Großraum versus Lebensraum. Die Interdependenzen geographischer, juristischer und rassenbiologischer Ordnungsvorstellungen

Abstract. Between 1940 and 1943, Nazi jurists such as Reinhard Höhn and Werner Best worked on a political theory of racial-biological rule, which they contoured in a controversy with Carl Schmitt over the basic principles of international law and of a European Großraum. The focus of the contribution is on the entanglement and transformation of geographical, international legal and racial-biological relations between the „peoples“ living in a Großraum. On the one hand, the multiple change in discourse raises the fundamental question of the relevance of geographical knowledge (such as Ratzel's Lebensraumtheorie) for the National Socialist policy of conquest and extermination. At the same time, the focus is on the significant shift from a description of human community and state formation based on supposed natural laws to an action-oriented agenda of racial-biological homogenisation of Europe, which with brutal openness legitimised genocide as an option regarding the „Umvolkung“ that had already been practised in occupied Poland since 1939.