state and all of its works had to be cleared away. But then it would be, as Hitler said in July 1941, a “Garden of Eden.” The British Empire had been a central preoccupation of Stalin’s predecessor Lenin, who believed that imperialism artificially sustained capitalism. Stalin’s challenge, as Lenin’s successor, was to defend the homeland of socialism, the Soviet Union, against a world where both imperialism and capitalism persisted. Stalin had made his concession to the imperialist world well before Hitler came to power: since imperialism continued, socialism would have to be represented not by world revolution but by the Soviet state. After this ideological compromise (“socialism in one country”), Stalin’s alliance with Hitler was a detail. After all, when one’s country is a fortress of good surrounded by a world of evil, any compromise is justified, and none is worse than any other. Stalin said that the arrangement with Germany had served Soviet interests well. He expected it to end at some point, but not in 1941.2
Hitler wanted the Germans to become an imperial people; Stalin wanted the Soviets to endure the imperial stage of history, however long it lasted. The contradiction here was less of principle than of territory. Hitler’s Garden of Eden, the pure past to be found in the near future, was Stalin’s Promised Land, a territory mastered at great cost, about which a canonical history had already been written (Stalin’s
The contradiction was not a matter of ideas acting on their own. Hitler wanted a war, and Stalin did not—at least not the war of 1941. Hitler had a vision of empire, and it was of great importance; but he was also courting the possibilities and rebelling against the constraints of a very unusual moment. The crucial period was the year between 25 June 1940 and 22 June 1941, between the unexpectedly swift German victory in France and the invasion of the Soviet Union that was supposed to bring a similarly rapid triumph. By the middle of 1940, Hitler had conquered much of central, western, and northern Europe, and had only one enemy: Great Britain. His government was backed by Soviet wheat and oil, and his army was seemingly unbeatable. Why, given the very real gains to Germany of the Soviet alliance, did Hitler choose to attack his ally?
In late 1940 and early 1941, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were the only great powers on the European continent, but they were not the only two European powers. Germany and the Soviet Union had remade Europe, but Great Britain had made a world. The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany influenced each other in certain ways, but both were influenced by Great Britain, the enemy that defied their alliance. Britain’s empire and navy structured a world system that neither the Nazis nor the Soviets aimed, in the short run, to overturn. Each instead accepted that they would have to win their wars, complete their revolutions, and build their empires, despite the existence of the British Empire and the dominance of the Royal Navy. Whether as enemies or as allies, and despite their different ideologies, the Soviet and Nazi leaderships faced the same basic question, posed by the reality of British power. How could a large land empire thrive and dominate in the modern world without reliable access to world markets and without much recourse to naval power?4
Stalin and Hitler had arrived at the same basic answer to this fundamental question. The state must be large in territory and self-sufficient in economics, with a balance between industry and agriculture that supported a hardily conformist and ideologically motivated citizenry capable of fulfilling historical prophecies—either Stalinist internal industrialization or Nazi colonial agrarian-ism. Both Hitler and Stalin aimed at imperial autarky, within a large land empire well supplied in food, raw materials, and mineral resources. Both understood the flashy appeal of modern materials: Stalin had named himself after steel, and Hitler paid special attention to its production. Yet both Stalin and Hitler understood agriculture as a key element in the completion of their revolutions. Both believed that their systems would prove their superiority to decadent capitalism, and guarantee independence from the rest of the world, by the production of food.5
As of late 1940 and early 1941, war factored into this grand economic planning very differently for the Soviets than it did for the Nazis. By then Stalin had an economic revolution to defend, whereas Hitler needed a war for his economic transformation. Whereas Stalin had his “socialism in one country,” Hitler had in mind something like National Socialism in several countries: a vast German empire arranged to assure the prosperity of Germans at the expense of others. Stalin presented collectivization itself both as an internal class war and as a preparation for the foreign wars to come. Hitler’s economic vision could be realized only after actual military conflict—indeed, after a total military victory over the Soviet Union. The secret of collectivization (as Stalin had noted long before) was that it was an alternative to expansive colonization, which is to say a form of internal colonization. Unlike Stalin, Hitler believed that colonies could still be seized abroad; and the colonies he had in mind were the agrarian lands of the western Soviet Union, as well as the oil reserves in the Soviet Caucasus. Hitler wanted Germany, as he put it, to be “the most autarkic state in the world.” Defeating Britain was not necessary for this. Defeating the Soviet Union was. In January 1941 Hitler told the military command that the “immense riches” of the Soviet Union would make Germany “unassailable.”6
The willingness of the British to fight on alone after the fall of France in June 1940 brought these contradictions to the fore. Between June 1940 and June 1941, Britain was Germany’s lone enemy, but stronger than it appeared. The United States had not joined the war, but President Franklin D. Roosevelt had made his commitments clear. In September 1940 the Americans traded fifty destroyers to the British for basing rights in the Caribbean; as of March 1941 the president had the authority (under the “Lend-Lease” act) to send war materiel. British troops had been driven from the European continent when France had fallen, but Britain had evacuated many of them at Dunkirk. In summer 1940 the Luftwaffe engaged the Royal Air Force, but could not defeat it; it could bomb British cities, but not intimidate the British people. Germany could not establish air superiority, a major problem for a power planning an invasion. Though an amphibious assault upon the British Isles would have involved a major crossing of the English Channel with men and materiel, Germany lacked the ships necessary to control the waters and effect the transport. In summer 1940 the Kriegsmarine had three cruisers and four destroyers: no more. On 31 July 1940, even as the Battle of Britain was just beginning, Hitler had already decided to invade his ally, the Soviet Union. On 18 December he ordered operational plans for the invasion to “crush Soviet Russia in a rapid campaign.”7
Hitler intended to use the Soviet Union to solve his British problem, not in its present capacity as an ally but in its future capacity as a colony. During this crucial year, between June 1940 and June 1941, German economic planners were working hard to devise the ways in which a conquered Soviet Union would make Germany the kind of superpower that Hitler wanted it to become. The key planners worked under the watchful eye of Heinrich Himmler, and under the direct command of Reinhard Heydrich. Under the general heading of “Generalplan Ost,” SS Standartenfuhrer Professor Konrad Meyer drafted a series of plans for a vast eastern colony. A first version was completed in January 1940, a second in July 1941, a third in late 1941, and a fourth in May 1942. The general design was consistent throughout: Germans would deport, kill, assimilate, or enslave the native populations, and bring order and prosperity to a humbled frontier. Depending upon the demographic estimates, between thirty-one and forty-five million people, mostly Slavs, were to disappear. In one redaction, eighty to eighty-five percent of the Poles, sixty-five percent of the west Ukrainians, seventy-five percent of the Belarusians, and fifty percent of the Czechs were to be eliminated.8
After the corrupt Soviet cities were razed, German farmers would establish, in Himmler’s words, “pearls of settlement,” utopian farming communities that would produce a bounty of food for Europe. German settlements of fifteen to twenty thousand people each would be surrounded by German villages within a radius of ten kilometers. The German settlers would defend Europe itself at the Ural Mountains, against the Asiatic barbarism that would be forced back to the east. Strife at civilization’s edge would test the manhood of coming generations of German settlers. Colonization would make of Germany a continental empire fit to rival the United States, another hardy frontier state based upon exterminatory colonialism and slave labor. The East was the Nazi Manifest Destiny. In Hitler’s view, “in the East a similar process will repeat itself for a second time as in the conquest of America.” As Hitler imagined the future, Germany would deal with the Slavs much as the North Americans had dealt with the Indians. The Volga River in Russia, he once proclaimed, will be Germany’s Mississippi.9
Here ideology met necessity. So long as Britain did not fall, Hitler’s only relevant vision of empire was the
