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Mein Kampf
at the time, and as a partially educated
man, he needed, despite his intuition, to know more about the real world. And
here was this university professor who could fill some of the gaps in his
knowledge. Chapter 14 of
Mein Kampf
, which defines Nazi foreign policy and
the Nazi ideal of
Lebensraum
, was possibly influenced by Haushofer, who was
in turn influenced by, among others, Ratzel, Kjellén, and especially Mackinder.
For Mackinder had written that world history has always been made by the great
outward thrusts of landlocked peoples located near Eastern Europe and the
Heartland of Eurasia.
1
Strausz-Hupé takes us on a journey along the line of thought by which
Haushofer came to be mesmerized by his contemporary Mackinder. Mackinder,
though obsessed with land power, never actually denigrated the importance of
sea power. But he was pessimistic about the ability of British sea power to
prevent a raid on the Heartland by German land power. And once in possession
of the Heartland, Germany could build a great navy to aid in its conquest of the
World-Island. In the twentieth century, Mackinder explained that, more than
ever, sea power required a broader and deeper landward reach to take advantage
of industrialization. The Industrial Age meant a world of big states, and the
strong ate the weak. Haushofer adopted this theory of Mackinder “to the
opposite German point of view,” Strausz-Hupé writes, “and concluded that the
path to German world power lay along the lines that had frightened the English,
i.e., consolidation of the German and Russian ‘greater areas.’ ” Haushofer, in the
words of Strausz-Hupé, goes positively cloudy and mystical and nebulous when
describing Mackinder’s Heartland. It is the “cradle of world conquerors,” “a
gigantic citadel reaching from ‘the Elbe to the Amur,’ ” that is, from central
Germany to Manchuria and the Russian Far East, deep into which Germany can
withdraw her vital war industries while its army and navy can strike outward in
all directions.
2
Whereas Mackinder, influenced by Wilsonianism and the need to preserve the
balance of power in Eurasia, recommended in 1919 a belt of independent states
in Eastern Europe, Haushofer, inverting Mackinder’s thesis, calls a few years
later for the “extinction of such states.” Haushofer, Strausz-Hupé reports, calls
them “bits of states … fragments,” whose inhabitants think only in terms of
“narrow space,” which to Haushofer, as Strausz-Hupé explains, “is the
unmistakable symptom of decay.” Strausz-Hupé goes on, uncovering
Haushofer’s “neat logic” about the dissolution of the British Empire and the
need to break up the Soviet Union into its component ethnic parts, which will all
lean on a Greater Germany, which in Haushofer’s view is the only state entitled
to national self-determination. For in Haushofer’s own words, “one-third of the
German people [are] living under alien rule outside the borders of the Reich.”
German
Geopolitik
, Strausz-Hupé warns, is a world of “acrobatics on the
ideological trapeze,” with conclusions of “stark simplicity.” The German new
world order presupposes a Greater East Asia under Japanese hegemony, a U.S.-
dominated “Pan-America,” and a German-dominated Eurasian Heartland with a
“Mediterranean–North African subregion under the shadow rule of Italy.” But
for Haushofer, this is only an intermediate step: for, according to Mackinder, the
Heartland dominates the World-Island and hence the world.
3
Strausz-Hupé tells us that Mackinder’s concept of the Heartland “is colored by
the very personal point of view of an Edwardian Englishman.” For Mackinder’s
generation, Russia had been Great Britain’s antagonist for almost a century, and
consequently British statesmen lived with the fear of a Russia that would control
the Dardanelles, consume the Ottoman Empire, and fall upon India. Thus,
Mackinder fixated upon a tier of independent buffer states between Russia and
maritime Europe, even as he identified the Heartland inside Russia itself as a
visual tool of strategy. “Mackinder’s vision,” Strausz-Hupé writes, “accorded
only too well with the morbid philosophy of world power or downfall which
explains so much about German national pathology. There is in Mackinder’s
dogma just the kind of finality for which the Wagnerian mentality yearns.” And
yet Strausz-Hupé ultimately rescues Mackinder’s reputation:
Mackinder’s book—written when the armies had not yet returned from
the battlefields—is dignified by a cool detachment and never loses
sight of the broad perspectives of history. It is his faith in the
individual which his German admirer so woefully lacks. For, though
Haushofer likes to stress the part of heroism in the shaping of history,
it is the collective sacrifice of the battlefield rather than the anonymous
struggles of ordinary men and women … which he has in mind.
4
Strausz-Hupé and Mackinder both believe in human agency, in the sanctity, as
they say, of the individual, whereas the German
Geopolitikers
do not.
Whereas in Mackinder’s hands the Heartland is an arresting way to explain
geopolitics, in Haushofer’s hands it becomes both a crazed and dreamy ideology.
Yet Strausz-Hupé takes it very seriously, and informs his fellow Americans to do
likewise: “To the Nazis,” Strausz-Hupé writes, Haushofer “transmitted
something that the vaporous cerebrations of Adolf Hitler had failed to provide—
a coherent doctrine of empire.” While Mackinder saw the future in terms of a
balance of power that would protect freedom, Haushofer was determined to
overthrow the balance of power altogether: thus he perverted geopolitics. To wit,
just as Haushofer distorted Mackinder, he also distorted Lord George Nathaniel
Curzon. Curzon delivered a lecture in 1907 about “Frontiers.” Haushofer,
inspired by Curzon, wrote a book entitled
Frontiers
, which was, in fact, about
how to break them. According to Haushofer, only nations in decline seek stable
borders, and only decadent ones seek to protect their borders with permanent
fortifications: for frontiers are living organisms. Virile nations build roads
instead. Frontiers were but temporary halts for master nations. To be sure,
German
Geopolitik
is perpetual warfare for “space,” and thus akin to nihilism.
Strausz-Hupé adds:
It should not be assumed, however, that this perverted use, destructive
to world peace as it is, necessarily invalidates all geopolitical theories;
anthropology is no less a science for having served as a vehicle to
racism.
5
Haushofer, even within the confines of his own violent worldview, had few
fixed principles. On Hitler’s fiftieth birthday, in 1939, he described the Führer as
a “statesman” who combined in his person “Clausewitz’s blood and Ratzel’s
space and soil.”
6
Haushofer greeted the Russo-German pact of 1939 with
enthusiasm in an editorial, stressing Germany’s need to join its land power
forces with those of Russia. Yet after Hitler invaded Russia in 1941, he wrote
another editorial, celebrating the invasion as a way to capture the Heartland. Of
course, nobody dared criticize Hitler’s decision. There is a strong case to be
made that Haushofer’s specific links to Hitler were greatly exaggerated, even as
Haushofer, nevertheless, came to represent a typical Nazi strategic view.
7
In any
case, as the war turned badly, Haushofer fell out of favor with the Führer, and
was imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp in 1944. The same year,
Haushofer’s son, Albrecht, also a geopolitician, was executed for his
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