Editing Lebensraum (section)

===Racial ideology===
[[File:Wochenspruch der NSDAP 17 December 1939 (für unseren Lebensraum).jpg|thumb|Poster from the ''[[Wochenspruch der NSDAP]]'' series, 17 December 1939. Hitler's quote reads: "We are fighting for the security of our people and for our living space."]]
In the national politics of [[Weimar Germany]], the geopolitical usage of {{lang|de|Lebensraum}} is credited to Karl Ernst Haushofer and his Institute of Geopolitics, in Munich, especially the ultra-nationalist interpretation of it, which was used as a justification for the desire to avenge Germany's military defeat at the end of the First World War (1914–18) and the desire to reverse the dictates of the [[Treaty of Versailles]] (1919), which reduced Germany geographically, economically, and militarily. Hitler said that the [[Nazism|Nazi]] geopolitics of "inevitable expansion" would reverse overpopulation, provide natural resources, and uphold German national honor.<ref>Stephen J. Lee. ''Europe, 1890–1945''. p. 237.</ref> In {{lang|de|Mein Kampf}} (1925; ''My Struggle''), Hitler presented his conception of {{lang|de|Lebensraum}} as the philosophic basis for the Greater Germanic Reich that was destined to colonize Eastern Europe—especially Ukraine in the [[Soviet Union]]—and so resolve the problems of overpopulation, and that the European states had to accede to his geopolitical demands.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Fest |first=Joachim C. |url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1021362956 |title=Hitler |date=2013 |publisher=Houghton Mifflin |isbn=978-0-544-19554-7 |oclc=1021362956}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |editor1=Wsevolod W. Isajiw |editor2=Yuri Boshyk |editor3=Roman Senkus |date=1992 |title=The Refugee Experience: Ukrainian Displaced Persons After World War II |publisher=CIUS Press |page=9 |isbn=9780920862858}}</ref>

The Nazi Party's usages of the term {{lang|de|Lebensraum}} were explicitly racial, to justify the [[mystical]] right of the racially superior [[Germanic peoples]] ({{lang|de|Herrenvolk}}) to fulfill their cultural destiny at the expense of racially inferior peoples ({{lang|de|Untermenschen}}), such as the [[Slavs]] of Poland, Russia, Ukraine, and the other non–Germanic peoples of "[[Eastern Europe|the East]]".<ref name="E/N301"/> Based upon Johan Rudolf Kjellén's geopolitical interpretation of Friedrich Ratzel's human-geography term, the [[Nazi regime]] (1933–45) established {{lang|de|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.<ref name="Encyclopaedia Britannica" />