to those people willing to till it "industriously" as opposed to the slothful, incompetent people unworthy to possess it. Describing the Russians in the harshest of terms while intimating that the German people were more deserving by virtue of their alleged superior intellect, Hitler stated: "It is criminal to ask an intelligent people to limit its children in order that a lazy and stupid people next door can literally abuse a gigantic surface of the earth". Presaging this Nazi goal, Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf: "Without consideration of traditions and prejudices, Germany must find the courage to gather our people and their strength for an advance along the road that will lead this people from its present restricted living space to new land and soil, and hence also free it from the danger of vanishing from the earth or of serving others as a slave nation". In this sense, social Darwinism and geography were merged in Hitler's mind. Many historians contend that Hitler's essential character and political philosophy can be discovered in Mein Kampf. Historian James Joll once claimed that Mein Kampf constituted "all of Hitler's beliefs, most of his programme and much of his character". According to Andreas Hillgruber, evident within the text of Mein Kampf is nothing less than the very crux of Hitler's program. One of Hitler's foremost goals was that Germany should become "a World Power" on the geopolitical stage, or as he stated, "it will not continue to exist at all". Biographer Joachim Fest asserted that Mein Kampf contained a "remarkably faithful portrait of its author". In his infamous tome, Hitler categorized human beings by their physical attributes, claiming German or Nordic Aryans were at the top of the hierarchy while assigning the bottom orders to Jews and Romani. Hitler claimed that dominated people benefit by learning from superior Aryans and said the Jews were conspiring to keep this "master race" from rightfully ruling the world by diluting its racial and cultural purity and exhorting Aryans to believe in equality rather than superiority and inferiority. Within Mein Kampf, Hitler describes a struggle for world domination, an ongoing racial, cultural and political battle between Aryans and Jews, the necessary racial purification of the German people and the need for German imperial expansion and colonisation eastwards. According to Hitler and other pan-German thinkers, Germany needed to obtain additional living space or Lebensraum which would properly nurture the