Hitler (41 page)

Though he pretended that these more relentless views had come to him during his imprisonment in Landsberg, in fact this aggravation of his hate complex had already taken place. As early as May, 1923, during a speech in the Krone Circus, Hitler had cried out: “The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but not human. They cannot be human in the sense of being an image of God, the Eternal. The Jews are the image of the devil. Jewry means the racial tuberculosis of the nations.” But when he began organizing his many scraps of ideas and feelings into something resembling a coherent system, they took on a different cast. Henceforth, when he denied that the Jews were human, it was not just the ranting of the demagogue but deadly earnest and fanatical belief. He borrowed his rhetoric from the language of parasitology: the laws of nature themselves demanded that measures be taken against the “parasites,” the “eternal leeches” and “vampires upon other peoples.” Such measures would have their own irrevocable morality. Once he had cast the problem in such terms, annihilation and mass murder came to seem the extreme triumph of this morality. To the last Hitler insisted that his services to mankind lay in his recognition of the “true role” of the Jews and his courage in pushing that recognition to its consequences. It wasn't as if he had merely sought the glory of a conqueror like Napoleon, who after all had been “only a human being, not a worldshaking event.”
¹⁷
At the end of February, 1942, shortly after the Wannsee conference at which the “final solution” was ordained, he declared to his table companions: “The discovery of the Jewish virus is one of the greatest revolutions which has been undertaken in the world. The struggle we are waging is of the same kind as, in the past century, that of Pasteur and Koch. How many diseases can be traced back to the Jewish virus! We shall regain our health only when we exterminate the Jews.” With the directness and determination of one who had thought more deeply and seen more clearly than all others, he had recognized his true mission, his “cyclopean task.”
¹⁸

For that was the other key correction he made in Gobineau. He not only personalized the process of racial and cultural death in the figure of the Jew as the prime mover of all decline; he also restored utopianism to history by transforming Gobineau's “melancholic and fatalistic pessimism into aggressive optimism.” In contrast to the French aristocrat, he held that racial decadence was not inevitable. Of course, the Jewish world conspiracy would see Aryan hegemony in Germany as the crucial enemy. In no other country was biological contamination or the interplay of capitalistic and Bolshevistic machinations carried out so systematically with such dire results. But for this very reason Hitler could appeal to the redeeming will: Germany was the world's battlefield on which the future of the globe would be decided.

And now it became obvious to what extent his anti-Semitism went beyond the traditional European brand; his fantasies about the Jews have a manic dynamism far surpassing all his visions of national grandeur. “If our people and our state become the victim of these bloodthirsty and avaricious Jewish tyrants of nations, the whole earth will sink into the snares of this octopus; if Germany frees herself from this embrace, this greatest of dangers to man may be regarded as broken for the whole world.” And with that operation out of the way, he already saw dawning the Millennial Kingdom, the Thousand-Year Reich, which he was impatiently hailing when he had taken only a small step toward it. Then order would once again arise out of chaos, unity would be achieved, masters and slaves would hold their proper places, and the wisely led “nucleus peoples of the world” would respect one another and live in peace, since the root of the world's ills would at last have been eliminated.

It was this ideology, well developed though never spelled out as a coherent system, that gave his career what he himself was fond of calling its “somnambulistic sureness.” Things might look fairly sanguine at the moment, but he would not allow this to alter his picture of the state of the world and his sense of being engaged in a life-and-death struggle. This interpretation and this feeling were what gave his politics such savage consistency. His indecisiveness, which almost all his associates report, always involved tactical alternatives; he was never in doubt on questions of principle. And in spite of his bent for postponements and temporizings, he pushed dauntlessly toward the great final confrontation. In trying to explain away many of the inhumanities of the regime, common folk would naively say, “If only the Führer knew!” But there they showed how utterly they misunderstood their ruler. In fact, he knew far more than anyone suspected, in a way far more than actually happened. As one of his close followers commented, Hitler himself was “the most radical Nazi of all.”

 

These theories particularly shaped his thoughts on foreign policy, which he expounded in
Mein Kampf
and was to pursue right to the end. But no one realized that the seemingly fantastic goals he set forth in his book were meant as a concrete political program. It all revolved around the premise that the plight of Germany was caused by racial factors and that its salvation would come only when it had restored its racial integrity. He argued:
“If the German people in its historical development had possessed that herd unity which other peoples have enjoyed, the German Reich today would doubtless be mistress of the globe.” He took the traditional nationalistic phrase
Volk ohne Raum
(“people without space”) and turned it around into
Raum ohne Volk.
The pressing domestic mission of the National Socialist Party was, he considered, “to establish a nation in the empty space between the Meuse and the Memel.” For “what we see there today are Marxist human herds, but no longer a German nation.”

The concept of revolution that he had dimly in mind also had a strongly elitist, biological cast. He thought of revolution as aiming nol only at new forms of rule and new institutions but also at a new type of man. In many of his speeches and proclamations he hailed the emergence of that new type as the dawn of a “vertitable golden age.” One of his oft-repeated statements was: “Anyone who understands National Socialism only as a political movement knows virtually nothing about it. It is even more than religion; it is the will to a new creation of man.” Thus one of the most pressing tasks of the new state would be to bring to a halt “further bastardization,” to “lift marriage from the level of continual miscegenation,” and enable it once more “to beget images of the Lord and not abortions midway between man and ape.” The pure Aryan type could be recovered by breeding back in a series of “regression crossings.” By such biological and pedagogical procedures, the German people could once more be restored to its pristine purity. In a secret speech to the 1938 officer class he spoke of a development continuing for a hundred years, at the end of which a majority would possess those select characteristics that would enable it to conquer and rule the world.

The living space that he continually called for was not intended merely to provide food for a surplus population, to insure against “starvation and misery,” and to receive a peasantry threatened by industry and trade. Rather, these territorial demands were a prelude to a program for world conquest. Every ambitious nation needed a certain amount of territory, enough to make it independent of alliances and the political alignments of a given period. Historical greatness was intimately connected with geographic extension. To this idea Hitler clung to the very last. Brooding in the bunker shortly before the end, he complained that fate had forced him into premature conquests because a nation without great space could not even set itself great goals.

He early saw four ways to meet the future threat of overpopulation. Three of these—restriction of births, internal colonization, overseas colonialism—he rejected as timid dreams or “unworthy tasks.” With explicit reference to the United States, he then argued that the only acceptable course was a continental war of conquest. “What is refused to amicable methods must be taken by force,” he wrote in Landsberg and made no secret of what he had in mind: “If land was desired in Europe, it could be obtained by and large only at the expense of Russia, and this meant that the new Reich must again set itself on the march along the road of the Teutonic Knights of old.”
¹⁹

Underlying such pronunciamentos was, once again, the concept of a great turning point in the history of the world. A new age was beginning; history was once more setting the mighty wheel in motion and apportioning lots anew. An end was coming to the era of sea powers who conquered distant lands with their navies, heaped up riches, established bases, and dominated the world. In the pretechnical age the sea had been the road to expansion. But under modern conditions that had totally changed. Colonial greatness was anachronistic and slated for destruction. Present-day technical capacities, the possibility of pushing roads and railways into vast, still unopened areas and linking these by a network of strongpoints, meant that the old order was being reversed. The empire of the future, Hitler held, would be a land power, a compact, integrally organized military giant. The age was already moving in that direction. Undoubtedly Hitler's way of conducting foreign policy in later years—as a succession of surprise blows—sprang from his inward restlessness. But he was also waging a desperate battle against time, against what he regarded as the course of history. He was forever seized by fear that Germany might for the second time arrive too late at the distribution of the world's goods. When he considered the powers who might compete with Germany for future mastery, his thoughts repeatedly returned to Russia. Racial, political, geographic, and historical indications coincided: everything pointed to the East.
²⁰

In line with prevailing sentiment, Hitler had begun as a revisionist, demanding annulment of the Versailles Treaty, restoration of the borders of 1914, by force if necessary, and the joining of all Germans in one mighty great power. To this school of thought the main enemy was France, and Germany's best hopes lay in exploiting the difficulties France was in increasing measure having with Italy and England. But Hitler did not keep to this view. True to his bent for thinking in larger terms, he was soon contemplating the Continent as a whole, and replacing border politics with area politics.

The core of his thesis was that Germany, in her militarily, politically, and geographically threatened middle position, could survive “only by ruthlessly placing power politics in the foreground.” In an earlier discussion of Germany's foreign policy in the age of Kaiser Wilhelm, Hitler had held that Germany should either have renounced sea trade and colonies in order to join England against Russia or, alternatively, if she sought sea power and world trade, she should have joined Russia against England. In the early twenties Hitler favored the second course. He viewed England as one of the “principal” opponents of the Reich, and on this basis developed a marked pro-Russian bias. Under the influence of the
emigré
circle around Scheubner-Richter and Rosenberg, he looked toward an alliance with a “nationalistic” Russia, one “restored to health” and freed from the “Jewish-Bolshevik yoke.” Teamed with this new Russia, Germany would confront the West. Neither the concept of
Lebensraum
nor the inferiority of the Slavic race—which later was to be the basis for his expansionist Eastern policy—seems to have entered his head at this time. It was not until the beginning of 1923, probably in view of the stabilization of the Soviet regime, that he began to think of taking the opposite course and forming a pact with England against Russia. The sources seem to suggest that Hitler weighed this idea for more than a year, considered its ramifications, its consequences, and its chances of being realized. The fruit of this thinking appears in the famous fourth chapter of
Mein Kampf,
where he speaks of a war for living space fought against Russia.

In presenting this program, Hitler certainly had not abandoned the idea of a war against France. That remained one of the primary points of his foreign policy right down to the last monologues in the bunker. But it now assumed another character. Just as Italy was to be placated by Germany's renouncing the South Tyrol and England was to be wooed into an alliance by Germany's dropping all colonial demands, war with France became simply another step that would allow Germany a free hand in the East. By the time he was writing the second volume of
Mein Kampf
in the course of 1925, Hitler forcefully assailed the revisionist approach; it aimed, he argued, at the restoration of wholly illogical, accidental, far too constricted borders, which, moreover, made no sense in terms of military geography. Worse still, such demands would stir up all of Germany's former Wartime foes and lead them to revive their crumbling alliance.
“The demand for restoration of the frontiers of 1914 is a political absurdity of such proportions and consequences as to make it seem a crime,”
Hitler declared in italics. National Socialism, on the contrary, aimed at securing land and soil for the German people. “This action is the only one which, before God and our German posterity, would make any sacrifice of blood seem justified.” Such broad gains would “some day acquit the responsible statesmen of blood-guilt and sacrifice of the people.”
²¹

Henceforth, the idea of attacking Russia, of a mighty Teutonic expedition to establish a vast continental empire in the old “German area of command in the East,” became the central tenet of Hitler's foreign policy. He assigned it epoch-making importance:

 

And so we National Socialists consciously draw a line beneath the foreign policy tendency of our pre-War period. We take up where we broke off six hundred years ago. We stop the endless German movement to the south and west, and turn our gaze toward the land in the east. At long last we break off the colonial and commercial policy of the pre-War period and shift to the soil policy of the future.
²²