by Ian Kershaw
Most likely, the memorandum, containing neither title nor signature and possibly completed only on 2 September, two days before it was presented to government ministers, was compiled at Göring’s suggestion.81 The Luftwaffe chief stood to gain most directly from it in the power-struggle with Schacht for dominance over the economy. ‘The lack of understanding of the Reich Economics Ministry and the resistance of German business to all large-scale (großzügigen) plans prompted him to compose this memorandum on the Obersalzberg,’ Hitler told his Armaments Minister Albert Speer, when handing him a copy eight years later.82 The only two copies of the memorandum originally distributed went to Göring himself, and to his ally against Schacht, War Minister Blomberg. The Economics Minister himself was not shown a copy of the memorandum, and in fact only heard as late as 2 September of Hitler’s intention to proclaim a new economic policy at the Reich Party Rally.83
The memorandum fell into two parts. The first, on ‘the political situation’, was pure Hitler. It was couched exclusively in ideological terms. The ‘reasoning’ was, as it had been in Mein Kampf and the Second Book, social-Darwinist and racially determinist. ‘Politics are the conduct and course of the historical struggle for life of peoples,’ he began. ‘The aim of these struggles is the assertion of existence.’ The world was moving towards a new conflict, centred upon Bolshevism, ‘whose essence and aim… is solely the elimination of those strata of mankind which have hitherto provided the leadership and their replacement by world-wide Jewry’. Germany would be the focus of the inevitable showdown with Bolshevism. ‘It is not the aim of this memorandum to prophesy the time when the untenable situation in Europe will become an open crisis. I only want, in these lines, to set down my conviction that this crisis cannot and will not fail to arrive,’ he asserted. A victory of Bolshevism over Germany would lead not to a Versailles Treaty but to the final destruction, indeed to the annihilation, of the German people… In face of the necessity of defence against this danger, all other considerations must recede into the background as being completely irrelevant.’ The defensive capacity of the German people had been greatly strengthened under National Socialism. The level of ideological solidarity was unprecedented. But making the German Army ‘into the first army in the world, in training, in the raising of units, in armaments, and, above all, in spiritual education (in der geistigen Erziehung)’ was vital. If this did not happen, then ‘Germany will be lost,’ he declared.84
The second part of the memorandum, dealing with ‘Germany’s economic situation’, and offering a ‘programme for a final solution of our vital need’, bore unmistakable signs of Göring’s influence, resting in turn on the raw material programmes drawn up by his planning staff, with significant input by IG Farben.85 The resemblance to statements on the economy put forward by Göring earlier in the summer suggests that Hitler either had such statements before him when compiling his memorandum, or that his Raw Materials Commissar worked alongside him in preparing the memorandum.86 The tone was nonetheless classically Hitlerian – down to the threat of a law ‘making the whole of Jewry liable for all damage inflicted by individual specimens of this community of criminals upon the German economy’, a threat put into practice some two years later.
A temporary solution to the economic problems was to be found in partial autarky. Maximizing domestic production wherever possible would allow for the necessary food imports, which could not be at the cost of rearmament. Fuel, iron, and synthetic-rubber production had to be stepped up. Cost was irrelevant. Objections – and the opposition voiced in the previous weeks – were taken on board and brushed aside. The nation did not live for the economy; rather, ‘finance and the economy, economic leaders and theories must all exclusively serve this struggle for self-assertion in which our people are engaged’. The Ministry of Economics had simply to set the national economic tasks; private industry had to fulfil them. If it could not do so, the National Socialist state, Hitler threatened, would ‘succeed in carrying out this task on its own’. In typical fashion, he couched his threat in stark alternatives: ‘The German economy will either grasp the new economic tasks or else it will prove itself quite incompetent to survive in this modern age when a Soviet State is setting up a gigantic plan. But in that case it will not be Germany that will go under, but, at most, a few industrialists.’ Though Germany’s economic problems, the memorandum asserted, could be temporarily eased through the measures laid down, they could only finally be solved through the extension of ‘living space’. It was ‘the task of the political leadership one day to solve this problem’. Again this was redolent of Mein Kampf and the Second Book. But it also matched Göring’s aggressive tone in his economic statements earlier in the summer. Only nuances separated Göring’s more pragmatic nationalist-imperialism from Hitler’s race-determined version. Both variants implied war at some point in the future – when economic mobilization, wrote Hitler, would become ‘solely a question of will’. The memorandum closed by advocating a ‘Several Years Plan’ – the term ‘Four-Year Plan’ was not mentioned in the document – to maximize self-sufficiency in existing conditions and make it possible to demand economic sacrifices of the German people. Opportunities had been missed during the previous four years; in the next four years, the German army had to be made operational, the economy made ready for war.87
Even in the economic sections, few concrete details were offered. No organizational structure was laid down. The economic ideas mooted in the second part were in themselves not new. But the drive for maximum autarky in the interests of a forced rearmament drive was now taken on to a new plane, and established as the outright priority.88 Hitler’s economic notions were confined, as always, to an ideological imperative. The memorandum was wholly programmatic. The more pragmatic expansionist notions of Göring and Blomberg both in the military and in the economic sphere were accommodated within the Hitlerian ideological vision. Moreover, Hitler’s way of argumentation was characteristic. The inflexibility of its ideological premisses coupled with the very broadness of its dogmatic generalities made it impossible for critics to contest it outright without rejection of Hitler himself and his ‘world-view’. This ‘world-view’, whatever tactical adjustments had proved necessary, showed again its inner consistency in the central place assigned to the coming showdown with Bolshevism – an issue which, as we have seen, preoccupied Hitler throughout 1936.
Göring got what he wanted out of Hitler’s memorandum. Armed with Hitler’s backing he was able to determine his supremacy in the central arena of the armaments economy.89 Schacht recognized the scale of the defeat he had suffered.90 Hitler was reluctant to drop him because of the standing he enjoyed abroad.91 But his star was now waning fast. Alternative policies to that advanced in Hitler’s memorandum could now be condemned out of hand. Goerdeler’s memorandum rejecting the autarkic programme and arguing for curtailment of rearmament in favour of re-entry into the international market economy was peremptorily dismissed by the new armaments supremo. The dictatorial style in which he conducted the meeting of the Prussian Ministerial Council on 4 September was that of the victor in the power-struggle, basking in the certainty of control over the massive economics empire now opening up before him.92
The growth of this huge domain did not derive from a clearly conceived notion of economic planning. Hitler – in so far as he had given any consideration at all to organizational matters – had, it appears, simply imagined that Göring would work through only a small bureaucracy and function as an overlord in coordinating economic policy with the relevant ministries, which would retain their specific responsibilities.93 Instead, Göring rapidly improvised a panoply of ‘special commissioners’ (Sonderbeauftragte), each backed by their own bureaucratic apparatus, for different facets of the Four-Year Plan, often without clear lines of control, not infrequently overlapping or interfering with the duties of the Ministry of Economics, and all of course answerable to Göring himself. It was a recipe for administrative and economic anarchy.
But
the momentum created by the Four-Year Plan was immense. All areas of the economy were affected in the following peacetime years. The resulting pressures on the economy as a whole were not sustainable indefinitely. The economic drive created its own dynamic which fed directly into Hitler’s ideological imperative. The ambitious technocrats in the offices and sub-organizations of the Four-Year Plan, not least the leaders of the rapidly expanding chemicals giant IG Farben, were in their own way – whatever their direct motivation – also ‘working towards the Führer’. Territorial expansion became necessary for economic as well as for ideological reasons. And racial policy, too, was pushed on to a new plane as the spoils to be gained from a programme of ‘aryanization’ were eagerly seized upon as easy pickings in an economy starting to overheat under its own, self-manufactured pressures.
When Hitler drew up his memorandum in late August 1936 all this was in the future. Hitler had no clear notion himself of how it would all unfold. Nor was he specially interested in such questions. Propaganda concerned him more immediately than economics in drawing up the memorandum. He needed the new economic programme as the cornerstone of the Party Rally. His big speech there on the economy – which, as we have seen, Göring had initially wanted to deliver – was closely based, occasionally word for word, on his August memorandum.94 He now spoke publicly for the first time of a ‘new Four-Year Programme’ (recalling his initial ‘four-year plan’ put forward immediately after his appointment as Chancellor in 1933).95 A planned economy sounded modern. A ‘Five-Year Plan’ had already been taken up in the Bolshevik state at which German preparations were ultimately targeted.96 The designation ‘Four-Year Plan’ rapidly caught on in the German press. It became officially so called some weeks later, on 18 October, with Hitler’s ‘Decree for the Implementation of the Four-Year Plan’.97
IV
In the foreign-policy arena, the shifts which had begun during the Abyssinian crisis were hardening across the summer and autumn of 1936. Clearer contours were beginning to emerge. Diplomatic, strategic, economic, and ideological considerations – separable but often closely interwoven – were starting to take Germany into more dangerous, uncharted waters. The possibility of a new European conflagration – however unimaginable and horrifying the prospect seemed to most of the generation that had lived through the last one – was starting to appear a real one.
The long-desired alliance with Britain, which had seemed a real possibility in June 1935 at the signing of the Naval Pact, had remained elusive. It was still a distant dream. The Abyssinian crisis and the reoccupation of the Rhineland, now the Spanish Civil War, had all provided hurdles to a closer relationship despite German efforts to court those they imagined had power and influence in Britain and some British sympathizers in high places.98 Ribbentrop, appointed in the summer an unwilling Ambassador to London with a mandate from Hitler to bring Britain into an anti-Comintern pact, had since his triumph with the Naval Treaty become increasingly disillusioned about the prospects of a British alliance.99 Hitler pointed out to Mussolini in September that Ribbentrop’s appointment marked the last attempt to win over Great Britain.100 But the new ‘Ambassador Brickendrop’, as he was lampooned on account of the innumerable faux pas (such as saluting the King with the ‘Hitler Greeting’) for which he became renowned in London diplomatic circles, or ‘Half-Time Ambassador’ because of his frequent absences, in any case made his own personal contribution to the growing alienation felt in Britain towards the Third Reich.101 Hitler saw the abdication on 11 December 1936 of King Edward VIII, in the face of opposition in Britain to his proposed marriage to a twice-divorced American, Mrs Wallis Simpson, as a victory for those forces hostile to Germany.102 Ribbentrop had encouraged him in the view that the King was pro-German and anti-Jewish, and that he had been deposed by an anti-German conspiracy linked to Jews, freemasons, and powerful political lobbies.103
By the end of the year (according to a reported indication of his view), Hitler had become more lukewarm about a British alliance, claiming – whether with total conviction may be doubted – that it would at best bring some minor colonial gains but would, on the other hand, hinder Germany’s plans for expansion in central and south-eastern Europe. The reason he gave was that Italy would, through an Anglo-German alliance which undermined its policy in the Mediterranean, be forced on to the side of France, leading to a block by the two countries on any attempt at a new order in south-eastern Europe. Germany, he concluded, had its interests better served by close ties with Italy.104
The rapprochement with Italy – slow and tenuous in the first half of 1936 – had by then come to harden into a new alliance of the two fascist-style militaristic dictatorships dominating central and southern Europe. The Abyssinian crisis, as we have noted, had turned Italy towards Germany. The repercussions on Austria were not long in the waiting. Deprived de facto of its Italian protector, Austria was swept inevitably further into the German slipstream.105 Encouraged by the Italians as well as put under pressure by the Germans, Austria was ready by 11 July 1936 to sign a wide-ranging agreement with Germany, improving relations, ending restrictions placed upon the German press, and upon economic and cultural activities within Austria.106 Though recognizing Austrian independence, the agreement in reality turned the Reich’s eastern neighbour into an economic and foreign-policy dependency.107 It was a development which by this time suited both Germany and Italy.108 And within weeks, the aid provided by the two dictatorships to the nationalist rebels in Spain, and the rapidly deepening commitment to the Spanish Civil War, brought Italy and Germany still closer together. German and Italian pilots in Spain were soon operating in unison.109 The annihilation of the small Basque market town of Guernica, leaving over 2,500 citizens dead or injured, in a devastating three-hour bombing raid on the afternoon of 26 April 1937 by combined German and Italian forces, immortalized in Picasso’s famous painting, would become an emblem of the horror of the Spanish Civil War, and of innocent civilians defenceless against the new menace of terror from the skies.110
The diplomatic benefits from closer ties with Italy were reinforced in Hitler’s own eyes by the anti-Bolshevik credentials of Mussolini’s regime. In his August memorandum on the economy, Hitler had highlighted Italy as the only European country outside Germany capable of standing firm against Bolshevism.111 In September, he made overtures to Mussolini through his envoy Hans Frank, inviting the Duce to visit Berlin the following year – an invitation readily accepted.112 Mussolini’s son-in-law, the vain Count Ciano – the ‘Ducellino’ – arranged matters with Neurath in mid-October. There was agreement on a common struggle against Communism, rapid recognition of a Franco government in Spain, German recognition of the annexation of Abyssinia, and Italian ‘satisfaction’ at the Austro-German agreement.113
Hitler was in effusive mood when he welcomed Ciano to Berchtesgaden on 24 October. He described Mussolini as ‘the leading statesman in the world, to whom none may even remotely compare himself’.114 In a conversation of two and a quarter hours, Hitler, noted Ciano, ‘talked slowly and in a low voice’, with ‘violent outbursts when he spoke of Russia and Bolshevism. His way of expressing himself was slow and somewhat verbose. Each question was the subject of a long exposition and each concept was repeated by him several times in different words… The principal topics of his conversation were Bolshevism and English encirclement.’115 Ciano had drawn Hitler’s attention to a telegram, which had fallen into Italian hands, to the Foreign Office in London from the British Ambassador in Berlin, Sir Eric Phipps, stating that the Reich government was in the hands of dangerous adventurers. Hitler’s furious response was that ‘England, too, was led by adventurers when she built the Empire. Today it is governed merely by incompetents.’ Germany and Italy should ‘go over to the attack’, using the tactic of anti-Bolshevism to win support from countries suspicious of an Italo-German alliance. There was no clash of interests between Italy and Germany, he declared. The Mediterranean was ‘an Italian sea’. Germany had to have freedom of action
towards the East and the Baltic.116 He was convinced, he said, that England would attack Italy, Germany, or both, given the opportunity and likely chances of success. A common anti-Bolshevik front, including powers in the East, the Far East, and South America, would however act as a deterrent, and probably even prompt Britain to seek an agreement. If Britain continued its offensive policy, seeking time to rearm, Germany and Italy had the advantage both in material and psychological rearmament, he enthused. In three years, Germany would be ready, in four years more than ready; five years would be better still.117