Hitler

by Brendan Simms

  The main vehicle of Anglo-American enslavement remained Hitler’s old bugbear, international capitalism, and its directing mind, world Jewry. ‘We know the relationships between these families,’ he thundered at the height of the election campaign, ‘the Warburgs and Friedländer from Berlin to New York.’ ‘If these people agree among themselves,’ he continued, ‘then the end of the German people is at hand.’ In Germany itself, the principal instrument of coercion was the reparations regime. Hitler’s main target here was Parker Gilbert, whose interventions into the parliamentary budgetary discussions had made him something of a hate figure in German society and politics. When Gilbert criticized the Reichstag for debating an increase in civil service pay, Hitler fumed that ‘we are just an international colony, which is exposed to foreign arbitrariness and international exploitation’. He complained that Germany was compelled to hand over ‘entire national properties as collateral for international Jewish big capital’. He accused the government of having ‘mortgaged the entire socialist republic’ just as it had ‘already handed over the German Reichsbahn with all its income to international capital’.12

  The NSDAP therefore sidestepped any discussion of economic specifics by arguing that it all came down to politics in the end, in other words, the lost war. Germany’s domestic constitution, the party claimed, was determined by the structures of international governance imposed upon her. ‘Do not speak to me of the Weimar constitution,’ Hitler demanded, ‘our three constitutions are: peace treaty, Dawes Plan and Locarno Pact. Those are the three constitutions according to which Germany is governed.’13 End Germany’s political subjection by the global powers that be, the Nazis argued, and all political, economic or social issues would resolve themselves. When the votes were counted in May 1928, however, it was clear that the Nazis had suffered a catastrophic defeat. The gains made during the 1924 elections were wiped out. It appeared as if the Germans were not looking for a new political movement, a new idea or a new leader after all. To all intents and purposes Nazism seemed extinct as an electoral phenomenon.

  To make matters worse, the Nazi Party in 1928 was only slightly less divided than it had been during and immediately after Hitler’s incarceration in Landsberg. The main fractures persisted, and others were soon to appear. Foreign policy was still hotly disputed. Some agreed with Rosenberg that Russia was an ideological enemy to be despoiled; others saw the Soviet Union as a potential ally against Anglo-America. The South Tyrol issue continued to give trouble.14 A new subject of contention was European unity, which found widespread support in the NSDAP.15 Goebbels had looked forward to a time ‘when we have liberated ourselves [and] we can speak of the United States of Europe [as] equal partners’.16 The most ardent supporters of European unity, however, were the Strasser brothers, Otto and Gregor, who saw it as the key to repelling not so much Bolshevik Russia, as the all-consuming ambition of Anglo-American capitalism.

  Hitler was also plagued by turf wars and personal squabbles. The perennial bad penny here was Julius Streicher, whose behaviour in Nuremberg outraged even the local party elite, especially the SA, not to mention the rest of the political spectrum. Hitler tried to avoid being sucked in, and in fact gave the city a wide berth for most of 1928. When one of Streicher’s rivals founded a separate Ortsgruppe Nuremberg-Mitte in opposition to Streicher, he merely remarked that ‘this would mean the end of all organization’,17 but did not intervene. It was only after Streicher came out on top that Hitler went to the Franconian capital to shake Streicher’s hand in public and to put the seal on his victory.18 That, however, was not the end of the matter. Later in the year, the party’s arbitration committee was called upon to investigate an anonymous claim that Streicher was conducting ‘champagne parties’ at party expense, but also spreading false rumours about Hitler’s sexual overtures to women. The initiators appear to have been partisans of Artur Dinter, who had been sacked as Gauleiter of neighbouring Thuringia for his attack on the churches. He was now expelled from the party altogether. Streicher had survived again, but he was such a divisive character that it would not be long before his authority was challenged once more.

  If Franconia was essentially a sideshow, albeit a particularly lurid one, the disputes between Berlin and Munich, and increasingly within the Berlin party, were more serious. This was partly about policy, with the more ‘left-wing’ northerners pitched against the more conservative southerners. It was also a question of culture and access, however. ‘Munich is governed by a terrible bureaucracy,’ Goebbels wrote in disgust, ‘and the chief is surrounded by a camarilla.’ The main problem, though, was the growing stagfight in Berlin itself between the two ‘left’ factions, around Goebbels and the Strasser brothers. This was essentially a struggle for control of the party propaganda apparatus. Once again, Hitler was repeatedly called upon to intervene. ‘There is no way of dealing with Dr Strasser,’ Goebbels complained, ‘that skunk is too crafty and too mean. Now Hitler will have to lay down the law.’ ‘No answer yet from Hitler,’ he noted disconsolately. When none came, Goebbels considered resignation.19 These rows were complicated by deep differences over economic and social affairs, with Goebbels and the Strasser brothers still prominent on the anti-capitalist ‘left’ of the party. They were all, in different ways, enthusiasts for ‘Europe’, which they saw as the repository of cultural and racial value not so much against Soviet Russia, with which they continued to feel a sense of affinity, as against the Anglo-American capitalist ‘west’.

  Hitler did not welcome these and other disputes as an opportunity to divide and rule. On the contrary, he saw them as a waste of his own time and a mortal threat to the unity of the movement. Hitler therefore seized the opportunity of the 1928 Reichstag election campaign to make another attempt to re-establish ideological coherence, to reassert his own authority and to set out a path for German recovery. It was typical of his approach to focus not on the immediate issues of the day but on broad ideological principles.20 Hitler’s text ‘Determination of [our] Standpoint after the Reichstag Election’, later known to English audiences as the ‘Secret’ and then the ‘Second Book’, was begun in the summer of 1928, when Hitler took himself off to the Obersalzberg. ‘Wolf [Hitler] is in Berchtesgaden,’ Winifred Wagner wrote, ‘and is writing a new book, which I am to receive as a birthday present. Hess, who has already had a read, thinks a lot of it.’21

  Work continued on the manuscript intermittently for about eighteen months. It drew on many themes that he had long rehearsed in his speeches and publications. Like Mein Kampf, the Second Book needs to be seen in the context of his many other pronouncements at the time, some of which found their way into the text. Its composition also reflects Hitler’s continuing conception of himself as a ‘writer’.22 He was a man of the spoken word, to be sure, but he was also given to programmatic statements and, in his own way, profound thought about the state of the world and Germany’s place in it. The resulting text, when taken together with Hitler’s other statements throughout the mid and late 1920s, is absolutely critical to understanding the development of his thinking and the path which Nazism took after 1933.

  The main focus of the text was the overwhelming power of Anglo-America, and especially of the United States. This theme had been present in Mein Kampf, and especially in subsequent speeches, but it now completely dominated Hitler’s thinking. ‘The American Union,’ Hitler argued, ‘has created a power factor of such dimensions that it threatens to overthrow all previous state power rankings’, and had the capacity to challenge even the British Empire. This was partly a question of space. Thanks to the expulsion and extermination of the Native Americans, Hitler argued, land was plentiful. ‘The relationship between the population size and territorial extent of the American continent,’ he wrote, ‘is much more favourable than the analogous relationship of the European peoples to their living spaces.’ Moreover, Hitler added, the United States had great potential for further growth. It contained ‘40 to 50 per cent of all available natural resources’, and i
ts industry not only benefited from a huge domestic market, but was also highly competitive on the world stage. ‘The American Union’, Hitler claimed, was no longer just focused on its ‘internal market’ but now ‘appeared as a world competitor, advantaged by its sources of raw materials, which are as unlimited as they are cheap’.23

  Anglo-American superiority was also a question of race. As we have seen, Hitler had come to believe, and continued to believe until the end of his life, in the high racial value of the British, the ‘Anglo-Saxons’, who were one of the world’s ‘master races’. Throughout the late 1920s, he returned to their economic, military, diplomatic, colonial and political strength again and again. The key to British power, however, was demographic. Hitler spoke admiringly of the ‘racial value of Anglo-Saxondom as such’, which constantly thirsted for ‘space’ in order to escape their ‘insular location’. The British, he said, had attempted expansion in Europe but had been frustrated by racially ‘no less’ valuable states; here he may have had the failure of the English medieval empire in France in mind. So instead, London had embarked on a colonial policy whose main aim was to find ‘outlets for British human material’ while ‘maintaining their link to the motherland’–something which Germany, on his reading, had spectacularly failed to do–as well as markets and raw materials for the British economy. The result, Hitler concluded crushingly, was that the ordinary Briton had the edge over his German counterpart. ‘The German people as such do not measure up to the average value of, for example, the British.’24 In Hitler’s view they were quite simply superior to the Germans.

  The other repository of ‘racial value’, on Hitler’s reckoning, was the United States. It had an Anglo-Saxon settler core, enlarged and preserved over time. ‘The American Union,’ he wrote, ‘has established particular criteria for immigration, thanks to the teachings of its own racial researchers’ (here he probably once again meant Madison Grant).25 Hitler also admired US measures to keep its population racially robust through selection. In part, this was a question of eugenics. Hitler remarked privately that he had studied the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in his view, probably be of no value or even injurious to the racial stock.26 For the rest, American superiority rested on selective immigration. ‘The fact that the American Union sees itself as a Nordic-Germanic state and in no sense as an international peoples’ mush,’ Hitler remarked, no doubt rebutting Israel Zangwill’s idea of the United States as a ‘melting pot’, was clear from ‘the distribution of the immigrant quotas among the European peoples’.27 Whereas Scandinavians, Britons and ‘finally’ (sic) Germans were at the top of the list, Slavs and Latins were not favoured, and then Chinese and Japanese were right at the bottom of the hierarchy.

  Perhaps surprisingly, the relationship between whites and the long-established black community did not loom large in Hitler’s view of the United States, though Nazi bureaucrats would later study segregation closely when drawing up anti-Semitic legislation. In particular, he did not show much interest in the South, or in the Confederacy’s struggle to preserve slavery. Reports of his enthusiasm for the Ku Klux Klan, though superficially plausible, come from unreliable sources.28 In fact, the only verifiable comment Hitler ever made about slavery was clearly condemnatory. He spoke of the ‘transplanting of millions of Negroes to the American continent’ as an example of ‘barbarian customs’ on a par with slavery in the ancient world and the treatment of the Aztecs and Incas.29 One way or the other, Hitler’s enthusiasm for America was based on a concern with whites and Jews, not blacks, and an admiration not for the agrarian south but for the industrial north.

  If Hitler had a healthy respect for the demographic, ‘racial’, economic and thus military might of the United States, he also had a keen sense of what we would today call her ‘soft power’. Partly this was a positive sense of what the American way of life had to offer, which he had already documented on earlier occasions. Hitler never actually used the phrase ‘American Dream’, but his rhetoric showed him to be fully aware of the concept. ‘The European of today,’ he wrote, ‘dreams of a living standard’ which might be possible in Europe, but ‘actually exists in America’. ‘The American,’ he noted simply, lived ‘on average better than we do.’ This was because ‘the relationship between population size and territory in America is so close,’ he argued, ‘that prosperity is spread more generally’.30 This was epitomized, on Hitler’s reading, by the very high level of motorization in the United States.

  That said, Hitler was also deeply concerned by aspects of American culture. He contrasted the glories of the ancient world with the ‘crassly different’ ‘parvenu-culture’ of America. Hitler and Hess sneered at one American multi-millionaire who was so vulgar as to have erected a faux palace of Versailles with a golden bath, liveried servants and a picture gallery in which the original price tags for the paintings were still visible.31 Hitler was particularly worried about the influence of American popular culture in Germany, and inveighed against the ‘department store vampires’ who not only destroyed many smaller shops, but also offered ‘all kinds of trinkets, neon lights and tea shops, escalators and palm gardens,’ to ensnare the unwary. Hitler thus unfolded a whole vista of moral panic. Perhaps his greatest concern, however, was music, a matter close to his own heart. ‘Jazz music,’ he argued, ‘has achieved the equality of people, but through lowering standards.’32 This ambivalence about the nature of America, which should never be mistaken for pure contempt, was to remain with him to the end.

  Anglo-American strength was contrasted with German weakness. Again, this was partly a matter of space. In the Second Book and on many other occasions in the late 1920s, Hitler elaborated on Germany’s geopolitical exposure. ‘Everywhere unprotected, open territories,’ he lamented, the western parts of which contained important industrial facilities. Germany was surrounded by potential predators, such as France and Russia, not to mention being boxed in navally and commercially by England. To make matters worse, France was linked by alliance to Poland in the east, and Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia in the south-east. Germany, in short, was encircled: ‘surrounded’ and ‘completely hemmed in’. Moreover, Germany not only was vulnerable, but lacked critical territorial mass. It was impossible to defend in depth, he thought, especially given recent advances in technology. Millions of Germans, Hitler bewailed, were jammed into an area ‘which a modern aeroplane can traverse from north to south in about two hours’. More generally, Germany was too small to count in the world. ‘Germany is, from the purely geographic point of view,’ he claimed, so territorially limited that ‘it amounted to a [mere] province in comparison to other states and countries on this earth’.33

  If all this was broadly in the classic Prusso-German geopolitical tradition, Hitler’s emphasis on Germany’s other alleged critical weakness was not. This was ‘race’, where the Second Book elaborated themes which had been sketched only in outline in Mein Kampf and his speeches during the mid 1920s. As we have seen, this was particularly true with regard to his relentless focus on the alleged weakness of the German people itself, especially when contrasted with the British. ‘Our people in particular,’ he wrote, ‘sorely lack in their racial fragmentation those characteristics which, for example, distinguish the Briton’, namely ‘holding together in times of danger’.34 He attributed this only partly to alleged Jewish corruption and much more to other factors, such as Germany’s longstanding religious, political and territorial fragmentation.

  The separatist spectre, which had so exercised Hitler in 1921–3, had somewhat receded, but Hitler was still concerned enough to deliver several broadsides against the BVP. In a philippic delivered in Munich in late February 1928, he condemned Bavarian ‘monarchists’, rejected their claims to ‘reserved [state] rights’ and decried their ‘federalist’ mantras as a mere smokescreen for wider ambitions. Hitler’s objection to Bavarian, and other, particularist, demands was rooted in his long-held belief that only a ‘c
ompletely coherent form of state’ could cope with the external challenges to the German Reich. He continued to fight a grudge match against the BVP, Bavaria’s monarchists, and their clerical backers, with accusations of sexual deviance, religious misbehaviour and philo-Semitism being hurled back and forth,35 exceeding in intensity and hatefulness any exchanges he had with the Weimar left.36

  German fragmentation, in Hitler’s eyes, was aggravated and epitomized by the Weimar Republic. Democracy, he claimed, undermined authority and made coherence impossible. ‘With regard to the army,’ he complained, one ‘recognized the law of authority, but the nation was subjected to the law of humanity.’ And ‘what is majority,’ Hitler asked, but ‘the embodiment of lies, and inadequacy and stupidity’? ‘Democracy,’ he pronounced, ‘contradicts the law of all growth’ because ‘it cannot tolerate any leaders.’ In short, Hitler argued, ‘if a people allows western democracy to govern its state constitution, in other words if it introduces western parliamentarism’, then it would create a ‘system’ which would ‘inevitably’ lead to the ‘filtering out of existing talent’. For all these reasons, Hitler regarded the ‘democratic principle’, which he invariably associated with the west and with Jewry, as ‘a principle of destruction of peoples and states’.37

  The Westminster parliament posed an intellectual and rhetorical difficulty for Hitler, as it seemed to suggest that democracy and national coherence were not incompatible. Reprising a theme he had already ventilated in Mein Kampf, he explained the paradox away through the principle of selection. ‘British democracy,’ he argued, ‘was no more than just a small closed elite.’ ‘Never forget,’ he continued, ‘that until the 1880s only 470,000 people enjoyed the franchise, in other words a small group of selected people.’ Hitler emphasized how political tradition was handed down in England through the great families, and he stressed the stabilizing effect of the monarchy, which was ‘the centre of gravity’ in England’s political system. Finally, Hitler argued that an ancient democracy like Rome had always elected a dictator in times of crisis, and that ‘this England elected a dictator in the war’, namely Lloyd George, while the German parliament had merely ‘blathered’.38 In other words, whereas in his view democracy had undermined the coherence of the Volk in Germany, it had served as an instrument of positive racial selection in Britain.