Overview
Hitler's National Socialist foreign policy contained four broad goals: racial unification, agricultural autarky, lebensraum in the East, culminating in a Eurasian land-based empire. Not justified by strategic or realpolitik considerations, Hitler's ideas stemmed almost exclusively from his conception of racial struggle and the natural consequences of the need for German expansion. The historical record shows that German geopoliticians, chief among them General Karl Haushofer, were in contact with and taught Nazi officials, including Adolf Hitler, Rudolf Hess and Konstantin von Neurath. Furthermore, Nazi leaders used the language of geopolitik, along with Haushofer's maps, and reasoning in their public propaganda. How receptive they were to the true intent of Haushofer's geopolitik, and what that intent was exactly, is unclear. The ideas of racial organic states, lebensraum, and autarky clearly found their way into Hitler's thinking, whereas pan-regions and the landpower-seapower dichotomy did not appear prominently, much less correctly, in National Socialist strategy. Examination of Germany's pre–World War I imperial aims demonstrates that many of the ideas which would later surface in Nazi thought were not novel, but simply continuations of the same revisionist strategic aims. Racially motivated autarky, achieved by annexation, especially in the East, found its way into National Socialist policy as a continuous and coherent whole. However, Hitler along with the geopoliticians would drop the imperial focus on industry, trade and naval power. The practical outcomes of Imperial, geostrategic, and Nazi foreign policy plans were all largely the same.
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