by Ian Kershaw
The presumed rule of the Jews in Russia stood, on the other hand, as Hitler had pointed out as early as July 1920, firmly in the way of any alliance with Russia. Even so, at this time Hitler shared the view of many on the völkisch Right that a distinction could be drawn between ‘national’ Russians – where the Germanic influence was strong – and the ‘bolshevization’ of Russia brought about by the Jews. Hitler’s approach to Russia was probably in part shaped by Rosenberg, the early NSDAP’s leading ‘expert’ on eastern questions, whose Baltic origins fed a ferocious antipathy towards Bolshevism. It was, most likely, reinforced by Scheubner-Richter, another prolific writer on eastern policy in the infant party, with extremely strong connections to Russian exiles. Dietrich Eckart, too, who was already in early 1919 writing of the identity of Jewry and Bolshevism, probably also exerted some influence.
Russia was coming already before the putsch to loom larger in Hitler’s thoughts on foreign policy. He had somewhat vaguely mentioned the ‘land question’, comparing Germany unfavourably with Russia in its relation of population to the land at its disposal, as early as December 1919. He hinted in a speech on 31 May 1921, through praise of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty of 1918 (which had ended Russian participation in the war) for giving Germany the additional land it needed to sustain its people, at an expansion of German ‘living space’ at the expense of Russia. On 21 October 1921 he was still speaking, somewhat cryptically, of an expansion with Russia against England opening up ‘an unlimited possibility of expansion towards the east’. Such remarks indicated that at this time, Hitler still shared – even if vaguely expressed – the Pan-German view on eastern expansion. This amounted broadly to the notion that eastern expansion could be carried out through collaboration with a non-Bolshevik Russia, whose own territorial demands would be settled also through looking eastwards, towards Asia, leaving the former Russian border areas in the west to Germany. It would have amounted, essentially, to something like a resurrection of the Brest-Litovsk arrangement, while Russia would have been left to find compensation in the lands on its own eastern borders.
By early 1922, these views had shifted. By now, Hitler had abandoned any idea of collaboration with Russia. He saw no prospect of Russia looking only eastwards. Extension of Bolshevism to Germany would prove an irresistible urge. The logic of the changed position was evident. Only through the destruction of Bolshevism could Germany be saved. And at the same time, this – through expansion into Russia itself – would bring the territory which Germany needed. During the course of 1922 – perhaps reinforced towards the end of the year by contact with the arch-expansionist, Ludendorff – the changed approach to future policy towards Russia was consolidated. By December 1922, Hitler was explaining in private to Eduard Scharrer, co-owner of the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten and favourably disposed towards the Nazi Party, the outline of the foreign alliance ideas which he was to elaborate in Mein Kampf. He ruled out the colonial rivalry with Britain that had caused conflict before the First World War. He told Scharrer:
Germany would have to adapt herself to a purely continental policy, avoiding harm to English interest. The destruction of Russia with the help of England would have to be attempted. Russia would give Germany sufficient land for German settlers and a wide field of activity for German industry. Then England would not interrupt us in our reckoning with France.
In the light of his comments to Scharrer, it can scarcely be claimed that Hitler developed an entirely new concept of foreign policy while in Landsberg, one based on the idea of war against Russia to acquire Lebensraum. And what he wrote in Mein Kampf on Germany’s need for land being satisfied at the expense of Russia had indeed already been anticipated in an essay he wrote in spring 1924, which was published in April that year. There was no ‘transformation’ of Hitler’s ‘vision of the world’ in Landsberg. What he came to write in Landsberg was the result of the gradual gestation of his ideas, rather than a flash of intuition, set of new insights, or overnight conversion to a different approach.
The imperialist and geopolitical ideas that went to make up the idea of Lebensraum were, in fact, common currency on the imperialist and völkisch Right in Weimar Germany. The idea of Lebensraum had been a prominent strand of German imperialist ideology since the 1890s. It had been strongly represented in the Pan-German League under Heinrich Claß, supported by the press controlled by founder-member of the League, director of Krupp’s, and media tycoon Alfred Hugenberg. For Pan-Germans, Lebensraum could both justify territorial conquest by evoking the colonizing of Slav lands by Teutonic knights in the Middle Ages and, emotively, conjure up notions of uniting in the Reich what came to be described as Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans) scattered throughout eastern Europe. For the most part these constituted fairly small minorities, as in the parts of Poland (outside the towns) which Prussia had ruled before 1918. But in a number of areas – Danzig, for example, parts of the Baltic, or the area of Czechoslovakia later known as the Sudetenland – the German-speaking population was sizeable, and often vociferously nationalist. The idea of Lebensraum symbolized, then, for Pan-Germans the historic conquest of the East while at the same time, in emphasizing German alleged over-population, cloaking real, modern, power-political imperialist ambitions. It existed alongside, rather than blending with, the mainstream imperialist concentration on overseas trading colonies, encapsulated in the slogan of Weltpolitik. In the Weimar era it came to be popularized by Hans Grimm’s best-selling novel Volk ohne Raum (People without Space), published in 1926.
Hitler could scarcely have avoided the imperialist and geopolitical writings in circulation on ‘living space’. Among them, whether read at first hand or in bowdlerized form, it seems highly likely that those of Karl Haushofer, the leading exponent of ‘geopolitics’, were one significant source for his notion of Lebensraum. Through Rudolf Heß, Hitler already knew Haushofer by 1922 at the latest. Haushofer’s influence was probably greater than the Munich professor was later prepared to acknowledge. If he was not acquainted with them before, Hitler certainly had time on his hands while in prison to read his works, as well as those of Friedrich Ratzel, the other foremost geopolitics theorist. Whether he did so cannot be proved. But it seems at the very least likely that the broad lines of their arguments were made known to him by Haushofer’s former pupil, Rudolf Heß.
At any rate, by the time of the Scharrer discussion at the end of 1922, Hitler’s thinking on Russia and the ‘living space’ question was essentially in place. And by spring 1924, his views were effectively fully formed. What Landsberg and the writing of Mein Kampf did was to provide elaboration. Beyond that, it showed that Hitler had by then firmly established the link between the destruction of the Jews and a war against Russia to acquire Lebensraum.
Already in the first volume of Mein Kampf, the choice – which Hitler had still rhetorically left open in his article of April 1924 – of a land-policy directed against Russia, with Britain’s support, or a world trading policy upheld by sea-power directed against Britain with Russia’s support, was emphatically determined. By the second volume, mainly written in 1925, the enemy in the short term was still seen as France. But in the baldest language, the long-term goal was now stated to be the attaining of ‘living space’ at the expense of Russia.
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 towards 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.
If we speak of soil in Europe today, we can primarily have in mind only Russia and her vassal border states … For centuries Russia drew nourishment from [the] Germanic nucleus of its upper leading strata. Today it can be regarded as almost totally exterminated and extinguished. It has been replaced by the Jew … He himself is no element of organization, but a ferment of decomposition. The giant emp
ire 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 …
The mission of the National Socialist Movement was to prepare the German people for this task. ‘We have been chosen by Fate,’ wrote Hitler, ‘as witnesses of a catastrophe which will be the mightiest confirmation of the soundness of the völkisch theory.’
With this passage, the two key components of Hitler’s personalized ‘world-view’ – destruction of the Jews and acquisition of ‘living space’ – came together. War against Russia would, through its annihilation of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’, at the same time deliver Germany its salvation by providing new ‘living space’. Crude, simplistic, barbaric: but this invocation of the most brutal tenets of late nineteenth-century imperialism, racism, and antisemitism, transposed into eastern Europe in the twentieth century, was a heady brew for those ready to consume it.
Hitler himself repeatedly returned to the ‘living space’ notion, which became a dominant theme of his writings and speeches in the following years. His foreign-policy ideas were to be more clearly laid out, but in no significant way altered, in his ‘Second Book’, written in 1928 (though left unpublished in Hitler’s own lifetime). Once established, the quest for Lebensraum – and with it the destruction of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ – would remain a keystone of Hitler’s ideology. One element remained to complete the ‘world-view’: the leader of genius who would accomplish this quest. In Landsberg, Hitler found the answer.
III
Many years later, Hitler regarded ‘the self-confidence, optimism, and belief that simply could not be shaken by anything more’ as deriving from his time in Landsberg. His self-perception did indeed alter while he was in prison. Even at his trial, as we have seen, he had been proud to be the ‘drummer’ of the national cause. Anything else was a triviality, he had declared. In Landsberg this changed – though, as noted, the change had already been under way during the year preceding the putsch.
Hitler was preoccupied from the beginning of his sentence with the question of his own future and that of his party after his release. Since he expected his release within six months, the question was an urgent one. For Hitler, there was no turning back. His political ‘career’, which had developed into his political ‘mission’, left him nowhere to go but forwards. He could not return to anonymity, even had he wanted to do so. A conventional ‘bourgeois’ lifestyle was out of the question. Any retreat, after the acclaim he had won on the nationalist Right at his trial, would have confirmed the impression of his opponents that he was a figure of farce, and would have exposed him to ridicule. And as he pondered over the failed putsch, transforming it in his mind into the martyrs’ triumph that would come to have its central place in Nazi mythology, he had no trouble in assigning the blame to the mistakes, weakness, and lack of resolve of all the leading figures to whom he was at the time bound. They had betrayed him, and the national cause: this was his conclusion. More than that: the triumph at his trial; the torrents of adulation ever-present in the völkisch press or pouring unabated from letters sent to Landsberg; and not least the collapse of the völkisch movement in his absence into derisory sectarian squabbling, and the growing conflict with Ludendorff and the other völkisch leaders; all these contributed towards giving him an elevated sense of his own importance and of his unique historic ‘mission’. The idea, embryonically forming in 1923, took firm hold in the strange atmosphere of Landsberg. Surrounded by sycophants and devotees, foremost among them the fawning Heß, Hitler now became certain: he himself was Germany’s coming ‘great leader’.
Such a notion in its full implications was unimaginable before his triumph at the trial and the acclaim that followed. The ‘heroic’ leadership he now claimed for himself was an invention of his followers before he saw himself in that role. But the role fitted the temperament of one whose personal failures in early life had found an exaggerated wish-fulfilment in unbound admiration for heroic figures, above all the artist-hero Wagner. Whether an extraordinary depth of self-loathing is a necessary precondition for such an abnormal elevation of self-esteem into that of the heroic saviour of the nation is a matter best left to psychologists. But whatever the deep-seated reasons, for such a narcissistic egomaniac as Hitler, the hero-worship which others directed towards him, combined with his own inability to find fault or error in himself, now produced a ‘heroic’-leadership self-image of monumental proportions. No one in mainstream German political life, outside the tiny and fractured völkisch movement, was aware of or would have taken seriously the change in Hitler’s self-perception. At the time it was of no consequence. But for Hitler’s demands on the völkisch movement, and for his own self-justification, it was a vital development.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler pictured himself as a rare genius who combined the qualities of the ‘programmatist’ and the ‘politician’. The ‘programmatist’ of a movement was the theoretician who did not concern himself with practical realities, but with ‘eternal truth’, as the great religious leaders had done. The ‘greatness’ of the ‘politician’ lay in the successful practical implementation of the ‘idea’ advanced by the ‘programmatist’. ‘Over long periods of humanity,’ he wrote, ‘it can once happen that the politician is wedded to the programmatist.’ His work did not concern short-term demands that any petty-bourgeois could grasp, but looked to the future, with ‘aims which only the fewest grasp’. Among the ‘great men’ in history, Hitler singled out at this point Luther, Frederick the Great, and Wagner. Seldom was it the case, in his view, that ‘a great theoretician’ was also ‘a great leader’. The latter was far more frequently ‘an agitator’: ‘For leading means: being able to move masses.’ He concluded: ‘the combination of theoretician, organizer, and leader in one person is the rarest thing that can be found on this earth; this combination makes the great man.’ Unmistakably, Hitler meant himself.
The ‘idea’ he stood for was not a matter of short-term objectives. It was a ‘mission’, a ‘vision’ of long-term future goals, and of his own part in the accomplishment of them. Certainly, these goals – national salvation through ‘removal’ of the Jews and acquisition of ‘living space’ in the east – did not amount to short-term practical policy guidelines. But, incorporated into the notion of the ‘heroic’ leader, they did amount to a dynamic ‘world-view’. This ‘world-view’ gave Hitler his unremitting drive. He spoke repeatedly of his ‘mission’. He saw the hand of ‘Providence’ in his work. He regarded his fight against the Jew as ‘the work of the Lord’. He saw his life’s work as a crusade. The invasion of the Soviet Union, when it was launched many years later, was for him – and not just for him – the culmination of this crusade. It would be a serious error to underestimate the ideological driving-force of Hitler’s few central ideas. He was no mere propagandist or ‘unprincipled opportunist’. He was indeed both a masterly propagandist and an ideologue. There was no contradiction between the two.
When he left Landsberg, to try to rebuild a crippled movement, Hitler’s leadership claims were, therefore, not only externally enhanced within the völkisch movement, but had been inwardly transformed and consolidated into a new perception of himself and awareness of his role. His sense of realism had by no means altogether disappeared beneath his messianic claims. He had no concrete notion of how his aims might be achieved. He still imagined that his goals might be brought to fruition only in the distant future. Since it consisted of only a few basic, but unchangeable tenets, his ‘world-view’ was compatible with short-term tactical adjustments. And it had the advantage of accommodating and reconciling a variety of otherwise conflicting positions on particular issues and fine points of ideology adopted by subordinate Nazi leaders. Within the framework of his basic ‘world-view’, Hitler himself was flexible, even indifferent, towards ideological issues which could obsess his followers. Opponents at the time, and many later commentators, frequently underestimated the dynamism of Nazi ideology because of its diffuseness, and because of the cynicism of Nazi p
ropaganda. Ideology was often regarded as no more than a cloak for power-ambitions and tyranny. This was to misinterpret the driving-force of Hitler’s own basic ideas, few and crude as they were. And it is to misunderstand the ways those basic ideas came to function within the Nazi Party, then, after 1933, within the Nazi state. What mattered for Hitler was indeed the road to power. He was prepared to sacrifice most principles for that. But some – and those were for him the ones that counted – were not only unchangeable. They formed the essence of what he understood by power itself. Opportunism was always itself ultimately shaped by the core ideas that determined his notion of power.
Following his months in Landsberg, Hitler’s self-belief was now such that, unlike the pre-putsch era, he could regard himself as the exclusive exponent of the ‘idea’ of National Socialism and the sole leader of the völkisch movement, destined to show Germany the path to its national salvation. The task facing him on release would be to convince others of that.
7
Mastery over the Movement
I
Hitler spent Christmas Eve 1924 at the Hanfstaengls’ in their splendid new villa in Munich’s Herzogpark. He had put on weight during his time in prison, and looked a little flabby. His blue suit was flecked with dandruff on the collar and shoulders. Four-year-old Egon Hanfstaengl was glad to see his ‘Uncle Dolf’ again. Within two minutes, Hitler was asking to hear Isolde’s ‘Liebestod’ on Hanfstaengl’s elegant Blüthner grand piano. Wagner’s music, as Hanfstaengl had often noticed, could transform Hitler’s mood. His initial nervousness and tension disappeared. He became relaxed and cheerful. He admired the new house, then suddenly stopped in mid-sentence, glanced over his shoulder, and explained that he had not lost his habit from prison of imagining he was being observed through the peephole. It was, as Hanfstaengl realized, a pathetic piece of play-acting. Putzi had seen Hitler in Landsberg, relaxed and comfortable; and there had been no peephole in his room. He noticed that Hitler had a good appetite during the meal of turkey followed by his favourite Viennese sweet pastries, but that he scarcely touched the wine. Hitler subsequently explained that he had begun on leaving Landsberg to cut out meat and alcohol in order to lose weight. He had convinced himself that meat and alcohol were harmful for him, and, ‘in his fanatical way’, went on Hanfstaengl, ‘finally made a dogma out of it and from then on only took vegetarian meals and alcohol-free drinks’. After the meal, Hitler treated the family to his war-memories, marching up and down the room, imitating the sounds of different sorts of artillery fire at the battle of the Somme. Late in the evening, a well-connected artist, Wilhelm Funk, dropped in at the Hanfstaengls’. He had known Hitler for quite some time, and now ventured his views on how the party could be built up again. Hitler replied in a familiar, and revealing, tone. For one who had ‘come up from the bottom’, he said, ‘without name, special position, or connection’, it was less a matter of programmes than hard endeavour until the public was ready to see ‘a nameless one’ as identical with a political line. Hitler thought he had now reached that position, and that the putsch had been of value to the movement: ‘I’m no longer an unknown, and that provides us with the best basis for a new start.’