The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (71 page)

and emergency decrees. Using an arson attack on the Reichstag in

1933 as an excuse to suspend the Weimar constitution, Hitler manipulated the legislators into giving him full executive and legislative

powers. One year later, he assumed both the presidency and chancellorship on the death of President Paul von Hindenburg. This gave

him the means to ban rival political parties and assert direct control

over the Weimar Republic’s constituent states.

Although Hitler only suspended the Weimar constitution rather

than abolishing it, he used his dictatorial powers to establish the

highly centralized Third Reich. This designation positioned the Nazis

as the heirs of the fi rst Holy Roman Empire and Bismarck’s second

Wilhelmian Reich, but they actually had no specifi c plan for a new

empire. The Third Reich was in fact a highly ineffi cient and improvised state in which the organs of the party and the governmental

bureaucracy overlapped and competed with each other.

As one of the key pillars of the new regime, the Nazi Party evolved

into a hierarchical organization with Hitler and eighteen
Reichsleiters

(Reich leaders) presiding over a laddered bureaucracy reaching from

powerful
Gauleiters
(regional leaders) down to
Zellenleiters
(neighborhood cell leaders). It also infi ltrated and co-opted key elements

of German society through the Hitler Youth, the National Socialist

Women’s Organization, the German Labor Front, and the Schutzstaffel (SS), a paramilitary unit that began as Hitler’s personal guard

and evolved into a massive state within a state by the end of the Second World War. Only the churches retained a measure of autonomy,

but Hitler’s 1933 concordat with the Catholic Church placed the German clergy under state protection in return for the Nazis’ promise to

let them manage their own affairs.

France under the Nazis 365

The Third Reich’s second major prop was the old Weimar state

structure, which Hitler still needed to handle the practical business of

governance. On paper, the judiciary, central government ministries,

and federal and state bureaucracies appeared relatively unchanged,

but the Nazis infi ltrated and undercut them at every level. The Reich

ministries theoretically had the authority to draft legislation and

decrees, but these needed the
Führer
’s personal approval to become

law. The Ministry of Defense had responsibility for the German

armed forces until 1938, when Hitler placed them under a more

compliant Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (High Command of the

Armed Forces) to better impose his will on the military. The Nazis

also took over the state police forces and
gendarmerie
and placed

them under the authority of the SS and the Reich Main Security

Offi ce. The Secret State Police (Gestapo), the party’s Security Service

Branch, special political courts, and a network of concentration camps

dealt ruthlessly with Hitler’s real and imagined enemies.

The Nazi regime’s enormous scope made it seem omnipotent and

highly disciplined, but it was more of an amorphous, ever-changing

semicriminal syndicate in which party elites vied with each other

constantly in pursuit of personal wealth and power. With nearly

two million members in 1939, the Nazi Party tried to be both a popular

movement of the masses and a vanguard party of the elite.13 At fi rst

glance, it appeared unequipped to manage a modern state, much less

an empire. This authoritarian chaos served Hitler well. As the head

of both the party and the state, he had total control over the Reich’s

governing institutions. Every major policy decision required his personal approval, and the blurred lines of authority in the party and

bureaucracy allowed him to intervene in any aspect of government

that suited him.

Recalling that domestic turmoil brought down the Second Reich,

the Nazis aspired to build what Götz Aly termed a “racist-totalitarian

welfare state.” This
Volkstaat
(people’s state) put millions of Germans back to work, expanded education, supported families, and

expanded health care. At the same time, the Third Reich undertook

a massive rearmament campaign that increased defense spending as a

percentage of the German gross national product from 1 to 25 percent between 1932 and 1939. To further complicate matters, Hitler

devoted most of Germany’s gold and foreign currency reserves to

the military buildup, which led to shortages of food and other key

366 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

industrial raw materials. The Nazis tried to address these problems

through a state-directed development program to make the Reich

self-suffi cient, but in reality foreign conquest and plunder offered the

only hope of bringing the national debt of 37.4 billion reichsmarks

under control.14

German Jews were the fi rst to bear the brunt of the Nazis’ extractive agenda. Anti-Semitism was an inevitable outgrowth of hyperracial nationalism and was relatively common throughout interwar

Europe. Hitler courted popular support by tapping into the widely

held right-wing suspicion that Jewish fi nanciers had maneuvered

Germany into the Great War and that Jewish conspirators had engineered its defeat. Karl Marx’s Jewish ancestry also allowed the Nazis

to depict communism as a Jewish plot. German Jews thus became an

alien race that threatened the purity of the
Volk
. In 1935, this ugly lie

led to the Nuremberg Laws, which defi ned German citizenship on the

basis of blood and inheritance. Henceforth, Germans with demonstrable Jewish ancestry lost the franchise and suffered increasing

social isolation in the name of racial self-defense. This largely propagandistic discrimination and abuse took on an explicitly economic

dimension in 1938 when the Third Reich introduced an aryanization

program to loot the German Jewish community systematically. All

told, their assets covered 9 percent of the Third Reich’s total budget

outlays in 1939.15

This state-sponsored anti-Semitic extraction was only a stopgap

measure. Jewish wealth was fi nite, and Hitler believed that the Reich

had to expand to survive. The Nazis desperately needed the stolen

wealth of Europe to pay for their massive military mobilization and

comprehensive domestic social welfare programs. By 1939, Germany

had a national debt of 37.4 billion reichsmarks, which led the national

bank directors to warn Hitler that the economy was on the verge of

collapse. Unwilling to test their popularity by raising taxes or sparking infl ation, the Nazis needed enormous infusions of looted wealth

to keep Germany solvent.16

On the eve of the Second World War, Germany had almost four

million men under arms, a ridiculously large fi gure that undercut Hitler’s claims that the Nazi rearmament program was for self-defense.

In the short term, the Nazi leader’s goal was to undo the humiliating 1919 peace settlement by reclaiming neighboring territories with

measurable German populations. Recognizing that his military was

France under the Nazis 367

not yet ready for war, he built this greater Germany by playing on

the European powers’ determination to avoid another continental

confl agration at virtually any cost. Britain and France allowed Hitler

to annex Austria, the Sudetenland, and all of Czechoslovakia between

1938 and 1939. German-speakers in these territories who could demonstrate their racial purity became full citizens of the Reich. Everyone else became the Nazis’ fi rst imperial subjects.

In contrast, Hitler made no move to reclaim Germany’s overseas

empire. While the Nazi Party platform of the 1920s called for the

return of the Second Reich’s lost African and Asian territories, this

was largely a gambit to court the conservatives and industrialists who

still believed that the remote holdings had some value. German imperial enthusiasts took the bait and aligned themselves with the Nazis

even though some were uncomfortable with their extremist rhetoric.

Hitler, however, raised the lost colonies only as part of his strategy of

hoodwinking the British and French into believing that the Third Reich

could be appeased with limited territorial concessions. He was actually telling the truth in
Mein Kampf
when he declared: “The German

people will have no right to engage in a colonial policy until they shall

have brought all their children together in the one State.” In 1937, the

Nazi economist Walther Funk ordered the Reich Colonial Federation to

stop distracting the German public by romanticizing the African colonies, and during the war the
Führer
claimed: “If it were only a question

of conquering a colony, I’d not continue the war a day longer.”17

Although Hitler disavowed the new imperialism’s goals and legitimizing ideologies, his grand strategy for the Second World War sought

to emulate its tactics. Just as military superiority, ambition, and sheer

ruthlessness gave the western powers quick and easy victories over

Africans and Asians, the Nazis gambled that their blitzkrieg tactics

would bring swift triumphs over continental enemies. Recognizing

that Germany lacked the manpower and resources for a protracted

war, they aimed to vanquish the western powers rapidly, with an eye

to their grand expansionist plans in the east. Hitler’s opportunistic

1939 nonaggression treaty with the Soviet Union, which made nonsense of his anticommunist rhetoric, was purely a pragmatic gambit

to keep the Soviets out of the war until Germany fi nished its business

in the west.

Nazi military strategists had planned to delay war until the mid1940s to give them time to assimilate the Austrian and Czechoslovakian

368 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

economies. Hitler brought on the war prematurely in September 1939

by ordering the invasion of Poland. He incorrectly calculated that the

failure of Britain and France to protect the Czechs indicated that they

would not honor their defense pact with the Poles. From then on,

however, the fi rst year of the war largely unfolded according to plan.

After dispatching Poland in a matter of weeks, Nazi forces overran

Denmark and Norway before winning their stunning victories in

the Low Countries and France. Fascist Italy then opportunistically

joined the war on the Axis side in the hope of claiming a share of the

overseas French Empire. The Nazis needed the extra manpower, but

Benito Mussolini did Hitler no favors in drawing the Germans into a

broader Mediterranean war.

All the same, the Germans were the masters of most of continental

Europe by the summer of 1941. Their fi rst agenda was to reclaim the

border regions of Poland, Belgium, and France that had once belonged

to the Second Reich. These formally became part of Germany. As for

the rest of their western conquests, the Nazis ruled Denmark and

Norway through cooperative local offi cials, placed the Netherlands

under a civilian German administration, and kept Belgium and occupied France under direct military control in preparation for an invasion of Britain that never materialized.

In the east, the Nazis surrendered eastern Poland to their Soviet

“allies” and created the Poland General Government to administer

what remained. Similarly, the non-German parts of Czechoslovakia

became the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. To the south, the

Nazis helped Mussolini overrun Greece and conquer Yugoslavia in

April 1941 when its young king refused to become a German lackey.

Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria became relatively willing Nazi

puppets to escape the fate of the Czechs and reacquire bits of territory they had lost under the 1919 peace settlement. Hitler also won

additional accomplices by playing upon the frustrated nationalist

aspirations of the Ruthenians, Slovaks, Croats, Slovenes, and other

minority communities who similarly felt betrayed by the delegates

at Versailles. Conversely, the Finns joined the German camp to gain

protection from Soviet aggression.

This preliminary empire building set the stage for Hitler’s main

imperial project: the defeat of the Soviet Union and the colonial

settlement of its vast fertile heartland. Following in the footsteps

of Napoleon 129 years earlier, he launched a massive invasion in

France under the Nazis 369

September 1941. The Nazi forces consisted of three million Germans

and six hundred thousand of their Croat, Romanian, Hungarian,

Slovakian, Italian, and Finnish auxiliaries. Anchored by more than

three thousand armored vehicles, the Nazi blitzkrieg sought to seize

the USSR’s key industrial centers while encircling and destroying the

fi ve-million-man Red Army. Timed to last just four months, it was

an audacious plan that almost succeeded. Within a matter of weeks,

the Soviets lost two and a half million men and thousands of tanks

and planes, but, as in 1812, the German advance ground to halt with

the outbreak of winter. The Nazi legions suffered upward of eight

hundred thousand casualties during the fall campaign and faced the

fi rst of many Soviet counterattacks in December 1941.18 That same

month Hitler acquired another formidable opponent by honoring his

promise with the Japanese to declare war on the United States after