Hitler

simultaneous war against France, was not wholly alien to the foreign policy of the Wilhelminian Empire. Shortly after the outbreak of the 1914 war, the German Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg discussed the very same idea, even thinking, by means of a blitzkreig in the West, to arrive at an alliance with England in order to proceed jointly with England against Russia. Toward the end of the war he declared that the conflict “could have been avoided only by an understanding with England.” Here was the original sketch for Hitler’s ideal plan as formulated in Mein Kampf; and when he came to power, Hitler did in fact promptly seek an understanding with England and British neutrality. The Weimar Republic, especially under the guidance of Gustav Stresemann, had given precedence to rapprochement with France.

But beyond these matters of ideology, geopolitics, and alliances, the continuity of German military ambitions can also be seen embodied in the attitudes of social groups. It was chiefly the conservative ruling class whose spokesmen drafted the expansive projects of the period of the monarchy and in whom the collapse of 1918 had bred an exacerbated status complex. Ever since, they had been bent on restoring Germany’s shaken selfconfidence and winning back the lost territories (especially from Poland). Throughout the Weimar period even the most temperate representatives of that class had always been averse to offering a guarantee of the Eastern borders. A 1926 memorandum for the Foreign Office from the army chiefs, for example, set forth in highly characteristic fashion the following guidelines for German foreign policy: liberation of the Rhineland and the Saar, elimination of the Polish Corridor and repossession of Polish Upper Silesia, Anschluss of German Austria, and finally elimination of the demilitarized zone. Here we have, in somewhat different order, the foreign-policy schedule followed by Hitler during the thirties.

The members of the former ruling class looked to the Fuhrer of the National Socialist Party to carry out their revisionist aims. He seemed well qualified for this mission since he was supremely skillful in manipulating the Versailles Treaty and the widespread feelings of humiliation it evoked as integrating factors for the mobilization of the nation. Significantly, at the beginning of his chancellorship, they actually encouraged him to take a still bolder course. In the matter of withdrawal from the Disarmament Conference, or from the League of Nations, the conservative members of the cabinet pressed the hesitating Hitler to take the plunge. The same applied to the question of disarmament. Up to the occupation of Prague they approved entirely of his objectives, even though they questioned his gambler’s methods.

At this point the continuity ends. For what the revisionistic conservatives of the type of von Neurath, von Blomberg, von Papen, or von Weizsacker regarded as the goal was to Hitler not even a stage, but merely a preliminary step. He despised his halfhearted partners because they stopped short of reaching out for world power as he did. His fixed aim continued to be not new (or even old) borders, but vast new areas, over half a million square miles, indeed all the land as far as the Urals and eventually beyond. “We shall impose our laws upon the East. We shall break through and gradually smash forward to the Urals. I hope that our generation will live to accomplish that…. Then we shall have a healthy selection [of the fittest] for the entire future. In this way we will create the preconditions allowing the whole of Europe—directed, ordered and led by us, the Germanic race—to survive for generations its destined battles with an Asia that will undoubtedly flare up again. We do not know when that will be. But if the mass of humanity amounting to one to one and a half billions surges forward, then the Germanic race with its, as I hope, 250 to 300 millions, together with other European races totaling from 600 to 700 million people, and with a deployment area extending to the Urals or in a century beyond the Urals, will pass the test of its struggle for survival against Asia.”¹⁴

What made this kind of imperialism qualitatively different from that under the kaisers, what shattered the continuity, was less the enormous hunger for sheer space (for that had been already suggested among the Pan- Germans and in more specific terms of power politics in Ludendorff’s 1918 plans for handling the East) than the ideological additives that lent it coherence and impetus: the notions of selection, racial bloc, and eschatological mission. Something of the sudden insight into this difference—which as a rule came much too late—breaks through in the assessment of Hitler’s character by a conservative at the time: “This man doesn’t even belong to our race. There is something utterly alien about him, as if he belonged to an otherwise extinct primitive race.”¹⁵

Hitler’s statement that the Second World War was the continuation of the First was also not the imperialistic commonplace for which it has generally been taken. He himself knew better. For the last time he wanted the generals and his conservative partners to believe that he was the trustee of their unrealized dreams of power, who would deliver to them their rightful victory of 1918. But he had far more sweeping victories in mind. The revisionist sentiments merely served him as useful links with the past. Once more we have the peculiar duality of proximity and distance that characterized all his relationships. Against the background of an undialectic concept of continuity it is easy to overlook the nature of the phenomenon. Hitler was not Wilhelm III!

Long ago, in Mein Kampf, he had written that his program represented a declaration of war against the existing order, against the known state of affairs, in short, against the established view of life in general. In September, 1939, he began waging that struggle by armed force and beyond the frontiers. The First World War had already been in part a clash of ideologies and systems of rule; the Second became such a clash in an incomparably more acute and doctrinaire fashion, a kind of world-wide civil war to decide not so much the kind of power that would henceforth rule the world as the kind of morality.

The enemies who faced one another after the unexpectedly rapid subjugation of Poland had no avowed territorial object of dispute, no aims of conquest; and for a time, during the “phony war” of that autumn, it seemed as if the war had lost its rationale. Might this mean that peace could be restored again? On October 5 Hitler had gone to Warsaw for the victory parade and had announced an important “appeal for peace” for the following day. Hardly anyone suspected how pointless the announcement of these vague hopes was. Two weeks earlier Stalin had informed Hitler that he had little use for an independent rump Poland. With his newly arisen antipathy for cautious politics, Hitler promptly agreed to the proposed negotiations. When they ended on October 4, Poland had once more been partitioned by her overpowering neighbors. But along with that act, all chance was lost of ending the war with the Western powers by a political solution. A foreign diplomat remarked after Hitler’s Reichstag address that he had threatened peace with the punishment of forced labor.

Within the framework of his larger design, Hitler had acted with total consistency. Although he would have welcomed a once more neutralized West, Stalin’s offer, at last provided him with a common border with the Soviet Union. And, after all, he had begun the war against Poland to achieve just that. As early as October 17 he had issued a significant order to General Keitel, chief of the High Command of the armed forces. Keitel had been instructed to consider, in future planning, that the occupied Polish region “has military importance for us as an advanced glacis and can be utilized for deployment. To that end the railroads, road and communications must be kept in order and exploited for our purpose. Any signs of consolidation of conditions in Poland must be stamped out.”

Morally, too, he now crossed the boundary that made the war irrevocable. In the same conversation he demanded the repression of any sign “that a Polish intelligentsia is coming forward as a class of leaders. The country is to continue under a low standard of living; we want to draw only labor forces from it.” Territory that went far beyond the borders of 1914 was incorporated into the Reich. The remainder was set up as a general government under the administration of Hans Frank; one part was subjected to a ruthless process of Germanization, the other to an unprecedented campaign of enslavement and annihilation. And while the commandos, the Einsatzgruppen, commenced their reign of terror, arresting, resettling, expelling, and liquidating—so that one German army officer wrote in a horrified letter of a “band of murderers, robbers and plunderers”—Hans Frank extolled the “epoch of the East” that was now beginning for Germany, a period, as he described it in his own peculiar brand of bombastic jargon, “of the most tremendous reshaping of colonizing and resettlement implementation.”

With the intensified stress on ideology, Heinrich Himmler was now visibly gaining more power. Hitler had occasionally remarked in private that Himmler did not shrink from proceeding “with reprehensible methods” and by doing so not only established order but also created accomplices. It would seem that this motive, quite aside from all expansionist plans, contributed to the more and more undisguised criminalization of the system. The idea was to bind the entire nation to the regime by complicity in an enormous crime, to engender the feeling that all the ships had been burned, that Salamis feeling of which Hitler had spoken. This, too, like his relinquishing the means of politics, was an attempt to cut off all avenues of retreat. In nearly every speech Hitler delivered after the beginning of the war the formula recurs: a November, 1918, will not be repeated. No doubt he sensed what