Haushofer's Heritage

In a quiet, rambling country house near Munich, 76-year-old Major General Professor Dr. Karl Ernst Nikolas Haushofer, Germany's apostle of geopolitics, last week took poison. His wife took poison also, then hanged herself. His epitaph had already been written -- by his son, Albrecht, whom Old Haushofer had denounced to the Gestapo for taking part in the July '44 bomb plot against the Fuehrer. Wrote Albrecht shortly before he was executed last year:

In father's life, the die is cast.

Once it was in the power of his will

To push the demon back into his cell.

My father held the seal and broke it.

He did not sense the breath of evil

And out into the world he let the devil.

Professor Haushofer's Geopolitik--a strange conglomeration of objective fact, respectable theory, pseudo-scientific dialectic, scurrilous fanaticism--formed the chief intellectual disguise of Nazi aggression. The geopolitical devil did not die with the Haushofers.

Land v. Sea. Some nations, declared Haushofer, were "static"--old, tired, with declining birthrates, content to hold on to what they had; others were "dynamic"--aggressive, young, with increasing birthrates, in need of more Lebensraum. A state was a living organism, quite justified in seizing what it needed to survive. For a dynamic nation like Germany, conquest was a natural biological function.

Shorn of this special nationalist fungus, geopolitics is a simple, sensible, and often obvious business, based on the plain truth that geography influences history. At Munich's Geopolitical Institute, Haushofer did much painstaking, genuinely scientific work. Almost directly derived from Brit ain's distinguished geographer, Sir Halford Mackinder, were his more significant theorems :

P: Colonial empires and sea power belong to the past. The future belongs to vast, continuous land powers (like Russia and the U.S.) with enough space to absorb the aggressive shocks of modern warfare.

P: The world's most important land mass is Asia with its small western promontory, Europe, and its large southern appendix, Africa. Together, they form the "World Island," capable of dominating the whole world.

P:P: The World Island in turn can be dominated by the vast, mostly Russian region between the Elbe and Amur -- the "Heart land" which the Germans hoped to conquer.

P: Outside the World Island, the U.S. is the only other important geopolitical force.

Land v. Land. According to the laws of geopolitics, German land power defied sea power and nearly won the war. According to the same laws, Germany exhausted herself in the depths of Russian space, was finally beaten by Allied land power. A few weeks before he committed suicide, Haushofer disclosed that he was more German than scientific. "When Germany went down," he said, "she took with her my raison d'etre" Actually, Haushofer had found a new and brilliant disciple. Russia has long been interested in geopolitics, has its own version of a geopolitical institute (Moscow's Institute for World Economy and Politics), which concerns itself with the conflict between the U.S. and the World Island toward the shores of which Russia presses.

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