Hitler

by Joachim C. Fest

  Hitler and his Lebensraum commissioners regarded the Eastern part of Europe as vacant territory without a history. Its Slavic inhabitants were to be in part exterminated, in part retained to serve the German master race as a helot population. One hundred million persons were eventually to be transplanted to the Eastern plains; millions must be brought there, Hitler explained, until “our settlers are numerically far superior to the natives.” European emigration must no longer go to America, but only to the East. “In ten years at the latest,” he wanted to receive a report of “at least twenty million Germans living in the Eastern territories.”78

  The “gigantic cake” was to be divided into four Reich commissariats (Eastland, Ukraine, Caucasia, and Moscovia). Alfred Rosenberg, the former leading ideologue of the party, who in recent years had been repeatedly outmaneuvered and who had been knocking around without employment before his significant appointment as Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, vainly urged partitioning of the Soviet Union into politically autonomous nationalities. Hitler rejected the concept because he considered it dangerous to shape new political units on an ethnic or historical basis. Everything depended, he said, on “avoiding any political organization and thus keeping the members of these nationalities on the lowest possible cultural level.” He was even prepared, he declared, to grant these peoples a certain degree of individual liberty, because all liberty had a reactionary effect, since it negated the supreme form of human organization, the state.

  With unflagging enthusiasm, he drafted the details of his imperial daydream: Germanic masters and Slavic serfs together filling the vast Eastern spaces with bustling activity, though with the racially based class distinctions emphasized vividly in every conceivable way. Before his mind’s eye arose German cities with gleaming governors’ palaces, towering cultural and administrative structures, while the settlements of the native population would deliberately be kept inconspicuous. These were by no means to be “in any way refurbished let alone embellished.” Even the “mud stucco” or the thatched roofs would not be permitted to show uniformity, he said.

  He insisted on a low educational standard for the Slavic populace. They would be allowed to learn the meaning of traffic signs, the name of the capital of the Reich, and a few words of German, but no arithmetic, for example. General Jodi, he added on one occasion, had quite rightly objected to a poster in Ukrainian forbidding crossing of a railroad embankment, for “it can well be a matter of indifference to us whether a native more or less is run over.” In that facetious Machiavellianism that he fell into in relaxed moments, he added that it would be best to teach the Slavic nationals “nothing but a sign language” and use the radio to present them with “what they can digest: music without limit…. For gay music promotes joy in labor.” He regarded all concern for the health of the subject populations, all hygiene, as “sheer madness,” and recommended spreading the superstition “that inoculation and so on is a very dangerous business.” When he discovered in a memorandum a proposal to ban the sale and use of abortifacients in the occupied eastern territories, he became wildly excited and declared that he would “personally shoot down… the idiots” responsible for this idea. On the contrary, he went on, it seemed to him essential to promote a “vigorous business in contraceptives.” And becoming facetious once more: “But I supposed we’d have to get the help of the Jews to get such things into lively circulation.”79

  A system of broad roads and lines of communication (“the beginning of all civilization”) was to make the territory governable and help to open up its natural resources. One of Hitler’s favorite ideas was a railroad to the Donetz Basin with a track width of twelve feet, on which two-story trains would travel back and forth at a speed of 125 miles per hour. At the intersections of the principal arteries of communication there would arise cities conceived as great military bases. These would hold sizable units of mobile military forces, and would be secured at a radius of twenty or twenty-five miles by a “circuit of beautiful villages” with a well-armed rural population. In a memorandum dated November 26, 1940, Himmler had already issued guidelines for rural reconstruction in the conquered Polish territories; he fixed the social hierarchy among the German settlers, from hired man to the representative of an “autochthonous leadership,” with just as much pendantry as the layout of the villages and farms (“wall thicknesses… less than 38 centimeters will not be permitted”). Above all the “provision for greenery” was to help express the German tribes’ inherited love of trees, shrubs, and flowers and give the landscape as a whole a German imprint. The planting of village oaks and village lindens was therefore just as important as bringing “the electric lines… as inconspicuously as possible up to the buildings.” The same romantic idyl was also planned for the rural defense areas of Russia: small, well-garrisoned settlements in the midst of hostile surroundings would preserve the primal situation of the permanent fight for survival, and would thus prove their viability.

  Meanwhile, however, it soon became apparent that the vastness of the area presented something of a problem. Those who had been primarily designated as new settlers were the Volksdeutsche, the Germans living in the countries of southeastern Europe and overseas, and also decorated soldiers, sailors, or airmen, and members of the SS. The East belonged to the SS, declared Otto Hofmann, chief of the Race and Settlement Office of the SS. According to the calculations of the planners, however, there were no more than 5 million of such settlers. Assuming extremely favorable circumstances, according to a memorandum dated April 27, 1942, “we can count on a figure of eight million Germans in these areas in about thirty years.”80 For the first time a certain degree of agorphobia seemed to be current.

  A whole list of measures was devised to overcome this unexpected dilemma. Thus someone thought of “reawakening in the German people the urge toward settlement in the East” and also allowing the racially valuable neighboring peoples to participate in the colonization. A memorandum of Rosenberg’s considered not only the settlement of Danes, Norwegians, and Dutch, but “after the victorious termination of the war also Englishmen.” All would be “members of the Reich,” Hitler declared, and boasted that this procedure would have a significance similar to the inclusion of several German states in the Customs Union a hundred years earlier. Simultaneously, according to the recommendations of a memorandum issued by Rosenberg’s Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, 31 million of the 45 million inhabitants of western Russia were to be expatriated or killed. Furthermore, it was intended to introduce rival sects and, if this measure should prove insufficient, it would be only necessary, Hitler suggested, “to drop a few bombs on their cities and the job will be done.”

  The greatest hopes were placed in the measures for recovery of good blood. Hitler compared his activity during the so-called time of struggle with the effect of a magnet that had drawn all the metallic element, all the iron content, of the German people. “Now we must also proceed in this way in building the new Reich,” he declared at the beginning of February, 1942, speaking in the Führer’s headquarters. “Wherever Germanic blood is to be found anywhere in the world, we will take what is good to ourselves. With what the others have left they will be unable to oppose the Germanic Empire.” In Poland “race commissions” had investigated the “Germanism” of large numbers of selected persons and in some cases brought them back to Germany for Umvolkung (restoration to the race), whether they wished it or not. Minors in particular were taken. Henceforth, Himmler declared at the evening meal in Rastenburg, they would institute annual “fishing parties for bloodlines,” throughout France, and he proposed that the children taken should be removed to German boarding schools in order to teach them the accidental nature of their French nationality and make them conscious of their Germanic blood. “For we will recuperate the good blood, which we can make use of, and incorporate it among us, or else, gentlemen—you may call this cruel, but nature is cruel—we will destroy this blood.”81

  Behind these proposa
ls for “broadening the blood base” there once again cropped up that old fear of the extinction of the Aryan, of the second “expulsion from paradise” that Hitler had conjured up in Mein Kampf.82 But if it should prove possible, he ranted, to keep the Reich “racially high and pure, it would gain a crystalline hardness and be unassailable.” Then the Germans’ greater force, boldness, and barbaric vitality would once again come into their own, all false religions of reason and humanity would go down to destruction, and natural order would triumph. As the “most gluttonous predator in world history” National Socialism had Nature and her promises on its side. And with that strangely distorted sense of reality he had, so that his own visions always seemed already within his grasp, he saw growing up in a few years, within those Eastern “nurseries of Germanic blood,” the longed-for type of human being, “regular master personalities,” as he enthusiastically described them, “viceroys.”

  Simultaneously, he backed the efforts sponsored chiefly by Himmler and Bormann to establish new legislation concerning marriage. Their argument ran that the population shortage after the war would tend to get more serious, since 3 or 4 million women would necessarily have to remain unmarried. As Hitler remarked, such losses translated into divisions “are intolerable for our people.” In order to make it possible for these women to have children, and at the same time to provide “decent, physically and psychically healthy men of strong character” with the opportunity for increased reproduction, special arrangements would have to be made. A procedure for application and selection would enable such men “to enter a firm marital relationship not only with one woman, but with an additional one.”

  These ideas were set forth in a memorandum by Bormann. Himmler supplemented them, suggesting, for example, that the privileged position of the first wife be secured by conferring upon her the title Domina, and that the right to enter a second marriage be reserved for the time being “as a high distinction for the heroes of the war, the bearers of the German Cross in gold, and the bearers of the Knight’s Cross.” Later, he explained, “it could be extended to the bearers of the Iron Cross First Class and to those who wear the silver and gold bar for close-quarters combat.” For, as Hitler was wont to say, “The greatest fighter deserves the most beautiful woman…. If the German man is to be unreservedly ready to die as a soldier, he must have the freedom to love unreservedly. For struggle and love belong together. The philistine should be glad if he gets whatever is left.”83

  Such speculations were carried even further within the top leadership of the SS. There was strong sentiment, for instance, in favor of mandatory divorce for marriages that remained childless for five years. Moreover, “all single and married women who do not yet have four children shall be obliged up to the age of thirty-five years to have four children begotten upon them by racially unexceptionable German men. Whether these men are married is of no consequence. Every family which already has four children must release the husband for this operation.”84

  The Eastern settlement program was, however, also intended to provide a solution for Europe’s national and ethnic disputes. The Crimea, for example, which was the favorite target of the settlement plans, was to be “completely cleansed,” as Hitler put it, and under the ancient Greek name of Tauria, or even Gotenland (Gothland), was to be incorporated directly into the Reich. Simferopol would be renamed Gotenburg and Sevastopol Theoderichhafen.85 According to one of the projects, that attractive peninsula, which over the millennia had attracted Scythians and Huns, Goths and Tatars, was to be transformed into a “great German spa.” Others envisioned a “German Gibraltar” to dominate the Black Sea. As prospective settlers, the 140,000 persons of German blood living in Rumanian Transnistria were considered, and for a while some 2,000 Palestine Germans also haunted memoranda and files. But above all it was the population of South Tyrol on whom the new-order fanatics who were doing the planning for the Crimea lighted. Gauleiter Frauenfeld, who had been appointed commissioner general for the Crimea, suggested transporting the South Tyrolese to the peninsula in a body. Hitler termed that idea “extraordinarily good.” He thought “the Crimea extremely well suited in respect to climate and landscape to South Tyrolean nationals.” Besides, it was “a land of milk and honey compared with the present region settled by the South Tyrolese.” Transportation of the South Tyrolese to the Crimea would not impose any special difficulties physically or psychologically. “They need only sail down a German river, the Danube, and they’re already there.” Frauenfeld also had the idea of building a new metropolis for the peninsula in the Yaila Mountains.

  Although a Führer’s directive had been issued as early as the beginning of July, 1942, to evacuate the Russian populace from the Crimea, all the resettlement plans became entangled in the confusion of authorities and the additional chaos produced by the events of the war. Extensive resettlement took place only in Ingria (Ingermanland), the country between Lake Peipus and Lake Onega, which had been designated as the first resettlement area because, according to the Lebensraum specialists, it had preserved a comparatively strong component of Germanic blood in the population. Early in 1942 the Finnish government was informed that it could have “its” Ingers back. And in fact up to the spring of 1944, when the area was lost again, some 65,000 persons were moved to Finland. From this single example we can see in what manner the regime would have carried out its vision of a new order. For it solved a nonexistent minorities problem and created a new one in Finland.86

  Hitler’s lust for expansion, however, was not directed solely toward the East. He had repeatedly averred, even after the war broke out, that he desired no conquests in the West. But this highmindedness soon came into collision with his inability to give back anything he had once obtained. No one could blame him, he observed during the period when victory seemed very near, if he took the position: he who has, keeps! “For anyone who gives away what he has is committing a sin, since he is alienating that part of this earth that he as the stronger has conquered with effort. For the earth is like a trophy cup and therefore tends always to fall into the hands of the strongest. For tens of thousands of years there has been a tugging back and forth on this earth.”87

  Soon his ambitions went far beyond all the war aims conceived by völkisch and Pan-German circles. His “Great Germanic Empire of the German Nation” embraced nearly the entire continent of Europe in one unitary, totalitarian, and economically independent imperium. The individual members were to be reduced to vassals whose one purpose was to serve his aspirations for world power. “Old Europe has outlived its usefulness,” Hitler is reported to have said in a conversation with Slovak President Tiso. He saw Germany in the position of Rome poised for the overpowering of the other city-states of Latium. Occasionally he spoke of Europe’s “rubbish heap of small countries” that he intended to clean out. Alongside America, the British Empire, and the Greater East Asian bloc to be formed by Japan, Europe—under the leadership of Germany—would constitute the fourth of those economic empires into which he envisioned the world of the future as divided. For centuries, in his view, the old Continent had been able to solve its overpopulation problems, or at least to cover them up, with the aid of overseas possessions. But with the colonial age coming to its end, only the thinly populated East could offer a way out. “If the Ukraine were administered by European methods,” he declared, “it would be possible to get three times its present production out of it. We could supply Europe without limit with what can be produced there. The East has everything in unlimited quantities: iron, coal, oil, and a soil that can grow everything Europe needs: grain, linseed, rubber, cotton, and so on.”

  In his so-called second book, the sequel to Mein Kampf, written in 1928, Hitler had already developed the idea that this Europe was not to arise as the result of federation, but by the racially strongest nation’s subjugating the others. This early view of his determined his style of ruling over both conquered and allied countries. Occasionally he received offers of collaboration within the framework o
f a Fascist federated Europe; one such offer, for example, came from certain elements in France. But Hitler regarded such offers merely as arrogance and did not even deign to reply. Sometimes, it is true, he was apt to reject the idea of the nation in the name of the “higher concept of race”: “It [race] breaks up the old and affords the possibility of new combinations,” he declared. “Employing the concept of the nation, France carried her great revolution beyond her borders. Employing the concept of race, National Socialism will extend its revolution until the New Order has been achieved all through the world.”