Hitler

by Brendan Simms

  The racial struggle which Germany had just lost, and she desperately needed to win the next time around, was therefore not primarily that between German and Slav or Jew, but the conflict between the Germans and an Anglo-America enriched by the most racially valuable elements of German society. It was, although Hitler did not quite put it that way, the confrontation between Teuton and Anglo-Saxon.

  This is what Hitler was referring to in Mein Kampf when he spoke of the future ‘general war struggle of the peoples’. He meant the final showdown not with the Jews, but rather with the other so-called Aryan or Nordic powers, namely Britain and the United States. ‘If two peoples which are [racially] similarly inclined [i.e. both are Aryan] compete with each other,’ he wrote, ‘then victory will go to the one whose leadership has drawn on the best talents available,’ whereas defeat awaited the people ‘whose leadership was no more than a giant feeding trough for particular estates and classes’, without consideration for the ability of its individual member.’ If possible, however, such a confrontation should be avoided and he warned of ‘hatred against Aryans, from whom we might be divided on almost every issue’, and yet with whom Germans were ‘connected by shared blood’ and a ‘common culture’.97 Here it was the deadly narcissism of small racial difference that Hitler feared, especially as he believed Anglo-America to be the stronger of the two sides, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

  It is in this context of Hitler’s overarching preoccupation with Britain and the United States that Hitler’s anti-Semitism should primarily be understood. He associated Jews not only with Anglo-American international capitalism, but also with the rise of racial false consciousness in the British Empire and the United States. In Mein Kampf, Hitler spoke of ‘a Manchester liberalism of Jewish mindset’. He further claimed that ‘Jews are the regents of the stock exchange forces of the American Union’, who became with every passing year increasingly the ‘controllers of the working power of a people of 120 million’. It was this power, Hitler argued, that enabled them to turn the immense force of Anglo-America against their fellow Aryans in the Reich. The ultimate aim, he claimed, drawing explicitly on the old conspiracy theory of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was the implementation of an ‘action programme’ for their plans for ‘world conquest’ based on ‘the extermination of peoples’.98 Worse still, as we have seen, the Jews allegedly undermined Germany at home, politically, culturally and racially, reducing her resistance to outside domination. Even on its own terms, of course, this theory suffered from some obvious internal contradictions. If the Jews were so inherently parasitical and disintegrative, why had they not also enfeebled Anglo-America? Conversely, if Anglo-America was as strong as he made out, then why had it not rid itself of the Jews? Be that as it may, Hitler’s belief in the Anglo-American-Jewish symbiosis was sincerely held.

  Much of this merely repeated what Hitler had been saying for some time, even if at greater length and with some important elaborations. The dangers of emigration and the power of Anglo-America had been among his earliest themes in 1919–20, and if they had been somewhat obscured by the dramas of 1921–3, they re-emerged with new vigour in the mid 1920s. Hatred of the Jews, the distinction between national and international capitalism, the need for territorial expansion to balance the great world empires and unions, the inadequacy of a purely economic or colonial response to the threats facing Germany, warnings about the dangers of domestic division, attacks on federalism and separatism, hostility to the Habsburgs, the primacy of foreign policy, the sense of Germany’s national enslavement by the Entente and international capitalism, fear of encirclement, the need for an Italian alliance, the importance of propaganda, and the Führer concept were hardy perennials.99 So were his rejection of alliances with the other global ‘have-nots’, parliamentarism and elections, the restoration of the monarchy and aristocracy, the League of Nations or global governance generally, Zionism, and the nostrums offered by the mainstream conservative nationalist right. These themes remained part of Hitler’s repertoire, to varying degrees, right down to the end in 1945.

  That said, there were important shifts evident in Hitler’s thinking. Some topics were receding. There was less emphasis on the racial danger posed by French colonial forces of occupation, and indeed on the threat of French domination more generally; this peaked in 1921–3. German separatism, especially the Bavarian variety, remained a concern, but it never reached the fever pitch consuming Hitler just before and after the Munich Putsch. Some important new themes were also visible. In part, these reflected the changed political and geopolitical situation, or were made possible by them. If Hitler had once expected a nationalist restoration of the old Russia, and an end to ‘Judaeo-Bolshevik’ domination in the interests of international capital, he was now convinced that the Russian Revolution was there to stay. He stepped up his anti-communist broadsides, and while he never changed his view that Bolshevism was essentially an instrument of international capitalism, a superstructural phenomenon, Hitler did assign it a greater relative autonomy from then on. He spoke of the ‘world plague of Bolshevism’, the need for an ‘ideological war of destruction against Marxism and its puppeteers’ and proclaimed the NSDAP the ‘fanatical mortal foe of Marxism’.100

  Crucially, Hitler was referring here to the threat of global communism, which in his view was directed from London and New York, in the interests of international capitalism, or the threat of a communist takeover in Germany, either electorally or by force of arms. Hitler still did not identify the Soviet Union itself as a serious military challenge, however, and–at this time at any rate–he spoke generally of ‘Marxism’ rather than of the more specifically Russian ‘Bolshevism’. The main purpose of his anti-communist rhetoric, therefore, was not so much to appeal to the German bourgeoisie as to demonstrate to the various party factions that the situation in eastern Europe had changed, and that Nazi grand strategy must change with it. An alliance with Russia, a stock demand not only of the Conservative right, but also of the more left-wing party element such as Goebbels and the Strassers, was ruled out as pointless and even pernicious; here Hitler explicitly rejected the Bismarckian tradition.101 More importantly, the continuing weakness of Russia now provided an opportunity to address Germany’s crucial geopolitical weakness, the lack of space to accommodate her alleged demographic surplus.

  The solution, Hitler argued, lay in overcoming the mismatch between space and population growth in Germany. ‘We find ourselves today in a world of emerging great powers [he meant something close to the concept of ‘superpowers’],’ he wrote, ‘in which our own Reich is declining ever more into irrelevance’ because of its small size. ‘Only a sufficiently large space on this earth secures a people’s freedom of existence’ in the context of its geopolitical exposure. For this reason, he claimed, ‘the National Socialist movement must try to eliminate the discrepancy between our population and the size of our territory,’ both from the perspective of ‘food supply’ and from the strategic point of view. He had already rejected the Caprivian idea of exporting goods rather than people, and the return of colonies. Both solutions, Hitler argued, were vulnerable to naval and commercial coercion by Anglo-America. He also dismissed the standard nationalist demand for a restoration of the borders of 1914, which would do no more than simply restore the unsatisfactory geopolitical constellation under which the Reich had lost the war.102

  Instead, he called for territorial expansion–‘living space’103–within Europe, contiguous or nearly so with the German Reich, to wit in ‘Russia and her vassal states’. He summarized all this in a concluding passage which subsequently became notorious. ‘With this,’ he concluded, ‘we Germans consciously draw a line beneath the foreign policy of the pre-war period.’ ‘We start,’ he continued, ‘where one stopped six hundred years ago. We will end the eternal march of the Germans to the south and west of Europe and turn our eyes to the land in the east.’ ‘We will finally end the trade and colonial policy of the pre-war period,’ Hitler went on,
‘and go over to the territorial policy of the future.’ Here he had in mind ‘in the first instance only Russia and the neighbouring states subject to it’.104

  Here Hitler meant neither Poland nor Czechoslovakia, but the Soviet Union. It was singled out not because it was the chief Jewish enemy, but for the entirely opposite reason that Jewish subversion there had rendered the territory ripe for takeover by Germany. The Soviet Union was to be attacked because it was weak, not because it was a threat. To be sure, Hitler, who had hitherto shown no hostility towards Slavs as such, now expressed a racial antagonism against them, albeit much milder than that which he showed towards the Jews. In Mein Kampf he attributed the historic strength of the Russian state to the ‘state effectiveness of the [mainly Baltic] Germanic element in an inferior race’,105 which had been ‘completely exterminated and extinguished’ by the Revolution. It is also true that he preached the need to extirpate world communism, but here he had a more global threat in mind (more virulent in the democratic and capitalist west) than a specifically Soviet one. The crucial point is that Hitler did not primarily justify the quest for Lebensraum with the inherent inferiority of the Slav population there, as an ideological war against Bolshevism, or even as a first step towards the annihilation of the Jews in Europe. His main motive was that Germany, weak herself, would in his view have to colonize her even weaker neighbour before she was herself completely enslaved. Hitler targeted the Soviet Union not so much for what it was (ideologically), as for where it lay (geographically). There was, so to speak, nothing personal about it.

  His aim throughout was not world domination, but simple national survival. There was, Hitler averred, no room for half-measures. Germany would have to be a world power, or she would go completely under. The half-measures and restraint of Bismarck’s times, he argued, were outdated in a world of global empires. ‘Germany will either be a world power or nothing,’ Hitler wrote, ‘but to be a world power one needs the necessary size.’ This meant, he concluded, that ‘the German people will only be able to guarantee their future through world power’.106 Hitler may have spoken privately of his hopes for world hegemony, but this was probably bluster.107 It is more likely that, at least at this stage, Hitler did not envisage ‘world domination’ by Germany, as opposed to the ‘world power’ status necessary for her very survival.

  To sum up: the driving force behind Hitler’s strategy in the mid 1920s, as in the period immediately after the First World War, remained fear and admiration of Anglo-America. Lebensraum in the east would kill two birds with one stone. First, it would provide Germany with the critical territorial mass necessary to balance the American Union and the British Empire, and to some extent that of France as well. Secondly, eastward expansion would secure the raw materials and especially the farmland necessary to feed the German demographic surplus. Eastern colonization was the answer to pernicious transatlantic and antipodean migration. Hitler was proposing to strike east, but he was really looking west.

  Hitler’s geopolitical shift towards Lebensraum in the mid 1920s was matched by an equally important transformation, or at least elaboration, in his thinking about domestic politics. This was his increasingly evident racial pessimism about the German people. He lamented ‘our own fragmentation of the blood’ as the result of ‘centuries of racial decay’. Germany’s internal divisions since the Reformation, Hitler argued, and the resulting external interference, had subverted the Aryan character of her people. ‘With the Thirty Years War,’ he claimed, ‘a slow decline of our national power began.’ The Reich was torn apart by confessional, class, political and regional differences. Worse still, Germany’s exposed geopolitical position left her vulnerable to constant racial contamination. ‘The geographically disadvantageous location of Germany,’ he argued, ‘facilitates a continuous influx which naturally results in hundreds of thousands of bastards.’ Moreover, in his view the weakness of Germany meant that there was no effective immigration control. ‘Everybody,’ he complained, ‘is indiscriminately admitted into Germany.’108

  As if all this were not bad enough, the German people was further weakened by mass emigration because it was always the best and brightest who left. ‘Hundreds and thousands of the best elements,’ he lamented, ‘were lost to our people for all time and with it we perhaps lost the most valuable [and] most energetic blood.’ In Mein Kampf he wrote that ‘experience has shown’ that it was usually the ‘healthiest and most energetic’ who emigrated. The result, Hitler argued, was that ‘our German people are no longer based on a unitary racial core’, so that the basic racial elements were diffused not only territorially, but also within territories. In Germany, he went on, ‘we find Slavic next to Nordic, Dinaric next to Slavic, western next to both of these and [various] mixtures interspersed’. 109 The German Volk was thus not co-terminous with the Nordic race. On the contrary, it was in his view locked into a downward racial spiral, in which the path dependency of uninterrupted racial decline rendered the Reich incapable of preventing further contamination and emigration.

  Hitler’s preoccupation with Anglo-America only sharpened this sense of German racial inadequacy. He admired the ‘racial instincts in foreign countries’ by which the people rallied in ‘critical moments’ by ‘thinking the same thing and coming to the same decisions’, because in the end ‘the language of blood will out’. Here he had in mind particularly those who could look back on a long, unbroken national history. ‘That is not the case in Germany,’ he claimed, ‘that is the case in Britain,’ which had risen continuously over the past 300 years. ‘In this way,’ Hitler continued, ‘the British nation could fuse into a unity whose granite-like ability to resist could no longer be shaken.’ Unlike the Germans, it was ‘belief and pride’ which united the British.110 Hitler, in other words, was in no doubt that the British, and their descendants in North America, enjoyed a substantially higher average racial value than the German people.

  This sense of hierarchy was confirmed by his engagement with American racial theorists. Hitler was familiar with Madison Grant, whose sensational Passing of the Great Race was translated into German and widely discussed in 1925, though it seems that the racial chapters of Mein Kampf were already complete by then.111 Grant’s book is usually taken as a contribution to anti-black racism in America, but its most remarkable feature was the author’s clear stratification of the white races, and his unflattering view of the quality of German immigrants. According to him, only about 9 or 10 million Germans out of a total of some 70 million in 1914 were truly Nordic. This categorization gave considerable offence in 1920s Germany, especially on the right, but Hitler accepted the analysis. ‘On the strength of the work of an American scholar [Grant] who proves that Germany hardly contains 9 to 10 million really Nordic-Aryan people,’ Hitler argued, ‘the American Union has established the immigration quotas. It privileges those from the Scandinavian countries, from Britain and only in third place those from Germany because it is already racially inferior.’ He noted with approval that, unlike Germany, the United States ‘does not allow every Polish Jew to immigrate’ but ‘puts a limit on numbers’.112 There was no contradiction between this view and Hitler’s despair about emigration. The Germans who went to the United States might be inferior to the resident Anglo-Saxons, but they were the best of a bad lot, he thought.

  There was, in his view, a silver lining to this dark racial cloud. There had at least not been a ‘crossbreeding’ at the level of the lowest common denominator, creating a ‘general racial mish-mash’. The ‘blessing’ of this absence of ‘complete [racial] mixing’ was that we ‘today still have in the body of the German people large quantities of unadulterated Nordic-German people who constitute our most important treasure for the future’. Once Hitler came to power, the mining of that treasure was to be as important as the removal of what he considered racial dross. For now, the uneasy co-existence of various so-called unassimilated elements in the German people meant that ‘at least part of our best blood remained pure and escaped racial
decline’. This left open the possibility of selecting and multiplying the best strains in the existing German Volk. Hitler therefore defined the ‘truly supreme mission’ of the National Socialist state as putting the German people on a racially sound basis. ‘The German Reich,’ he wrote, should be a state ‘encompassing all Germans with the task not only of collecting and maintaining the most valuable original racial elements but also of slowly and surely raising these to a dominant position.’113 In other words, for Hitler, eliminating the Jews and other ‘undesirable’ elements was a necessary but not a sufficient condition for racial salvation. It was the perceived racial fragility of the German people itself, especially when contrasted to the vitality of Anglo-America, which was his greatest concern.

  From now on, Hitler’s racial thought and later racial policy would have two linked but separate planks. His ‘negative eugenics’ sought to eliminate the allegedly negative through the removal of ‘inferior’ elements deemed ‘harmful’ to the racial body politic, especially Jews, but also gypsies, the disabled and the insane.114 His ‘positive eugenics’ sought to accentuate the positive, by elevating the allegedly ‘superior’ elements. Hitler started from his crucial distinction between the German Volk–which in his view was made up of many different racial strands–and the Nordic or Aryan race–which only constituted a minority within it. One way or the other, he warned in the penultimate paragraph of Mein Kampf, ‘a state which devotes itself to the care of its best racial elements in an age of [general] racial contamination will one day became the lord of the world’.115 This was a role which Hitler would have very much liked to claim for Germany, but his fear was that it would go to the United States.

  Hitler’s solution to all this was not based on any sort of Germanic, esoteric or supernatural faddery; these theories helped Germans to transcend their ‘subaltern’ European status after 1918.116 Unlike many contemporary ‘Völkisch’ activists, and some later prominent National Socialists, especially the subsequent SS leader Heinrich Himmler, Hitler had little time for abstruse Aryan theories or the celebration of the ancient Germanic tribes. In Mein Kampf, Hitler made fun of these enthusiasts. ‘If anything is “unvölkisch”,’ he wrote, ‘then it is this throwing around of particularly old Germanic expressions.’ He lampooned the ‘German-Völkisch wandering scholars’ and the ‘Völkisch Methuselahs’. Hitler sneered at ‘old Germanic heroism, from time immemorial [with] stone axes etc.’ as portrayed by bearded ‘Völkisch comedians’. Hitler also rejected the old strategies of Germanization. ‘Nationality, or rather race,’ he explained, ‘doesn’t lie in language but in the blood.’ He insisted, in a phrase that was to resonate later, that ‘Germanization could only be carried on on the soil and not on the individual’.117