Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (3 page)

The complete loss of the African colonies during and after the war created the possibility for a vague and malleable nostalgia about racial mastery. Popular novels about Africa with titles such as
Master, Come Back!
could make sense only after such a complete break. Germans could continue to see themselves as good colonizers, even as the realm of colonization itself became fluid and vague, projected into the future. Hans Grimm’s novel
A People Without Space
, which sold half a million copies in Germany before the Second World War, concerned the plight of a German who had left Africa only to be frustrated by confinement within a small Germany and an unjust European system.

The problem suggested its own solution. Since racism was an asserted hierarchy of rights to the planet, it could be applied to Europeans who lived east of Germany. Africa as a place was lost, but “Africa” as a form of thinking could be universalized. The experience in eastern Europe had established that neighbors could also be “black.” Europeans could be imagined to want “masters” and yield “space.” After the war, it was more practical to consider a return to eastern Europe than to Africa. Here, as in so many other cases, Hitler drew vague sentiments to remorselessly tight conclusions. He presented as racial inferiors the largest cultural group in Europe, Germany’s eastern neighbors, the Slavs.

“
The Slavs are born as a slavish mass,” wrote Hitler, “crying out for their master.” He meant primarily the Ukrainians, who inhabited a stretch of very fertile land, as well as their neighbors—Russians, Belarusians, and Poles. “I need the Ukraine,” he stated, “in order that no one is able to starve us again, like in the last war.” The conquest of Ukraine would guarantee “a way of life for our people through the allocation of
Lebensraum
for the next hundred years.” This was a matter of natural justice: “It is inconceivable that a higher people should painfully exist on a soil too narrow for it, whilst amorphous masses, which contribute nothing to civilization, occupy infinite tracts of a soil that is one of the richest in the world.” As their land was taken, Ukrainians could be given, said Hitler, “scarves, glass beads, and everything that colonial peoples like.” A single loudspeaker in each village would “give them plenty of opportunities to dance, and the villagers will be grateful to us.” Nazi propaganda would simply remove Ukrainians from view. A Nazi song for female colonists described Ukraine thus: “There are neither farms nor hearths, there the earth cries out for the plough.” Erich Koch, chosen by Hitler to rule Ukraine, made the point about the inferiority of Ukrainians with a certain simplicity: “If I find a Ukrainian who is worthy to sit with me at table, I must have him shot.” Even in the racial murder threats, the dining room was the backdrop.

When German occupation came in 1941, Ukrainians themselves made the connection to Africa and America. A Ukrainian woman, literate and reflective in a way that Nazi racism could not have contemplated, recorded in her diary: “We are like slaves. Often the book
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
comes to mind. Once we shed tears over those Negroes, now obviously we ourselves are experiencing the same thing.” Yet in one respect, colonialism in eastern Europe had to differ from the American slave trade or the conquest of Africa. It required two feats of imagination: the wishing away not just of peoples but also of political entities that were similar to the German state. Hitler’s preoccupation with the racial struggle for nature occluded both nations and their governments. It was always legitimate to destroy states; if they were destroyed, that meant that they should have been destroyed.

Some states, claimed Hitler, were inviting attack. Lower races were incapable of state building, so what appeared to be their governments was illusory—a façade for Jewish power. Hitler maintained that the Slavs had never governed themselves. The lands east of Germany had always been ruled by “foreign elements.” The Russian Empire had been the creation of an “essentially German upper class and intelligentsia.” Without this tradition of German leadership, “the Russians would still be living like rabbits.” Ukrainians were by nature a colonial people and, as German colonial administrators would say, “blacks.” After Germany was forced in 1918 to withdraw its troops and cede its new empire, most of Ukraine, like most of the lands of the Russian Empire, was consolidated within a new communist state known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (Soviet Union, USSR). Hitler claimed that the USSR was an expression of a Jewish “worldview.” The idea of communism was simply a deception that led Slavs to accept their “new leadership in Jewry.”

Communism was the proximate example of Hitler’s claim that all universal ideas were Jewish and all Jews were the servants of universal ideas. The proclaimed identity of Jews with communism—the Judeobolshevik myth—was for Hitler the apposite demonstration of both the supernatural strength and the earthly weakness of Jews. It demonstrated that Jews could win destructive power over the masses with their unnatural ideas. “Bolshevism of international Jewry attempts from its control point in Soviet Russia to rot away the very core of the nations of the world,” he wrote. Yet this apparent misfortune was in fact an opportunity. In killing the strongest members of the Slavic races inside the Soviet Union, Jews were doing the work that Germans would have to do in any event. Jewish communism was in this sense, Hitler wrote, “fortunate for the future.” The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, thought Hitler, was therefore “merely a preparation” for the later return of “German domination.”

Hitler’s interpretation of the Bolshevik Revolution as a Jewish project was far from unusual: Winston Churchill and Woodrow Wilson saw it the same way, at least at first. A
Times
of London correspondent saw Jews as the leading force of the world Bolshevik conspiracy. What was unusual was Hitler’s relentlessly systematic conclusion that Germany could gain global power by eliminating east European Jews and overturning their supposed Soviet citadel. This was nothing more than self-defense, he maintained, since Bolshevism’s victory by whatever insidious means would bring the “destruction, indeed the final extermination, of the German people.” In a direct confrontation, though, the Jewish threat could be eliminated. The destruction of Soviet Jews would cause the Soviet Union to “immediately break up.” It would prove to be a “house of cards” or a “giant with feet of clay.” The Slavs would fight “like Indians,” with the same result. Then, in the East, “a similar process will repeat itself for the second time, as in the conquest of America.” A second America could be created in Europe, after Germans learned to see other Europeans as they saw indigenous Americans or Africans, and learned to regard Europe’s largest state as a fragile Jewish colony.

In this racist collage Europeans were interspersed with Africans and Native Americans. Hitler compressed all of imperial history and a total racism into a very short formulation: “Our Mississippi must be the Volga, and not the Niger.” The Niger River, in Africa, was no longer accessible to German imperialism after 1918, but Africa remained a fount of the images and the colonial longing. The Volga, the eastern border of Europe, was where Hitler imagined the outer limit of German power. The Mississippi was not only the river that runs from north to south through the middle of the United States. It was also the line beyond which Thomas Jefferson wanted all Indians expelled. “Who,” asked Hitler, “remembers the Red Indians?” For Hitler, Africa was the source of the imperial references but not the actual site of empire; eastern Europe was that actual site, and it was to be remade just as North America had been remade.

The destruction of the Soviet Union, thought Hitler, would allow the right master race to starve the right subhumans for the right reasons. Once the Germans replaced the Jews as the colonial masters, food from Ukraine could be directed away from the useless Soviet populations towards grateful German cities and a submissive Europe. Hitler’s axiom that life was a starvation war and his proposal for a hunger campaign against the Slavs were reflected in policy documents formulated after his rise to power in Germany in 1933. A Hunger Plan created under the authority of Hermann Göring foresaw that “many tens of millions of people in this territory will become superfluous and will die or must emigrate to Siberia.” Then, according to a second round of plans, designed under the authority of Heinrich Himmler, colonization by Germans could begin.

The Judeobolshevik conception allowed Hitler’s portrait of a planetary ecosystem polluted by Jewish ideas to crystallize as planning. The Judeobolshevik myth seemed to define the point where the application of German force could win an empire and restore the planet. It also permitted a politics of war and extermination that would be decisive for Jews and, in a different way, for Germans. The idea that Jewish power was global and ideological seemed to make the Jewish hold on territory weaker rather than stronger. If Jews could be eliminated, then they could no longer purvey their false ideas of human solidarity, and would have to yield their planetary dominion. Thus the Judeobolshevik myth courted the warriors by promising an easy triumph.

If the war did not proceed as planned, if the Soviet Union could not be so easily destroyed, then the idea of Jewish hegemony over the entire planet could return to the forefront of rhetoric and policy. If the Jews were not weakened by a first strike on Soviet territory, then the war against them would have to be escalated. If Germany had to fight a global enemy, there would seem to be no alternative to a total campaign against Jews, since in a long war the Jews could strike from any point at any time. The Jews behind the lines, in places under German control, would have to be exterminated. This latent potential within Hitler’s ideas was realized in practice: Jews were not killed in large numbers first in Berlin, but on the frontiers of German power in the Soviet East. As the tide of war turned, the mass killing moved west from the occupied Soviet Union to occupied Poland and then to the rest of Europe.

The Judeobolshevik myth seemed to justify a preemptive strike on a certain valuable territory against an inherently planetary enemy. It linked the elimination of the Jews to the subjugation of the Slavs. If this connection could be established in theory and Germans thrust eastward into war, Hitler could hardly fail in practice. Failure to conquer Slavs would make the case for exterminating Jews.

The Judeobolshevik idea, a major source of the Second World War, had its origins in the First. It reached Hitler’s mind after a peculiar German experience during the collapse of the Russian Empire, on the eastern front of the First World War.

From the perspective of Berlin, the First World War was fought on a western front against France (and Britain, and later the United States) and on an eastern front against the Russian Empire. Germany was surrounded by enemies on both sides and had to try to eliminate one quickly in order to defeat the other. The attack on France in 1914 failed, condemning Germans to a long two-front war. Under these circumstances, German diplomats sought nonmilitary means of removing the Russian Empire from the conflict, such as fomenting revolution. In April 1917, after a first revolution in Russia had already taken place, Germany arranged the transport of Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Bolsheviks, from Zurich to Petrograd in a sealed train. He succeeded, along with his comrades, in organizing a second revolution in November. He then withdrew the Russian Empire from the war. This appeared at first to be a tremendous German victory.

Before the revolutions of 1917, the Russian Empire had been the homeland of more Jews than any other country in the world—and an actively antisemitic state. Jews were subject to official forms of discrimination and targeted in pogroms of increasing intensity and frequency. These were not organized by the state, but the Russian imperial subjects who perpetrated them believed that they were following the will of the tsar. Jews were almost two hundred times more likely than ethnic Russians to emigrate from the Russian Empire, in part because they were more likely to want to leave, and in part because imperial authorities were glad to see them go. During the First World War, Jews were largely excluded from the body politic.