Hitler

would “personally shoot down… the idiots” responsible for this idea. On the contrary, he went on, it seemed to him essential to promote a “vigorous business in contraceptives.” And becoming facetious once more: “But I supposed we’d have to get the help of the Jews to get such things into lively circulation.”⁷⁹

A system of broad roads and lines of communication (“the beginning of all civilization”) was to make the territory governable and help to open up its natural resources. One of Hitler’s favorite ideas was a railroad to the Donetz Basin with a track width of twelve feet, on which two-story trains would travel back and forth at a speed of 125 miles per hour. At the intersections of the principal arteries of communication there would arise cities conceived as great military bases. These would hold sizable units of mobile military forces, and would be secured at a radius of twenty or twenty-five miles by a “circuit of beautiful villages” with a well-armed rural population. In a memorandum dated November 26, 1940, Himmler had already issued guidelines for rural reconstruction in the conquered Polish territories; he fixed the social hierarchy among the German settlers, from hired man to the representative of an “autochthonous leadership,” with just as much pendantry as the layout of the villages and farms (“wall thicknesses… less than 38 centimeters will not be permitted”). Above all the “provision for greenery” was to help express the German tribes’ inherited love of trees, shrubs, and flowers and give the landscape as a whole a German imprint. The planting of village oaks and village lindens was therefore just as important as bringing “the electric lines… as inconspicuously as possible up to the buildings.” The same romantic idyl was also planned for the rural defense areas of Russia: small, well-garrisoned settlements in the midst of hostile surroundings would preserve the primal situation of the permanent fight for survival, and would thus prove their viability.

Meanwhile, however, it soon became apparent that the vastness of the area presented something of a problem. Those who had been primarily designated as new settlers were the Volksdeutsche, the Germans living in the countries of southeastern Europe and overseas, and also decorated soldiers, sailors, or airmen, and members of the SS. The East belonged to the SS, declared Otto Hofmann, chief of the Race and Settlement Office of the SS. According to the calculations of the planners, however, there were no more than 5 million of such settlers. Assuming extremely favorable circumstances, according to a memorandum dated April 27, 1942, “we can count on a figure of eight million Germans in these areas in about thirty years.”⁸⁰ For the first time a certain degree of agorphobia seemed to be current.

A whole list of measures was devised to overcome this unexpected dilemma. Thus someone thought of “reawakening in the German people the urge toward settlement in the East” and also allowing the racially valuable neighboring peoples to participate in the colonization. A memorandum of Rosenberg’s considered not only the settlement of Danes, Norwegians, and Dutch, but “after the victorious termination of the war also Englishmen.” All would be “members of the Reich,” Hitler declared, and boasted that this procedure would have a significance similar to the inclusion of several German states in the Customs Union a hundred years earlier. Simultaneously, according to the recommendations of a memorandum issued by Rosenberg’s Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, 31 million of the 45 million inhabitants of western Russia were to be expatriated or killed. Furthermore, it was intended to introduce rival sects and, if this measure should prove insufficient, it would be only necessary, Hitler suggested, “to drop a few bombs on their cities and the job will be done.”

The greatest hopes were placed in the measures for recovery of good blood. Hitler compared his activity during the so-called time of struggle with the effect of a magnet that had drawn all the metallic element, all the iron content, of the German people. “Now we must also proceed in this way in building the new Reich,” he declared at the beginning of February, 1942, speaking in the Fuhrer’s headquarters. “Wherever Germanic blood is to be found anywhere in the world, we will take what is good to ourselves. With what the others have left they will be unable to oppose the Germanic Empire.” In Poland “race commissions” had investigated the “Germanism” of large numbers of selected persons and in some cases brought them back to Germany for Umvolkung (restoration to the race), whether they wished it or not. Minors in particular were taken. Henceforth, Himmler declared at the evening meal in Rastenburg, they would institute annual “fishing parties for bloodlines,” throughout France, and he proposed that the children taken should be removed to German boarding schools in order to teach them the accidental nature of their French nationality and make them conscious of their Germanic blood. “For we will recuperate the good blood, which we can make use of, and incorporate it among us, or else, gentlemen—you may call this cruel, but nature is cruel—we will destroy this blood.”⁸¹

Behind these proposals for “broadening the blood base” there once again cropped up that old fear of the extinction of the Aryan, of the second “expulsion from paradise” that Hitler had conjured up in Mein Kampf.⁸² But if it should prove possible, he ranted, to keep the Reich “racially high and pure, it would gain a crystalline hardness and be unassailable.” Then the Germans’ greater force, boldness, and barbaric vitality would once again come into their own, all false religions of reason and humanity would go down to destruction, and natural order would triumph. As the “most gluttonous predator in world history” National Socialism had Nature and her promises on its side. And with that strangely distorted sense of reality he had, so that his own visions always seemed already within his grasp, he saw growing up in a few years, within those Eastern “nurseries of Germanic blood,” the longed-for type of human being, “regular master personalities,” as he enthusiastically described them, “viceroys.”

Simultaneously, he backed the efforts sponsored chiefly by Himmler and Bormann to establish new legislation concerning marriage. Their argument ran that the population shortage after the war would tend to get more serious, since 3 or 4 million women would necessarily have to remain unmarried. As Hitler remarked, such losses translated into divisions “are intolerable for our people.” In order to make it possible for these women to have children, and at the same time to provide “decent, physically and psychically healthy men of strong character” with the opportunity for increased reproduction, special arrangements would have to be made. A procedure for application and selection would enable such men “to enter a firm marital relationship not only with one woman, but with an additional one.”

These ideas were set forth in a memorandum by Bormann. Himmler supplemented them, suggesting, for example, that the privileged position of the first wife be secured by conferring upon her the title Domina, and that the right to enter a second marriage be reserved for the time being “as a high distinction for the heroes of the war, the bearers of the German Cross in gold, and the bearers of the Knight’s Cross.” Later, he explained, “it could be extended to the bearers of the Iron Cross First Class and to those who wear the silver and gold bar for close-quarters combat.” For, as Hitler was wont to say, “The greatest fighter deserves the most beautiful woman…. If the German man is to be unreservedly ready to die as a soldier, he must have the freedom to love unreservedly. For struggle and love belong together. The philistine should be glad if he gets whatever is left.”⁸³

Such speculations were carried even further within the top leadership of the SS. There was strong sentiment, for instance, in favor of mandatory divorce for marriages that remained childless for five years. Moreover, “all single and married women who do not yet have four children shall be obliged up to the age of thirty-five years to have four children begotten upon them by racially unexceptionable German men. Whether these men are married is of no consequence. Every family which already has four children must release the husband for this operation.”⁸⁴

The Eastern settlement program was, however, also intended to provide a solution for Europe’s national and ethnic disputes. The Crimea, for example, which was the favorite target of the settlement plans, was to be “completely cleansed,” as Hitler put it, and under the ancient Greek name of Tauria, or even Gotenland (Gothland), was to be incorporated directly into the Reich. Simferopol would be renamed Gotenburg and Sevastopol Theoderichhafen.⁸⁵ According to one of the projects, that attractive peninsula, which over the millennia had attracted Scythians and Huns, Goths and Tatars, was to be transformed into a “great German spa.” Others envisioned a “German Gibraltar” to dominate the Black Sea. As prospective settlers, the 140,000 persons of German blood living in Rumanian Transnistria were considered, and for a while some 2,000 Palestine Germans also haunted memoranda and files. But above all it was the population of South Tyrol on whom the new-order fanatics who were doing the planning for the Crimea lighted. Gauleiter Frauenfeld, who had been appointed commissioner general for the Crimea, suggested transporting the South Tyrolese to the peninsula in a body. Hitler termed that idea “extraordinarily good.” He thought “the Crimea extremely well suited in respect to climate and landscape to South Tyrolean nationals.” Besides, it was “a land of milk and honey compared with the present region settled by the South Tyrolese.” Transportation of the South Tyrolese to the Crimea would not impose any