41 Facts About Karl Haushofer

Karl Ernst Haushofer was a German general, professor, geographer, and diplomat.

Karl Haushofer coined the political use of the term Lebensraum, which Hitler used to justify both crimes against peace and genocide.

Karl Haushofer was born in Munich to Max Haushofer Jr, a well-known professor of economics, politician and author of both academic and literary works, and Adele Haushofer.

Karl Haushofer's grandfather was the landscape painter Max Haushofer Sr.

On his graduation from the Munich Gymnasium, in 1887, Karl Haushofer entered the 1st Field Artillery regiment "Prinzregent Luitpold" of the Bavarian Army and completed Kriegsschule, Artillerieschule and War Academy.

In November 1908, Karl Haushofer was ordered to Tokyo as a military attache to study the Imperial Japanese Army and as a military advisor in artillery instruction.

Karl Haushofer travelled with his wife via India and South East Asia and arrived in February 1909.

Karl Haushofer was received by Emperor Meiji and became acquainted with many important people in politics and the armed forces.

Karl Haushofer established himself as one of Germany's foremost experts regarding the Far East, and co-founded the geopolitical monthly Zeitschrift fur Geopolitik, which he would co-edit until it was suspended towards the end of World War II.

Karl Haushofer continued his career as a professional soldier after the annexation of Bavaria by Germany, serving in the army of Imperial Germany and returning to teach War History at the Military Academy in Munich.

In 1919, Karl Haushofer successfully defended his second dissertation, and became Privatdozent for political geography at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and was made a professor in 1933, although he declined a formal position and salary, because that would have affected his military pension.

Karl Haushofer entered academia with the aim of restoring and regenerating Germany.

Karl Haushofer believed the Germans' lack of geographical knowledge and geopolitical awareness to be a major cause of Germany's defeat in World War I, because Germany had found itself with a disadvantageous alignment of allies and enemies.

Karl Haushofer's specialty was to combine the fields of geography, history, economics, demography, political science, and anthropology into a new discipline that came to be called Geopolitik.

Karl Haushofer became a teacher of politics and philosophy to both Hess and Hitler.

Dr Karl Haushofer made the 100-kilometer-long round trip from Munich to Landsberg.

Karl Haushofer was a founding member of the Deutsche Akademie, of which he served as president from 1934 to 1937.

Karl Haushofer was a prolific writer, publishing hundreds of articles, reviews, commentaries, obituaries and books, many of which were on Asian topics, and he arranged for many leaders in the Nazi party and in the German military to receive copies of his works.

Under Hitler's regime, Karl Haushofer became both rich and immensely influential.

Karl Haushofer was arrested on 28 July 1944, and imprisoned for a month at Dachau before he was released.

Karl Haushofer wrote a personal letter to Hitler pleading for mercy for his son, but never sent it.

Karl Haushofer did not see the rising breath of evil.

Karl Haushofer was repeatedly arrested by the American forces he so detested.

Edmund A Walsh on behalf of Nuremberg Trials prosecutor Robert H Jackson to determine whether Haushofer should stand trial.

Walsh ultimately reported to Jackson that Karl Haushofer was both legally and morally guilty of complicity in Nazi war crimes.

Karl Haushofer left a detailed map to help his son, Heinz, find the bodies.

Karl Haushofer exercised influence both through his academic teachings, urging his students to think in terms of continents and emphasizing motion in international politics, and through his political activities.

Karl Haushofer justified lebensraum, even at the cost of other nations' existence because conquest was a biological necessity for a state's growth.

Karl Haushofer's writings served as welcome justification for imperial expansion.

Karl Haushofer was exposed to Ratzel, who was friends with Karl Haushofer's father, a teacher of economic geography, and would integrate Ratzel's ideas on the division between sea and land powers into his theories, saying that only a country with both could overcome this conflict.

Karl Haushofer even held that urbanization was a symptom of a nation's decline, evidencing a decreasing soil mastery, birthrate and effectiveness of centralized rule.

Karl Haushofer acknowledges the strategic concept of the Heartland Theory put forward by the British geopolitician Halford Mackinder.

Ultimately, Hess and Konstantin von Neurath, the German Minister of Foreign Affairs, were the only officials Karl Haushofer would admit had a proper understanding of geopolitik.

Father Edmund A Walsh, professor of geopolitics and dean at Georgetown University, who interviewed Haushofer after Allied victory in preparation for the Nuremberg trials, disagreed with Haushofer's assessment that Hitler and the Nazis terribly distorted geopolitik.

Karl Haushofer cites Hitler's speeches declaring that small states have no right to exist, and the Nazi use of Haushofer's maps, language and arguments.

Rumors floated that Karl Haushofer was Hess's father, or, conversely, that the two men were lovers.

Aware of some of these accusations, after the war Karl Haushofer denied assisting Hitler in writing Mein Kampf, saying that he only knew of it once it was in print, and that he never read it.

Chapter XIV, on German policy in Eastern Europe, in particular displays the influence of the materials Karl Haushofer brought Hitler and Hess while they were imprisoned.

Karl Haushofer was never a member of the Nazi Party, and did voice disagreements with the party.

Karl Haushofer did profess loyalty to the Fuhrer and make anti-Semitic remarks.

Karl Haushofer claimed that after 1933 much of what he wrote was distorted under duress: his wife had to be protected by Hess's influence.