Hitler

by Joachim C. Fest

  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

  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 nu
cleus 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.

  Crises and Resistances

  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.