rearmament.28
The military had other ideas. The leaders of the armed forces, uninterested in the niceties of economics but fully taken up by the potential of modern advanced weaponry, pressed unabatedly for rapid and massive acceleration of the armaments programme. Within weeks of the reoccupation of the Rhineland, General Ludwig Beck, Chief of the General Staff of the army, had come up with plans to expand the thirty-six divisions envisaged in March 1935, when military service was reintroduced, into forty-one divisions. By the summer, the projections had been worked out for an army to be bigger in 1940 than the Kaiser’s war army had been in 1914.29
The army leaders were not acting in response to pressure from Hitler. They had their own agenda. They were at the same time ‘working towards the Fuhrer’, consciously or unconsciously acting ‘along his lines and towards his aim’ (in phrases tellingly used by one Nazi official in a speech two years earlier, hinting at how the dynamic of Nazi rule operated)30 in the full knowledge that their rearmament ambitions wholly coincided with Hitler’s political aims, and that they could depend upon his backing against attempts to throttle back on armament expenditure. Reich War Minister Werner von Blomberg, Colonel-General Werner Freiherr von Fritsch, Commander-in-Chief of the Army, and his Chief of Staff, Beck, were thereby paving the way, in providing the necessary armed might, for the later expansionism which would leave them all trailing in Hitler’s wake.31
Even so, the economic impasse seemed complete. Huge increases in allocation of scarce foreign currency were demanded by both the Ministry of Food and the Ministry of Armaments.32 The position could not be sustained. Fundamental economic priorities had to be established as a matter of urgency. Autarky and export lobbies could not both be satisfied. Hitler remained for months inactive. He had no patent solution to the problem. The key figure at this point was Goring.
Several factors contributed to Goring’s arrival centre-stage in the arena of economic policy: his own insatiable drive to aggrandizement of power; his involvement the previous autumn when acting as Hitler’s troubleshooter in a dispute between Schacht and Richard Walther Darre, Reich Minister for Food and Agriculture, over the allocation of scarce foreign currency to import food products in short supply instead of for raw materials needed by the expanding armaments industries; Schacht’s attempt to use him as a barrier against Party intrusions into the economic sphere; the increasing desperation of Blomberg about the raw-materials crisis in armaments production which eventually forced him to back the power pretensions of the Luftwaffe chief; and not least Hitler’s patent reluctance to become involved, especially if it meant taking decisions in opposition to Party demands.33 Blomberg had been pressing for months for a ‘Fuel Commissar’. Schacht’s repeated rejection of the proposition, realizing the threat to his own sphere of competence, opened the door for Goring, as Air Minister and head of the Luftwaffe, to demand that the Fuel Commissar be answerable to him. Then in March 1936, as the fuel shortage reached crisis-point, Goring decided to put himself forward as ‘Fuel Dictator’.34 Keen for different reasons to block Goring’s ambitions, Schacht and Blomberg tried to tie him down within the framework of a four-man commission involving the three of them and Reich Minister Hanns Kerrl (a close ally of Goring to whom Hitler had assigned a role in economic affairs in spring 1936) to tackle the foreign-exchange crisis.35 Hoping to keep the party off his back, Schacht helped persuade Hitler to install Goring at the beginning of April as Plenipotentiary for the Securing of the Raw Materials and Foreign Exchange Demands of the Reich. Goring’s brief was to overcome the crisis, get rearmament moving again, and force through a policy of autarky in fuel production.36 But by now Goring was in the driving-seat. Schacht was rapidly becoming yesterday’s man. In May, shocked at the new power-base that his own Machiavellian manoeuvrings had unwittingly helped to create for Goring, the Economics Minister protested to Hitler. Hitler waved him away. He did not want anything more to do with the matter, he was reported as telling Schacht, and the Economics Minister was advised to take it up with Goring himself.37 ‘It won’t go well with Schacht for much longer,’ commented Goebbels. ‘He doesn’t belong in his heart to us.’ But Goring, too, he thought would have difficulties with the foreign-exchange and raw-materials issue, pointing out: ‘He doesn’t understand too much about it.’38
It was not necessary that he did. His role was to throw around his considerable weight, force the pace, bring a sense of urgency into play, make things happen. ‘He brings the energy. Whether he has the economic know-how and experience as well? Who knows? Anyway, he’ll do plenty of bragging,’ was Goebbels’s assessment.39
Goring soon had a team of technical experts assembled under Lieutenant-Colonel Fritz Lob of the Luftwaffe. In the research department of Lob’s planning team, run by the chemical firm IG Farben’s director Karl Krauch, solutions were rapidly advanced for maximizing production of synthetic fuels and rapidly attaining self-sufficiency in mineral-oil extraction.40 By midsummer, Lob’s planners had come up with a detailed programme for overcoming the unabated crisis. It envisaged a sharp tilt to a more directed economy with distinct priorities built on an all-out drive both to secure the armaments programme and to improve food provisioning through maximum attainable autarky in specific fields and production of substitute raw materials such as synthetic fuels, rubber, and industrial fats.41 It was not a war economy; but it was on the road to becoming the nearest thing to a war economy in peacetime.
At the end of July, while Hitler was in Bayreuth and Berchtesgaden, Goring had a number of opportunities to discuss with him his plans for the economy. On 30 July he obtained Hitler’s agreement to present them with a splash at the coming Reich Party Rally in September. ‘A big speech of the Colonel-General at the Party Congress’ was envisaged, according to a note in Goring’s desk-diary.42 Goring intended to reap the glory. The new economic programme would dominate the Rally. That was what the Luftwaffe chief had in mind. But when it came to propaganda, Hitler, sniffing another chance to enhance his image through the major announcement of a ‘Four-Year Plan’, was unwilling as ever to concede the star-role. He decided to deliver the key speech himself.43
Hitler had meanwhile become increasingly preoccupied with the looming threat, as he saw it, from Bolshevism, and with the prospect that the mounting international turmoil could lead to war in the nearer rather than more distant future.44 Whatever tactical opportunism he deployed, and however much he played on the theme for propaganda purposes, there is no doubt that the coming showdown with Bolshevism remained — as it had been since the mid-1920s at the latest — the lodestar of Hitler’s thinking on foreign policy. In 1936, this future titanic struggle started to come into sharper focus.
At his private meeting with the former British Air Minister Lord Londonderry in February 1936, Hitler had concentrated on what he described as ‘the growing menace to the world of Bolshevism’. He was, he said, destined to play the part of the prophet internationally, as he had done within Germany some fifteen years earlier. He understood the dangers of Bolshevism better than other European statesmen, he went on, since ‘his political career had grown out of a struggle against Bolshevist tendencies’. Continental Europe was unbalanced and unstable, he claimed. Most governments were weak and short-lived. The continent was living ‘from hand to mouth’. The ‘extraordinary development of Soviet power’ had to be seen against this background of ‘decay’. Moreover, he added, playing up the bogey of Bolshevism to his British guest, the Soviet Union was not merely the greatest military power on the continent, but also ‘the embodiment of an idea’. He went on to provide Lord Londonderry with facts and figures on Soviet military and economic might. The admission of Russia to the League of Nations reminded him of the fable of Reynard the Fox — overcoming the suspicion of the other animals, then devouring them one after another. ‘Just in the same way as one does not allow germ-carriers in ordinary life to frequent the society of healthy people, so we must keep Russia at a distance,’ he maintained. But if the decomposition of Europe and the strengthening of the Soviet Union continued, he asked, ‘what will the position be in ten, twenty, or thirty years?’45
Hitler had visualized for Lord Londonderry the prospect of war between the Soviet Union and Japan, with defeat for the Japanese opening the path for Soviet domination also of the Far East. After meeting the Japanese ambassador in Berlin early in June, Hitler repeated his view that deepening conflict was on the way in the Far East, though he now thought that Japan would ‘thrash’ Russia. At that point, ‘this colossus will start to totter
Holidaying in Berchtesgaden in mid-July, Hitler told Goebbels that ‘the next Party Rally will again be against the Bolsheviks’.47 A few days later in Bayreuth, where as usual he was attending the Wagner
