Hitler (133 page)

Soon his ambitions went far beyond all the war aims conceived by
völkisch
and Pan-German circles. His “Great Germanic Empire of the German Nation” embraced nearly the entire continent of Europe in one unitary, totalitarian, and economically independent imperium. The individual members were to be reduced to vassals whose one purpose was to serve his aspirations for world power. “Old Europe has outlived its usefulness,” Hitler is reported to have said in a conversation with Slovak President Tiso. He saw Germany in the position of Rome poised for the overpowering of the other city-states of Latium. Occasionally he spoke of Europe's “rubbish heap of small countries” that he intended to clean out. Alongside America, the British Empire, and the Greater East Asian bloc to be formed by Japan, Europe—under the leadership of Germany—would constitute the fourth of those economic empires into which he envisioned the world of the future as divided. For centuries, in his view, the old Continent had been able to solve its overpopulation problems, or at least to cover them up, with the aid of overseas possessions. But with the colonial age coming to its end, only the thinly populated East could offer a way out. “If the Ukraine were administered by European methods,” he declared, “it would be possible to get three times its present production out of it. We could supply Europe without limit with what can be produced there. The East has everything in unlimited quantities: iron, coal, oil, and a soil that can grow everything Europe needs: grain, linseed, rubber, cotton, and so on.”

In his so-called second book, the sequel to
Mein Kampf,
written in 1928, Hitler had already developed the idea that this Europe was not to arise as the result of federation, but by the racially strongest nation's subjugating the others. This early view of his determined his style of ruling over both conquered and allied countries. Occasionally he received offers of collaboration within the framework of a Fascist federated Europe; one such offer, for example, came from certain elements in France. But Hitler regarded such offers merely as arrogance and did not even deign to reply. Sometimes, it is true, he was apt to reject the idea of the nation in the name of the “higher concept of race”: “It [race] breaks up the old and affords the possibility of new combinations,” he declared. “Employing the concept of the nation, France carried her great revolution beyond her borders. Employing the concept of race, National Socialism will extend its revolution until the New Order has been achieved all through the world.”

Immediately after the campaign in France, a draft defining the border in the West was worked out under his personal supervision. It provided for the territory of the Reich to include Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg, thus extending to the coast of Flanders. “Nothing in the world can prompt us to... give up again the Channel position won by the Western campaign,” he is quoted as saying. From the Channel the new boundary would run “about from the mouth of the Somme eastward to the northern rim of the Paris basin and along Champagne to the Argonnes, there turning southward and passing farther across Burgundy and west of the Franche-Comte to the Lake of Geneva.”
⁸⁸
Historical treatises, and measures for Germanization, were to provide a historical base for these annexations. Nancy was henceforth to be known as Nanzig; Besançon would be called Bisanz.

Hitler also declared that he would “never again leave Norway.” He intended to make Trondheim a German city of 250,000 inhabitants and build it up into a great naval base. Early in 1941 he issued orders to this effect to Albert Speer and the heads of the navy. Similar bases to guard the sea routes were to be established along the French Atlantic coast as well as in northwestern Africa. Rotterdam was to become the “largest port in the Germanic area.” There were also plans for organizing the economy in the conquered countries on the pattern and in harmony with the interests of German industry, to accommodate wages and cost of living to the conditions in Germany, to regulate problems of employment and production on a continental scale, and to redistribute markets. The internal frontiers of Europe would soon lose their importance, one of the ideologues of the new order wrote, “except for the Alpine frontier where the Germanic Empire of the North and the Roman Empire of the South” meet.

The wider panorama was of such grandeur that the regime itself was awestricken. At the center of the stage there would be the world capital of Germania, which Hitler meant to transform into a metropolis that would stand comparison with the capitals of ancient empires, “with ancient Egypt, Babylon or Rome... what is London, what is Paris by comparison?” And radiating from it would extend, from the North Cape to the Black Sea, a dense network of garrisons, party citadels, temples of art, camps, and watchtowers, in whose shadôw a generation of master personalities would pursue the Aryan blood cult and the breeding of the new god-man. SS formations would be stationed in the regions with inferior blood, such as the Bavarian Forest or Alsace-Lorraine. “Through them a refreshening of the blood of the population would be provided.” Following old, deeply incised psychic tracks, Hitler combined his vision of the new Europe with the mythology of death. After the end of the war, when the great reckonings with the churches had begun and the pope in tiara and full pontificals had been hanged in St. Peter's Square, Strassburg Cathedral would be converted into a monument to the Unknown Soldier, while on the borders of the empire, from the rocky capes of the Atlantic to the steppes of Russia, a chain of monumental towers would be built as memorials to the dead.
⁸⁹

Projects such as these reveal an unbridled mania for planning, an elemental drive, blind to all obstacles as well as to the rights and claims of others, dictating destinies, trampling down “bastard races,” resettling peoples, or, as the above-mentioned memorandum of the East Ministry curtly put it, “scrapping” them. Yet to Hitler himself the building of the new order was “something wonderfully beautiful.” Here we see once again the strange incongruities of National Socialist philosophy, the combination of stoic objectivity and irrationality, of “ice-coldness” and belief in magic, of modernity and medievalism. Through the supercities of the future would march an ideological vanguard. They would revive the “Cimbrian art of knitting” and plant exotic root. They would propagate themselves, breeding for blond and blue-eyed issue, and begetting largely male children through the practice of abstinence, long hikes and proper nutrition. For along with the sweeping, ruthless dictates of National Socialism there was an element of trivial fantasy play. With “holy earnestness” Nazi philosophers considered the question of oatmeal porridge and organic manure, the possibility of developing a perennial rye, of, steatopygia in the women of primitive tribes, and ravings about the flylike witch of epidemics, Nasav.
⁹⁰
They were great at the institutionalization of nonsense; there was a “Special Commissioner of the Reichsführer-SS for the Care of Dogs” and an “Assistant Secretary for Defense against Gnats and Insects.” Even as Hitler made fun of all superstition, he was always extremely subject to it. He inclined toward all sorts of crude theories about falling heavens and moons, saw the Mongoloid origin of the Czechs in their drooping mustaches, and planned—in the empire of the future—to forbid smoking and introduce vegetarianism.
⁹¹

The same incongruities pervade his great dream of 200 million racially conscious persons established as masters of the Continent, secure in their rule because monopolizing the military and technological power, planning on a vast scale but personally abstinent, eager soldiers, and bearers of many children while all the other peoples of Europe would have been reduced to slavery, leading “their modest and contented existences beyond good and evil.” The masters themselves fulfilled their historic mission and danced around fires on Midsummer's Night, honoring the laws of nature, art, and the idea of greatness, and seeking relaxation from the burdens of history in the Strength-Through-Joy mass hotels on the Channel Islands, on the fjords of Norway, or in the Crimea, to the accompaniment of jolly folklore and operetta music. In moments of depression, Hitler would speak of how far off the realization of his visions was, 100 or 200 years; “like Moses” he would see “the Promised Land only in the distance.”

 

The series of setbacks from the summer of 1943 on pushed the dream even further off. After the failure of the great offensive against the Russian lines near Kursk, the Russians surprisingly went over to the attack in the middle of July, and with apparently inexhaustible reserves threw back the desperately fighting German troops. In the southern sector the ratio of the forces was one to seven, in the north and center army groups about one to four. In addition an army of partisans supported the Soviet offensive by carefully co-ordinated actions. In the course of August alone, for example, they destroyed the railroad tracks in the German rear area in 12,000 places. Early in August the Red Army retook Orel, some three weeks later Kharkov, on September 25 Smolensk, and then the Donets Basin. By mid-October they were at the gates of Kiev.

Meanwhile, the situation in the Mediterranean was also deteriorating. Despite all the encouragements and concessions by the Germans, by the beginning of the spring it had become all too clear that Italy was on the verge of collapse. Mussolini, a tired and sick man, had lost more and more of his power and had become a gesticulating marionette, totally lacking in conviction, tugged from all sides by the contesting parties. In the middle of April he had met Hitler in Salzburg. His entourage had been pressing him to speak up boldly and tell his Axis partner that Italy would continue the war only under certain conditions. In particular, he was to repeat his demand that peace be concluded in the East—a stipulation he had vainly made several weeks before. But once again he succumbed to Hitler's torrent of words. On arrival the Duce had seemed “like a broken old man,” Hitler summed up the conference. But four days later, when leaving for home again, he had seemed “in fine fettle, eager for action.”

Three months later, on July 19, 1943, the increasingly critical situation brought the two men together in Feltre in northern Italy. For meanwhile the Allies had conquered Tunis and Bizerte. They had taken captive the African forces, which against Rommel's advice had been reinforced to 250,000 men, and in mid-July had launched their blow against the “soft-underbelly” of the Axis by opening a second front in Sicily. Mussolini now hoped to be released from the alliance and to make Hitler see that it was also in the German interest for Italy to drop out of the war so that the Wehrmacht could concentrate on defending the line of the Alps. But again Hitler would not even listen to arguments. Instead, he tried to convince Mussolini, who had come to the meeting with his generals, that Italy must hold out. For three hours he talked away in German at Mussolini, without calling upon the interpreter at all. The Duce looked pale and seemed not to be concentrating. In fact he was far more concerned with the reports of the first sizable air raid on Rome than with Hitler's portentous perspectives. Hitler's one idea, persistently varied but recurring in every phrase and every sentence, was that the only choice was to fight and win or go down to doom. “If anyone tells me that our tasks can be left to another generation, I reply that this is not the case. No one can say that the future generation will be a generation of giants. Germany took thirty years to recover; Rome never rose again. This is the voice of History.”
⁹²

But Mussolini merely kept silent. The call of history to which he had been so susceptible a|l his life, seemed no more able to rouse him out of his apathy than the instinct for self-preservation. He remained passive in the following days also, after his return to Rome, although, like everyone else, he sensed that the ground was shaking underfoot and that his fall was impending. Although he knew there was a scheme afoot to strip him of his powers and replace him by a triumvirate of prominent Fascists, he did not prevent the meeting of the Grand Council on the night of July 24. At the last moment one of his followers called upon him to smash the plot; he told the man to shut up. Mutely, with an air of astonishment, he listened to the passionate ten-hour arraignment of himself. The following evening he was arrested. Not a hand was lifted to help him. Noiselessly, after so many paroxysms and theatrical excitements, he and Fascism vanished from public life. Marshal Badoglio, appointed head of government, dissolved the Fascist party and relieved the functionaries of their position.

Although Hitler was not unprepared for the fall of Mussolini, he nevertheless was deeply affected. The Italian dictator was the only statesman for whom he had felt a measure of personal attachment. He was even more disturbed by the political consequences of the event, especially the all too obvious “parallels with Germany,” which according to the reports of the political police the public was well aware of. Significantly, he refused to make a speech, but he ordered massive measures to prevent disturbances. Then he whipped up a plan for the freeing of Mussolini (Operation Oak), the military occupation of Italy (Operation Black), and the arrest of Badoglio and the King, with the aim of restoring the Fascist regime (Operation Student). At the evening conference of July 25 he rejected Jodi's proposal that they wait for more exact reports:

 

There can be no doubt about one thing: in their treachery they will announce that they are going to stick with us; that is perfectly obvious. But that is an act of treachery, for they won't stick with us.... Sure that what's-his-name [Badoglio] declared right away that the war would be continued, but that changes nothing. They have to do that, it's what treachery does. But we'll go on playing the same game, with everything prepared to take possession of that whole crew like a flash, to clean up the whole riff-raff. Tomorrow I'm going to send a man down there who'll give the commander of the Third Armored Grenadiers Division orders to drive straight into Rome with a special group and immediately arrest the whole government, the King, the whole lot, especially the Crown Prince, get our hands on that rabble, especially Badoglio and the rest of the crew. Then you'll see they'll turn limp as a rag, and in two or three days there'll be another overthrow of the government.
⁹³