Karl Haushofer

Born Aug. 27, 1869, in Munich; died Mar. 13, 1946, in Paehl, near Weilheim. German political geographer.

Haushofer became a professor at the University of Munich in 1921. He was the leading exponent of the geopolitical school of German fascism and headed a number of fascist scholarly and political organizations. Haushofer’s version of geopolitics, which drew on the ideas of F. Ratzel and R. Kjellen, became part of the official doctrine of the Third Reich. In his works, Haushofer indiscriminately combined geographic determinism, race theory, social Darwinism, and the notion of the state as a biological organism. He considered geopolitics a guide for political practice and provided a justification for fascist aggression by arguing that Germany lacked sufficient Lebensraum, that its borders were unsatisfactory, and that it had an excessive population density.