The Nazi Past of US Geopolitics

 

Geopolitics is the linking of political power to geographic space. Perhaps Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard remains one of its best abstract representations. It’s not only the USA that has geopolitical goals; many other countries, like the UK, France, Russia and Germany, also developed distinct geopolitical ideas. In nineteenth century Germany, geopolitics included imperialist expansion based on a biological conception of geography.

Germany’s geopolitics was turbo-charged in 1923 when a German general, geographer, politician, professor and teacher of top-ranking Nazi, Rudolf Hess, founded the Zeitschrift für Geopolitik (Journal for Geopolitics). During the 1920s, the journal’s editor Karl Haushofer had been a student of Rudolf Hess. In 1933, he became Adolf Hitler’s Deputy Führer until his infamous flight to Scotland in 1941. The goal was to convince none other than the wartime prime minister Winston Churchill to join Nazi-Germany’s invasion of the Soviet-Union. The effort failed, of course.

Karl Haushofer might not be the inventor of term Lebensraum (living space) but he certainly was the one who shaped the term into a strategic plan and introduced the idea to Adolf Hitler. The relatively uneducated Hitler (who was born Adolf Schicklgruber in Austria’s rural hinterland) never attended university, never completed the typical German apprenticeship, never received any military training beyond being a relatively inconsequential foot-soldier during the Great War I (WWI).

In short, Hitler was utterly incapable of grasping the intellectual depth of the rather abstract concept of geopolitics. To understand the basics of geopolitics Hitler needed a clever associate like Rudolf Hess, whom Hitler called “mein Hesserl,” as well as his other adviser Karl Haushofer, “the general” as he was usually called. Unlike Adolf Hitler who had been merely a little message boy at the relatively safe regimental headquarter, Haushofer was the one who moved up the ranks during WWI to become a Major General – a rank in which Haushofer would never have as much as recognized the existence of the little dogsbody named Adolf.  (more...)

The Nazi Past of US Geopolitics