Lebensraum

Lebensraum means literally living space in German, and in practice is a political concept used in discussing a group or nation’s demand for foreign land to expand into.  While best known for its use by German dictator Adolf Hitler to justify his invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 to gain Lebensraum for Germans, the term was a quasi-academic invention at the end of the nineteenth century and was already in use in the First Word War from 1914-1918. In its original form Lebensraum, as invented by German geographer Friedrich Ratzel,  envisaged an expanding agricultural population taking possession of further lands for its own agricultural production, not industry or resource extraction, as part of a natural process of expansion by any flourishing species.

Nazi ideology regarded the populations of eastern Europe and Russia as inferior races, or Untermenschen.  In this extreme belief system, sometimes called Social Darwinism despite its misinterpretation and misrepresentation of the process of evolution,  nature intended that weaker groups should  be enslaved or eliminated by superior races. Paraphrased as “survival of the fittest”, it mischaracterises evolution as a direct conflict between different groups where the better one vanquishes the other, whereas in fact the key driver of evolution is what is called “differential reproduction”: the more successful species live longer and produce more and better offspring who in turn out-reproduce the less well adapted.