Hitler (42 page)

 

How he arrived at this concept, as logical as it was monstrous, really does not matter. Some of it was original, some of it an extension of current theories. The notion of living space seems to have been a borrowing from Rudolf Hess. Thanks to his adulation of “the man,” as he called Hitler, Hess had gradually won himself an important place among the group at the Landsberg prison. In particular, he replaced Emil Maurice in the position of Hitler's secretary. Hess also brought Hitler into personal contact with his teacher, Karl Haushofer, who had taken the highly suggestive subject of political geography, the “geopolitics” expounded by Sir Halford Mackinder, and shaped it into a philosophy of imperialistic expansion.

Mackinder had already drawn attention to the basic strength of what he called “the heartland”: Eastern Europe and European Russia, protected by huge land masses, were destined to be the “citadel of world rule.” The founder of geopolitics had decreed: “Whoever rules the heartland rules the world.” As we have seen, such pseudoscientific formulas had a special appeal to Hitler's mind. But with all due credit to outside influences, Hitler's version of these ideas was distinctively his own. Seldom had his “combinative talent” operated so brilliantly, for he drew the outlines of a foreign policy that not only guided Germany's relations with the various great powers of Europe but satisfied her craving for revenge upon France, her desire for expansion and conquest, and his own miscellaneous ideological fixations, including his sense that a new age was dawning. To give this scheme the final fillip, it was made to fit into a pattern of “racial” history.

 

Here Fate itself seems desirous of giving us a sign. By handing Russia to Bolshevism, it robbed the Russian nation of that intelligentsia which previously brought about and guaranteed its existence as a state. For the organization of a Russian state was not the result of the political abilities of the Slavs in Russia, but only a wonderful example of the state-forming efficacy of the German element in an inferior race.... For centuries Russia drew nourishment from this Germanic nucleus of its upper leading strata. Today it can be regarded as almost totally exterminated and extinguished. It has been replaced by the Jew. Impossible as it is for the Russian by himself to shake off the yoke of the Jew by his own resources, it is equally impossible for the Jew to maintain the mighty empire forever. He himself is no element of organization, but a ferment of decomposition. The giant empire in the east is ripe for collapse. And the end of Jewish rule in Russia will also be the end of Russia as a state. We have been chosen by fate as witnesses of a catastrophe which will be the mightiest confirmation of the soundness of the folkish theory.
²³

 

Out of theories of this sort Hitler had formed, by the mid-twenties, the essentials of the foreign policy he later put into practice: the early attempts at alliance with England and the Rome-Berlin Axis, the campaign against France and the vast war of annihilation in the East to conquer and take possession of the world's “heartland.” Moral considerations played no part in these plans. “An alliance whose aim does not embrace a plan for war is senseless and worthless,” he declared in
Mein Kampf.
“State boundaries are made by man and changed by man.” They seem unalterable “only to the thoughtless idiot”; the conqueror's might adequately demonstrates his right; “he who has, has.” Such were his maxims. And however extravagant the program he patched together out of his nightmares, his theories of history, his distorted view of biology and his situation analyses, in its hyperactive radicality it held greater promise of success than the temperate revisionist demands for the return of West Prussia or South Tyrol. Unlike his nationalist partners, Hitler had realized that Germany had no chances within the existing world political system. His profound emotional bias against normality served him well when he set out to challenge the normal ideas of foreign policy from the very roots. The game could be won only by refusing to play it. By turning in another direction, against the Soviet Union, which was felt as a threat by other respectable nations, he made these nations his confederates and rendered Germany “potentially so strong... that the conquest of an empire was in a very precise sense easier than the isolated recovery of Bromberg or Königshutte.”
²⁴
He had a better chance to seize Moscow than Strassburg or Bozen.

Along with the goal, Hitler recognized and accepted the risk. It is astonishing to see how directly, in 1933, he began to put his program into effect. The alternative for him was never anything but world power or doom in the most literal sense. “Every being strives for expansion,” he told the professors and students of Erlangen in a 1930 speech, “and every nation strives for world dominion.” That proposition derived, he thought, straight from the aristocratic principle of Nature, which everywhere desired the victory of the stronger and the annihilation or unconditional subjugation of the weak. From this point of view he was entirely consistent at the end, when he saw the whole game lost and doom impending, and remarked to Albert Speer, who found the sentiment profoundly shocking: “If the war is lost, the people will be lost also. It is not necessary to worry about what the German people will need for elemental survival. On the contrary, it is best for us to destroy even these things. For the nation has proved to be the weaker, and the future belongs solely to the stronger eastern nation.”
²⁵
Germany had lost far more than a war; he was entirely without hope. For the last time he bowed to the law of Nature, “this cruel queen of all wisdom,” which had imperiously ruled his life and thought.

 

Toward the closing days of 1924, after approximately a year, the imprisonment that Hitler ironically called his “university at state expense” approached its end. At the request of the state prosecutor, prison warden Leybold on September 15, 1924, drew up a report that made the granting of parole a virtual certainty. “Hitler has shown himself a man of order,” the report states, “of discipline not only in respect to himself, but also in respect to his fellow inmates. He is easily content, modest and desirous to please. Makes no demands, is quiet and sensible, serious and quite without aggressiveness, and tries painstakingly to abide by prison rules. He is a man without personal vanity, is satisfied with the institution's food, does not smoke and drink, and though comradely, is able to exert a certain authority over his fellow inmates.... Hitler will attempt to revitalize the nationalist movement according to his own principles, but no longer, as in the past by violent methods which if necessary (!) may be directed against the government; instead, he will work in league with the concerned governmental bureaus.”

Such model behavior and political change of heart were the conditions for parole, the court having held out some prospect for this after Hitler had served a mere six months of his five-year-sentence. We may well wonder how the Nazi leader who had already violated one parole, had escaped another prosecution by the intercession of a government minister, had for years instigated riots and meeting-hall rows, who had deposed the national government, arrested cabinet ministers and been responsible for killings, could possibly be granted so early a release. And in fact a complaint from the office of the state prosecutor had for the time being delayed the court's action. But the state authority was inclined to pardon the lawbreaker for sharing its own bent. Consequently, it put very little pressure behind the obligatory deportation of Hitler. In a letter to the Ministry of the Interior dated September 22, 1924, the Munich police commissioner's office had referred to this deportation as “essential,” and Prime Minister Held, the new Bavarian governmental chief, had even sent out feelers to discover whether the Austrians would be willing to take Hitler if he were deported. But nothing further had been done. Hitler himself was extremely worried; he tried in every conceivable way to prove his docility. He was angry when Gregor Strasser arose in the Landtag to denounce the continued imprisonment of Hitler as a disgrace for Bavaria and splutter that the country was being ruled by a “gang of swine, a mean, disgusting gang of swine.” He was also displeased by Röhm's underground activity.

Once more, circumstances were working in his favor. In the Reichstag elections held on December 7, the
völkisch
movement was able to garner only 3 per cent of the votes. It had previously had thirty-three deputies in the Reichstag; of these, only fourteen returned after the election. The results seemed to indicate that the radical Right had passed its peak. Apparently the Bavarian supreme court saw it that way, too, for it supported the lower court's decision to grant Hitler parole, despite the protest of the state prosecutor. On December 20, while the inmates in Landsberg were already preparing to celebrate Christmas there, a telegram from Munich ordered the immediate release of Hitler and Kriebel.

A few friends and followers, who had been informed beforehand, appeared with a car outside the prison gate. They were a disappointingly tiny group. The movement had fallen apart, its members scattered or at odds. Hermann Esser and Julius Streicher were waiting at Hitler's Munich apartment. There was no grand scene, no triumph. Hitler, who had put on weight, seemed restive and tense. That Very evening he went to see Ernst Hanfstaengl and at once asked him: “Play the
Liebestod
for me.” Even while in Landsberg, such sorrowful moods had taken hold of him.
Die Weltbühne
carried an ironic obituary reporting the early demise of Adolf Hitler and adding that the Germanic gods had no doubt loved him too well.

Hitler will run out of gas!

Karl Stützel, Bavarian Minister of the Interior, in 1925

 

It was in fact a depressingly changed scene to which Hitler returned from Landsberg. The turn of events could be traced to the stabilization of the currency. On the one hand, people could again feel that society had a reliable foundation. On the other hand, the end of the inflation worked hardship on the professional promoters of turmoil—for the Free Corps and the paramilitary associations had depended for support on foreign currency, trivial sums of which could go a long way under inflationary conditions. Gradually, the government acquired solidity and authority. By the end of February, 1924, it rescinded the state of emergency proclaimed on the night of November 9. In the course of the same year Foreign Minister Stresemann's policy of reconciliation began to show results. These were not so much a matter of specifics as an improvement in the psychological climate within Germany. Gradually, the anachronistic hatreds and resentments of wartime began to dissolve. The Dawes Plan offered a prospect of solving the reparations problem. The French gave signs of willingness to evacuate the Ruhr. Security treaties were being discussed and even the question of Germany's entry into the League of Nations. With the influx of American capital, the economy began to recover. Unemployment, which had created such scenes of misery on street corners and at bread lines and welfare offices, was tangibly receding. These changes for the better were reflected in the election results. In May, 1924, the radical forces still had one more success, but by the December elections of the same year they had been markedly thrown back. In Bavaria alone the racist-nationalist groups lost nearly 70 per cent of their following. Although this shift was not instantly reflected in a strengthening of the democratic centrist parties, it did appear as though Germany, after years of crisis, depressions, and threats of upheaval, was beginning to return to normality.

Like many others among the brand-new class of unemployed professional politicians, Hitler himself seemed to have reached the end of a ten-year phase of irregular living and to be faced once again with the law and order, the “domestic tranquillity,” that had horrified him as an adolescent. Viewed in sober terms his situation was hopeless. Though he had covered himself with glory during his trial, he had since been reduced to the sorry role of the failed and half-forgotten politician. The National Socialist Party and all its organizations had been banned, as had the
Völkische Beobachter.
The Reichswehr and most of the private patrons of the movement had withdrawn their support; after all the excitement and playing at civil war, they had turned back to the routine of everyday life. In retrospect, many people dismissed the year 1923 with an irritated shrug. It had been a crazy time, a bad time. Dietrich Eckart and Scheubner-Richter were dead, Göring living in exile, Kriebel on the way to exile. Most of Hitler's closer followers were either in jail or had quarreled with one another and dispersed. Immediately before his arrest, Hitler had managed to send a scribbled note to Alfred Rosenberg: “Dear Rosenberg, from now on you will lead the movement.” Adopting the pseudonym Rolf Eidhalt (Ralph Oath-keeper), an anagram of Adolf Hitler, Rosenberg tried to hold the remnants of Hitler's former following together under the guise of a Grossdeutsche Volksgemeinschaft (GVG) (Greater German People's Community). The SA was continued under the guise of various sports clubs, glee clubs, and marksmen's clubs. But Rosenberg had no talent as a leader; the movement soon broke up into feuding cliques. In Bamberg Streicher founded a Völkischer Block Bayern (Bavarian Racial-Nationalist Bloc), which claimed a measure of independence. Finally, Esser, Streicher, and a Dr. Artur Dinter from Thuringia, author of some wild racist maunderings in the form of novels, seized the leadership of the GVG, while Ludendorff, together with von Graefe and Gregor Strasser (soon joined by Ernst Röhm) organized the National Socialist Freedom Party as a kind of united front for the nationalist and racist groups. Thus various would-be leaders tried to make use of Hitler's absence as a means of rising in the nationalist movement or even dislodging Hitler from the star position he had won during the trial and forcing him back into the role of “drummer.”