In this context, Hitler made a last attempt to reverse the tide of demography. His calculation was simple. He wanted German Jews to emigrate and to confiscate their property, but few states were prepared to take penniless immigrants. Hitler also wanted German emigrants, and ultimately German-Americans, to return to the Reich, but lacked the funds to pay for their passage and resettlement, even if they wanted to return.132 The ‘logical’ solution was to exchange German Jews and their property for Germans in America and their assets. For Hitler this was the ultimate ‘win-win’, where ‘negative’ met ‘positive’ eugenics. On 16 December 1938, Göring rang Weizäcker, the state secretary in the Foreign Office. He wanted ‘a large-scale operation… to bring back those of German origin from America (including those who were already American citizens)’ to provide workers for the Four Year Plan. Hitler not only approved the plan, but he seems to have been the inspiration behind the idea that ‘one could perhaps even organize an exchange of returning Americans of German origin and Jews to be sent there’.133 The Foreign Office was deeply sceptical about the practicality of the scheme, and warned that any attempt to lure American citizens back would infuriate Washington.134 In the end, the outbreak of war put an end to these plans.
As the breach with Anglo-America loomed, Hitler globalized his policy and rhetoric. The Japanese alliance became ever more important. Whereas he had previously welcomed the prospect of a Russo-Japanese war, which would give him the opportunity to seize Lebensraum in the east, he now sought to prevent one. His entire policy was henceforth geared to enlisting Tokyo against London and Washington. Part of this strategy was reducing the German footprint in China. In the autumn of 1938, General Falkenhausen’s military mission was withdrawn in order to please the Japanese. Some generals resisted this strongly, much to Hitler’s fury.135 Another important plank was reducing Russo-Japanese tensions, which had resulted in a stinging defeat for Tokyo at Changkufeng on the Soviet border with China and Korea in July–August 1938; German propaganda was instructed to discredit any resulting suggestion that the Japanese were not valuable allies.136 These moves were accompanied by a number of peppery assertions about the quality of the Japanese army, and the degeneracy of the Americans: ‘a comprehensively weakened and decadent people’.137 Hitler genuinely admired Japan, and its ambassador in Berlin, Oshima, but such statements should be primarily read as yet more racial whistling in the wind to keep up German spirits.
Hitler’s confrontation with the British Empire also caused him to rethink his attitude towards anti-imperialist movements in Asia and the Middle East. This was partly a question of propaganda as British imperial policies were traduced in order to illustrate the ‘hypocrisy’ of London’s concern for human rights within Germany. ‘Enquiries from British politicians about the fate of Germans or members of the Reich inside the borders of the Reich,’ he said, ‘are misplaced. After all, we don’t concern ourselves with similar matters in England, for example events in Palestine,’ a reference to the British suppression of the ‘Arab Revolt’. The main purpose of Hitler’s new global rhetoric, however, was to show Germans the dangers of being colonized themselves, and to caution the west that they would refuse to be so subjected again. ‘I am by no means inclined,’ Hitler warned at the height of the Sudeten crisis, ‘to allow the establishment of a second Palestine here in the centre of Germany. The poor Arabs may be defenceless and abandoned but the Germans in Czechoslovakia are neither defenceless nor abandoned. That needs to be realized.’ Hitler of course equated the Arabs with the oppressed Germans, not the Czechs; he in fact received thirty Iraqi nationalists at the Nuremberg rally.138 Before 1933, Hitler had criticized those who saw Germans as the wretched of the earth, but he was now closer to that argument than he cared to admit.
In the autumn of 1938, the Third Reich began to prepare a propaganda offensive against the British Empire, which was specifically designed as retaliation against the German-language broadcasts of the BBC. The driving force here was Goebbels, in concert with the Führer.139 The first programmes in English and Arabic were broadcast in the following spring and disseminated anti-colonialism, anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.140 How much of this message was actually heard and accepted by the target audience is not clear. Some of it, of course, was redundant. Exporting anti-Semitism to the Middle East was like transporting oranges to Jaffa. It is clear, though, that German propaganda struck a chord with many Third World nationalists. For example, Joseph Said Abu Durra, the leader of the resistance in northern Palestine, wrote to Hitler in late December 1938. He praised ‘the great Führer of Germany who has secured his nation undying honour and fame’. He excoriated the ‘crimes’ committed by ‘England, that state which claims to be just, civilized and humane’. The author then went on to attack the Jews, and to suggest that the Arab struggle in Palestine was worthy of German support.141
The rapid deterioration of relations with Anglo-America had a profound impact on Hitler’s military thinking and armaments policy. He was clearly not planning a large-scale land war in the west, at least not if he could help it. Nor was he planning to attack Poland. He was hoping to despoil the Soviet Union, but he had such a low opinion of the chaos and violence of Stalin’s rule that he did not expect to need his entire force or a long time to do that. Hitler’s priorities were to produce a naval and aerial capability sufficient to deter or contain the west with one hand, while he secured Lebensraum in the east with the other. In December 1938, Hitler authorized a vast naval construction programme to build no fewer than six battleships, various cruisers and nearly 250 U-boats.142 That same month, he launched the aircraft carrier Graf Zeppelin, and the Germaniawerft at Kiel was commissioned to build another.143
Hitler was particularly anxious about western air power, especially the ability of French and British bombers to strike the Ruhr. He specifically highlighted the threats of Westminster parliamentarians to do just that. Unlike the Americans, who had panicked at the radio broadcast of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, which featured an invasion from outer space, Hitler claimed he was not ‘in fear of bombs from Mars or the Moon’.144 He was, however, worried by the terrestrial variety. In the late autumn of 1938, Hitler demanded a fivefold increase in the Luftwaffe–
‘a gigantic programme compared to which previous achievements are insignificant’–involving a fleet of heavy bombers, long-range fighter escorts, and interceptor aircraft designed to protect the Reich. Hitler also invested a huge proportion of his industrial capacity in anti-aircraft artillery.145 Fear of Franco-British air attacks was one reason why he was so determined to crush what remained of Czechoslovakia, which he continued to describe as a giant ‘aircraft carrier’ for the Western Allies. The aggregate cost of these measures was huge, and coming on top of the vast amounts already spent on, or committed to, rearmament completely unrealizable under peacetime conditions. Civilian construction all but ceased. Only Hitler’s personal monumental projects were to continue.
By the end of 1938, in short, the contours of the coming struggle were becoming clearer. Unsurprisingly and necessarily, from Hitler’s point of view, it would pit the Germans against world Jewry, in its communist and capitalist incarnations, primarily the latter. Unfortunately from Hitler’s point of view, it would also range the Reich against the British Empire and the United States. Hitler would have greatly preferred to remain at peace with both, and had had high hopes of allying with at least one of them. The somewhat surprising consequence of the new situation was not just a formal alliance with Japan, long regarded as the rising star in the east, but also a growing rapprochement with the anti-imperialist forces in the British Empire. This was not the place that Hitler wanted to be in, or ever anticipated being in, and by his own lights he had done his best to avoid such an outcome, but it was where he was.
In the New Year, relations with Anglo-America, already very poor, deteriorated still further.
In his annual message to Congress on 4 January 1939, Roosevelt announced that he would use all means ‘short of
war’ to contain the aggressors. ‘God-fearing democracies of the world’, he explained, ‘cannot safely be indifferent to international lawlessness anywhere.’ This came a day after a huge leap in US defence expenditure to by far the highest level ever seen in peacetime. A week later, the German military attaché in Washington warned against the ‘president and his Jewish friends [and] their boundless armament plans and their attempts to paint a German spectre on the wall’; even if the immediate capacity of the United States to wage war was limited, its potential was massive. Hitler was acutely aware of all this. He told Boet-
ticher that he would destroy Roosevelt by proving to the world that the president was of Jewish descent. Hitler now asked the Washington embassy and other experts to establish the date by which the United States could practically intervene if war broke out in Europe in 1939.146 It was no longer a question of whether war with America would come, but of when.
Hitler’s determination to match the United States was reflected in his architectural visions. In January 1939, he met with Todt and Speer in the Imperial Chancellery for further discussions about the planned remodelling of Hamburg and its huge San-Francisco-style bridge over the Elbe. He noted with satisfaction that the architect, Konstanty Gutschow, ‘has also made studies in America’.147 Hitler explained his thinking to the German High Command. Such monumental construction projects were part of his plan to show the German people ‘that it is not second-rate, but the equal of any other people on earth, even America’. ‘This,’ Hitler continued, ‘is why I have ordered this great bridge to be built in Hamburg’. Its purpose was to ensure ‘that any German coming from abroad or going abroad or who has had the opportunity to compare Germany with other countries must say to himself: “What is so extraordinary about America and its bridges? We can do the same.”’ This, Hitler concluded, ‘is why I am having skyscrapers built [in Hamburg] which will be just as “impressive” as the American ones’.148 Here, Hitler was trying to implement in stone and concrete what he was telling the German newspapers to do in print.
Hitler had also still not completely given up on the consumption front. In mid February 1939, he opened the International Car and Motorcycle Exhibition in Berlin. The car industry, he claimed, was important not only in Germany but in ‘in large parts of the world’. Hitler stressed that ‘The motor car is not a luxury item but an article of consumption’, thus reaffirming his commitment to raise German standards of living. This required, he continued, an appropriate pricing structure ‘for all classes of potential buyers’. The extent to which Hitler saw all this in the context of international competition was demonstrated by his emphasis on the need to increase the ‘confidence of the German people in their own motor cars’ and to secure ‘a raw materials base independent of the rest of the world’.149 The ‘Motorisierung’ of Germany was to be achieved not as part of a general western process but independently and in parallel; separate, but equal, as it were. An advance model of the Volkswagen was displayed at the exhibition with the announcement that mass production would begin as soon as possible. The challenge resonated across the Atlantic loud and clear. ‘Hitler declares Auto War,’ the Pittsburgh Press headlined, ‘$400 car actually on view’.150
Diplomatically, the rising enmity with Anglo-America drove Hitler to deepen his ties to Japan. The main function of Japan in his strategic concept was to pin down the United States in the Pacific, rather than to distract the Soviet Union in the Far East. Ribbentrop explained this, with Hitler’s agreement, to a group of senior military figures towards the end of January 1939.151 In February 1939, he attended the Japanese Art Exhibition in Berlin as a token of his respect. Despite Hitler’s urgings, however, Tokyo was slow to commit itself.152
Militarily, Hitler reacted by giving the navy priority in arms procurement and resource allocation.153 In January 1939, he secretly authorized the ‘Z-Plan’, a massive programme of construction designed to culminate in the mid 1940s, the moment by which Hitler expected the confrontation with the United States to be unavoidable. It involved the building of 10 battleships, 10 battle cruisers, 4 aircraft carriers, 5 heavy cruisers, 18 light cruisers, 20 smaller cruisers, 64 destroyers, 78 torpedo boats and 249 submarines of various sizes.154 The total tonnage proposed came to 2 million, and some 200,000 sailors would be required to man these ships. Some 20,000 new machines to make tools would be required to support the effort. All this, of course, was incompatible with the 1935 Naval Agreement with Britain. It was also potentially disastrous for the army and especially for the Luftwaffe, at whose expense the new production was to take place; Göring complained bitterly.155
The cumulative strain of past and planned military expenditure on the German economy was now too great to ignore, or to trump with declarations of political ‘will’. On 7 January 1939, the Reichsbank directorate warned Hitler that the sums simply did not add up. There was no foreign exchange left to buy vital raw materials. Schacht finally put his foot down.156 He was promptly sacked as Reichsbank president.
Hitler’s mounting anxieties found expression in his landmark speech on 30 January 1939, the sixth anniversary of the takeover of power.157 The Führer’s continuing lack of confidence in German unity, however, especially in the face of external threats, was evident throughout the speech. It was, in fact, his main reason for giving it. The principal challenge came from the west, in particular the United States, and it was words as much as weapons that Hitler feared. He inveighed against ‘certain newspapers and politicians in the rest of the world’–meaning Roosevelt and the American press–who claimed that Germany was threatening European peace. Explicitly referring to the president’s intervention over Munich, and implicitly to his new year’s address to Congress, Hitler vowed that Germany would ‘not accept that western states interfered in certain matters’ which were the Reich’s business and hers alone.158
Worst of all the western threats was the idea of democracy, whose political and social divisiveness Hitler blamed for Germany’s weakness in times past. Democracy was the enemy, not just internally but externally as well. ‘In certain democracies,’ Hitler claimed, ‘it is apparently a particular privilege artificially to cultivate hatred against the so-called totalitarian states.’ Hitler attacked his main enemies in the democratic world, namely the ‘war apostles such as Mr Duff Cooper, Mr Eden, Churchill or Mr Ickes’.159 Hitler’s bracketing of Roosevelt’s confidant and long-serving secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, with the British anti-appeasers reflected the Führer’s belief that Anglo-America was leaguing against him. He said that while one might be inclined to laugh off the claim ‘that Germany planned to attack America’, one had to remember that ‘one is dealing in these democracies with states whose political construction makes it possible that within a few months these terrible war-hawks might take over the leadership of the government’. Hitler thus once again anticipated Churchill’s premiership, something, of course, which he would do more than anybody else to bring about.
The main target of the speech now came into view, ‘world Jewry’ and its supposed instrument, the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Just as the president had warned Hitler in his New Year’s speech to Congress, so Hitler replied in his parliament, the Reichstag. Hitler’s intention here was twofold. On the one hand, he wanted to prepare the German people for this contest because otherwise the outbreak of a war provoked by these enemies would put the Germans in a situation for which they were ‘psychologically completely unprepared’, which would seem ‘inexplicable’ to them. ‘The German people,’ he continued, ‘must know who the men are who are trying to provoke a war at all costs’ and for this reason all propaganda should be focused on the ‘Jewish world enemy’. On the other hand, Hitler wanted not merely to expose, but to warn off the enemy, by threatening retaliation so dire that they would desist from plunging the peoples of Europe back into war.
He then issued a coded, but clear warning to Roosevelt and ‘world Jewry’. ‘If Jewish international finance in and outside Europe should succ
eed in plunging the peoples into another war,’ Hitler announced, ‘then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thus the victory of Jewry, but the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe.’ Hitler could not have been more explicit: European Jewry would be held responsible for the behaviour of ‘international finance Jewry’ not just in Europe, by which London and Paris, rather than Moscow, was meant, but also outside Europe, that is in New York and in Roosevelt’s America generally.160
Hitler’s speech heralded a further intensification of anti-Jewish measures. In late February 1939, Jews were banished from the sleeping and dining cars of the Reichsbahn at Hitler’s request.161 Over the next few months Jews were also deprived of tenancy protection in order to force them to live together in separate accommodation.162 They also found their access to public swimming pools and other establishments limited.163 The aim was still to force Jews to leave Germany, and in late January 1939 Reinhard Heydrich was made head of the Reich Centre for Jewish Emigration. There was disagreement among the SS leaders in charge of the policy about where they should be sent. Some saw Palestine as the obvious destination; others warned that this would simply create a ‘Vatican of World Jewry’, which would in any case not be large enough to accommodate all the Jews to be deported. Truly, as Heydrich put it, Palestine had become a ‘World Question’. Emil Schumburg, the official in the Foreign Office charged with coordinating policy with the SS, suggested that Jews be sent to as many different countries as possible, at least initially, in order to increase anti-Semitism to a sufficient degree to make an agreed international solution possible.164 All this reflected Hitler’s continued view that the ‘Jewish question’ was to be resolved through international action.
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