Hitler

“useless as building blocks for a people’s community”). The simple of heart, on the other hand, were forever being hailed. In November, 1937, the press received directives to keep silent about the preparations for “total war” being initiated in all the branches of the NSDAP.⁶⁸

The economic field as well was being regeared. Once again, the businessmen, contrary to the theory that capitalist interests were the dominant force in the Third Reich, proved willing tools who “had no more influence upon the political decisions than their day laborers.”⁶⁹ Should they fail to meet the demands set for them, “it is not Germany that would be ruined, but at most a few managers,” Hitler had hinted as early as the autumn of 1936 in a memorandum concerning his economic program. As always, he was proceeding entirely from considerations of efficiency. We misread his matter-of-fact view of all practical problems if we view the regime’s economic policy in ideological terms. Basically, the economic system remained capitalist; but it was in many ways overlaid by authoritarian command structures and atypically distorted.

In his memorandum Hitler explicitly admitted his expansionist intentions—for the first time since he had become Chancellor. He had had to speed up his plans, he indicated, because of the country’s troubling situation in raw materials and foodstuffs, thus once more evoking the old terror of a hopelessly overpopulated country with the proverbial 140 inhabitants per square kilometer. A Four-Year Plan on the Soviet Russian model was to supply the sinews for the Lebensraum policy. Hermann Goring was put in charge. He promptly proceeded to bully the businessmen into carrying out the plans for autarchy and rearmament without regard to the costs or the economic consequences. At the ministerial session devoted to Hitler’s memorandum, Goring insisted that the country must act “as if we were in the stage of imminent peril of war.” A few months later he told a meeting of big businessmen that producing economically no longer mattered; what counted was simply to produce at all. It was a plan for Raubbau—strip mining the economy, as it were—and its aim was a war of conquest, for only such a war could justify it. “We must always remember that if we lose, everything’s shot anyhow,” Hitler later commented, during the war itself.

When Hjalmar Schacht criticized these methods, there was a breach which soon forced him out of the cabinet. Hitler now felt that time was running out. His memorandum had ruled that economic rearmament must be conducted “in the same tempo, with the same resolution, and if necessary with the same ruthlessness” as the political and military preparations for war. The concluding sentences were similarly dramatic: “Herewith I am setting the following task: First. The German army must be ready for commitment within four years. Second. The German economy must be ready for war within four years.”

Reports on morale during this period speak of “a certain fatigue and apathy.”⁷⁰ The overorganization of people was becoming almost unbearable. The regime’s policy toward the churches, the defamation of minorities, the racial cult, the pressure upon the arts and the sciences, and the excessive zeal of minor party functionaries engendered anxieties that could be expressed only in the most covert terms; such griping was totally ineffective. The majority tried, as far as possible, to go on living, ignoring both the regime and its injustices. The report cited above notes that “the German greeting [Heil Hitler]—which at any rate is a sensitive measure of shifts in political moods—has yielded almost entirely to the older customary salutations, or is only casually responded to, outside the circles of party members and officials.”

Though such local reports were scarcely definitive, they fed Hitler’s sense of urgency and showed him what had to be done: he must shake the populace out of its lethargy and create a situation in which anxiety, pride, and an offended sense of self-importance combined so that “the inner voice of the people itself slowly began to scream for violence.”

“Where Hitler draws perspectives, war is always in sight,” Konrad Heiden wrote around this time, and in the same passage asked whether the man could continue to exist “without disintegrating the world.”⁷¹

The “Greatest German in History”

Give me a kiss, girls! This is the greatest day of my life. I shall be known as the greatest German in history.

Adolf Hitler on March 15, 1939, to his secretaries.

Hitler’s real plans came to light in the secret conference of November 5, 1937, whose course we know from the record kept by one of the participants, Colonel Hossbach. To a restricted circle consisting of Foreign Minister von Neurath, War Minister von Blomberg, Commander of the Army von Fritsch, Commander in Chief of the Navy Admiral Raeder, and Air Force Commander Goring, Hitler unveiled ideas that struck some of those present as sensational at the time, and others later on when they were disclosed at the Nuremberg trial.

The psychological importance of his statements evidently outweighs their political weight. For what Hitler produced in an exalted mood, inspired by the favorable circumstances, in the course of more than four hours of nonstop speech to the group assembled in the chancellery, was nothing more than the design he had developed years before in Mein Kampf. Now he presented it as the “result of detailed considerations and the experiences of his four and a half years as head of government,” but it was the same old concept from which he had never strayed, which had become the fixed point of all his steps and maneuvers. Only the tone of impatience was new. He would ask those present, he added portentously after his introductory words, “to regard the following statement as his testamentary bequest in case of his decease.”

If the goal of German policy, he began, were considered as the safeguarding, preservation, and increase of the body of the nation, the “problem of space” must immediately be confronted. All economic and social difficulties, all racial dangers, could be mastered only by overcoming the scarcity of space; the future of Germany absolutely depended on that. The problem could no longer be solved by reaching out for overseas colonies, as had been possible for the powers of the liberalistic colonial age. Germany’s living space was situated on the Continent. Granted, every expansion involved considerable risks, as the history of the Roman Empire or the British Empire demonstrated: “Neither earlier nor at the present time has there ever been space without a master; the aggressor always comes up against the possessor.” But the gain, specifically a spatially coherent Greater Reich ruled by a solid “racial nucleus,” justified a high stake. “For the solution of the German question all that remains is the way of force,” he declared.

Once that resolve had been taken, he continued, all that remained was to decide on the most favorable time and circumstances for applying that force. Six to eight years later, conditions could develop only unfavorably for Germany. If, therefore, he was “still alive, it was his unalterable resolve to solve the question of German space between 1943–1945 at the latest.” But he was also determined, if an earlier opportunity offered, to take advantage of it—whether the occasion were a severe domestic crisis in France or a military involvement of the Western powers. In any case, the subjection of Austria and of Czechoslovakia must come first, and he made it clear that he would not be content with the demand of the racial revisionists for annexation of the Sudetenland but had in mind the conquest of all Czechoslovakia as a springboard for far-reaching imperialist aims. By that conquest Germany would win not only twelve divisions but also the food supply for an additional 5 million to 6 million persons, this in the event “that a compulsory emigration of two million from Czechia, of one million persons from Austria, would be successfully carried out.” For the rest, he considered it probable that England and France had “already written off Czechia.” There was strong likelihood that some conflicts would erupt as early as the coming year, in the Mediterranean area, for example; these conflicts would involve a heavy drain on the Western powers. In that case he was determined to strike in 1938, without waiting. In view of these circumstances, from the German viewpoint a rapid and complete victory by Franco in the Spanish Civil War was undesirable. Rather, the interests of the Reich required continuance of the tensions in the Mediterranean area. In fact, it might be wise to encourage Mussolini to undertake additional expansionist moves, in order to create a casus belli between Italy and the Western powers. Anything of that sort would provide a magnificent opportunity for Germany to begin the “assault upon Czechoslovakia” with “lightning rapidity.”

This exposition evidently stunned and disturbed some of the group, and in his description of the conference Colonel Hossbach notes that the subsequent discussion “at times took a very sharp tone.” Neurath, Blomberg, and Fritsch, in particular, opposed Hitler’s arguments and explicitly warned him against the risks of a war with the