The most influential and yet most secretive intellectual among the Axis countries was Professor Karl Haushofer. He taught Hitler to be a statesman, shaped his alliances and dictated foreign policy. He was the man in the dark who held many strings, drawn to geopolitics and mysticism. Haushofer's influence was so great that he was sometimes referred to as "Hitler's Merlin". A great sorcerer and strategist, he built Nazi Germany as the great and arrogant Babylon, before the mad ruler smashed it.
Haushofer was a professional soldier in the Artillery Corps. His talents were soon recognized by the German General Staff and he was appointed in 1908 a military attaché in Tokyo, who followed the reorganization of the Japanese army. It was a fateful journey, as he was greatly influenced there by the Japanese esoteric philosophical teachings that nurtured the samurai culture.
Haushofer fought on the Western Front in World War I and was promoted to the rank of senior general. His personal passion for the "samurai spirit" was not enough to bring Germany to victory in the war. It made him feel bitter and with a sense of betrayal following the defeat. He retired from the army, accusing the Communists and Jews of the defeat.
During the First World War, Haushofer became known as a man with hidden powers, who could see into the future and know in advance what was about to happen. He used the occult vision to find out where the enemy forces would attack and was able to point out on which areas the artillery fire would land. After the war, in 1919, he founded in Berlin the "Brotherhood of Vril", which preceded the mystical fraternity in which Hitler was educated. He was hailed as "the greatest sorcerer in Germany".
Haushofer got a job at the University of Munich, where his travels to the Far East made him a perfect geography teacher. His doctorate was on a new conception of international relations, which he called "Geopolitics''. The basis of the doctrine was a term derived from the first lecture he gave at the University of Munich: "The living space''.
Dr. Carl Haushofer developed and distributed the theory. He argued that the state has the right to physical expansion in order to economize its population at the expense of less developed countries. It was a theory that had already been widely applied by the Western powers, England, France and the United States, within the framework of colonialism and imperialism. Haushofer's innovation was in the pretense of developing an objective scientific model, based on his arrogant mastery of facts and analysis. Haushofer's theories have become very popular in Germany and around the world. American scholars were also greatly influenced by him.
The state, as Haushofer taught, is not an objective scientific concept, but a subject from the realm of occultism. At the heart of his teachings is the idea that the state is similar to a natural organism, a cosmic tree with the practical right to grow and spread. The natural order of things is that the strong will take advantage of the weak. Absolutism is essential to the developing country. The idea reduces the status of the citizen to a particle from the state and gives legitimacy to the denial of the rights and freedoms of the individual.
There is no doubt that Haushofer was aware of aviation as an important factor in the development of living space. British imperialism developed in the wake of the invention of the steam engine, locomotive and ship and Haushofer must have thought of the development of the Internal combustion engine and the car and aircraft in a similar context for Germany. The geography professor's theory was nothing more than an incentive for a new political strategy: maritime transport lost its premiere, because land and sea distances and obstacles could be overcome by train, car and aircraft, which were state-of-the-art technology invented partly Germany. Haushofer formed an alliance between Germany, Russia, China, India and Japan against the naval colonial power of England, France and the United States.
Haushofer longed for the return of Germany's imperial power and claimed authority to bring about it through his teachings. He justified the spread at the expense of neighboring countries by virtue of cultural superiority. He therefore wanted to unite all German minorities in these countries under one flag.
One of his students was Rudolf Hess, later Hitler's deputy. Haushofer took an interest in the young pilot, who occasionally invited him to sightseeing flights over southern Germany. Haushofer offered Hess to be his academic assistant. At the same time Adolf Hitler also offered Hess to be his secretary. Hess did not hesitate and chose the second job, but he initiated a connection between Haushofer and Hitler. After Hitler and Hess were imprisoned together in the wake of the "putsch in the beer cellar", Haushofer visited them several times, and helped writing "Mein Kampf".
At the beginning of the Nazi rise to power, Rudolf Hess and Karl Haushofer were appointed presidents of a foreign relations organization, which under cover as a cultural organization established the Nazi base among German minorities in neighboring countries. The notion that all Germans should be united in neighboring countries under the banner of Nazism bore fruit during the annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia and during the Second World War in the other occupied countries.
Under various pretexts and tricks, Haushofer bent Versailles treaty, built the power of Nazi Germany and began to organize support for it. The alliance that Haushofer later formed between Germany-Russia-Japan, against the Western powers, was nicknamed the "Block". Haushofer was responsible for an agreement under which German troops were sent to secret training in Russia and German aircraft planners were sent to Japan. The Axis Pact, the document that bound Germany, Italy and Japan together, was written by him.
After Germany's invasion of Russia, Haushofer's vision of the Euro-Asian alliance collapsed. Like many others in the Nazi regime he sought a solution to the situation. After the defeat at Stalingrad it was clear that the Reich was collapsing. Haushofer became active in an organization that conspired to assassinate Hitler and his son Albert joined him. The conspirators wanted Hitler to die and to form a civilian government. They were active in the failed assassination attempt on Hitler on July 20, 1944, in his operations bunker on the Russian front. They were suspected of collaborating and imprisoned until the end of the war. In 1946, at the age of 75, Haushofer ended his life by committing suicide in the spirit of samurai customs.
