Abstract
When Hitler touched off World War II in Europe by sending German forces into Poland on September 1, 1939, he was not just bent on regaining territory Germany had lost in World War I. His public proclamations that he needed to protect the German minority in Poland were a flimsy façade to justify his actions before a world that would never assent to his real plans of violent conquest, exploitation, deportation, and racial extermination. About three months before invading Poland, Hitler candidly told his highest military leaders in private that war against Poland was inevitable. However, contrary to his public statements, Hitler informed them, “It is not Danzig that is at stake. For us it is a matter of expanding our living space (Lebensraum) in the East and making food supplies secure and also solving the problem of the Baltic states. Food supplies can only be obtained from thinly populated areas.”1 Almost three months after the war began, Hitler told his military officials in a private speech that this war was a racial struggle caused by the growing German population. The goal was to bring the population size and the living space into harmony.2
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Notes
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Robert Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 28–29.
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© 2009 Richard Weikart
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Weikart, R. (2009). The Struggle for Living Space: War and Expansionism. In: Hitler’s Ethic. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230623989_9
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