During his first three and a half years in power, Hitler’s timeline did not shift much. ‘I know,’ he remarked in September 1933, ‘that this great process of the internal welding together of our people cannot be achieved from one day to the next.’ ‘What gradually disintegrated over 30, 40, 50 [or] 100 years,’ Hitler continued, could not be put together again ‘in a few months’.192 Ten months later, he was still speaking in terms of a secular project of transformation. ‘The National Socialist state,’ he told the Reichstag, ‘will internally exterminate, if necessary in a hundred year war, the last remnants’ of ‘the “Jewish-international” poison’.193 In cabinet, in January 1935, he spoke of the reform of local government as taking twenty to thirty years.194 ‘None of our technical projects will be finished in fewer than ten or twenty years,’ he warned in May 1935, while ‘none of the spiritual tasks would be completed within fifty or even a hundred years.’195 He clearly envisaged a long-term process of transformation, in which conflict with the western powers was to be avoided as long as possible.
That said, there was–as we have seen–a change of tone in late 1936. He seems to have sensed that the days of easy victories were almost over. He continued, all the same, to take enormous risks, because he believed that there was no other way of saving Germany. Hitler did not have the luxury of certainty, as he explained with astonishing frankness on the anniversary of the 1923 putsch, a time when his gamble had failed catastrophically. ‘I have had to take some very difficult decisions over the past three and half years,’ he announced, ‘on which sometimes the future of the entire nation depended.’ ‘I unfortunately never had 51 per cent certainty [of success]’, but rather there was ‘often 95 per cent likelihood of failure and only 5 per cent of success’.196 Hitler could not have been clearer. He was planning to roll the dice again and again in the coming years until his luck ran out.
PART FIVE
Confrontation
At the start of 1937, the Third Reich appeared secure. Hitler had created a new age, with its own values and calendar. Time seemed to stretch to the horizon. In the course of the year, however, Hitler became convinced that he was running out of time, and that Anglo-America–suffering in his view from Jewish-induced false consciousness–had turned against him. He had also lost the standard of living battle with the west. The next phase of the Third Reich was therefore to be one of confrontation. This was a diplomatic battle, in which Hitler accepted that he had ‘lost’ Britain and the United States, and sought to consolidate his alliances with Italy and Japan. It was a military contest, in which the Führer went from bloodless victories over Austria and Czechoslovakia to more costly but still remarkable triumphs over Poland, much of Scandinavia and then–most spectacularly of all–over the British and French field armies in the west. It was, finally, a racial contest in which Hitler speeded up the elimination of the ‘negative’ strands in German society, and brought forward the acquisition of ‘living space’ in the east required for his planned ‘elevation’ of the German people in order to prepare them for the likely clash with the ‘Anglo-Saxons’.
13
‘Living Standards’ and ‘Living Space’
In Germany, 1937 was a year when time seemed to stand still. There were no major headline-grabbing domestic or foreign initiatives. Hitler promised the Reichstag in late January that the ‘era of surprises was over [and that] peace was now our most prized possession’.1 He had gathered all the low-hanging fruit at home and abroad. His rule was not yet absolute, but there were no major challenges to his authority, either within the party or in the country at large. National Socialism, the Führer principle and the Hitler-myth were the new normal.2 The chancellor’s portrait adorned thousands of public buildings and spaces; countless schools and streets were named after him. In March 1937, he overcame his almost atavistic resistance to being depicted on postage stamps, so that his image–adapted from one of Heinrich Hoffmann’s photographs–became even more ubiquitous.3 The Führer was omnipresent, sometimes even featuring in the dreams (or nightmares) of ordinary people.4 Germany enjoyed more or less full employment.5 Life as a Jew, gypsy, homosexual, leftist or Bavarian monarchist was harsh, but, by contrast with the first years of the regime, appeared increasingly predictable. There were fewer arrests, and the camp population actually fell during the first part of the year. Beyond Germany, the world had got used to Hitler. There was, in short, a general sense of a lull, which later felt like the quiet before the storm.6 ‘It is very quiet on the political front,’ Goebbels remarked in the late summer of 1937.
‘Give us four years time,’ Hitler had promised in his first radio address at the start of his chancellorship, ‘and then judge us,’ a phrase which he repeated in various formulations and which was ultimately rendered by the Nazi propaganda machine as the ubiquitous ‘Give me four years and you will not recognize Germany again!’7 As the fifth year of the Third Reich dawned in 1937, the Führer and the movement now looked back on their ‘achievements’, in what was widely understood to be an ‘accountability moment’. In a series of speeches to mark special days in the Nazi calendar, for example the anniversaries of the seizure of power and the launching of the NSDAP programme, Hitler celebrated and wildly exaggerated the economic, political and military progress made since 1933 over and over. Goebbels reinforced this message in a travelling exhibition entitled ‘Give Me Four Years’, which Hitler opened in person in Berlin, and in a similarly named newsreel.
Hitler pressed ahead with his programme of domestic transformation undisturbed. The removal of the Jews from German national life continued. That said, there was a recognizable pause in anti-Jewish measures in the spring and summer of 1937. For now, because of the alleged power of international Jewry, Hitler still had to tread carefully. A third decree of the ‘State Citizenship Law’, planned by Hitler for February 1937, involving special status for non-Jewish businesses, was put on hold in June on the grounds that it would antagonize foreign owners of such enterprises. The measure was finally enacted a year later. In May 1937, Hitler also ordered that plans for a special citizenship document be dropped.8 He explained his strategy in a private speech to party leaders. His ‘final objective’ of removing the Jews, Hitler explained, had not changed. He wanted to avoid, however, having to take any steps that he might have to ‘reverse’, or which might ‘harm’ the Third Reich. ‘I always go to the limit,’ he continued, ‘but not beyond’; he claimed to have a ‘nose’ for what was possible and what not. Rather than provoking his enemies to all-out resistance, Hitler argued, he was trying to manoeuvre them into a ‘corner’ before delivering the mortal blow.9 For this reason, Hitler did not undertake any major new initiative on the Jewish front throughout 1937.
In one area, however, the regime did radicalize racial policy. Hitler had long hung back on the issue of the ‘Rhineland bastards’, the offspring of black French colonial soldiers during the Rhineland occupation of the 1920s, for fear of offending France, but on 18 April 1937, he ordered the discreet ‘sterilization’ of these offspring. He dismissed the suggestion of the Foreign Office, which was worried about the French reaction, that the victims should simply be confined to barracks or deported.10 The task was given to the Gestapo and completed in the course of the year.11 These measures did not apply to ‘full-blooded’ black Africans, about whom Hitler and the regime were considerably more relaxed.12 To be sure, their situation worsened as the Third Reich progressed and they often found themselves subject to the Nuremberg Laws, but not apparently at Hitler’s direct request. Clearly identifiable as ‘alien’, blacks posed a much reduced risk of racial ‘contamination’. They found employment as waiters, as minstrels, in circuses or as extras on films designed to show the inequities of British imperial rule. They were also in demand for the ‘German African Revue’, which was designed to celebrate German colonialism and remind the Volk of its global mission. An audience in Lower Austria was startled to hear the performers announce that ‘We believe in Germany, Heil Hitler.’13 Though the bla
ck residents suffered great hardship during the Third Reich, the contrast with the treatment of Hitler’s principal racial enemy, the Jews, is striking.
The other strand of Hitler’s policy was to accentuate the positive, by continuing the racial ‘elevation’ begun in 1933. Central to this project was the German woman. Hitler managed to keep the formidable ‘imperial women’s leader’, Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, at arm’s length; she failed in her quest for a face-to-face discussion.14 As his personal adjutant, Fritz Wiedemann, remarked, Hitler took a dim view of women in politics generally, though he was prepared to make exceptions.15 He also sought to drive women out of the workplace, or at least the professions, and back into the home. In the summer of 1937, Hitler announced that appointments to the higher reaches of the civil service should be reserved ‘in principle’ to men. ‘He would make only a few exceptions’, mainly in the ‘area of welfare, education and health’.16 Female lawyers, by contrast, were to be phased out.
Hitler saw women primarily as agents of racial reproduction and regeneration. If this was socially ‘regressive’, especially with regard to women in the workforce, it also had some surprisingly ‘progressive’ implications. Hitler was determined to remove traditional barriers to increased fertility among the racially ‘superior’ elements of the German people. In January 1937, Hitler erupted in cabinet against attempts to force unmarried mothers to name the fathers of their children, outraged by a recent Hanoverian case in which a woman had been given a prison sentence for refusing to cooperate with the authorities in that regard. ‘That sort of absurdity,’ he thundered, ‘must end at once.’ Hitler supported the right of a woman to remain silent, even if the intention was to establish the father’s ‘Aryan’ credentials. He ‘considered it barbarism’, he added, ‘to apply pressure in order to force a statement’. Towards the end of the year Hitler laid down that the Hanoverian woman should not be forced to serve her sentence. In the same spirit, the new ‘midwives’ law removed at his request the old clause excluding midwives from practice for ‘moral transgressions’, such as extramarital sexual relations.17 Above all, Hitler was concerned to revise marriage law, to reduce the stigma of infidelity, to remove that attached to sex outside marriage and illegitimacy and generally increase the emphasis on reproduction.18
Despite his emphasis on ‘blood’, Hitler’s programme of racial elevation was not confined to biology and reproduction. Intellectual and cultural instruments remained extremely important to him. One critical front was education, understood in the broadest terms to encompass not merely schooling but also law and military service. On the negative side, Hitler demanded that ‘the Volk should be educated to believe that treason was the greatest possible crime, which would ordinarily receive the death penalty’.19 On the positive side, Hitler wanted German youth to be exposed to the classical tradition, which he saw as an instrument of character formation, and an aesthetic ideal, rather than as part of a humanistic education. Here the British public school system, or least his understanding of it as a nursery of imperial rulers, served as an inspiration. Hitler understood the resulting ‘natural selection process’ in meritocratic terms, as necessary to sustain the new Führerstaat. It was intended to combat not so much Jewry or other ‘harmful’ elements, whose removal was simply assumed, as the innate tendency towards fragmentation within the German Volk itself. Hitler conceived this not merely as a struggle which divided classes, regions, confessions and even individuals, but as a contest playing out within every German breast. This is why he urged that opposition should be ‘internal to the person’. Germans must resolve the dialectic or thesis and antithesis within themselves, not against each other.20 Every man was to be his own synthesis.
Another front was the arts, in which Hitler maintained a keen interest, not just for his own amusement but for the edification and improvement of the Volk. In his view, the appreciation of true art both reflected and increased racial value. It was part of what he called the regime’s ‘incredible endeavours to elevate the Volk in countless areas of life’. Hitler showcased what he regarded as sublime art in the ‘Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung’ in the new Munich Haus der Deutschen Kunst. He opened the exhibition in mid July 1937 with a speech spelling out the role of art in the political and racial regeneration of Germany. He explicitly related the Reich’s cultural collapse to the lost war, the growth of socialism and communism, the spread of ‘liberal economic concepts’, and the evils of internationalism. The resulting ‘ideological and political fragmentation’ had led to the ‘gradual dissolution of a sense of common purpose in the Volk’ and the ‘weakening of the German body politic’. Central to this misery, Hitler argued, was the way in which Jewry ‘exploited its position in the press with the help of so-called art critics’, in order to ‘destroy’ all ‘healthy instincts’ in the population at large. He tried to expose that influence in a parallel exhibition on ‘Degenerate Art’, and in the speech he fired off broadsides against ‘Cubism, Dadaism, Futurism, Impressionism and so on’.21
Eliminating Jewish and other alien influences was only half the racial battle. Hitler believed that the real problem was that the German Volk was made up, as he put it, of ‘a number of more or less separate races’, which had over time developed into ‘that mixture which we see in our Volk today’. The originally ‘constitutive’ element in the Volk had been the same ‘Aryan manhood’ which had characterized the ‘ancient civilizations’, but had subsequently been diluted through admixture with ‘other’–here he meant primarily ‘non-Jewish’, but also ‘non-Aryan’–racial elements. The purpose of art, Hitler claimed, was to combat this adulteration by contributing to the ‘unification’ or ‘standardization’ of the ‘racial body politic’. The close link between artistic appreciation and racial ‘elevation’ in his mind was made clear towards the end of Hitler’s speech, when he praised antiquity, which ‘in appearance and sensibility’ was closer to the present day than ever before. He objected to modern art because of its alleged celebration of ugliness and disfigurement in the form of ‘deformed cripples and cretins, women, who can only provoke disgust, [and] men who are closer to animals than humans’. Instead, the Führer wanted art which would make ‘our men, boys and youths, girls and women, healthier and thus stronger’. He was developing a ‘glowingly beautiful type of person’, which he had paraded on the catwalk of the Olympic Games, displaying ‘radiant, proud, bodily strength and health before the whole world’.22 Hitler’s hope was that if Germans contemplated statues of Roman and Greek youths long and appreciatively enough they would begin to resemble them, at least inwardly. Hitler laid so much stress on the ‘rebirth of the nation’ through its ‘cultural cleansing’ that he spoke of it as being ‘in the first instance’ a cultural question. This, he claimed, was more important ‘for the future’ than mere political and economic revival. It is clear from these remarks that Hitler was thinking in terms of generations rather than a quick fix.
Hitler intervened repeatedly to ensure that the works displayed at the Haus der Deutschen Kunst enjoyed his imprimatur, overturning a more liberal selection shortly before the opening.23 Unlike Goebbels, he never flirted with modernism.24 Hitler called for art to be ‘clear’ and ‘true’, though he was always clearer on what he considered degenerate than on what constituted true German art.25 In painting, Hitler favoured the Italian Renaissance and German masters from the nineteenth century, who might broadly be characterized as Romantic. He rigorously policed what was exhibited in the Haus der Deutschen Kunst, boasting that he would always ruthlessly remove anything which was not artistically perfect.26 With regard to architecture and spectacle, Hitler was firmly classical in his sympathies. For example, the Munich pageant accompanying the ‘Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung’ was dominated by themes from antiquity rather than the Middle Ages.
The genre in which Hitler’s aesthetics and political ambitions combined most strikingly was architecture, especially his plans for the remodelling of Berlin. On 30 January 1937, the fourth anniversary of
his appointment as chancellor, he signed a ‘Decree for a General Building Inspector for the Imperial Capital’. Albert Speer was formally appointed to the post, the first step in what was intended to be the transformation of Berlin into a truly global capital representing the might of the Third Reich.27 Over the next few years, he and his team produced ever more precise and grandiose plans, which Hitler pored over and commented on in detail. Speer and Hitler settled on two great thoroughfares, the ‘North–South’ and ‘East–West’ axes, at the heart of which would lie the Great Hall of the People. As we shall see, the architectural inspiration for the new Berlin–or Germania–came from many sources: the ancient world, of course, but also Paris, London and, especially, Washington.
All these measures suggested that Hitler’s tempo had lessened somewhat. Rome had not been built in a day and nor would the Third Reich be. Whatever the outward signs of conformity in the Reich, Hitler himself was under no illusion of the distance he still had to travel. In early March 1937, he rejected the first sentence of the proposed new Criminal Code, which appeared to him to exaggerate the extent to which German society had already been Nazified. He stressed that ‘the National Socialist Weltanschauung had not yet been completely implemented’, and that ‘every law’ should be ‘adapted to the stage in which Volk and state found itself at that particular moment’.28 In other words, the Führer believed that a truly Nazi society was still some way off; in 1937, it was an aspiration rather than a reality. Hitler seems at this point to have envisaged a gradual process by which the German people would rid itself of harmful elements over time and acquire positive characteristics in their stead. In his speeches he was still referring to a timeframe of about a hundred years, that is a completion date long after his death.29
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