Editing Lebensraum (section)

===Ideology===
[[Racism]] usually is not a concept integral to the ideology of territorial [[expansionism]]; nor to the original meaning of the term {{lang|de|Lebensraum}} ("biological habitat"), as defined by the ethnographer and geographer [[Friedrich Ratzel]]. Nonetheless, [[Nazism]], the ideology of the [[Nazi Party]], established racism as a philosophic basis of {{lang|de|Lebensraum}}-as-geopolitics; which Adolf Hitler presented as Nazi racist ideology in his political autobiography {{lang|de|[[Mein Kampf]]}} (1926–28). Moreover, the geopolitical interpretations of national living-space by the academic [[Karl Haushofer]] (a teacher of [[Rudolf Hess]], Hitler's deputy) provided Adolf Hitler with the intellectual, academic, and scientific rationalisations that justified the territorial expansion of Germany—by the [[natural right]] of the German Aryan race—to expand into, occupy, and exploit the lands of other countries, regardless of the native populations.<ref>Rosenberg, Matt (November 1, 2008). [http://geography.about.com/od/politicalgeography/a/geopolitics.htm "Geopolitics."] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090822164553/http://geography.about.com/od/politicalgeography/a/geopolitics.htm |date=2009-08-22 }} About.com.</ref> In {{lang|de|Mein Kampf}}, Hitler explained the living-space "required" by Nazi Germany:

{{Blockquote|In an era when the Earth is gradually being divided up among states, some of which embrace almost entire continents, we cannot speak of a world power in connection with a formation whose political mother country is limited to the absurd area of five hundred thousand square kilometres.<ref>Adolf Hitler, ''[[Mein Kampf]]''. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971, p. 644</ref> Without consideration of traditions and prejudices, Germany must find the courage to gather our people, and their strength, for an advance along the road that will lead this people from its present, restricted living space to new land and soil, and, hence, also free it from the danger of vanishing from the earth, or of serving others as a slave nation.<ref>{{harvnb|Hitler|1939|p=646}}</ref> For it is not in colonial acquisitions that we must see the solution of this problem, but exclusively in the acquisition of a territory for settlement, which will enhance the area of the mother country, and hence not only keep the new settlers in the most intimate community with the land of their origin, but secure for the entire area those advantages which lie in its unified magnitude.<ref>{{harvnb|Hitler|1939|p=653}}</ref>}}