Abstract
This chapter looks at pre-Nazi late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century expansionist ideas which informed and shaped Hitler’s understanding of Lebensraum imperialism, an ideology focused on gaining new ‘living space’for an expanding population, on colonizing that ‘space’ with settlers, and on ruthlessly thrusting aside the indigenous inhabitants. It examines the expansionist ideas of the American historian Frederick Jackson Turner (and his ‘frontier thesis’), the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel (and his notion of Lebensraum), and the German geopolitical theorist Karl Haushofer (and his geopolitical theories). It shows how the Turner-Ratzel transatlantic dialogue confirmed a shared genealogy between the classic American ‘frontier thesis’ and later German ideas of Lebensraum and how these Lebensraum imperialist ideas were transmitted to Nazi Party Leader Adolf Hitler.
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Notes
Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s Second Book: The Unpublished Sequel to Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler, trans. Krista Smith, Gerhard L. Weinberg (ed.), (New York: Enigma Books, 2003), p. 28.
For a full and informative discussion of these ideologies, see Woodruff D. Smith, The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
John Mack Faragher, ‘Introduction: “A Nation Thrown Back Upon Itself”, Frederick Jackson Turner and the Frontier’, in Frederick Jackson Turner, Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’ and Other Essays, with commentary by John Mack Faragher (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 1–10.
Walter L. Williams, ‘American Imperialism and the Indians’, in Frederick E. Hoxie (ed.), Indians in American History (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1988), pp. 231–50.
Quoted in Ray Allen Billington, The Genesis of the Frontier Thesis: A Study in Historical Creativity (San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library, 1971), pp. 173–4.
Quoted in Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 192–4.
Quoted in David Thomas Murphy, The Heroic Earth: Geopolitical Thought in Weimar Germany, 1918–1933 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1997), p. 9.
Quoted in Alan E. Steinweis, ‘Eastern Europe and the Notion of the “Frontier” in Germany to 1945’, Yearbook of European Studies, Vol. 13 (1999), pp. 56–69.
Shelley Baranowski, Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 64.
Steinweis, ‘Eastern Europe’, pp. 57, 61. For more on the dialogue between Ratzel and Turner, see Jens-Uwe Guettel, ‘From the Frontier to German South-West Africa: German Colonialism, Indians, and American Westward Expansion’, Modern Intellectual History, Vol. 7, No. 3 (2010), pp. 523–52.
David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany (New York: WW. Norton, 2006), p. 294.
Holger H. Herwig, ‘Geopolitik: Haushofer, Hitler, and Lebensraum, The Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 22, Nos 2/3 (1999), pp. 218–41.
Robert G.L. Waite, Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler (New York: Basic Books, 1977), pp. 11–12.
Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris (London: W.W Norton, 1998), p. 17.
J. Sydney Jones, Hitler in Vienna, 1907–1913 (New York: Stein and Day Publishers, 1983), n. 92, p. 326.
Quoted in John Toland, Adolf Hitler (New York: Doubleday, 1976), p. 604.
Klaus P. Fischer, Hitler and America (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), pp. 21–2.
Gerhard L. Weinberg, The Foreign Policy of Hitler’s Germany: Starting World War II 1937–1939 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1994), p. xii.
Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s Second Book: The Unpublished Sequel to Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler, trans. Krista Smith, Gerhard L. Weinberg (ed.), (New York: Enigma Books, 2003), pp. 28.
Richard Weikart, Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 160.
For support for this view, see Martyn Housden, Hans Frank, Lebensraum, and the Holocaust (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. viii.
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim, Mariner Books Edition (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999 [1925/27]), pp. 139.
Ian Kershaw, Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940–1941 (New York: The Penguin Press, 2007), pp. 56–7.
Quoted in Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Auschwitz, 1270 to the Present: A History (New York: W.W Norton, 1996), p. 82.
Aristotle A. Kallis, Fascist Ideology: Territory and Expansionism in Italy and Germany, 1922–1945 (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 43.
Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe (London: Allen Lane, 2008), p. 685.
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© 2013 Carroll P. Kakel, III
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Kakel, C.P. (2013). Pre-Nazi Discourse: Racial Imperialism. In: The Holocaust as Colonial Genocide: Hitler’s ‘Indian Wars’ in the ‘Wild East’. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-39169-8_2
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