In this emerging global conflict Hitler’s alignment with the Soviet Union chimed with the anti-plutocratic thrust of his global rhetoric. He appears to have been half-convinced that Moscow had turned away from Jewish Bolshevism towards a more authentically national Russian orientation, a development he had predicted during the early 1920s. ‘At the moment [Soviet] internationalism seems to have receded,’ he told the OKW privately later in the year, adding that this probably meant that she would go over to ‘Panslavism’. ‘It is hard to look into the future [on Russia],’ Hitler concluded.38 For this reason, the Nazi propaganda machine ceased all criticism of the Soviet Union and carefully began to extol the virtues of cooperation. The Wochenschau newsreels particularly praised the Russian supplies of foodstuffs and raw materials.39
The other way in which Hitler sought to escape the Allied chokehold was by avoiding direct military engagement with the western powers, especially Britain. On the eve of the invasion of Poland, he decreed that while vigorous action was to be undertaken in the east, in the west it was necessary ‘to leave the responsibility for the start of hostilities clearly to Britain and France’. Likewise, the Luftwaffe was instructed, ‘for now’, to restrict operations to the ‘repulsion of enemy air attacks across the borders of the Reich’. Hitler was particularly concerned not to provoke the Royal Navy at sea, where the danger of an unexpected clash was much greater. He had decreed at the start of the war that the main thrust of the war at sea should be against British commerce, but it was not until the end of September that Hitler actually authorized the Kriegsmarine ships at large in the Atlantic–in particular the Graf Spee and the Deutschland–to commence operations. This was followed shortly after by an instruction telling captains to avoid risky engagements as far as possible in order to deny the British cheap propaganda victories. The Führer’s sense of naval inferiority was thus palpable. Towards the close of the year, his concerns were vindicated by the fate of the pocket battleship Graf Spee. It enjoyed a short career attacking British shipping but was eventually cornered by the Royal Navy off Montevideo and forced to scuttle, to Hitler’s great embarrassment.40 Within weeks, therefore, it was clear that Germany was in practice primarily a regional actor in a world of global powers.
The Führer was also determined to keep the United States out of the war for as long as possible; he wanted to capture Warsaw quickly in order to present the American Congress with a fait accompli when it met after the summer recess.41 Hitler was well aware, and his diplomats and intelligence services reminded him on many occasions, that much of the New World’s immense potential would soon be at the service of the Allies. These fears were realized when the Roosevelt administration put in place a ‘cash and carry’ system which in practice meant that only the Western Allies could buy American arms. The American embassy in Berlin was formally correct in its behaviour towards the Reich, but largely hostile in practice.42 Hitler was equally aware, however, that it would take some time for the Americans to be militarily and psychologically ready for war with the Reich.43 One way or the other, propagandistic bluster aside, there was hardly anyone in the leadership of the Third Reich, least of all Hitler, who seriously believed that a war with Britain and the United States would be easy or even winnable.
For all these reasons, Hitler’s diplomacy after September 1939 was dominated by the desire to maintain American neutrality and a genuine wish to reach a negotiated solution with Britain, albeit on his own terms.44 The Führer was, as he told Halder four days into the war with the west, ‘ready to negotiate’,45 hoping at the very least to drive a wedge between Britain and France. Over the next eighteen months or so, Hitler made repeated diplomatic, rhetorical and back-channel overtures to London. On 19 September he used his first wartime radio speech to inaugurate a veritable peace offensive. Hitler spoke in Danzig, no doubt to emphasize his military success, blamed Poland’s predicament on the western powers and held out an olive branch.46 A week later, as the Polish campaign was drawing to a close, he received the intermediary Birger Dahlerus with a view to restarting talks.
Hitler’s hope for a peaceful solution with Britain drove his policy towards Poland. To be sure, his attitude towards that country had hardened considerably since the spring of 1939 and it deteriorated further in the course of the campaign. His visits to the front had left him with a highly unfavourable impression. The Poles had only a ‘thin Germanic layer’ below which the ‘material’ was ‘terrible’, he told Rosenberg in late September 1939, adding that the ‘Jews’ were the ‘most awful thing one could image’ and that the ‘cities were bristling with dirt’.47 This was not just rhetoric. Shortly after the fighting started, Hitler instructed the army not to interfere with the murderous activities of the SS. So while the Wehrmacht fought the Poles largely according to the rules of war, the treatment meted out to them by the SS and other formations was extraordinarily brutal from the start.48 When all is said and done, however, it is possible that it was the approach of war, and the conflict itself, which irrevocably turned Hitler into an extreme anti-Polish racist rather than the other way around.49 In his mind, the Poles had forced him to treat them badly, and he never forgave them for it.
That said, Hitler kept his options open in Poland for at least six weeks after the invasion began, partly in the residual hope of securing its assistance against the Soviet Union, but mainly in order to facilitate an agreement with London. In his remarks to Halder shortly after the British declaration of war, he held out the possibility that ‘rump Poland’ would be ‘recognized’, adding that while Germany would control the Narew and the Warsaw industrial area, ‘Krakau, Polen’ and ‘Ukraine’ [sic] would be ‘independent’.50 A month into the invasion, Hitler was still considering options for Poland, one of which was a ‘rump state’.51 This suggests that Hitler had not given up his idea of a modus vivendi with Poland based on joint expansion eastwards. A certain residual respect for Poland, even after the invasion, was evident in the fact that Hitler praised Marshal Piłsudski as ‘a man of indisputable realist understanding and energy’ in his Danzig speech of 19 September, blaming his death for the renewed hostility between Germany and Poland.52 The Führer also ordered an honour guard to be placed outside Marshal Piłsudski’s final resting place in Cracow, where it remained throughout the entire German occupation.53
These moves culminated in a dramatic Reichstag address on 6 October 1939, in which Hitler announced victory in Poland and offered Britain a peace settlement which would include an ill-defined rump Polish statehood.54 This offer was not merely tactically motivated but–by his own lights–sincerely meant.55 Failure to accept the proffered hand, he warned, would lead to the destruction of the British Empire. ‘This annihilatory struggle,’ Hitler proclaimed, ‘will not be limited to the mainland [of Europe]. No. It will spread far across the sea. There are no more islands today.’56
The war increasingly absorbed most of Hitler’s attention after September 1939, but that does not mean that he completely neglected domestic politics. On the contrary, the conflict drove a renewed engagement with internal affairs. Hitler was determined to avoid the repetition of the events of 1918, and therefore stressed the need to build the national solidarity he felt had been missing during the world war.57 He paid close attention to the summaries of the surveillance services on the state of popular opinion. Following some particularly critical reports in the autumn of 1939, for example, Hitler authorized an increased fat ration for children.58 To keep up morale at home, the Führer tried to maintain the–albeit restricted–supply of consumer goods. He symbolically insisted on sharing the privations of the home front, for instance by supposedly running his household on ration coupons.59 The ‘Winter Relief Organization’, which supplied coal and clothing to poorer Germans, also helped spread the burdens of war, at least psychologically, and to convince Britain of Germany’s will to resist. The Führer’s speech introducing the initiative stressed that he was looking for the ‘self-help of the people’ through the ‘willingness to sacrifice’
rather than ordaining it through an ‘appeal to the tax-payer’.60
Hitler also recognized the need to maintain cultural life even during wartime, partly to keep up the spirits of the population and partly to continue the process of gradual racial elevation of the German people through the appreciation of true art. For his own part, he largely ceased to watch films or to attend concerts and the opera, but he was concerned that the German people would not want for either entertainment or improvement, even and especially during the war. The plans for a huge art museum in Linz, for which Hans Posse presented detailed ideas in October 1939, continued to command Hitler’s attention,61 as did his various other projects, despite the demands of conflict.
On the negative side, Hitler further stepped up the suppression of internal dissent and the establishment of ideological coherence, especially in the Wehrmacht. In late September 1939, he set up the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), which brought all the main German police and security agencies under the direct control of Heinrich Himmler. At around the same time, Hitler agreed ‘in principle’ to Rosenberg’s plan for the ‘securing of the National Socialist ideology’ in the army.62 He was determined to prevent a repetition of the protests by some commanders, such as General Blaskowitz, against the behaviour of the SS in Poland, and to steel the army for the long war ahead. A visible sign of Hitler’s displeasure with the Wehrmacht and the rising importance of the SS was the creation of new SS military formations. On 18 September 1939, he instructed that the SS Death’s Head units, who were tasked with guarding the concentration camps, should detach the younger cohorts for military service in SS regiments and if possible divisions. For now, these formations were to remain under the operational control of the army.63 The trend, though, was already clear.
The war also accelerated Hitler’s plans for the racial transformation of Germany. He expected heavy casualties among the ‘best’ elements fighting at the front, and decreasing conceptions due to long separations of husbands and wives. One way of compensating for this was through a positive eugenics of increasing the numbers of ‘higher-value’ births. Some of this could be achieved through traditional methods, such as celebrating Mother’s Day or awarding particularly fecund women the Mutterkreuz. More controversially, the concept of illegitimacy came under increasing attack, as men–
especially those in the SS–were urged to defy convention and produce as many children as possible.64 Hitler does not at this point seem to have taken much interest in this idea. The problem with supposed positive eugenics, in any case, was that it was a slow process of improvement, bringing change over the longer term. It was a viable strategy in a country at peace but the advent of war meant that this approach had run out of time.
Several factors conspired to drive a radicalization of Hitler’s already extreme racial policies from September 1939. War put a new premium on negative eugenics, which could be implemented quickly, albeit at a high domestic and diplomatic price. In October 1939, Hitler ordered Brandt and Bouhler to go ahead secretly with the euthanasia programme, in defiance of the known objections of the Catholic Church and other groupings.65 The measure was retrospectively dated to the start of the war on 1 September, showing the link Hitler made between the two.66 Finally, the conquest of Poland had brought with it the unplanned and unwanted acquisition of millions of Polish Jews. According to Hitler’s logic, these would have to be deported or otherwise dealt with, partly because they represented ‘useless’ mouths to be fed, and partly because they constituted a threat behind German lines.67 In all of these cases, the war did not so much provide cover for long-planned measures, though this was a consideration, as necessitate in Hitler’s mind the speeding-up of what had originally been envisaged as a longer-term and thus more evolutionary process.
The outbreak of war did not fundamentally change Hitler’s role in the German political system.68 Despite this, the polycratic nature of the Third Reich was aggravated by the proliferation of new institutions related to the running of the war economy and military operations. The supreme command typified this phenomenon, as well as reflecting the primacy of the struggle against the west. It was divided between the High Command of the Army (OKH), the army leadership, which later ran the war in the east, and the High Command of the Wehrmacht (OKW), which coordinated the three services, ran all other theatres and had general superintendence over the conflict as a whole. There was also no fundamental shift in the character of Nazi high politics. Bitter feuding persisted at all levels, despite the fact that Hitler gave it no encouragement whatsoever.69 He gave strict instructions that ministers should try to resolve their differences without involving him first.70 Politics continued to revolve around Hitler himself, the only difference being that the Führer’s Headquarters was added to the list of existing centres of power. Perhaps surprisingly, he had not prepared a large central bunker complex from which to direct the war, but rather operated from a series of bespoke regional ones.71 The Führer’s Headquarters was thus an institution, not a place; it was where the Führer was at any given time.
What changed after the outbreak of war was not the extent of Hitler’s authority, which was never directly challenged, but its focus. He began to withdraw from day-to-day domestic politics and became inaccessible. Face-to-face meetings with members of the civilian administration, which had been quite common in the 1930s, were increasingly replaced by the dispatch of documents for approval. Likewise, the Führer basically no longer attended the meetings of the Gauleiter, but received them afterwards.72 That said, Hitler remained the ultimate arbiter, and in full control of those areas which mattered most to him, namely ideology, foreign policy and the overall conduct of the war. His immediate supervision of domestic policy was more and more reduced over time, to be sure, but he remained engaged there to the end. As we shall see, he retained tight control over matters affecting popular morale such as rations, prices and the conscription of women. The Führer determined the main lines of development and it was not possible to achieve anything against his will or to change a course he had embarked upon without his express permission. The men around him, including the increasingly ubiquitous Martin Bormann, were executive organs, not controlling ones.73 Hitler was still in charge, the uncontested master in the Third Reich.
On 12 October 1939, Chamberlain finally rejected German overtures for a negotiated settlement. Despite the fact that this had been on the cards for some time, Hitler was disappointed and furious.74 London’s refusal to compromise had two far-reaching consequences. First, it settled Poland’s fate; Stalin’s relentless hostility to any form of independent existence for the Poles also influenced the Führer’s position.75 Hitler dropped the idea of a rump Polish state and all restraint towards the population. The treatment of Poles, already very grim, became even harsher. On 17 October 1939, he reprimanded German officers who were conducting discussions with Polish grandees about a possible collaborationist regime.76 Parts of pre-war Poland were directly annexed to Germany. Towards the end of October, Hitler corralled the remaining Poles under his control into the ‘General Government’ under the direction of Hans Frank.77 He had already begun in early October to deport Jews from Germany into reservations there. Concrete instructions were now issued to suppress the entire Polish intelligentsia.78 All this was done ‘on the hoof’, not in accordance with any longstanding plan.79 Hitler’s original hope and expectation had been that he would conduct the attack on Russia with the cooperation, or at least the toleration, of Poland. Instead, he now found himself in alliance with the Soviet Union and in occupation of large swathes of Polish territory with millions of Poles, many of them Jews.
The short- to medium-term future of this space, and those who lived in it, was unclear. Hitler still planned to use it as a staging ground for an invasion of the Soviet Union,80 but the continuing war with Britain complicated this. Time, so short in August 1939, now seemed to expand again. Lebensraum in the east remained very much on Hitler’s mind, but it would have to wait until the western flank was secu
re. In the meantime, Hitler announced a joint ‘redevelopment project’ with the Soviet Union to remove at least part of the European ‘causes of conflict’. This involved extensive ‘resettlements’, not just of Poles but also of Germans.81 It was driven by a very simple and unexpected fact. From the start, Hitler’s policy had been to secure, for the cooped-up German people, the necessary living space in the east to counter-balance Anglo-America. Now he found himself in control of a large territory with nobody to put in it. Hitler faced the same problem in Bohemia and Moravia, albeit in a less extreme form. With full employment in Germany, and little economic migration to the United States or elsewhere, there was no incentive for Reich Germans to settle in Poland or for that matter in the Protectorate. Hitler had no actual demographic surplus to distribute. Instead of a ‘people without space’, it was now a case of a ‘space without people’.
Hitler responded to this problem in three ways. First, he cast around for alternative sources of Germans. Some of these were to come from South Tyrol, where the transfer of the those who had ‘opted’ for Germany was finalized in October 1939, 82 but most of them were sourced in the Baltic States and the Soviet Union. German populations there were to be repatriated in a huge ‘Home to the Reich’ operation. Hitler seems to have hit on this solution, which featured in none of his earlier writings or pre-war plans, largely by accident. Originally, he had only intended to absorb those Germans who had shown strong Nazi or nationalist inclinations, but he was prevailed upon by the leader of the German minority in Latvia to save all Baltic Germans from Stalin’s clutches. One way or the other, the German-Soviet ‘Border and Friendship Treaty’ of 28 September created facts on the ground by formalizing the new territorial arrangements.83
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