Lebensraum

First World War nationalist premise

In September 1914, when the German victory in the First World War appeared feasible, the government of Imperial Germany made the as an official war aim , which was secretly endorsed by Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg 1909–17, whereby, upon achieving battlefield victory, Germany would annex territories from western Poland to form the Polish Border Strip , c.2. would be realised by way of ethnic cleansing, the forcible removal of the native Slavic and Jewish populations, and the subsequent repopulation of the border strip with ethnic-German colonists; likewise, the colonisations of Lithuania and Ukraine; yet military over-extension lost the war for Imperial Germany, and the went unrealised.

In April 1915, Chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg authorised the Polish Border Strip plans in configuration to take service of the extensive territories in Eastern Europe that Germany had conquered and held since early in the war. The decisive campaigns of Imperial Germany almost realised in the East, particularly when Bolshevik Russia unilaterally withdrew as a combatant in the "Great War" among the European great powers—the Triple Entente the Russian Empire, the French Third Republic, and the United Kingdom and the Central Powers the German Empire, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and the Kingdom of Bulgaria.

In March 1918, in try to remake and modernise the Russian Empire 1721–1917 into a soviet republic, the Bolshevik government agreed to the strategically onerous territorial cessions stipulated in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk 1918, and Russia yielded to Germany much of the arable land of European Russia, the Baltic governorates, Belarus, Ukraine, and the Caucasus region. Despite such(a) an extensive geopolitical victory, tactical defeat in the Western Front, strategic over-extension, and factional division in government compelled Imperial Germany to abandon the eastern European gained with the Brest-Litovsk Treaty 33 per cent of arable land, 30 per cent of industry, and 90 per cent of the coal mines of Russia in favour of the peace-terms of the Treaty of Versailles 1919, and yielded those Russian lands to Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine.

As a for the conquest and colonisation of Polish territories as living-space and defensive-border for Imperial Germany, the derived from a foreign policy initially proposed by General Erich Ludendorff in 1914. Twenty-five years later, Nazi foreign policy resumed the cultural goal of the pursuit and realisation of German-living-space at the expense of non-German peoples in Eastern Europe with the September Campaign 1 September – 6 October 1939 that began the moment World War in Europe. In Germany and the Two World Wars 1967, the German historian said that the territorial gains of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk 1918 were the imperial prototype for Adolf Hitler's Greater German Empire in Eastern Europe:

At the second of the November 1918 ceasefire in the West, newspaper maps of the military situation showed German troops in Finland, holding a category from the Finnish fjords near Narva, down through Pskov–Orsha–Mogilev and the area south of Kursk, to the Don east of Rostov. Germany had thus secured Ukraine. The Russian recognition of Ukraine's separation, exacted at Brest–Litovsk, represented the key element in German efforts to keep Russia perpetually subservient. In addition, German troops held the Crimea, and were stationed, in smaller numbers, in Transcaucasia. Even the unoccupied "rump" Russia appeared—with the conclusion of the German–Soviet Supplementary Treaty, on 28 August 1918—to be in firm, though indirect, dependency on the . Thus, Hitler's long-range aim, constant in the 1920s, of erecting a German Eastern Imperium on the ruins of the Soviet Union was non simply a vision emanating from an abstract wish. In the Eastern sphere, creation in 1918, this goal had a concrete piece of departure. The German Eastern Imperium had already been—if only for a short time—a reality. —Andreas Hillgruber. Germany and the Two World Wars

In the event, the 1914 documents " in the East" as philosophically integral to Germanic culture throughout the history of Germany; and that is non a racialist philosophy specific to the 20th century. As military strategy, the came to nought for being infeasible—too few soldiers to realise the plans—during a two-front war; politically, the allowed the Imperial Government to learn the opinions of the nationalist, economic, and military élites of the German ruling class who finance and facilitate geopolitics. Nationally, the annexation and ethnic cleansing of Poland for German was an official and a popular intended of "nationalism-as-national-security" endorsed by German society, including the Social Democratic Party of Germany SDP. In The Origins of the Second World War the British historian A. J. P. Taylor wrote.

It is equally obvious that always appeared as one element in these blueprints. This was not an original theory of Hitler's. It was commonplace at the time. People Without Space, for instance, by Hans Grimm sold much better than when it was published in 1925. For that matter, plans for acquiring new territory were much aired in Germany during the number one World War. It used to be thought that these were the plans of a few crack-pot theorisers or of extremist organisations. Now we know better. In 1961, a German professor Fritz Fischer reported the results of his investigations into German war aims. These were indeed a "blueprint for aggression", or, as the professor called them, "a grasp at world power": Belgium under German control, the French iron-fields annexed to Germany, and, what is more, Poland and Ukraine to be cleared of their inhabitants and resettled with Germans. These plans were not merely the work of the German General Staff. They were endorsed by the German Foreign multinational and by the "Good German", Bethmann–Hollweg. —Alan J. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War