Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

rearmament. Fuel, iron, and synthetic-rubber production had to be stepped up. Cost was irrelevant. Objections — and the opposition voiced in the previous weeks — were taken on board and brushed aside. The nation did not live for the economy; rather, ‘finance and the economy, economic leaders and theories must all exclusively serve this struggle for self-assertion in which our people are engaged’. The Ministry of Economics had simply to set the national economic tasks; private industry had to fulfil them. If it could not do so, the National Socialist state, Hitler threatened, would ‘succeed in carrying out this task on its own’. In typical fashion, he couched his threat in stark alternatives: ‘The German economy will either grasp the new economic tasks or else it will prove itself quite incompetent to survive in this modern age when a Soviet State is setting up a gigantic plan. But in that case it will not be Germany that will go under, but, at most, a few industrialists.’ Though Germany’s economic problems, the memorandum asserted, could be temporarily eased through the measures laid down, they could only finally be solved through the extension of ‘living space’. It was ‘the task of the political leadership one day to solve this problem’. Again this was redolent of Mein Kampf and the Second Book. But it also matched Goring’s aggressive tone in his economic statements earlier in the summer. Only nuances separated Goring’s more pragmatic nationalist-imperialism from Hitler’s race-determined version. Both variants implied war at some point in the future — when economic mobilization, wrote Hitler, would become ‘solely a question of will’. The memorandum closed by advocating a ‘Several Years Plan’ — the term ‘Four-Year Plan’ was not mentioned in the document — to maximize self-sufficiency in existing conditions and make it possible to demand economic sacrifices of the German people. Opportunities had been missed during the previous four years; in the next four years, the German army had to be made operational, the economy made ready for war.⁸⁷

Even in the economic sections, few concrete details were offered. No organizational structure was laid down. The economic ideas mooted in the second part were in themselves not new. But the drive for maximum autarky in the interests of a forced rearmament drive was now taken on to a new plane, and established as the outright priority.⁸⁸ Hitler’s economic notions were confined, as always, to an ideological imperative. The memorandum was wholly programmatic. The more pragmatic expansionist notions of Goring and Blomberg both in the military and in the economic sphere were accommodated within the Hitlerian ideological vision. Moreover, Hitler’s way of argumentation was characteristic. The inflexibility of its ideological premisses coupled with the very broadness of its dogmatic generalities made it impossible for critics to contest it outright without rejection of Hitler himself and his ‘world-view’. This ‘world-view’, whatever tactical adjustments had proved necessary, showed again its inner consistency in the central place assigned to the coming showdown with Bolshevism — an issue which, as we have seen, preoccupied Hitler throughout 1936.

Goring got what he wanted out of Hitler’s memorandum. Armed with Hitler’s backing he was able to determine his supremacy in the central arena of the armaments economy.⁸⁹ Schacht recognized the scale of the defeat he had suffered.⁹⁰ Hitler was reluctant to drop him because of the standing he enjoyed abroad.⁹¹ But his star was now waning fast. Alternative policies to that advanced in Hitler’s memorandum could now be condemned out of hand. Goerdeler’s memorandum rejecting the autarkic programme and arguing for curtailment of rearmament in favour of re-entry into the international market economy was peremptorily dismissed by the new armaments supremo. The dictatorial style in which he conducted the meeting of the Prussian Ministerial Council on 4 September was that of the victor in the power-struggle, basking in the certainty of control over the massive economics empire now opening up before him.⁹²

The growth of this huge domain did not derive from a clearly conceived notion of economic planning. Hitler — in so far as he had given any consideration at all to organizational matters — had, it appears, simply imagined that Goring would work through only a small bureaucracy and function as an overlord in coordinating economic policy with the relevant ministries, which would retain their specific responsibilities.⁹³ Instead, Goring rapidly improvised a panoply of ‘special commissioners’ (Sonderbeauftragte), each backed by their own bureaucratic apparatus, for different facets of the Four-Year Plan, often without clear lines of control, not infrequently overlapping or interfering with the duties of the Ministry of Economics, and all of course answerable to Goring himself. It was a recipe for administrative and economic anarchy.

But the momentum created by the Four-Year Plan was immense. All areas of the economy were affected in the following peacetime years. The resulting pressures on the economy as a whole were not sustainable indefinitely. The economic drive created its own dynamic which fed directly into Hitler’s ideological imperative. The ambitious technocrats in the offices and sub-organizations of the Four-Year Plan, not least the leaders of the rapidly expanding chemicals giant IG Farben, were in their own way — whatever their direct motivation — also ‘working towards the Fuhrer’. Territorial expansion became necessary for economic as well as for ideological reasons. And racial policy, too, was pushed on to a new plane as the spoils to be gained from a programme of ‘aryanization’ were eagerly seized upon as easy pickings in an economy starting to overheat under its own, self-manufactured pressures.

When Hitler drew up his memorandum in late August 1936 all this was in the future. Hitler had no clear notion himself of how it would all unfold. Nor was he specially interested in such questions. Propaganda concerned him more immediately than economics in drawing up the memorandum. He needed the new economic programme as the cornerstone of the Party Rally. His big speech there on the economy — which, as we have seen, Goring had initially wanted to deliver — was closely based, occasionally word for word, on his August memorandum.⁹⁴ He now spoke publicly for the first time of a ‘new Four-Year Programme’ (recalling his initial ‘four-year plan’ put forward immediately after his appointment as Chancellor in 1933).⁹⁵ A planned economy sounded modern. A ‘Five-Year Plan’ had already been taken up in the Bolshevik state at which German preparations were ultimately targeted.⁹⁶ The designation ‘Four-Year Plan’ rapidly caught on in the German press. It became officially so called some weeks later, on 18 October, with Hitler’s ‘Decree for the Implementation of the Four-Year Plan’.⁹⁷

IV

In the foreign-policy arena, the shifts which had begun during the Abyssinian crisis were hardening across the summer and autumn of 1936. Clearer contours were beginning to emerge. Diplomatic, strategic, economic, and ideological considerations — separable but often closely interwoven — were starting to take Germany into more dangerous, uncharted waters. The possibility of a new European conflagration — however unimaginable and horrifying the prospect seemed to most of the generation that had lived through the last one — was starting to appear a real one.

The long-desired alliance with Britain, which had seemed a real possibility in June 1935 at the signing of the Naval Pact, had remained elusive. It was still a distant dream. The Abyssinian crisis and the reoccupation of the Rhineland, now the Spanish Civil War, had all provided hurdles to a closer relationship despite German efforts to court those they imagined had power and influence in Britain and some British sympathizers in high places.⁹⁸ Ribbentrop, appointed in the summer an unwilling Ambassador to London with a mandate from Hitler to bring Britain into an anti-Comintern pact, had since his triumph with the Naval Treaty become increasingly disillusioned about the prospects of a British alliance.⁹⁹ Hitler pointed out to Mussolini in September that Ribbentrop’s appointment marked the last attempt to win over Great Britain.¹⁰⁰ But the new ‘Ambassador Brickendrop’, as he was lampooned on account of the innumerable faux pas (such as saluting the King with the ‘Hitler Greeting’) for which he became renowned in London diplomatic circles, or ‘Half-Time Ambassador’ because of his frequent absences, in any case made his own personal contribution to the growing alienation felt in Britain towards the Third Reich.¹⁰¹ Hitler saw the abdication on 11 December 1936 of King Edward VIII, in the face of opposition in Britain to his proposed marriage to a twice-divorced American, Mrs Wallis Simpson, as a victory for those forces hostile to Germany.¹⁰² Ribbentrop had encouraged him in the view that the King was pro-German and anti- Jewish, and that he had been deposed by an anti-German conspiracy linked to Jews, freemasons, and powerful political lobbies.¹⁰³

By the end of the year (according to a reported indication of his view), Hitler had become more lukewarm about a British alliance, claiming — whether with total conviction may be doubted — that it would at best bring some minor colonial gains but would, on the other hand, hinder Germany’s plans for expansion in central and