Karl Haushofer

Karl Haushofer (1869-1946), German army officer, geographer, and prominent advocate of the geopolitical basis for the Nazi ideology of Lebensraum (living space) and for Nazi plans for world domination. He spent the years 1908 to 1910 in Japan, where he observed Japanese Asian policies and collected data for his political geography of that country. After his retirement from the army in 1919, he turned his focus to Germany, where he became director of the Institute of Geopolitics at the University of Munich. He was closely associated with Rudolf Hess and, through him, exerted great influence on Adolf Hitler and his political and military advisers. In his principal works, Macht und Erde (Power and Earth, 1934), and Deutsche Kulturpolitik im Indopazifischen Raum (German Cultural Politics in the Indo-Pacific Region, 1939), he asserted that Germany’s political and military strength and cultural supremacy gave it the right to subjugate other countries in Europe, Asia, and the Pacific. After Hess’s flight to Scotland in 1941, Haushofer’s influence decreased rapidly, and in 1944 he and his family were sent to the Dachau concentration camp. Under investigation for war crimes after Germany's defeat in World War II, he and his Jewish wife committed suicide.