Hitler

by Brendan Simms

  There was also, however, an open acknowledgement of the tactical nature of the anti-Semitic theme.71 The focus on a ‘single aim’, that is on the Jews, Hitler explained, was ‘practically’ motivated. The masses, Hitler explained, were in fact very differentiated. Many might sign up to the fight against the Jews and Marxism, but the minute one added further goals, people would start peeling off, until the mass had fragmented. It was therefore essential to stick to a single, simple aim. Moreover, unlike the more confident British, Hitler argued, the German people was particularly prone to an ‘objectivity hang-up’ and might be tempted by the sheer number of enemies into thinking that they were themselves in the wrong. For this reason, he concluded, it was ‘essential with a people like the Germans to point to one enemy and to march against one enemy’, because ‘one can if necessary mean many with one enemy’. Hitler returned to this theme in Mein Kampf, when he said that ‘for purely emotional reasons one should not show the masses two or more enemies, because this would otherwise lead to a complete fragmentation of their striking power’.72 The tactical use of anti-Semitism was also evident in another respect. When it was likely to put off potential backers, such as the well-to-do audience at the Nationalklub of 1919 in Hamburg, it was quietly dropped.73

  Be that as it may, anti-Semitism remained at the core of Hitler’s world view. He claimed the Jews brought the full weight of diplomatic, press, revolutionary and racial pressures to bear on national states that refused to submit. They began with domestic torments, such as parliamentarism, the press and the trade unions, which Hitler regarded as ‘instruments’ of the Jews, and ‘Marxism’, their ‘assault column’ and ‘principal weapon’, whose ‘final aim remains the destruction of the non-Jewish national states’. Here Hitler was reprising his earlier argument that communism was simply an instrument of international capitalism, speaking of ‘Marxism as a weapon for the demolition of the national economy and the erection of the rule of loan capitalism’. Hence his hostility to the trade unions, which Marxism had turned into an instrument to ‘smash the economic basis of the free and independent national states, in order to destroy their national industry and their national trade as part of the enslavement of free peoples in the service of a supranational world finance Jewry’.74 Hitler’s rhetoric was thus far more anti-capitalist than anti-communist: references to Dawes in his speeches dwarfed those to Lenin at this time.75 He continued to fear Bolshevism, not in the form of the Red Army, but principally as a virus which would render Germany ripe for takeover by the forces of international capitalism.

  Worse still, Hitler claimed, international capitalism sought to destroy the German bloodline by ‘contamination through Negro blood on the Rhine’ (an allusion to colonial soldiers in the French forces of occupation) in order to ‘begin the bastardization of the European continent from its central point’. Contamination of the blood, he warned, could only be removed in the course of ‘centuries, if at all’. In this narrative, German mass emigration took on a particular importance. Hitler saw it as part of a concerted plan to destroy the biological substance of German people going back centuries. ‘The German people had to send out their sons,’ Hitler lamented, with the result that for some three hundred years, Germans had served as ‘beasts of burden for other nations’ and had moved to ‘Australia, Central America and South America’.76 He would return to this theme over and over in the years to come.

  The main great power enemies of the Reich, according to Hitler, were not the Soviet Union, France or any other continental European state, but the British Empire and what he generally referred to as the ‘American Union’. This enmity was complex, and it would not be exaggerated to speak of a love-hate relationship. Hitler deeply admired Anglo-America. He did not believe, though he sometimes affected to, that Germany had been defeated solely as a result of domestic dissensions. On the contrary, he frequently paid tribute to the strength and bravery of the enemy he had faced during the war.77 One of his criticisms of German propaganda during the contest had been its portrayal of the British as a nation of cowardly shopkeepers. Hitler lambasted the ‘newspapers and satirical magazines’ for their ‘high degree of self-deception because this nonsense gradually infected everything else, and the result was an under-estimation’ of the British. The Germans, he lamented, came to believe that they were facing an ‘unbelievably cowardly businessman’. Reality was very different. ‘I still remember well,’ Hitler continued, ‘the surprised faces of my comrades when we met face to face with the Tommies in Flanders’, when they found the British soldier to be a much more formidable proposition than they had expected. If the individual Briton was tough and courageous, collectively they were formidable. The British Empire, in Hitler’s judgement, which was widely shared at the time, was simply the ‘greatest power on earth’. ‘How difficult it is,’ he elaborated, ‘to beat the British, we Germans know only too well.’78

  It was therefore hardly surprising that Mein Kampf and Hitler’s speeches were concerned with examining the basis for Britain’s superiority. Partly, it was a question of will. Hitler praised the ‘brutality’–a compliment in his lexicon–of Lloyd George in the war. He admired Britain’s willingness to continue the struggle, despite the U-boat threat, ‘whatever it costs’. Partly, it was a matter of clever propaganda. Hitler spoke of the ‘psychological superiority of the Briton’, who had defined the war as one for ‘freedom’ against German despotism. Partly, it was a question of careful strategy, a husbanding of resources. Hitler noted approvingly that the British invested their blood wisely and sparingly, pushing others to the front first. It would be, however, ‘a stupidity to believe that the Briton will never be ready to sacrifice his own’. ‘He will commit his blood,’ he claimed, ‘when it becomes necessary to do so.’ Partly, it was a matter of superior national coherence. ‘When the fur begins to fly,’ he noted, ‘the British unite as a race’; not so the Germans. Hitler lauded British social legislation as pioneering because it ‘preserved the British people for the British state’. The success of this policy, he argued, had been seen during the war when British workers had been largely patriotic. Partly, it was the ability of Britain to secure a huge global empire and to turn it to her political and military advantage in Europe. Here Hitler spoke of the ‘characteristic of British statecraft to turn political power into economic gain, and to convert every economic gain immediately back into political power’.79

  Hitler was well aware of the centrality of parliament to British history and her strength in the world. He spoke of ‘England, the land of classical “democracy”’, as the ‘model of this [sort of] entity’. Hitler claimed that as a young man, his extensive newspaper reading had given him, ‘a certain enduring admiration for the British parliament’. That admiration was still clearly visible in the mid 1920s. Hitler had at least a passing acquaintance with the layout and decor of the Palace of Westminster, which he found aesthetically more pleasing than the Austro-Hungarian assembly. ‘When Barry first let his parliamentary palace rise out of the waters of the Thames,’ he wrote, ‘he reached into the history of the British Empire’ to find inspiration for the ‘1,200 niches, corbels and pillars’. ‘In this way,’ he continued, Westminster ‘became a temple to the glory of the nation.’80 Paradoxically, Hitler regarded ‘parliamentarism’ as ruinous to German unity, but central to British power. The apparent contradiction is resolved by the fact that he believed the more coherent British were ready for democracy in ways that the Germans were not.

  Hitler’s admiration for Britain and its empire was matched, and in many ways exceeded, by his admiration for the United States. This did not stem from any Karl-May-style ‘wild-west’ romanticism on Hitler’s part, but rather expressed his belief in the modernity and vast industrial potential of the New World.81 Reflecting his growing preoccupation with ‘space’, Hitler was mesmerized by the sheer scale of America. The future of the world belonged to the ‘giant states’ and first among them was the US.82 In one speech he contrasted ‘how ridiculously small
the area of current German settlement was, which one could traverse north to south by car in eighteen hours, while the express trains of the United States required six days in order to get from one ocean to the other’. In Mein Kampf he referred to the ‘incredible internal power’ of the ‘American Union’, and the ‘gigantic colossus of the American state with its huge treasures of virgin soil’. Here Hitler was referring not so much to minerals as to food security. ‘In North America,’ he argued, ‘which has gigantic grain-producing areas, it is not like with us.’ There you found ‘the best soil for growing grain, which does not need to be fertilized, earth which one farmed with the best machinery’.83

  The principal reason for the strength of the United States, Hitler believed, was demographic. It was peopled by the allegedly racially sound descendants of British emigrants, and the best elements of continental Europe. In Mein Kampf, Hitler spoke of the ‘opening up of the American continent’ by ‘Aryans’. Foremost among these, at least numerically, were the Germans forced out by lack of living space at home in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the oppressions of international capitalism in the twentieth century. ‘Over centuries,’ he wrote, ‘the German emigrated to the other world [a shorthand for the Anglo-Saxon capitalist world] as the fertilizer for other peoples, as the cultural fertilizer for other nations.’ ‘This migration to America,’ he told an audience on the subject of German emigration, ‘made that country great.’ Moreover, it had been the best who left. ‘Endless droves of German farmers’ sons went across the great water, across the Ocean to America,’ Hitler claimed, ‘this flow lasted for centuries and it involved the best elements which our people possessed.’ Hitler’s belief in the German contribution to the growth of the United States was so great that, repeating a tenacious canard in contemporary discourse, he claimed German had nearly become the language of the young Republic.84

  Hitler was well aware, of course, that the establishment of the United States had only been possible through the expropriation, deportation and murder of the native American Indians. ‘Three hundred years ago,’ he argued, ‘New York was a fishing village’ when ‘more and more people moved west and took possession of a new world’. ‘This did not happen through peaceful discussion,’ Hitler continued, but through the use of ‘firearms and not least of firewater [meaning alcohol] until the red nation [Native Americans] succumbed’. ‘Then one criss-crossed the area with a system of roads and railways,’ Hitler went on, ‘and there followed the founding of gigantic cities, until finally the white race controlled the entire continent, which today represents a cornerstone of the white race.’ He accused the pacifists, socialists and liberals who had fled Germany for America of ‘forgetting’ that it was a country which had not been presented to the ‘white man’ by a ‘host of angels’, but rather taken from the ‘redskins’ with ‘powder and shot’, and brandy.85 Hitler, in short, believed that American power rested on the violent seizure of land originally belonging to another people.

  The price of demographic purity was eternal racial vigilance.86 Here again, Hitler saw the United States as paradigmatic. Claiming that ‘the result of every mixture of blood of the Aryan with lower peoples was the end of that culture’, he contrasted ‘North America, whose population consists largely of Germanic elements, which only mixed very little with lower coloured races’, with Central and South America, where the mainly Latin immigrants had allegedly engaged in a much more profound mixing with the original population. He therefore concluded that ‘the racially pure and unadulterated Germanic [inhabitant] rose to be master of the American [and] will remain master so long as he did not fall victim to contamination (Blutschande)’. Her immigration legislation, he noted approvingly, specifically discriminated against Asians, coloured and especially east European migrants. This was by no means enough, Hitler averred, but far better than the German situation. ‘Because the American Union refuses entry to medically poor elements,’ he wrote, and ‘simply excludes certain races from citizenship, she is already taking the idea of a Völkisch state in embryonic form.’ Hitler therefore saw the United States as the best example of the ‘survival instinct’ of the ‘white man’ and the most effective bulwark against the ‘negrification’ of the world.87

  If racial degeneracy could generally be traced to some sort of miscegenation, Hitler also believed that it could also result from behavioural flaws. High on his list of vices was alcohol, which he regarded as an agent of corruption. ‘Alcohol,’ he claimed, ‘is harmful to humanity’ and had ‘already destroyed’ many more valuable Germans over the century than had been lost on the battlefield in the same period. ‘Alcohol,’ Hitler continued, ‘is one of the worst causes of degeneration,’ and he referred once again to the ‘gruesome examples of the history of various colonial peoples’.88 For this reason, Hitler was deeply impressed by the introduction of Prohibition in the United States in 1920, following a series of state-level bans in preceding decades. This set him apart not only from the beer- and wine-drinking German mainstream, but also from German-America, for whom the resulting loss of the beer-garden culture was particularly traumatic.89 The Americans, he argued, took better care of the development of their race. ‘A whole continent has declared war on alcohol poisoning,’ Hitler wrote, ‘in order to release a people from the devastating grip of this vice.’ He warned that ‘if the European states did not soon solve the alcohol question in the American sense, then America will completely rule the world in 100 years’.90

  Hitler was also deeply impressed by what he regarded as the American socio-economic model, whose merits he had already acknowledged in Landsberg. Unlike hidebound Germany, it provided the opportunity for the development of talents across the social spectrum. ‘If in the last decades the number of important inventions has increased especially in North America,’ he argued, then this was not least due to the fact that ‘many more talents from the lower classes enjoyed the chance of higher education than was the case in Europe.’ American modernity was evident particularly in the rapid motorization of the continent: here Hitler claimed that ‘there was one car per inhabitant in North America’. Unlike many contemporary critics of technological change, Hitler saw it as an unalloyed good. To those who claimed ‘that new technology led to ever more unemployed’ he countered that ‘these inventions in turn created new jobs’. In particular, he celebrated Henry Ford, whose employees were able to afford their own car and home. This made them immune to the revolutionary virus. The American worker had thus been ‘nationalized’,91 an achievement which Hitler hoped to replicate in Germany.

  Hitler not only admired and feared Britain and the United States individually, he also regarded them as fundamentally akin. They enjoyed, though he himself did not quite put it that way, a ‘special relationship’. Hitler did speak specifically of the ‘sense of linguistic and cultural community’ between Britain and the ‘American Union’. Hitler described them collectively as ‘Anglo-Saxons’ and spoke of ‘the past drive of the Anglo-Saxon to establish world domination’. His main concern, therefore, was the power of Anglo-America: how it could be imitated, reconciled, appeased, deterred, contained or at the very least delayed. He attributed Germany’s defeat in 1918 to a combination of British skill in marshalling a global coalition before the conflict, her courage and ‘brutality’ during the war and her ability to undermine Germany from within, supported by American economic intervention from the start. He also claimed that shortly after the outbreak of war in 1914 ‘American shrapnel’ exploded over the heads of the German columns.92

  The main threat posed by Anglo-America was not industrial, however, but demographic. The descendants of the Germans whom the Reich had exported in the nineteenth century for want of land to feed them were now on the Anglo-American side. ‘Whether it is 9 or 10 million Germans live in the North American Union is hard to say,’ he claimed, ‘but these Germans were lost to Germany from the start.’ Hitler made a list of all the Germans living overseas. He claimed that the shells which had detonated over
his head in the autumn of 1914 were ‘produced in American factories with German workers at the machines’.93 The topic of ‘German engineers’ working for the American war economy was one to which he would return much later in his career.

  More importantly, Hitler believed that Germany’s demographic surplus had recrossed the Atlantic to fight against the Reich as American soldiers during the final stages of the war. In the mid and late 1920s, Hitler repeatedly came back to the moment ‘in the midsummer of 1918, when the first American soldiers appeared on the battlefields of France, well-grown men, men of our own blood, whom we had deported for centuries, who were now ready to grind the motherland itself into the mud.’94 ‘These lads, blond and blue-eyed, who are they really?’ he asked on another occasion, making the racial connection explicit. ‘They are all former German farmers’ sons. Now they are our enemies.’95 Moreover, the Germans who had left were always ‘the best’ (‘das Beste’), the most dynamic elements. ‘That all added up,’ he argued, ‘and gave a new continent a particular high-value character. We encountered it 1918 on the western front.’96 The world war, one might say, had effectively been a German civil war. It was the ur-trauma which drove so much of his subsequent policy and programme.