Defining Nazism as a " Weltanschauung" during his speech at the Nuremberg rally, Hitler stated:
"Already in the word 'Weltanschauung' lies the solemn proclamation of a decision that all acts are based upon a certain point of view and a visible tendency. Such a view can be true or false: it is the starting point for every opinion on the appearance and events of life, and is therefore a binding and obligating law for every act. The more such an opinion covers the natural law of organic life, the better its conscious utility can be applied for the sake of the people's life."
Therefore, the non-Germanic peoples of the annexed foreign territories would never be Germanised:
Hitler thought that history was dominated by a merciless struggle for survival among the different races of mankind; and that the races who possessed a great national territory were innately stronger than those races who possessed a small national territory—which the Germanic Aryan race could take by what he viewed as their natural right.Jäckel, Eberhard Hitler's World View A Blueprint for Power Harvard University Press: Cambridge, US, 1981 pp. 34–35 Such official racist perspectives for the establishment of German Lebensraum allowed the Nazis to unilaterally launch a war of aggression (italic=no) against the countries of Eastern Europe, ideologically justified as historical recuperation of the Oium (lands) that the Slavs had conquered from the native Ostrogoths.Poprzeczny, J. (2004), Odilo Globocnik, Hitler's Man in the East, pp. 42–43, McFarland,
Nazi propaganda depicted Eastern Europe as historically Germanic territories, promoting the myth that these regions were stolen from Aryan race by Huns and Avar tribes. Hitler viewed Slavs as primitive subhumans, and he detested the German empire's alliance with Austria-Hungary during World War I. In his works such as Mein Kampf and Zweites Buch, Hitler viewed the Slavs as lacking the capability to form a state. Although Hitler openly spoke about the need for living space in the 1920s, he never publicly spoke about it during his first years in power. It was not until 1937, with the German rearmament program well under way, that he began again to publicly speak about the need for living space.Richard Weikart, Hitler's Ethic, p. 167
On 6 October 1939, Hitler told the Reichstag that after the fall of Poland the most important matter was "a new order of ethnographic relations, that is to say, resettlement of nationalities".Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, p. 150. On 20 October 1939, Hitler told General Wilhelm Keitel that the war would be a difficult "racial struggle" and that the General Government was to "purify the Reich territory from Jews and Polacks, too."Document 864-PS translation", in Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression. Volume III: Documents 001-PS-1406-PS. District of Columbia: GPO, 1947. pp. 619–621. Likewise, in October 1939, Nazi propaganda instructed Germans to view Poles, Jews, and Gypsies as Untermenschen.Tomasz Szarota. "Polen unter deutscher Besatzung, 1939–1941" – Vergleichende Betrachtung (in German); p. 43. – "Es muss auch der letzten Kuhmagd in Deutschland klargemacht werden, dass das Polentum gleichwertig ist mit Untermenschentum. Polen, Juden und Zigeuner stehen auf der gleichen unterwertigen Stufe." Propaganda Ministry (October 24, 1939), Order No. 1306, in:
Nazi Germany's pursuit of its bio-geo-political ambitions was carried out through fanatical perpetration of a racist war of annihilation ( Vernichtungskrieg) which inflicted industrial-scale terrorism against entire populations. These policies resulted in the genocide of numerous ethnic groups in German-occupied territories, including the Jews, Poles, Russians, Romani people, etc. and also contributed to the failure of German war aims. Nazi policies in German-occupied territories were marked by spontaneous adaptation, on-the-fly modifications, and bureaucratic competition, underscoring the impulsive nature of Hitlerism.
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 Nazism and Jewish Bolshevism and between the Germanic (Nordic) peoples and the Untermenschen peoples of the East. 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." Volume 7. Nazi Germany, 1933–1945 Excerpt from Himmler's Speech to the SS-Gruppenführer at Posen (4 October 1943). German History in Documents and Images. Retrieved 06 June 2016. In that vein, Himmler published the pamphlet Der Untermensch, 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.Koon, Claudia. The Nazi Conscience, p. 260.
With the Polish decrees (8 March 1940), the Nazis ensured that the racial inferiority of the Poles was legally recognized in the German Reich, and regulated the working and living conditions of Polish laborers (Zivilarbeiter). The Polish decrees also established that any Pole "who has sexual relations with a German man or woman, or approaches them in any other improper manner, will be punished by death." The italic=no were vigilant of sexual relations between Germans and Poles, and pursued anyone suspected of race defilement (Rassenschande); likewise, there were of sexual relations between Germans and other ethnic groups brought in from Eastern Europe.
As official policy, Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler said that no drop of German blood would be lost or left behind to mingle with any alien races;Richard Overy, The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia, p. 543 and that the Germanisation of Eastern Europe would be complete when "in the East dwell only men with truly German and Germanic blood".Mark Mazower, Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe, p. 181. In the secret memorandum Reflections on the Treatment of Peoples of Alien Races in the East (25 May 1940), Himmler outlined the future of the Eastern European peoples: (i) division of native ethnic groups found in the new living-space; (ii) limited, formal education of four years of elementary school (to teach them only how to write their names and to count to five hundred); and (iii) obedience of the orders of Germans.Himmler, Heinrich. (25 May 1940). Reflections on the Treatment of Peoples of Alien Races in the East. Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals Under Control Council Law (US Government Printing Office, District of Columbia). pp. 147–150, No. 10. Vol. 13.
Despite Nazi Germany's official racism, the extermination of Eastern European native populations was not always necessary because the racial policy of Nazi Germany regarded some Eastern European peoples as being of Aryan-Nordic stock, especially the local leaders. Hitler's plans for Eastern Europe On March 4, 1941, Himmler introduced the German People's List (Deutsche Volksliste), which intended to segregate the inhabitants of German-occupied territories into categories of desirability according to criteria.Richard Overy, The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia, pp. 543–544 In the same memorandum, Himmler advocated the kidnapping of children who appeared to be Nordic because it would "remove the danger that this subhuman people (Untermenschenvolk) of the East through such children might acquire a leader class from such people of good blood, which would be dangerous for us because they would be our equals."Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius. The German Myth of the East: 1800 to the Present. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 187Lynn H. Nicholas. Cruel World: The Children of Europe in the Nazi Web. New York: Vintage, 2006, p. 241. According to Himmler, the destruction of the Soviet Union would have led to the exploitation of millions of peoples as slave labor in the occupied territories and the eventual re-population of the areas with Germans.
Nazi Germany's initiation of Operation Barbarossa was motivated by the racial theories and bio-political doctrines of the NSDAP, which were fervently anti-Slavic, anti-communist and anti-semitic. The Nazi party's doctrine of Lebensraum was central to its programme of waging a racial war against Russia, a geopolitical agenda advanced by Hitler since the 1920s.
During the final months of the Second World War, Nazi Germany intensified its anti-Semitic, anti-Slavic, and anti-communist propaganda. Hitler fanatically reiterated the core ideological tenets of Nazism, such as his goal of expanding German territories eastwards in pursuit of Lebensraum. He continued to advocate the Germanic settler-colonial project in Eastern Europe, including his desire to exterminate a significant portion of the Slavic populations. In his letter to German field marshal Wilhelm Keitel written on 29 April 1945, Hitler stated:
“Our goal must still be the capture of living space in the East for the German nation.”
| +German People's List ( Deutsche Volksliste) ! scope="col" | Classification ! scope="col" | Translation ! scope="col" | Heritage ! scope="col" | Definition |
Hitler, who was born in the ethnically diverse Austrian-Hungarian Empire, avowed in Mein Kampf (1926) that Germanising Austrian Slavs by language during the Age of Partitions could not have turned them into fully fledged Germans, because no "Negro" nor a "Chinaman" would ever "become German" just because he has learned to speak German. He believed that no visible differences between peoples could be bridged by the use of a common language. Any such attempts would lead to the "bastardization" of the German element, he said. Likewise, Hitler criticized the previous attempts at Germanisation of the Poles in the Prussian Partition as an erroneous idea, based on the same false reasoning. The Polish people could not possibly be Germanised by being compelled to speak German because they belonged to a different race, he said; "the result would have been fatal" for the purity of the German nation because the foreigners would "compromise" by their inferiority "the dignity and nobility" of the German nation. During the war, Hitler remarked in his "Table Talk" that people should only be Germanised if they were to improve the German blood line:
Informed by the blood and soil beliefs of ethnic identity—a philosophic basis of Lebensraum—Nazi policy required destroying the USSR for the lands of Russia to become the granary of Germany. The Germanisation of Russia required the destruction of its cities, in an effort to vanquish Russianness, Communism, and Jewish Bolshevism.Karel C. Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine Under Nazi Rule pp. 35–36 To that effect, Hitler ordered the Siege of Leningrad (September 1941 – January 1944), to raze the city and destroy the native Russian population.Edwin P. Hoyt, Hitler's War p. 187 Geopolitically, the establishment of German Lebensraum in the east of Europe would thwart , like those that occurred during the First World War, which starved the people of Germany.Richard Bessel, Nazism and War, p. 60 Moreover, using Eastern Europe to feed Germany also was intended to exterminate millions of Slavs, by slave labour and starvation. When deprived of producers, a workforce, and customers, native industry would cease and disappear from the Germanised region, which then became agricultural land for settlers from Nazi Germany.Karel C. Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine Under Nazi Rule p. 45
The Germanised lands of Eastern Europe would be settled by the Wehrbauer, a soldier–peasant who was to maintain a fortified line of defence, which would prevent any non–German civilisation from arising to threaten the Greater Germanic Reich.Robert Cecil, The Myth of the Master Race: Alfred Rosenberg and Nazi Ideology p. 190 At a conference in 1941, Hitler stated:
Plans for the Germanisation of western Europe were less severe, as the Nazis needed the collaborationism of the local political and business establishments, especially that of local industry and their skilled workers. Moreover, Nazi racial policies considered the populations of western Europe more racially acceptable to Aryan standards of racial purity. In practice, the number and assortment of Nazi racial categories indicated that "East is bad and West is acceptable"; thus, a person's "race" was a matter of life or death in countries under Nazi occupation.Lynn H. Nicholas, Cruel World: The Children of Europe in the Nazi Web p. 263
The racist ideology of Lebensraum also comprised the North German racial stock of the northern-European peoples of Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway, Sweden); and the continental-European peoples of Alsace and Lorraine, Belgium and northern France; whilst the United Kingdom would either be annexed or be made a puppet state.Gerhard L. Weinberg, Visions of Victory: The Hopes of Eight World War II Leaders p. 11 Moreover, the poor military performance of the Italian armed forces forced Fascist Italian's withdrawal from the war in 1943, which then made northern Italy a territory to be annexation to the Greater Germanic Reich.
For political expediency, the Nazis continually modified their racist politics towards non–Germanic peoples—and so continually redefined the ideological meaning of Lebensraum—in order to collaborate with other peoples, in service of the Reich's foreign policy. Early in his career as leader of the Nazis, Adolf Hitler said he would accept friendly relations with the USSR, on condition that the Soviet government re-establish the disadvantageous borders of European Russia, which were demarcated in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (1918). This made possible the restoration of Russo–German diplomatic relations.Peter D. Stachura. The Shaping of the Nazi State. p. 31.
In 1921–22, Hitler said that German Lebensraum might be achieved with a smaller USSR, created by sponsoring anti-communist Russians in deposing the Communist government of the Bolshevism; however, by the end of 1922, Hitler changed his opinion when there arose the possibility of an Anglo–German geopolitical alliance to destroy the USSR. However, following the invasion of the USSR in Operation Barbarossa (1941), the strategic stance of the Nazi régime towards a smaller, independent Russia was affected by political pressure from the German Army, who asked Hitler to endorse the creation of the anti–Communist Russian Liberation Army (ROA) and its integration into the Wehrmacht operations in Russia. The ROA was an organization of defectors, led by General Andrey Vlasov, who meant to depose the régime of Joseph Stalin and the Russian Communist Party. (2025). 9780674021785, Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674021785
Initially, Hitler rejected the idea of collaborating with the peoples in the East.Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History, pp, 544, 551 However, Nazis such as Joseph Goebbels and Alfred Rosenberg were in favor of collaboration against Bolshevism and offering some independence to the peoples of the East. (1997). 9780521470001, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521470001Robert Edwin Herzstein, The war that Hitler won: Goebbels and the Nazi media campaign, p. 364 In 1940, Himmler opened up membership for people he regarded as being of "related stock", which resulted in a number of right-wing Scandinavians signing up to fight in the Waffen-SS. When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, further volunteers from France, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, and Croatia signed up to fight for the Nazi cause. After 1942, when the war turned decisively against Nazi Germany, further recruits from the occupied territories signed up to fight for the Nazis. Hitler was worried about the foreign legions on the Eastern Front; he remarked that "One mustn't forget that, unless he is convinced of his racial membership of the Germanic Reich, the foreign legionary is bound to feel that he's betraying his country."Trevor-Roper, Gerhard L. Weinberg, Hitler's Table Talk 1941–1944: Secret Conversations, p. 305
After further losses of manpower, the Nazis tried to persuade the forced foreign laborers in the Reich to fight against Bolshevism. Martin Bormann issued a memorandum on 5 May 1943:
In 1944, as the German army continually lost battles and territory to the Red Army, the leaders of Nazi Germany, especially Reichsfuhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler, recognized the political, ideological, and military value of the collaborationist ROA in fighting Bolshevism. (1987). 9780521389600, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521389600 Secretly, Himmler in his Posen speeches remarked: "I wouldn't have had any objections, if we had hired Mr. Vlasov and every other Slavic subject wearing a Russian general's uniform, to make propaganda against the Russians. I wouldn't have any objections at all. Wonderful."
The Polish Campaign was Nazi Germany's first implementation of Lebensraum policy, beginning with the Occupation of Poland (1939–1945). In October 1939, Heinrich Himmler became the Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Nationhood, tasked with returning all ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) to the Reich, preventing harmful foreign influences upon the German people, and creating new settlement areas (especially for returning Volksdeutsche).
From mid–1940, the ethnic cleansing (forcible removal) of Poles from the Reichsgau Wartheland initially occurred across the border, to the General Government (a colonial political entity ostensibly autonomous of the Reich); then, after the invasion of the USSR, the displaced Polish populations were jailed in Polenlager (Pole-storage camps) in Silesia and sent to villages designated as . In four years of Germanisation (1940–44), the Nazis forcibly removed some 50,000 ethnic Poles from the Polish territories annexed to the Greater German Reich, notably some 18,000–20,000 ethnic Poles from Żywiec County, in Polish Silesia, effected in Action Saybusch.
The Nazi invasion of Poland consisted of atrocities committed against Polish men, women, and children. The German population's psychological acceptance of the atrocities was achieved with Nazi propaganda (print, radio, cinema), a key factor behind the manufactured consent that justified German brutality towards civilians; by continually manipulating the national psychology, the Nazis convinced the German people to believe that Slavs and Jews were Untermenschen.Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich at War, p. 102 For example, leaders of the Hitler Youth were issued pamphlets (such as On the German People and its Territory) meant to influence the rank-and-file Hitler Youth about the necessity of Nazi racist practices in obtaining Lebensraum for the German people. Likewise, in the Reich proper, schoolchildren were given propaganda pamphlets (such as You and Your People) explaining the importance of Lebensraum for the future of Germany and the German people.
On 21 June 1941, Himmler commissioned the drafting of Generalplan Ost (GPO), which was to be the blue-print of German expansionist and extermination policies in Eastern Europe. The draft, which was based on the proposals of Nazi agronomist Konrad Meyer, were forwarded to Hitler for approval. On 16 July 1941, Hitler appointed Alfred Rosenberg as Reich Minister for Occupied Eastern Territories, giving him directives to monitor Schutzstaffel activities. GPO was approved by Hitler's orders in May 1942 and became the official occupation program of Nazi Germany in July 1942. The program launched the genocide of millions of Slavs, Jews, Romani people, etc. through various methods like mass-killings, forced starvations, extermination through slave labour, etc. Ethnic cleansing was initiated to forcibly displace remaining non-Germanic inhabitants eastwards. Under the objectives of Generalplan Ost, the evacuated territories were to be colonized by over 10 million German settlers and establish the blueprint for a Greater Germanic Reich. Germanisation campaigns were extolled in Nazi Propaganda as the modern adaptation of what it portrayed as "civilizing missions" of the Teutonic Order.
In 1941, the Reich decided that within two decades, by the year 1961, Poland would have been emptied of Poles and re-populated with ethnic-German colonists from Bukovina, Eastern Galicia, and Volhynia.Volker R. Berghahn "Germans and Poles 1871–1945" in Germany and Eastern Europe: Cultural Identities and Cultural Differences, Rodopi 1999. The ruthless Germanisation that Hitler enacted for Lebensraum was attested in the reports of Wehrbauer (soldier–peasant) colonists assigned to ethnically-cleansed Poland—of finding half-eaten meals on the table and unmade beds in the houses given them by the Nazis. (2025). 067977663X, Vintage Books. 067977663X Baltic Germans from Estonia and Latvia were evaluated for racial purity; those classified to the highest category, Ost-Falle, were resettled in the Eastern Wall.
| + Area and population data in 1939 of Nazi German Gaue that included annexed territories of Poland: Estimates of 1947The Western Review, Supp. Number for Abroad, July and August, 1947 p. 49. as cited by Stanisław Waszak, Demographic Picture of the German Occupation (1970)Czesław Madajczyk. Polityka III Rzeszy w okupowanej Polsce pp. 234–286 vol. 1, Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, Warszawa, 1970 ! Gau ! scope=col style="width: 12%;" | Total population ! scope=col style="width: 12%;" | Poles ! scope=col style="width: 12%;" | Germans ! scope=col style="width: 12%;" | Jews ! scope=col style="width: 12%;" | Ukrainians ! scope=col style="width: 12%;" | Others |
| 4,933,600 | 4,220,200 | 324,600 | 384,500 | 4,300 | ||
| 2,632,630 | 2,404,670 | 98,204 | 124,877 | 1,202 | 3,677 | |
| 1,571,215 | 1,393,717 | 158,377 | 14,458 | 1,648 | 3,020 | |
| 1,001,560 | 886,061 | 18,400 | 79,098 | 8,099 | 9,902 | |
| 10,139,005 | 8,904,648 | 599,576 | 602,953 | 10,949 | 20,899 |
Moreover, the Germanisation of Russia which began with Operation Barbarossa (June–September 1941) meant to conquer and colonise European Russia as the granary of Germany.Madajczyk, Czesław. "Die Besatzungssysteme der Achsenmächte. Versuch einer komparatistischen Analyse" in Studia Historiae Oeconomicae vol. 14 (1980): pp. 105–122, quoted in Gerd R. Ueberschär and Rolf-Dieter Müller, Berghahn Books, 2008 (review ed.). . For those Slavic lands, the Nazi theorist and ideologue Alfred Rosenberg proposed administrative organisation by the Reichskommissariate—countries consolidated into colonial realms ruled by a commissar:
| Ostland | The Baltic States, Belarus, and western Russia |
| Ukraine | Ukraine (minus East Galicia and the Romanian-controlled Transnistria Governorate), extended eastwards to the Volga river |
| Moskowien | The Moscow metropolis and European Russia, exclusive of Karelia and the Kola peninsula, which the Nazis promised to Finland in 1941 |
| Kaukasien | The Caucasus |
In 1943, in the secret Posen speeches, Heinrich Himmler spoke of the Ural Mountains as the eastern border of the Greater Germanic Reich. He asserted that the Germanic race would gradually expand to that eastern border, so that, in several generations' time, the German Herrenvolk, as the leading people of Europe, would be ready to "resume the battles of destiny against Asia", which were "sure to break out again"; and that the defeat of Europe would mean "the destruction of the creative power of the Earth". Nonetheless, the Ural Mountains were a secondary objective of the secret Generalplan Ost (Master Plan East) for the colonisation of Eastern Europe.Madajczyk, Czeslaw (1962). General Plan East: Hitler's Master Plan For Expansion. Polish Western Affairs, Vol. III, No. 2.
The never-established Reichskommissariat Turkestan would have been the closest territory to Imperial Japan's north-westernmost extents of its own Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, as a "living wall" said to be defending the easternmost Lebensraum lands. It also would have elevated higher-social-class Chinese and nearly all Japanese-ethnicity populations as "honorary Aryans", partly to Hitler's own stated respect in Mein Kampf towards those specific East Asian ethnicities.
The early stages of Lebensraum im Osten (Lebensraum in the East) featured the ethnic cleansing of Russians and other Slavs (Galicians, Karelians, Ukrainians, et al.) from their lands, and the consolidation of their countries into the Reichskommissariat administration that extended to the Ural Mountains, the geographic frontier of Europe and Asia. To manage the ethnic, racial, and political populations of the USSR, the German Army promptly organized collaborationism, anti-Communist, puppet governments in the Reichskomissariat Ostland (1941–45) and the Reichskommissariat Ukraine (1941–44). Nonetheless, despite the initial strategic successes of Operation Barbarossa, the Red Army's counterattack victories against the German Army at the Battle of Stalingrad (August 1942 – February 1943) and at the Battle of Kursk (July–August 1943) in Russia, plus the Allied Operation Husky (July–August 1943) in Sicily, thwarted the full implementation of Nazi Lebensraum in Eastern Europe.
Within the Reich régime proper, the Nazis held different definitions of Lebensraum, such as the idyllic, agrarian society that required much arable land, advocated by the blood-and-soil ideologist Richard Walther Darré and Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler; and the urban, industrial state, that required raw materials and slaves, advocated by Adolf Hitler. Operation Barbarossa—the invasion of the Soviet Union in summer 1941—required a compromise of concept, purpose, and execution to realise Hitler's conception of Lebensraum in the Slavic lands of Eastern Europe.
During the Posen speeches, Himmler spoke about the deaths of millions of Soviet prisoners of war and foreign labourers:
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