Ostkrieg
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If this radical anti-Semitism gave Hitler’s ideology its manic dynamism, it was Lebensraum that provided the vital link between dogma and a pragmatic program of territorial expansion. Notions of living space and expansion in the east were common currency in Germany both before and especially after World War I. Based on work by geopolitical theorists such as Friedrich Ratzel and Karl Haushofer, and popularized in the 1920s by Hans Grimm’s best-selling novel Volk ohne Raum (People without space), Lebensraum stressed the necessity of a policy of expansion in order to achieve a positive ratio between population and resources. Ratzel emphasized that healthy states needed to expand and grow in order to survive, an idea hardly unique to Germany at the turn of the century. The British “hunger” blockade between 1914 and 1919, a plebeian form of killing that nonetheless had a profound impact on shaping Hitler’s ideas, seemed to confirm the truth of these notions. Responsible for the death by starvation of perhaps 750,000 civilians, and regarded by many Germans as the main culprit in the collapse of the war effort, the blockade reinforced and gave legitimacy in the minds of millions of Germans to the urgency of securing living space. For Hitler, it provided proof of his contentions and justification for his actions: the decisive factor in the struggle for survival was obtaining the means by which the German nation could sustain itself. The Great War had clearly demonstrated that Germany, a resource-poor nation surrounded by hostile powers, possessed insufficient resources and was, thus, vulnerable to the murderous actions of its enemies. If Germany was to survive, it had to gain living space.9
Viewed from the perspective of the 1920s, Germany faced a series of stark choices: attempt to resurrect the liberal economic policy of free trade and export orientation that had characterized imperial Germany; promote a policy of colonial expansion to secure vital resources; or promote a policy of contiguous expansion to secure Lebensraum in Eastern Europe. As Hitler assessed the situation, the first two choices offered no realistic alternative, the first because Great Britain and the United States dominated the global trading system, German exports faced increasing trade barriers, and reliance on foreign trade did not solve Germany’s ultimate problem. As World War I had demonstrated, its enemies, organized by the international Jewish conspiracy, could easily cut off imports and force Germany into defeat. The second option not only dispersed the German racial core but was also completely untenable in any case: no suitable land for colonization outside Europe existed, and Britain had in 1914 already shown its willingness to organize a coalition to quash German economic, naval, and colonial competition.10
As Adam Tooze has argued, from the vantage point of the early 1930s Germans looked back on a twenty-year period in which economic decline and insecurity dominated their experience. Despite their hard work, diligence, and technology, their country was poor, especially in comparison with the United States. Playing within the rules of the economic game as devised by the British and now dominated by the Americans clearly had not worked. Moreover, the Great Depression seemingly had made a mockery of the liberal doctrine of economic progress and only reinforced Hitler’s notion that, in economics, as in race, life was an unceasing process of struggle for survival. As he stressed in 1928, the huge difference in living standards between the United States and Germany could be understood only in terms of the American advantages in resources and space. Now, in the midst of the Depression, his basic Darwinian outlook and economic understanding combined to point in one direction: the solution to the existential threats facing Germany, both economic and racial, lay in the conquest of Lebensraum in the east. “And so we National Socialists consciously draw a line beneath the foreign policy tendency of our pre-war period,” Hitler emphasized in Mein Kampf. “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. If we speak of soil in Europe today, we can primarily have in mind only Russia and her vassal border states.”11
Not only did expansion in the east accord with Hitler’s ideology, but it also seemed to offer the fewest risks. Germany would conquer the necessary living space at the expense of the allegedly racially inferior Slavs, secure for Germany the resources needed to make it self-sufficient and powerful, and put it in position to wage a successful struggle against the Jewish-Bolshevik enemy. Moreover, expansion in the east seemed promising because Jewish-Bolshevik rule had, in Hitler’s opinion, already ruined the Russian state and left it ripe for collapse. “The struggle for world hegemony,” he claimed, betraying his constant obsession with World War I, “will be decided for Europe by the possession of Russia’s space: this will make Europe the most blockade-proof spot in the world.” Finally, Hitler believed that such eastward expansion posed no fundamental threat to the British Empire. Thus, if Germany pursued a purely continental policy and avoided any challenge to Britain’s colonial or commercial interests, which Hitler believed had been the key mistake of German governments before 1914, Britain might even aid in the destruction of Russia. Indeed, throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and even in the first years of World War II, he persisted in the belief that Britain would, ultimately, be an ally of German-dominated Europe in the eventual struggle with the United States for world domination.12
By the mid-1920s, then, Hitler had established in his own mind the key link between the destruction of Jewish-Bolshevism and the acquisition of Lebensraum in the east, both of which were necessary in order to secure Germany’s existence. In the desperate period following World War I, this potent combination of nineteenth-century notions of social Darwinism, imperialism, racism, and anti-Semitism provided a seemingly plausible explanation for Germany’s current quandary and a prescription for action to save and renew the nation. Once established, the quest for Lebensraum and the final reckoning with Jewish-Bolshevism remained the cornerstone of Hitler’s life’s work: only the conquest of living space could make good the mistakes of the past, preserve the racial value of the German Volk, and provide the resources to lift Germany out of its economic misery. Just a few days after becoming chancellor, Hitler announced unequivocally to his startled generals that his aim was “to conquer and ruthlessly Germanize new living space in the east.” Everything, he stressed, had to be geared toward securing German predominance in Europe. From his first days in office, then, Hitler began preparing for war, for the struggle, as he saw it, for Germany’s existence.13
Adolf Hitler was not one to appreciate paradox—he was far too humorless and self-absorbed for that. If he had been more detached, however, he might well have appreciated the great historical irony that confronted him in September 1939. Instead, his chief interpreter, Paul Schmidt, perfectly captured the Führer’s mood on the early evening of 3 September 1939. Having been summoned to the Reich Chancellery to translate the British declaration of war, Schmidt described the funereal scene:
After I finished there was total silence. . . . Hitler sat there as if petrified and stared straight ahead. He . . . did not rant and rave. . . . He sat in his seat completely quiet and motionless. After a while, which seemed like an eternity . . . , he turned to Ribbentrop who kept standing at the window as if frozen. “What now?” Hitler asked his Foreign Minister with a furious gaze in his eyes as if he wanted to indicate that Ribbentrop had misinformed him about the reaction of the British. . . . Goering turned to me and said: “If we lose this war, may Heaven have mercy on us!”
Far from the arrogant, infallible, rigidly self-assured Führer of myth, Hitler had at that moment allowed Schmidt to glimpse the nearer reality: an uncertain figure whose guiding illusion had been crushed and who did not know how to proceed. His great gamble had failed, and what followed his invasion of Poland he neither wanted nor expected. His original intention had been to attack the Soviet Union with Polish help, but, when the Poles balked at playing their assigned role, he had hoped to neutralize Great Britain through the conclusion
of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. This, he expected, would free his back in the west for a quick destruction of Poland followed by the showdown with Stalin’s Russia. Rather than fight the British, Hitler desired an alliance with England based on a common anti-Bolshevik attitude and a complementary relationship between a maritime and a continental power. What he got instead was a war with an Anglo-French alliance supported by the latent power of the United States.14
The irony, then, was that the nation he had wooed for years had now become his implacable enemy while the country that he envisioned as his greatest adversary had emerged as his indispensable ally. Moreover, he had embroiled Germany in what looked to be, at minimum, a protracted war in the west against the two nations that had undone it in the Great War and with a woefully unprepared Wehrmacht in no way comparable to the powerful military force of 1914. Given Germany’s position in the middle of Europe, the nightmare of its military planners had always been a two-front war, but Hitler had now conjured precisely this specter. Nor did his generals put faith in a supposed war-winning blitzkrieg strategy, for such a plan did not exist. In fact, they had absorbed all too well the lesson of World War I: they no longer believed that wars could be won quickly against opponents of superior strength. “The fixation upon a short war has been ruinous for us,” asserted Colonel (later General) Georg Thomas, chief of the Wehrmacht Economic Staff in 1937. “We should therefore not be guided by the illusion of a short war in the age of air and Panzer squadrons.” A 1938 study confirmed this opinion, stating categorically, “The possibilities of defeating an equivalent opponent by means of a Blitzkrieg are zero. . . . It is not military force that is strongest; instead, it is economic power that has become the most important.” By plunging recklessly into war, Hitler had created a nearly insurmountable strategic dilemma for Germany: although his generals had worked out a plan of operations against Poland, no overall war-winning concept existed.15
This was certainly not what Hitler intended. Since the mid-1920s, he had consistently expressed his desire to have Great Britain as an ally in the struggle against Jewish-Bolshevism. Although there were tantalizing hints of an alignment, such as the Naval Agreement of 1935 or Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement, by 1938 the hope of an alliance with Britain was illusory. If, in his ideologically blinkered world, the British did not act as Hitler wished, it meant that “world Jewry” had come to dominate in London and that “the Jew” had won over “the Briton.”16 This sense of a gathering worldwide Jewish conspiracy directed against Germany imparted a sense of urgency to Hitler’s actions in 1938–1939, as did his recognition that Britain was beginning a rapid, if belated, rearmament. Beyond this lay the vast latent power of the United States, which was also beginning to rearm and which Hitler had already identified in the late 1920s as the long-term opponent with which a German-dominated Europe would have to fight a war for world supremacy. The problem was many-sided. In order to protect Germany in its existential struggle with the Jewish conspiracy, German military power had to be restored in order to wage a successful war for Lebensraum. This meant a policy of rearmament that violated the Treaty of Versailles and threatened to alarm Germany’s neighbors. In addition, the provisions of the hated peace treaty had reduced German military strength so considerably that a crash program of rearmament would be necessary just to bring the military to adequate levels of self-defense. Moreover, all this was to be undertaken in a country only beginning to recover from the enormous economic and psychological trauma of the Great Depression. Just as the Nazis were beginning to reap the benefits of economic recovery, any overly ambitious rearmament program would imperil German economic recovery and Nazi popularity.
Hitler proved remarkably successful in striking a balance between these domestic and foreign policy demands between 1933 and 1936, but in August of that latter year, as he pondered Germany’s economic and political situation at the Eagle’s Nest on the Obersalzburg, he became more convinced than ever that Germany had to accelerate its preparations for war. His ideological fixation on struggle, along with his consciousness of Germany’s shrinking lead in rearmament, made the time factor increasingly important. In turn, this self-imposed time pressure inhibited the rational strategic calculations that had largely governed the first phase of his foreign policy. The result of his deliberations was a memorandum that he showed to a small circle of advisers: the defense minister, Werner von Blomberg, the builder of the autobahns and the West Wall, Fritz Todt, and the head of the German air force and de facto second in command to the Führer, Hermann Goering. Characteristically, Hitler felt compelled to justify his actions and, as usual, returned to his central argument of the necessity of war against Jewish-Bolshevism. “The historical struggle of nations for life,” he asserted, constituted the essence of politics; because of the growing military strength of the Soviet Union the world was moving “with ever-increasing speed towards a new conflict”; the present crisis rivaled that of the ancient world faced with the barbarian invasions or the long, violent struggle between Christianity and Islam; Germany could not “avoid or abstain from this historic conflict”; “the goal of Bolshevism [was] the elimination of those strata of mankind which have hitherto provided the leadership and their replacement by worldwide Jewry”; “a victory of Bolshevism over Germany would lead to the annihilation of the German people.” Given this existential threat, against which “all other considerations must recede into the background,” Hitler concluded that rearmament could not be “too large, nor its pace too swift.”17
Germany’s problems were also familiar, foremost among them overpopulation, lack of resources, and the need for living space. “I set the following tasks,” Hitler concluded his memorandum. “I: The German Armed Forces must be operational within four years. II: The German economy must be fit for war within four years.” With the announcement of the Four-Year Plan in October 1936, Hitler set Germany on a course of reckless rearmament with the express purpose of waging war in the near future. The primary function of economic activity was now to be preparation for war, so much so that by the spring of 1939 military production occupied one-quarter of the entire German labor force while German financial and economic stability had been imperiled by the breakneck speed of rearmament. The mandate given to Goering was clear: to make Germany ready for war, in terms of armaments and economic self-sufficiency in key raw materials, in four years. No specific war plan had yet been formulated, but implicit in this was Hitler’s belief that a clash with Russia was unavoidable.18
Hitler also had a clear sense of the purpose of a war for Lebensraum: the hold of the so-called Jewish plutocrats over the world’s economic resources and capital had to be broken in order to provide the German people with a living standard commensurate with their racial value. World War I, the British blockade, starvation, German defeat, the Treaty of Versailles, debt and reparations, the ruinous inflation of 1923, and the calamity of the Great Depression served as proof to Hitler that the international economic system was stacked against Germany. The only way to gain national freedom, then, lay in unilateral action to smash the existing system and establish a German-dominated “New Order,” a European economic bloc that could compete on an equal footing with the Anglo-American powers. This was, after all, a Darwinian world of struggle where the strong could do as they wished and the weak were compelled to do as they must. Ironically, Hitler proposed to free Germany from the shackles of this alleged Jewish-dominated system in much the same way he believed the two ascendant forces in the world economy, Great Britain and the United States, had achieved their predominance: through force.
The immediate dilemma for Hitler was that German rearmament could be achieved only through reckless financing that would imperil the domestic standard of living while also promising to so alarm Germany’s potential adversaries that they, too, would begin rapid rearmament. The military constraints imposed by Versailles had left Germany so weakened that even the ambitious rearmament program of 1933–1935 had left it barely able to defend itself, with offensive
operations out of the question. To make good his determination to resolve the vital issue of Lebensraum no later than 1943, which he revealed to his startled military and foreign policy leaders in November 1937, Hitler contemplated peacetime military expenditures unprecedented in a Western capitalist economy (only Stalin’s actions in the Soviet Union after 1928 were comparable). In the event, this breakneck policy of rearmament did surprisingly little to increase the effective strength of the German military since it resulted in a series of production bottlenecks, raw material and foreign currency shortages, interservice feuds over allocation of scarce resources, and an inability to establish which weapons should be given priority in production. Furthermore, even if moves to absorb Austria and Czechoslovakia did not result in Western military action, aggressive German rearmament would almost certainly touch off a response by the other powers. Given its inferior economic and resource base relative to its rivals, this would inevitably touch off an economic competition that Germany ultimately could not win. Time was, thus, not on Germany’s side, as any initial military advantage would not last. Hitler, however, believed that the only solution to Germany’s dilemma lay in expansion, so the time factor merely dictated action sooner rather than later. Despite, or perhaps because of, its precarious financial, food, and raw material situation, Germany, Hitler believed, had to escape the restrictions of Central Europe through force.19