Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

Even those who might criticize overt Nazi violence and the frequent outrages which the Jewish community had to suffer during the Weimar Republic were often infected by some form of resentment, envy, or suspicion of the Jews. Though relatively few were drawn to the outright violence against Jews (which was nonetheless commonplace in Weimar Germany), latent or passive antisemitism was widespread.¹⁹ As incessant Nazi agitation shored up layers of animosity already intensified by the search for scapegoats for a lost war, revolution, mounting political crisis, and deep social misery, prejudice intensified. Allegations that Jews were disproportionately wealthy, harmfully dominant in the economy, and unhealthily influential in the cultural sphere proliferated. The sense, in other words, that Jews were different (however much they strove to prove the opposite) and were responsible for Germany’s ills was spreading fast even before Hitler took power.

Once he had done so, the anti-Jewish premisses of Nazism were able to build on such negative feelings, permeate the entire regime and, magnified by incessant propaganda, touch all levels of society. The intention of ‘removing’ the Jews from Germany, as a basis of national renewal resting upon racial ‘purification’, was therefore guaranteed to prompt initiatives from every corner of the regime. And among the many who felt unease or disquiet at the ferocity of antisemitism in the new state, widespread latent dislike of Jews and moral indifference to discrimination offered no barriers to spiralling persecution.

The restraining of open aggression towards the Jews in the Olympic year of 1936 was regarded by activists as a mere temporary device, and simply kept the pressure for further discriminatory measures simmering below the surface. Social resentment, malice, and greed, as well as outright hatred and ideological correctness made sure the screw of persecution did not loosen. By late 1937 the ‘aryanization’ of the economy was starting to advance rapidly. By 1938, open assaults on the Jewish community were again commonplace. The internal dynamics of an ideologically driven police force with its own agenda, on the look-out for new racial target-groups, searching for fresh possibilities of ‘solving the Jewish Question’, additionally meant that radicalism in the fight against the ‘racial enemy’ mounted, rather than subsided, in the ‘quiet years’ of 1936 and 1937.

Gradually, then, the ‘removal of the Jews’, which Hitler as early as 1919 had advanced as the necessary aim of a national government, began to seem like a realizable aim.²⁰

In the other sphere most closely linked with Hitler’s own ideological obsessions, the expansion of Germany’s borders, radicalizing forces were also at work. If Hitler was the chief, most single-minded, and most unscrupulous exponent of the German expansionist drive, the dream of mastery in Europe was far from his dream alone. Rooted in certain strains of German imperialist ideology,²¹ it had been embedded as a key component in Hitler’s thinking by the mid-1920s at the latest. It had then gained momentum as the Nazi Movement itself had gained momentum and swollen massively in size in the early 1930s. It had formed part of the great ‘mission’ of ‘national redemption’ embodied in Hitler’s Utopian ‘vision’ of a glorious German future. However unreal acquisition of ‘living space’ in eastern Europe at the expense of the Soviet Union ‘by the sword’ (as Hitler had repeatedly stated in the later 1920s) might have seemed in conditions of unprecedented impoverishment and enfeeblement of the German state in the early 1930s, the vaguely expressed Hitlerian ‘vision’ of mastery in Europe had the great advantage that it could encompass (while not being identical with) long-held and differing conceptions of the revival of German dominance close to the hearts of powerful groups within the leadership of the army, in the upper echelons of the Foreign Ministry, in some prominent business circles, and among many intellectuals. As self- confidence returned during the first years of the Hitler dictatorship, as the economy recovered, as rearmament began to gather pace, and as the regime swept from one diplomatic triumph to another, the varying ideas of German expansion and dominance began gradually to congeal and to seem increasingly realistic.

Expansion, moreover, began to appear not just ideologically desirable as the fulfilment of the reborn nation, the culmination of the ‘national salvation’ which Hitler had preached; it was more and more seen to be desirable — even necessary — on economic and military grounds.

For businessmen, Hitler’s idea of ‘living space’ blended easily into their notions of a ‘greater economic sphere’ (Gro?raumwirtschaft), even if they favoured expansion to recover traditional German dominance in southeastern Europe rather than looking to the brutal colonization of Russia. As thoughts of economic recovery turned to thoughts of economic domination, and as the pressures of an increasingly armaments-orientated economy laid bare the mounting shortages of labour and raw materials, the attractiveness of expansion became all the more evident. The economic balancing-act of accommodating the demands of both consumer and armaments spending urgently needed a solution. The eventual setting of priorities in favour of an armaments economy effectively set the points for expansion. Indeed, for those sections of the economy aligned to armaments production, fervent backing for the regime’s expansionist programme was the certain route to soaring profits.

For the military, forced to bide its time as long as Germany had been shackled by the terms of the Versailles Treaty and the burden of reparations imposed on the country after the First World War (and effectively written off in 1932), the aim of restoring the army to its former stature in order to regain the lost territories and to establish dominance in central Europe was long-standing.²² The speed of the rebuilding of the armed forces after 1933 and the evident reluctance and inability of the western democracies to counter it now produced their own momentum. Not just to Hitler, but to some military leaders, too, it seemed opportune to take advantage of circumstances which could rapidly become less favourable once Britain and France entered an arms race to counter Germany’s rearmament. The international instability following the break-up of the post-Versailles order, the weakness of the western democracies, and the incipient arms-race all suggested that the time was more propitious than it might ever be again to establish Germany’s dominant role on the European continent. It was an argument that Hitler could often deploy with effect when addressing his generals. The proximity of potentially hostile neighbours in Poland and Czechoslovakia, prospects of conflict at some future point with France and Britain, and, above all, the fears — whatever the perception of current weakness — of Bolshevism to the east all added to the allure of expansionism and, in so doing, helped to tie the military to Hitler and to his own dreams of domination in Europe.

In such ways, Hitler’s fixed points of ideology — ‘removal of the Jews’ and preparations for a future titanic struggle to attain ‘living-space’ — acted as such broad and compelling long-term goals that they could easily embrace the differing interests of those agencies which formed the vital pillars of the Nazi regime. As a result, the instruments of a highly modern state — bureaucracy, economy, and, not least, army — in the heart of Europe increasingly bound themselves to Hitler’s ‘charismatic’ authority, to the politics of national salvation and the dream of European mastery embodied in the personalized ‘vision’ and power of one man. Hitler’s essential, unchanging, distant goals had inexorably become the driving-force of the entire Nazi regime, constituting the framework for the extraordinary energy and dynamism that permeated the entire system of rule. It was a dynamism which knew no terminal point of domination, no moment where power-lust could be satiated, where untrammelled aggression could lapse into mere oppressive authoritarianism.

The ‘good times’ which the first three years of Hitler’s dictatorship had seemingly brought to Germany — economic revitalization, order, prospects of prosperity, restored national pride — could not last indefinitely. They were built on sand. They rested on an illusion that stability and ‘normality’ were within reach. In reality, the Third Reich was incapable of settling into ‘normality’. This was not simply a matter of Hitler’s personality and ideological drive — though these should not be underestimated. His temperament, restless energy, gambler’s instinctive readiness to take risks to retain the initiative, were all enhanced through the gain in confidence that his triumphs in 1935 and 1936 had brought him. His expanding messianism fed itself on the drug of mass adulation and the sycophancy of almost all in this company. His sense that time was against him, the impatience to act, were heightened by the growing belief that he might not have much longer to live. But beyond these facets of Hitler’s personality, more impersonal forces were at work — pressures unleashed and driven on by the chiliastic goals represented by Hitler. A combination of both personal and impersonal driving-forces ensured that in the ‘quiet’ two years between the march into the Rhineland and the march into Austria the ideological dynamism of the regime not only did not subside but intensified, that the spiral of radicalization kept turning upwards.

The triumph of 1936, which had given Hitler’s own self-confidence such a huge boost, proved in this way not an end but a beginning. Most dictators would have been content to relish such a momentous triumph — and to draw the line. For Hitler, the remilitarization of the Rhineland was merely an important stepping-stone in the quest for mastery in Europe. The months that followed paved the way for the sharp radicalization of all aspects of the regime that became noticeable from late 1937 onwards, and which would take Germany and Europe two years later into a second cataclysmic conflagration.