a role as a land power rather than a sea power and focused his foreign policy on attaining the highest possible concentration of land power resources for a future that lay in Europe. The racial struggle for space envisioned by Hitler was essentially unlimited, a policy that could only have two results: total defeat or total conquest. Hess discovered in 1927, while the two were imprisoned at Landsberg prison, that Hitler believed only one race with total hegemony could bring about world peace. Hitler confirmed this attitude, regarding Europe specifically, in August 1943 speaking to his naval advisors and declaring, "Only if all of Europe is united under a strong central power can there be any security for Europe from now on. Small sovereign states no longer have a right to exist". In Mein Kampf, Hitler states his view that the total (but, as he saw it, temporary) destruction of civilization was, to him, an acceptable condition of final Aryan victory. Lebensraum as a foreign policy concept was based upon domestic considerations, especially that of population growth and the pressure it placed upon existing German resources. War, for Lebensraum, was justified by the need to re-establish an acceptable ratio between land and people. Whereas the Weimar Republic foreign policy was based on borders, the National Socialist foreign policy would be based on space and expansionism and point to fundamentally different conceptions of world order: the bourgeois saw in terms of states and law, but Hitler maintained an image of ethnic or racially defined nationhood. Lebensraum served to create the economic condition of autarky in which the German people would be self-sufficient, no longer dependent on import or subject to demand shifts in international markets, which had been forcing industry to struggle against other nations. To achieve Lebensraum, Hitler cautioned against what he saw as a dangerous Weimar policy of demanding a return to the 1914 borders. Foremost and inexcusable in his mind, the borders would not unite all ethnic Germans under the Reich. To commit to a nation of all German-speaking peoples, the borders of 1914 must be abandoned as incompatible with racial unity and their arbitrary nature. Open advocacy of border restoration would only urge a coalition to form against Germany before it could raise an army to achieve its ends. Further, he believed that empty saber rattling on this issue would shift public opinion against Germany in support