Haushofer, Karl (1869–1946)

Karl Haushofer was a German army general who, through his Zeitschrift fur Geopolitik (Journal of Geopolitics), was believed by some in the West to be directing Nazi strategy and tactics during World War II. While it was later discovered that such a belief was very greatly exaggerated, the supposed links between Haushofer's geopolitics, political geography, and the Nazis have been given as a partial explanation for geopolitics’ (and by extension, political geography's) decline as an academic field of study in the mid 20th century.

Born in Munich, Haushofer served in the German military from 1889 to 1919. Two time periods during his military career were especially important in focusing Haushofer's future direction: his work in Japan from 1908 to 1910, which helped shape his thinking on geopolitics (Haushofer's 1914 doctoral dissertation at the University of Munich focused on Japan), and his service in World War I. Haushofer left the military after the war and took up a teaching position at the University of Munich. He was not alone among Germans in feeling that the Versailles Peace Treaty that ended World War I, reducing the size of German territory and stripping it of its colonies, was unjust punishment for its defeat. Rectifying this situation was the basis for his subsequent geopolitical teaching and writing.

In his work, Haushofer blended previous writings in political geography/geopolitics from Friedrich Ratzel to Halford Mackinder. Haushofer emphasized the Ratzelian concept of lebensraum (living space) to suggest that, given its large [Page 1408]population, Germany needed greater amounts of land and resources for its state and people to survive and thrive in international competition with other states, advocating that Germany take over all or parts of adjacent states and other territories. He also proposed a division of global space into three giant blocks or pan-regions: (1) the Americas (centered on the United States), (2) Europe and Africa (centered on Germany), and (3) East/southeast Asia and Australia (centered on Japan). At the same time, borrowing from the Mackinder tradition, Haushofer saw the global geopolitical picture as a competition between land-based and sea-based powers. Early in World War II, Haushofer argued that Germany's lebensraum could best be achieved through the creation of a “heartland” alliance with the Soviet Union and Japan against the maritime-oriented British Empire.

Haushofer's vision of an expansionist Germany fit well with Nazi war aims. Haushofer's connections to the Nazis came through his former student Rudolf Hess, who he first met in the late 1910s and then later taught at the University of Munich. Haushofer visited Hess and Adolph Hitler in prison after the two were arrested for the failed 1923 Munich Beer Hall Putsch. Through these connections, some saw Haushofer's (and, by extension, geopolitics') influence in passages in Hitler's Mein Kampf. While more recently geographers have questioned the extent of Haushofer's influence on Hitler and the Nazis (whatever influence he had ended in 1941 following both Hess's flight to Britain and the German invasion of the Soviet Union, in direct contradiction to Haushofer's “geopolitical” advice), the American establishment's need to create a “boogeyman” during World War II to explain Hitler's actions centered on Haushofer and his supposed “Institute of Geopolitics” (which did not exist) masterminding Nazi war strategy (as seen in articles in American magazines such as Life, The New Republic, and Reader's Digest and in a 1943 Academy Award-nominated short documentary, Plan for Destruction).

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