Answer To A Quibble

Ah, there's absolutely no question that the German word "Lebensraum" made so infamous by Hitler was invented to translate ideas that were present in Charles Darwin's presentation of his theory of natural selection, note this section from a paper, On the genealogy of Lebensraum by C. Abrahamsson,  Department of Human Geography, Lund University, Lund, especially these sentences.

Here Peschel develops the term Lebensraum in order to translate Darwin’s hypothesis into geographical terms. For Peschel the notion of Lebensraum drew attention to the fact that, according to him, natural selection was always already a telluric selection (Peschel, 1860).

The Darwinian influence on German Geography 

Before we proceed to investigating the formation of the concept of Lebensraum in Ratzel and Kjellen, it is important to ´ give a brief overview of the geographical and historical context in which Ratzel’s ideas emerged. I will argue that the key event influencing and to some degree shaping German geographical thought during the second half of the 19th century was the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Of particular interest here is the fact that The Origin of Species appeared in German translation in 1860, just months after the original book was published (see Gliboff, 2008). The publication of The Origin of Species didn’t go unnoticed by the younger generation of German geographers at the time. Oscar Peschel, Ratzel’s predecessor at the chair of geography in Leipzig, began promoting Darwinian ideas immediately after Origin of Species appeared, most noticeably in a review in the journal for which he was the editor at the time, Das Ausland. Here Peschel develops the term Lebensraum in order to translate Darwin’s hypothesis into geographical terms. For Peschel the notion of Lebensraum drew attention to the fact that, according to him, natural selection was always already a telluric selection (Peschel, 1860). Without going into detail, suffice to say that the reception of Darwinian thought into the German sphere was widely divergent. Often, though not always, the battle lines were drawn along ideological lines, Darwinism being associated mainly with a liberal-universalist ideology, being associated with British civilisation distinct and different from Germanic kultur. Another, equally important, dividing line concerning the reception of Darwinism was that between monogenism – positing a common ancestry of man – and polygenism – positing that the races of man are of different lineages. These two battle lines are of importance when we want to understand the reception of evolutionary thought in German geography (see further Zimmerman, 2001; Richards, 2008; and Livingstone, 2005; Smith, 1991).

I will start by noting that the term "a liberal-universalist ideology" might be deceptive for an American audience, the term, beyond any doubt, is what today is called "neo-liberalism" the kind of liberalism that includes the most inhumane market ideology, free market ideology, what Glenda Jackson as an MP condemning Margaret Thatcher noted was all sharp elbows and sharp knees.  It isn't egalitarian, it is absolutely in line with what Darwin supported in Haeckel's book "Freedom in Science and Teaching" not only undemocratic and unsocialist but anti-democratic and anti-socialist while being absolutely aristocratic.

The very word which Hitler adopted as the name for his policy of, not only invading Poland and other countries to the East, murdering almost all of their inhabitants (reserving a small class of slave, helots to serve the Aryan masters) but also to get rid of Jews, Roma and other people within Germany and Austria to create more "living space" for Aryans and to "purify" the Aryan population.  That concept is present, certainly in The Descent of Man but, as can be seen in the date of Peschel inventing the term for purposes of translating Darwin, in 1860, when he would have been working from the first edition of On the Origin of Species.  Darwin confirmed that discovery of those ideas in his first and major book on evolution in his later editions in which he blatantly identifies natural selection with Spencer's Darwinist elucidation "Survival of the Fittest" (Darwin's capitalization) and most blatantly of all in The Descent of Man in 1872.

That in the ensuing years there were details in the use of the term "Lebensraum" though not in the basic concept of what it meant, on the idea as a law of science, does nothing to change the fact that it is a term that flows directly from Darwin into German science and even the more general intellectual life of German academics and those who read popular science.  The final solution, Hitler's order to the German officers who were about to invade Poland that they were to murder all of the Polish people, minus a small number who were judged sufficiently Aryan, those are an aspect of the exact telluric selection that Peschel correctly identified in Darwin's writing.   That Friedrich Ratzel and Rudolf Kjellen did some fine-tuning of the concept doesn't change much.   Ratzel being credited (so they think) with the idea in a more developed form was as much an aspect of his Darwinism as it was Peschel's.  Ratzel was one of those German-European academics who, reading Origin of Species,  took to Darwinism which powered all of his later work.  It's exactly the same phenomenon that led Galton and Greg, in Britain, to almost immediately begin developing eugenics, which also had an independent development of Schallmeyer's German eugenics inspired by his reading of the book.

Update:  I should have noted that Ernst Haeckel's book, Freedom in Science and Teaching, which Charles Darwin, in a published letter, endorsed without reservation was written in opposition to the conservative (for its time and place) viewpoint expressed by Rudolph Virchow, for the "liberal" (for its time and place) viewpoint of Darwinism, which explicitly opposed democracy and socialism while bolstering aristocracy, though a biological aristocracy of qualities and not of inherited titles.  It's the same "liberalism" which was consistent with the socialism of Karl Pearson and George Bernard Shaw, as well as others in Britain (and America) who endorsed the idea of mass eradication of those deemed "less fit" as expressed by H. G. Wells and D. H. Lawrence, among others.  Needless to say, its not compatible with the present American left's idea of liberalism based in egalitarian democracy though the fact that the debate in 1870s Germany makes consideration of Haeckel's elucidation of Darwinism entirely relevant to the posts this answer grew out of.  That's true no matter how ignorant so many American lefties are of these issues and what the terms they misconstrue meant in the context in which they were used. 

Having proved, beyond any doubt, that ideas that would be adopted by and later identified with Nazism were present in the writings of Charles Darwin and the understanding of those Darwin, himself said were the people who best understood his theory, and that those ideas, expressed in exactly the same terms the Nazis would use them only a few short years later were in the bedrock of Darwinism as it was expounded in mainstream biological and other sciences, it's only necessary to point those out and how it was the mere translation of them into German instead of American or British English, changing the groups slated to be killed is there, for all time, in the primary documentary record.

That mainstream science and academic culture refuses to acknowledge that obvious and glaring line of descent of Nazism due to its ideological war with creationism changes nothing about the fact that that is there and it is still present in mainstream biology and, probably even more dangerously, the pseudo-social sciences, such as also provided so much scientific cover for the Nazis in the 1920s-40s.  Having removed the need for direct observation in evolutionary science, the even less restrictive and more "liberal" practices of the social sciences is a guarantee of trouble.  Evolutionary Psychology, which has already harbored a Kevin Macdonald and John Hartung, in plain sight is proof of that potential.

Update 2:  In reading the paper this post is based on, I sensed a reluctance on the part of the author to state the obvious connections I haven't had any hesitation to point out.  Considering the readiness of Darwin's defenders to use any and all accusations and tactics to preserve their mythical version of him, I'm not surprised.   But even with what could, to Darwin-true-believers, be a safety switch, rescuing their Darwin, the slightly different interpretations, what I would say were viewpoints of the idea of Lebensraum, those connections AND THEIR CONTINUING RELEVANCE are undeniable.  From the end of the paper:

This series of men – Ratzel, Kjell en and Haushofer – is the familiar genealogy used to describe the formation of the concept  of  Lebensraum.  I  do  not  disagree  with  this  argument, there are strong affinities and resemblances between the theories and practices of all three men. There are, however, adverse effects connected with the emphasis of a linear genealogy stretching from the Ratzelian Lebensraum, via Kjellen’s organic state theory to Haushofer’s operationalization in Geopolitik. 

I argue that this particular genealogy has failed to acknowledge a crucial operationalization of the concept of Lebensraum in relation to National socialist planning and  ideology.  I  am  talking,  here,  more  specifically  of  the planning  programs  that  were  initiated  by  Heinrich  Himmler’s Reich’s Commission for the Strengthening of Germandom , particularly the work conducted by Konrad Meyer and his associates at the Planning and Soil office of that organization (Koehl, 1957). The aim of the Planning and Soil office was to provide the Third Reich with areal plans for its Eastern conquests, known as Generalplan Ost . That plan, according to Rossler (1990), was developed as a detailed policy  for  the  settlement  and  administration  of  the  newly  acquired Eastern territories (see further Rossler and Schleiermacher, 1993; Barnes, 2012; Rossler, 1989; Burleigh, 1988; Kamenetsky, 1961). 

For Himmler, and other high-level Nazi officials, the formulation of the Generalplan Ost was a step towards a larger reorientation and reformation of the German people (Rossler, 1990). In one sense the Generalplan Ost can be understood as the implementation of ideological ideas stemming from the more radical “green” wing of the Nazi-party – prominent among them were Richard Walther Darre, Gottfried Feder and Fritz Todt (Bramwell, 1985; Dahl, 2006). The operationalization of Lebensraum, in the context of the Generalplan Ost, is closely connected to the semantic shift identified by Esposito. 

Lebensraum thus came to function as a key element in the formation of the biocracy of the Nazi-state. More precisely, it came to function as a conceptual bridge between its thanatopolitics, reaching its zenith in the final solution, and the biopolitical policies aimed towards strengthening the German race. (Esposito, 2008; Burleigh and Wippermann, 1991; Neumann, 2002; Mouton, 2007; Weiss, 2010). Furthermore, it is of importance to account for the divergent mobilisation of Lebensraum in Nazi policy if we are to better understand how certain elements of it actually never went away.

I inserted breaks in what is otherwise presented as a single paragraph, for clarity.

This passage is definitive support for my interpretation of the connection, Darwinian in all three of the men mentioned at the beginning of this passage, between Lebensraum and the genocides of the Nazis, most noted, the "final solution".  And that the entire policy of the Nazis tied up their two "biopolitical" aims, getting rid of entire populations and "strengthening the German race".  That is an idea taken directly from Darwin, the contention that a "struggle for existence" will result in the survivors being of enhanced quality and the danger to the would-be improved stock by the presence of those whose lesser quality made the desireability of them being culled from the population a matter of political and legal urgency.  I've given some, though not all, of the passages from The Descent of Man proving he considered that to be a logical necessity of his theory of natural selection, something which the later generations of Darwinists would endorse right up to the war, as mentioned, most authoritatively by his son, Leonard Darwin, and which didn't end with the war, being promoted by such later day Darwinists as his grandson Charles Galton Darwin, R. A. Fischer, Francis Crick, James Watson, Arthur Jensen, and numerous others in mainstream science.  Those are among the "certain elements of it that never went away."