The Greater Germanic Reich, fully styled the Greater Germanic Reich of the German Nation, was the official state name of the political entity that Nazi Germany tried to establish in Europe during Worl
Poster from the Wochenspruch der NSDAP series, 22 February 1942. Hitler's quote reads: "When this war is over, I will return as an even more fanatic National Socialist than I was before."
Lebensraum is a German concept of expansionism and Völkisch nationalism, the philosophy and policies of which were common to German politics from the 1890s to the 1940s. First popularized around 1901,
Greater Germanic Reich
…meant the complete German annexation of all of Wallonia, French Switzerland, and large areas of northern and eastern France. Additionally, the policy of Lebensraum required mass expansion of Germany and the settlement of Germans eastwards as far as the Ural Mountains (seizing territory from the Baltic states and…
The German geographer and ethnographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904) coined the word Lebensraum (1901) as a term of human geography, which the Nazis adopted as a by-word for the aggressive territorial expansion of Germany into the Greater Germanic Reich.
The Swedish political scientist Johan Rudolf Kjellén (1864–1922) interpreted Friedrich Ratzel's ethnogeographic term, Lebensraum, as a geopolitical term, which the Nazis applied to justify German warfare.
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."
Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, Chancellor of Germany from 1909 until 1917, was a proponent of German Lebensraum as a natural right of Imperial Germany.