(3) To acquire further territories in colonial Europe and elsewhere claimed to be required by “racial Germans” as “Lebensraum” or living space, at the expense of neighboring and other countries. Hitler made it clear that the two objectives of the Nazi conspirators set forth above were only preliminary steps in a more ambitious plan of territorial aggrandizement. Thus he stated:
“One must take the point of view, coolly and soberly, that it certainly cannot be the intention of Heaven to give one people fifty times as much space (Grund und Boden) on this earth as to another. One should not permit himself to be diverted in this case by political boundaries from the boundaries of eternal justice.
* * * * * *
“The boundaries of 1914 do not mean anything for the future of the German nation. They did not represent either a defense of the past nor would they represent a power in the future. The German people will not obtain either its inner compactness by them, nor will its nutrition be secured by them, nor do these boundaries appear from a military standpoint as appropriate or even satisfactory. * * *” (2760-A-PS)
While the precise limits of German expansion were only vaguely defined by the Nazi conspirators, they clearly indicated that the lebensraum to which they felt they were entitled would be acquired primarily in the East. Rosenberg was particularly insistent in his declarations that Russia would have to “move over” to make way for German living space. He underlined this demand as follows:
“The understanding that the German nation, if it is not to perish in the truest sense of the word, needs ground and soil for itself and its future generations, and the second sober perception that this soil can no more be conquered in Africa, but in Europe and first of all in the East—these organically determine the German foreign policy for centuries. (2777-PS)
“The Russians * * * will have to confine themselves so as to remove their center of gravity to Asia.” (2426-PS)
A similar view was expressed by Hitler in Mein Kampf:
“If one wanted territory in Europe, this could be done on the whole at the expense of Russia, and the new Reich would have to set out to march over the road of the former Knights, in order to give soil to the German plow by means of the German sword, and to give daily bread to the nation.” (2760-A-PS)
In Mein Kampf Hitler threatened war as a means of attaining additional space: