Lebensraum (Acerca de este sonido escuchar (?·i)) es un término que en alemán significa «espacio vital». Esta expresión fue acuñada por el geógrafo alemán Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904), influido por el biologismo y el naturalismo del siglo XIX. Establecía la relación entre espacio y población, asegurando que la existencia de un Estado quedaba garantizada cuando dispusiera del suficiente espacio para atender a las necesidades del mismo. Adolf Hitler recurrió esta idea para justificar su proyecto del Tercer Reich. Su equivalente en el Imperio de Japón fue la Esfera de Coprosperidad de la Gran Asia Oriental propuesta en 1940, un año antes del ataque a Pearl Harbor.

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Lebensraum (German pronunciation: [ˈleːbənsˌʁaʊm] , "living space") refers to conceptions and policies of a form of settler colonialism connected with agrarianism that existed in Germany from the 1890s to the 1940s. One variant of this policy was supported by the Nazi Party and Nazi Germany. Originally a biology term for "habitat", the publicists for the German Empire (1871–1918) introduced Lebensraum as a concept of nationalism that became a geopolitical goal of Imperial Germany in the First World War (1914–1918), as the Septemberprogramm (1914). The British blockade of trade to Germany during World War I caused food shortages in Germany and resources from Germany's African colonies were unable to help; this caused support to rise during the war for a Lebensraum that would expand Germany eastward into Russia to gain control of resources to stop the food shortages. Lebensraum was an ideological element of Nazism, which advocated Germany's territorial expansion into Eastern Europe, justified by the need for agricultural land in order to maintain the town-and-country balance upon which depended the moral health of the German people. In practice, during the war, the Nazi policy Generalplan Ost (Master Plan East) was to kill, deport, or enslave the Polish, Ukrainian, Russian and other Slavic populations and other peoples living there considered racially inferior to the Germans and to repopulate Eastern Europe with Germanic people to achieve Lebensraum. The populations of cities were to be exterminated by starvation, thus creating an agricultural surplus that would feed Germany, and thereby allow political replacement by and re-population with a German upper class. The eugenics of Lebensraum explicitly assumed the racial superiority of Germans as an Aryan master race (Herrenvolk), who, by virtue of their superiority (physical, mental, genetic) had the right to displace any people they deemed to be Untermenschen (subhumans) of inferior racial stock.

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