Hitler (119 page)

There is no doubt that Hitler saw these difficulties and risks. In his memorandum of October 9, 1939, “on the waging of the war in the West” he discussed these matters and devoted a special section to analyzing “the dangers of the German situation.” His chief concern was a protracted war, for which he considered Germany not sufficiently armed politically, materially, or psychologically. But he thought such weaknesses were intrinsic to Germany's general plight, and thus believed that “by no matter what efforts they cannot be essentially improved within a short time.” Essentially, this meant that as things stood Germany was in no position to wage a world war.

Hitler reacted to this dilemma with an enormously significant twist that revealed all his shrewdness and all his cunning—cunning even toward himself. If Germany was incapable of waging a major, protracted war against an enemy coalition, she must bring her power to bear as events demanded, in spaced, short and concentrated blows against selected individual opponents, thus step by step enlarging her economic base until she finally reached the position to wage world war. This was the strategic concept of blitzkrieg.
¹²

For a long time the idea of blitzkrieg was understood merely as a tactical or operative method of annihilating the enemy's military forces by surprise attack. But in fact it was a prescription for total warfare, which took account of the specific weaknesses and strengths of the German situation and ingeniously combined them in a novel method of conquest. By using the interval between successive campaigns for a fresh build-up of armaments, the material burden on the economy and the public could be kept relatively low. Moreover, the preparations could be attuned directly to the next enemy. Each time a triumph was celebrated, the fanfares provided psychological stimulation for the next thrust. In the final analysis, it was an attempt to get around that discouraging saying of the days of the First World War, that Germany won her battles but lost her wars, by breaking up the war into a series of victorious engagements. But though the plan corresponded so well to the nature of the regime and to Hitler's improvising style, which depended so largely on momentary inspirations, it had a serious flaw. It was bound to fail as soon as a strong enemy coalition came into being, committed to fight a protracted war.

Hitler had such faith in the blitzkrieg concept that he was in no way prepared for the alternative of large-scale warfare. In the summer of 1939 the armed forces operations staff suggested that it would be wise to draw up contingency plans and undertake war games in view of a full-scale conflict. Hitler ruled against this, emphasizing that the war against Poland would be localized. His memorandum of October 9 was the first concrete attempt to define the situation and the goals of a conflict with the West. He also repeatedly rejected proposals to retool the economy for the needs of a protracted total war; industrial production in 1940 went down slightly from the previous year. And shortly before the winter of 1941–42 production of military goods was actually cut back in anticipation of the impending blitz victory over the Soviet Union. Here, too, the experience of the First World War was influencing Hitler. He wanted to avoid the psychologically wearing effects of a rigorously restricted economy that for years scanted the wants of the people.

 

The continuity between the First and the Second World War is tangibly present on a variety of planes, and not only as a matter of interpretation. Hitler himself would often say that behind him lay only an armistice, whereas before him was “the victory we threw away in 1918.” In his speech of November 23, 1939, referring to the First World War, he wrote: “Today the second act of this drama is being written.” In the light of this continuity, Hitler appears as the specifically radical representative of a concept of German world hegemony that can be traced back to the late Bismarck period. As early as the turn of the century, it had condensed into specific war aims, and after the failed attempt of 1914–18 a fresh attempt was made to carry it out, with new and greater resolution, in the Second World War. An imperialistic drive nearly a century old culminated in Hitler.
¹³

This view can be upheld on many grounds. The general connection between Hitler and the prewar world, his origins in its complexes, ideologies, and defensive reactions, in itself represents a weighty argument. For in spite of all his modernity Hitler was a profoundly anachronistic phenomenon. In his naive imperialism, in his magnitude complex, in his conviction of the inescapable choice between ascent to world power or doom, he was a leftover of the nineteenth century. In principle the biased young man of the Vienna days repeated the typical and fundamental movement of the conservative ruling classes of the period: flight from their fears of the socialist menace into expansionist ideas. Hitler merely extended and radicalized that tendency. Whereas the conservatives expected war and conquest to bring about a “general clean-up” that would bolster the social and political status (“strengthening of the patriarchal order and principles” was the way they phrased it), Hitler always thought in gigantically expanded categories, regarding war and expansion as something that went far beyond class interests, as the nation's and even the race's sole chance for survival. In Hitler's thinking social imperialism of the traditional variety was peculiarly mixed with biologizing elements.

The direction of Hitler's expansionist plans also corresponded to tradition reaching into the past. It had long been a part of German ideology that the East was the natural
Lebensraum
for the Reich. The fact that Hitler had come from the Dual Monarchy reinforced his tendency to look in this direction. As far back as 1894 a statement by the strident Pan-German Association had guided the nation's interest toward the East and Southeast, “in order to assure the Germanic race those living conditions which it needs for the full development of its energies.” At the notorious “council of war” held on December 8, 1912, Chief of Staff von Moltke insisted that “the press should be used to build up sentiment for a war against Russia.” Hence some papers were soon calling for the inevitable decisive struggle with the East. The question, according to the press, was whether the hegemony over Europe would fall to Teutons or Slavs. A few days after the outbreak of the First World War the Foreign Office put forth a plan for the “formation of several buffer states” in the East, all of which were to stand in military dependence on Germany. A memorandum by the president of the Pan-Germans, Heinrich Class, “On the German War Aim,” which was distributed as a leaflet in 1917, went even further. It demanded extensive provinces in the East and suggested a “racial clean-up” by exchange of Russians for Volga Germans, transference of the Jews to Palestine, and a relocation to the East of Germany's Polish population. Hitler's design for an Eastern policy surely derived from such grandiose wartime proposals. When we add to this the influence of Russian exile circles in Munich and his own bent for intellectual extremism, we have the full-blown Hitlerian plan.

Similarly, Hitler's ideas about alliances were by no means without precedent. That Germany must obtain England's neutrality in order to join with Austria-Hungary in a war of conquest to the East, with possibly a 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 Führer 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 Weizsäcker 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.”
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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.