Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

Kiev. He saw the destruction of Soviet cities as the basis for lasting German power in the conquered territories.⁵⁰ No military power was to be tolerated within 300 kilometres east of the Urals.⁵¹ ‘The border between Europe and Asia,’ he stated, ‘is not the Urals but the place where the settlements of Germanic types of people stop and pure Slavdom begins. It is our task to push this border as far as possible to the east, and if necessary beyond the Urals.’⁵²

Hitler thought the Russian people fit for nothing but hard work under coercion.⁵³ ‘The Slavs,’ he declared, ‘were a rabbit-family (Kaninchenfamilie) who would never proceed beyond the family association if not forced to do so by a ruling class. Their natural and desired condition was one of general disorganization.’⁵⁴ ‘The Ukrainians,’ he remarked on another occasion, ‘were every bit as idle, disorganized, and nihilistically asiatic as the Greater Russians.’ To speak of any sort of work ethic was pointless. All they understood was ‘the whip’. He admired Stalin’s brutality. The Soviet dictator, he thought, was ‘one of the greatest living human beings since, if only through the harshest compulsion, he had succeeded in welding a state out of this Slavic rabbit-family’.⁵⁵ He described ‘the sly Caucasian’ as ‘one of the most extraordinary figures of world history’, who scarcely ever left his office but could rule from there through a subservient bureaucracy.⁵⁶

Hitler’s model for domination and exploitation remained the British Empire. His inspiration for the future rule of his master-race was the Raj. He voiced his admiration on many occasions for the way such a small country as Great Britain had been able to establish its rule throughout the world in a huge colonial empire. British rule in India in particular showed what Germany could do in Russia. It must be possible to control the eastern territory with a quarter of a million men, he stated. With that number the British ruled 400 million Indians. Russia would always be dominated by German rulers. They must see to it that the masses were educated to do no more than read road signs, though a reasonable living standard for them was in the German interest.⁵⁷ The south of the Ukraine, in particular the Crimea, would be settled by German farmer-soldiers. He would have no worries at all about deporting the existing population somewhere or other to make room for them. The vision was of a latter-day feudal type of settlement: there would be a standing army of 1?-2 million men, providing some 30–40,000 every year for use each year when their twelve-year service was completed. If they were sons of farmers, they would be given a farmstead, fully equipped, by the Reich in return for their twelve years of military service. They would also be provided with weapons. The only condition was that they must marry country-not town-girls.⁵⁸ German peasants would live in beautiful settlements, linked by good roads to the nearest town. Beyond this would be ‘the other world’ where the Russians lived under German subjugation. Should there be a revolution, ‘all we need to do is drop a few bombs on their cities and the business will be over’.⁵⁹ After ten years, he foresaw, there would be a German elite, to be counted on when there were new tasks to be undertaken. ‘A new type of man will come to the fore, real master-types, who of course can’t be used in the west: viceroys.’⁶⁰ German administrators would be housed in splendid buildings; the governors would live in ‘palaces’.⁶¹

His musings on the prospect of a German equivalent of India continued on three successive days and nights from 8–11 August. India had given the English pride. The vast spaces had obliged them to rule millions with only a few men. ‘What India was for England, the eastern territory will be for us,’ he declared.⁶²

For Hitler, India was the heart of an empire that had brought Britain not only power, but prosperity. Ruthless economic exploitation had always been central to his dream of the German empire in the east. Now, it seemed, that dream would soon become reality. ‘The Ukraine and then the Volga basin will one day be the granaries of Europe,’ he foresaw. ‘And we’ll also provide Europe with iron. If Sweden won’t supply it one of these days, good, then we’ll take it from the east.⁶³ Belgian industry can exchange its products — cheap consumer wares — for corn from these areas. From Thuringia and the Harz mountains, for example, we can remove our poor working-class families to give them big stretches of land (gro?e Raume).’⁶⁴ ‘We’ll be an exporter of corn for all in Europe who need it,’ he went on, a month later. ‘In the Crimea we will have citrus fruits, rubber plants (with 40,000 hectares we’ll make ourselves independent), and cotton. The Pripet marches will give us reeds. We will deliver to the Ukrainians head-scarves, glass chains as jewellery, and whatever else colonial peoples like. We Germans — that’s the main thing — must form a closed community like a fortress. The lowest stable-lad must be superior to any of the natives…’⁶⁵

Autarky, in Hitler’s thinking, was the basis of security. And the conquest of the east, as he had repeatedly stated in the mid-1920s, would now offer Germany that security. ‘The struggle for hegemony in the world will be decided for Europe through the occupation of the Russian space,’ he told his entourage in mid-September. ‘This makes Europe the firmest place in the world against the threat of blockade.’⁶⁶ He returned to the theme a few days later. ‘As soon as I recognize a raw material as important for the war, I put every effort into making us independent in it. Iron, coal, oil, corn, livestock, wood — we must have them at our disposal… Today I can say: Europe is self-sufficient, as long as we just prevent another mammoth state existing which could utilize European civilization to mobilize Asia against us.’ He compared, as he had frequently done many years earlier, the benefits of autarky with the international market economy and the mistakes, as he saw them, made by Britain and America through their dependence upon exports and overseas markets, bringing cut-throat competition, corresponding high tariffs and production costs, and unemployment. Britain had increased unemployment and impoverished its working class by the error of industrializing India, he continued. Germany was not tied to exports, and this had meant that it was the only country without unemployment. ‘The country that we are now opening up is for us only a raw-material source and marketing area, not a field for industrial production… We won’t need any more to look for an active (aufnahmefahigen) market in the Far East. Here is our market. We simply need to secure it. We’ll deliver cotton goods, cooking-pots, all simple articles for satisfying the demand for the necessities of life. We won’t be able to produce anything like so much as can be marketed here. I see there great possibilities for the build-up of a strong Reich, a true world-power… For the next few hundred years we will have a field of activity without equal.’⁶⁷

Hitler was blunt about his justification for conquering this territory: might was right. A culturally superior people, deprived of ‘living space’, needed no further justification.⁶⁸ It was for him, as always, a matter of the ‘laws of nature’. ‘If I harm the Russians now, then for the reason that they would otherwise harm me,’ he declared. ‘The dear God, once again, makes it like that. He suddenly casts the masses of humanity on to the earth and each one has to look after himself and how he gets through. One person takes something away from the other. And at the end you can only say that the stronger wins. That is after all the most sensible order of things.’⁶⁹

There would be no end of the struggle in the east, that was clear, even after a German victory. Hitler spoke of building an ‘Eastern Wall’ along the Urals as a barrier against sudden inroads from the ‘dangerous human reservoir’ in Asia. It would be no conventional fortification, but a live wall built of the soldier-farmers who would form the new eastern settlers. A permanent border struggle in the east will produce a solid stock and prevent us from sinking back into the softness of a state system based purely on Europe.’⁷⁰ War was for Hitler the essence of human activity. ‘What meeting a man means for a girl,’ he declared, ‘war meant for him.’⁷¹ He referred back frequently in these weeks to his own experiences in the First World War, probably the most formative of his life. Looking at the newsreel of the ‘Battle of Kiev’, he was completely gripped by ‘a heroic epic such as there had never previously been’. He immediately then added (in flat contradiction) that it had been like that in what he always called ‘the World War’, but that nobody had been able to record it in the same way for posterity. ‘I’m immensely happy to have experienced the war in this way,’ he added. ⁷² If he could wish the German people one thing, he remarked on another occasion, it would be to have a war every fifteen to twenty years. If reproached for the loss of 200,000 lives, he would reply that he had enlarged the German nation by 2? million, and felt justified in demanding the sacrifice of the lives of a tenth. ‘Life is horrible (grausam). Coming into being, existing, and passing away, there’s always a killing (ein Toten). Everything that is born must later die. Whether it’s through illness, accident, or war, that remains the same.’⁷³

Hitler’s notions of a social ‘new order’ have to be placed in this setting of conquest, ruthless exploitation, the right of the powerful, racial dominance, and more or less permanent war in a world where life was cheap and readily expendable. His ideas often had their roots in the resentment that still smouldered at the way his own ‘talents’ had been left unrecognized or the disadvantages of his own social status compared with the privileges of the high-born and well-to-do. Thus he advocated free education, funded by the state, for all talented youngsters. Workers would have annual holidays and could expect once or twice in their lives to go on a sea-