Editing Lebensraum (section)

==Interwar propaganda==
In the national politics of the [[Weimar Republic]] (1919–33), the German [[Eugenics|eugenicists]] took up the nationalist political slogan of {{lang|de|[[Volk ohne Raum]]}}, and matched it with the [[Nazi eugenics|racial]] slogan {{lang|de|Volk ohne Jugend}} (a People without Youth), a cultural proposition that ignored the declining German birth rate (since the 1880s) and contradicted the popular belief that the "German race" was a vigorous and growing people. Despite each slogan (political and racial) being contradicted by the [[reality]] of such [[demography|demographic]] facts, the nationalists' demands for {{lang|de|Lebensraum}} proved to be ideologically valid politics in Weimar Germany.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Paul Weindling |title=Health, Race and German Politics Between National Unification and Nazism, 1870–1945 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |year=1993 |isbn=978-0-521-42397-7 |page=343}}</ref><ref>[[Robert Cecil (British diplomat)|Robert Cecil]], ''The Myth of the Master Race: Alfred Rosenberg and Nazi Ideology'' p. 69 {{ISBN|0-396-06577-5}}</ref>

In the lead-up to {{lang|de|[[Anschluss]]}} (1938) and the [[invasion of Poland]] (1939), the propaganda of the [[Nazi Party]] in Germany used popular feelings of wounded [[national identity]] aroused in the aftermath of the First World War to promote policies of {{lang|de|Lebensraum}}. Studies of the homeland focused on the lost colonies after the establishment of the [[Second Polish Republic]], which was ratified by the [[Treaty of Versailles]] ({{lang|de|Volk ohne Raum}}), as well as the [[The Eternal Jew (art exhibition)|"eternal Jewish threat"]] ({{lang|de|Der ewige Jude}}, 1937). Emphasis was put on the need for rearmament and the pseudoscience of superior races in the pursuit of "[[blood and soil]]" ({{lang|de|Blut und Boden}}).<ref>{{Cite book |last=Lisa Pine |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=1ymC_kb-_WcC&q=Raum |title=Education in Nazi Germany |publisher=Berg |year=2010 |isbn=978-1-84520-265-1 |page=(48), 1893}}</ref>

During the twenty-one-year inter-war period between the First (1914–18) and the Second (1939–45) World War, {{lang|de|Lebensraum}} for Germany was the principal tenet of the extremist nationalism that characterised German party politics. The Nazis, led by Adolf Hitler, demanded not only the geographic reversion of Germany's post-war borders (to recuperate territory lost by the Treaty of Versailles), but also the German conquest and colonisation of Eastern Europe (whether or not those lands were German before 1918).<ref>Weinberg, Gerhard ''The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany Diplomatic Revolution in Europe 1933–1936'', Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1970 pp. 166–168</ref> To that end, Hitler said that flouting the Treaty of Versailles was required for Germany to obtain needed {{lang|de|Lebensraum}} in Eastern Europe.<ref>Trevor-Roper, Hugh "Hitler's War Aims" pp.&nbsp;235–250 in ''Aspects of the Third Reich'', edited by H.W. Koch, Macmillan Press: London, United Kingdom, 1985 pp. 242–245.</ref> During the 1920s, [[Heinrich Himmler]]—as a member of the [[Artaman League]], an anti-Slav, anti-urban, and anti-Semitic organisation of "blood and soil" ideology—developed the {{lang|de|[[Völkisch]]}} ideas that advocated {{lang|de|Lebensraum}}, for the realisation of which he said that the:

{{Blockquote|Increase [of] our peasant population is the only effective defense against the influx of the Slav working-class masses from the East. As six hundred years ago, the German peasant's destiny must be to preserve and increase the German people's patrimony in their holy mother earth battle against the Slav race.<ref>Anthony Read, ''The Devil's Disciples'', p. 159.</ref>}}