his old laments that he had become a politician against his will and was sorely burdened by the necessities of office which kept him from immortalizing himself with his cultural projects. “It’s a pity,” he would say, “that I have to wage war on account of a drunken fellow [Churchill], instead of serving the works of peace, like art.” He said he was longing to go to the theater or the Wintergarten in Berlin and “be human again.” Or he spoke bitterly of deception and treachery all around him, of the way the generals were always misleading him, and gave way more and more to an unwonted tone of lachrymose misanthropy: “I meet nothing but betrayal!”
From comparable observations during the twenties one of his early followers had drawn the conclusion that Hitler needed self-deception in order to be able to act at all.69 He craved vastly overblown sham worlds, against whose background all obstacles became insignificant and all problems trivial. He was capable of acting only on the basis of false pretenses. That note of fantastical overexcitement associated with his personality derived from this disturbed relationship to reality. We might say: only unreality made him real. In his comments to his entourage, even in those weary, toneless monologues in the last phase of the war. his voice became animated only when he spoke of the “gigantic tasks,” the “enormous plans” for the future. Those were his real reality.
It was a monstrous prospect that opened before the favored group who sat deep into the night about the Fuhrer’s table whenever he vouchsafed it “insights through the side door into paradise.” An entire continent was to be transformed by mass annihilation, extensive resettlements, assimilations and redistribution of the vacated areas. The program called for the conscious destruction of the past and the reshaping of all structures according to a plan without regard for historical tradition. True to his intellectual tendency, Hitler moved in spheres of vast proportions. Centuries shrank before his eyes, which saw only eternity; the world was reduced, and nothing was left of the Mediterranean but a mere, as he put it, “briny puddle.” The innocent age was approaching its end, and the millennium of a new way of thinking was dawning, a way founded upon science and artistic prophecy, and demanding gigantic projects. Its central idea was the salvation of the world from centuries-old infection in an eschatological struggle between pure and inferior blood.
His mission was to provide the good blood with an imperial basis: an empire dominated by Germany, comprising the greater part of Europe as well as vast areas in Asia, which a century hence would be “the most compact and the most colossal power bloc” that had ever existed. Unlike Himmler and the SS, Hitler was free of all romanticism about the East. “I’d rather tramp on foot to Flanders,” he commented, and bewailed the need to conquer territory in an easterly direction. Russia, he said, was “a dreadful country… the end of the world.” He associated Russia with images of Dante’s inferno. “Only reason bids us go to the East.”
Presiding over this power bloc would be a racially homogeneous master race described by Hitler as “creatively Aryan humanity of the Atalantine-Aryan-Nordic type.” It would be divided into a social hierarchy of three strata: the National Socialist “high nobility,” veterans of the struggle; the party members, who would form a kind of “new middle class”; and “the great anonymous masses… the collective of those who serve, those who never come of age,” as Hitler explained it. But these would still be called to rule over the “class of subject alien nationals… let us not flinch at calling them the modern slave class.” And however repellent this picture may seem to us, it had the sound of an ideal order, at least for the ideological vanguard of National Socialism. As Communism preached the utopia of a consistently egalitarian society, this was the utopia of a consistently hierarchic society. The difference was that the historically determined destiny of a class to rule was replaced by the “natural” destiny of a race to rule.
The prewar years had seen a host of measures to purify the race, such as the SS marriage regulations and the genetic point system introduced by the Race and Settlement Bureau of the SS. Now, in the conquered regions of the East, a new, far more comprehensive and radical campaign was launched. Once again Hitler and the executives of the new order proceeded with a combination of positive and negative measures, linking endeavors to select good blood with extermination of those of inferior race. “They will fall like flies,” the SS announced in one of its widely disseminated propaganda releases. And from Hitler’s monologues there emerged a picture of, as he phrased it, a biological “process of mucking out” all contaminants of alien races, with subsequent Germanization.
As always he displayed extraordinary energy for destruction. On October 7, 1939, in a secret decree he had appointed the Reichsfuhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler to the new post of Reich Commissioner for Consolidation of German Racialism, commissioned to undertake a racial “clean-up” in the East and prepare the region for an extensive resettlement program. Nevertheless, in this field, too, there soon developed that confusion of authorities and intentions that the regime engendered wherever it took action. The conquered Eastern territories became the testing ground for a multiplicity of genetic theories, which never progressed beyond their amateurish beginnings; and similarly, no more than a few confused outlines of the new order ever came into being.
In annihilation, on the other hand, the regime displayed the greatest effectiveness. The special vocabulary surrounding the extermination program was a good indication of how closely the regime identified its nature and its destiny with these activities. For this was the “world-historical task,” the “glorious page in our history,” the “supreme stress test,” in the course of which the followers were being trained to a new kind of heroism and toughness. “It is considerably easier in many cases,” Himmler declared, “to go into battle with a company than with the same company in some area to hold down an antagonistic population of culturally lower type, to carry out executions, transport people out of the area, take away howling and weeping women… this quiet compulsion to act, this quiet activity, this standing guard over our Weltanschauung, this need to be consistent, to be uncompromising—in many ways that is much, much harder.”70 He defined his task: What was above all involved was “a perfectly clear solution” of the Jewish question. What was involved was the decision “to make this race disappear from the earth.” But since the majority of the German people were still not sufficiently enlightened about racial matters, the SS “has borne that for our people; we have taken the responsibility upon ourselves… and will then take the secret with us to our graves.”71
We still do not know when Hitler made the decision on the “final solution” of the Jewish question, for no document on the matter exists. Much earlier than his closest followers, evidently, he understood such words as “elimination” or “extermination” not merely metaphorically, but as acts of physical annihilation, because such thoughts held no terrors for him. “Here too,” Goebbels wrote with an undertone of admiration, “the Fuhrer has been the fearless vanguard and spokesman of a radical solution.” Even at the beginning of the thirties Hitler had, among his intimates, called for the development of a “technique of depopulation” and explicitly added that by that he meant the elimination of entire races. “Nature is cruel; therefore we also are entitled to be cruel. When I send the flower of German youth into the steel hail of the coming war without feeling the slightest regret over the precious German blood that is being spilled, should I not also have the right to eliminate millions of an inferior race that multiplies like vermin.”72
Even the procedure of killing the victims by poison gas, first applied in an old, remote castle in the forest near Kulmhof, in December, 1941, can be traced back to Hitler’s own experiences in the First World War. At any rate, a passage in
As early as the end of 1939 the first deportations to the ghettos of the Government General (Poland) began. But Hitler’s specific decision for mass extermination apparently was made during the period of active preparation for the Russian campaign. The speech of March 31, 1941, which informed a sizable group of higher-ranking officers about Himmler’s “special tasks” in the rear area, represents the first concrete reference to plans for mass killings. Two days later Alfred Rosenberg, after a two-hour talk with Hitler, confided with a shudder to his diary. “Which I do not want to write down today, but will never forget.” Finally, on July 31, 1941, Goring issued to SD Chief Reinhard Heydrich the directive concerning the “desired final solution of the Jewish
