Ostkrieg (3 page)

A small railway car stands in a clearing in the woods. Representatives of the defeated nation arrive after an arduous journey, dazed, weary, in despair and humiliation. They wait despondently for the armistice terms to be read to them by the victors, terms that will reduce their once-mighty nation to a position akin to vassalage. It is a somber scene, made more shocking by the seeming incomprehensibility of the military collapse that preceded it. A familiar image, but it is not November 1918, and the victors are not the French; it is, instead, a warm summer day, 21 June 1940, some twenty-two years after the German defeat in World War I.

Observing the scene, the American correspondent William L. Shirer watched as Adolf Hitler strode slowly toward the clearing in the woods. His face, Shirer noted, was “grave, solemn, yet brimming with revenge. . . . There was something else, difficult to describe, in his expression, a sort of scornful inner joy at being present at this great reversal of fate—a reversal he himself had wrought.” Hitler and his delegation paused as they reached the great granite block erected to commemorate the earlier French triumph and read the inscription: “
HERE ON THE ELEVENTH OF NOVEMBER
1918
SUCCUMBED THE CRIMINAL PRIDE OF THE GERMAN EMPIRE . . . VANQUISHED BY THE FREE PEOPLES WHICH IT TRIED TO ENSLAVE
.” Shirer, some fifty yards away, intently studied Hitler's face through binoculars. “I have seen that face many times at the great moments of his life,” he remarked. “But today! It is afire with scorn, anger, hate, revenge, triumph. . . . He glances slowly around the clearing, and now, as his eyes meet ours, you grasp the depth of his hatred. . . . He swiftly snaps his hands on his hips, arches his shoulders, plants his feet wide apart. It is a magnificent gesture of defiance, of burning contempt for this place.” Somewhat anti-climactically, Hitler proceeded to the rail carriage, where he received the French delegation in silence, then left, again without saying a word,
after ten minutes. The open wound, however, had been healed. “The humiliation is obliterated. One has a feeling of being reborn,” Joseph Goebbels exulted, after Hitler had informed him of the proceedings in a late-night telephone call.
¹

Despite the relatively restrained performance by Hitler at Compiègne, these had been momentous weeks that marked an extraordinary personal triumph for the Führer. Twenty years earlier an obscure political agitator in Munich, and even a decade ago merely one of many aspirants to power in a Germany torn by political chaos and economic distress, Hitler stood at the pinnacle of his fame and popularity. He had undone the shame of November 1918, as he had vowed to do, had humiliated Germany's two tormentors from the Great War, had destroyed the hated Treaty of Versailles, and had made Germany master of a European bloc that in economic power compared favorably with the British Empire and the United States.

Although outwardly unmoved, Hitler appeared to be deeply affected by the events of May and June 1940. On 1 June, even as the battle for France was still raging, he made two visits of a deeply symbolic character. In the early afternoon he visited the German cemetery at Langemarck to pay homage to the young soldiers, now elevated to mythical status in Nazi lore, killed in the legendary “Children's Slaughter” (Kindermord) in November 1914, deaths that had now been redeemed by the victories of May 1940. Later that afternoon he made a more personal journey, one that took him back to the battlefields of World War I where he had experienced so much, including the temporary loss of his eyesight after a British gas attack in October 1918. Standing alone, absorbed in his thoughts, the impact of what had been and what had just happened must have been overwhelming. The Great War had shaped Hitler and many others of his generation, their personal traumas leaving deep wounds that never fully healed. Goebbels provided a glimpse of this deep emotion, noting in his diary, “The Führer himself was at the old battle-fields, in his old trenches. He gave me a moving description of it.” The sufferings of the past, however, would now be redeemed. “What great times!” Goebbels also exulted. “What happiness to be allowed to work in such times.” Ominously, however, a few sentences later the means of that salvation became clearer, Goebbels threatening, “We will quickly finish with the Jews after the war,” a comment, given Hitler's conviction of the nexus between the Jews and the earlier German defeat, that perhaps also revealed something of the thrust of Hitler's thoughts at the time.
²

Having now redeemed the humiliation that had so seared his consciousness, Hitler returned to his military headquarters at Bruly-le-Péche.
Following the signing of a Franco-Italian armistice on 24 June, all fighting was to cease at 1:35
A.M
. on the following morning. Shortly before the agreed time, Hitler, sitting in his field headquarters, gave orders to turn out the light and open the windows. “Silently,” Albert Speer remembered, “we sat in the darkness, swept by the sense of experiencing a historic moment so close to the author of it. Outside, a bugler blew the traditional signal for the end of fighting. . . . Occasional flashes of heat lightning shimmered through the dark room. . . . Then Hitler's voice sounded, soft and unemphatic: ‘This responsibility. . . .' And a few minutes later: ‘Now switch the light on. . . .' For me it remained a rare event. I thought I had seen Hitler as a human being.” Three days later, in the early morning hours of 28 June, Hitler and an entourage including Speer and the sculptor Arno Breker descended on Paris for a whirlwind visit. The Führer delighted in showing off his detailed knowledge of the Opéra, and appeared impressed by the Eiffel Tower and the tomb of Napoléon in the Invalides, but otherwise seemed disappointed in the famous city. During the course of the three-hour tour, the question arose of a German victory parade in the city, but Hitler eventually rejected the idea, saying, “I am not in the mood for a victory parade. We aren't at the end yet.”
³

What exactly Hitler meant by this cryptic remark is still open to interpretation. Some see in it only a reference to the expected impending victory over Great Britain, while others view the comment as evidence of Hitler's deeper ideological obsession with the Soviet Union. In any case, his assessment of the situation in late June was more accurate than perhaps even he realized at the time. Unbeknownst to Hitler, the British cabinet had made the key decision to continue to fight even before he began his historic tour of the old battlefields of Flanders. His gamble in September 1939 had now backfired, as he found himself entangled in a war in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy and one, moreover, from which he could not easily extricate himself.

In “Beim Propheten,” a short story written in 1904, Thomas Mann described “strange places, strange minds, strange regions of the spirit . . . , on the peripheries of large cities where the street-lights grow fewer and the police go in pairs . . . , pale young geniuses, criminals of the dream, sit with folded arms and brood. . . . Here rules defiance, the most extreme consequences, the despairing, crowning ‘I' . . . madness and death.”
⁴
Written years before Adolf Hitler launched a career in politics, Mann's story cannot itself be seen as prophetic of a specific individual. Still, Hitler was almost the perfect incarnation of Mann's “criminal of
the dream,” a man who thought concretely and sought to shape the world according to his will. Hitler had little formal education, but he possessed a quick mind and an astonishing memory, and his weltanschauung (worldview) took shape and was nurtured in the hothouse atmosphere of post–World War I Munich. What emerged, cobbled together from rather standard ideas floating around Germany and Europe at the turn of the century, was a unique explanatory system with considerable inner logic: a curious combination of fear, anxiety, resentment, revenge, conspiratorial fantasies, and rational, pragmatic assessment. Above all, two things characterized his ideology: his all-encompassing hatreds and his belief in the importance of will and the power of ideas. Stunned by the sudden German collapse and defeat in World War I, Hitler, like most Germans, struggled to make sense of the seemingly inexplicable. His ideology—shaped by war, the trauma of German impotence and vulnerability in November 1918, the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles, and the postwar political turmoil—not only pointed to those allegedly responsible for what had been done to Germany but explained why it had happened, promised revenge on the “November criminals,” and outlined an idealistic vision of a new society.

Central to Hitler's ideology were an extreme social Darwinism that posited the struggle for survival as an all-or-nothing process that governed the life of nations as well as individuals; a belief that racial conflict between peoples and nations of differing “value,” and not class struggle, shaped the process of history; a radical anti-Semitism that viewed Jews as a conspiratorial, destructive force in world history; and the necessity of securing Lebensraum (living space) for the German nation as a means of ensuring its survival in this process of struggle for existence. By themselves, none of these ideas was original; what was unique was the manner in which Hitler combined his pathological anti-Semitism with the notion of Lebensraum to imbue German expansion to the east with a sense of urgency and historic mission.
⁵

In both
Mein Kampf
and his so-called
Second Book
, Hitler asserted that history unfolded as a result of the unceasing process of racial struggle, which provided “the key not only to world history but to all human culture.” This notion of culture was significant since he asserted that only people of a higher racial quality, so-called culture-creating races, could produce a sustainable civilization. What distinguished Hitler's racialist notions was his Manichaean belief that this was a struggle of good versus evil. Thus, to him, the alleged culture-destroying races—the Jews being the prime example—constantly sought to undermine the culture created by the superior racial entities. Lacking a nation of their own, the
Jews acted as a parasitic force, working from within to undermine and destroy the superior culture. For Hitler, the culmination of this process was unfolding before his very eyes in Russia, where the “blood Jew,” ruling through Bolshevism, had “killed or starved about thirty million people with positively fanatical savagery, in part amid inhuman torture. . . . But the end is not only the end of the freedom of the peoples oppressed by the Jews, but also the end of this parasite upon the nations. After the death of his victim, the vampire sooner or later dies too.”
⁶

Moreover, Jewish-Bolshevism, as he now identified it, posed an imminent, existential threat to Germany that had to be confronted. From the beginning of his political activity, Hitler displayed an overriding, all-encompassing obsession with the danger posed by the Jews, on whom again and again he blamed the German collapse in 1918. In a famous passage in
Mein Kampf
, he made an explicit connection between the destructive workings of the Jews and the loss of the war: “If at the beginning of the war and during the war twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas . . . the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain. On the contrary: twelve thousand scoundrels eliminated in time might have saved the lives of a million real Germans.” This passage should not be taken as evidence of a straight line from intention to later mass murder, but it does indicate, as Ian Kershaw has stressed, the connection in Hitler's mind between the loss of the war, the destruction of the Jews, and national salvation.
⁷

Crucially, Hitler also viewed Jewry as an actual political entity, a hidden force that had started World War I, engineered the German defeat and humiliation, and ruined Russia and was now intent on exterminating Germany and the Germans. Unless the Jewish question was solved by a “bloody clash,” he asserted in 1924, “the German people will end up just like the Armenians.” As Saul Friedländer has stressed, Hitler's was a “redemptive anti-Semitism” that combined anxious, conspiratorial notions of an all-powerful, destructive Jewry with promises of redeeming Germany. For Hitler, the Jewish conspiracy constituted the primary obstacle to German renewal. “The Jew today is the great agitator for the complete destruction of Germany,” Hitler insisted, while the ultimate goal of the Jewish conspiracy remained the “annihilation of Germany . . . , the next great war aim of Bolshevism.” Once he made the link with Bolshevism, Hitler cemented in his own mind his mission of waging a racial struggle against a ruthless, implacable, and brutal foe for the very existence of German and Western culture. The mission of National Socialism became the destruction of Bolshevism and, with it,
“our mortal enemy: the Jew.” In this struggle, “A victory of the Marxist idea signifies the complete extermination of the opponents.” To Hitler, there could be no middle ground: “There is no making pacts with Jews. There can only be the hard either-or.” The outcome of the struggle, he stressed in a 1922 speech, would be “either victory for the Aryan side or else its annihilation and victory for the Jews.”
⁸
Implicit in this was the notion of absolute destruction: either they would win and kill us, or we would win and eliminate them.

If this radical anti-Semitism gave Hitler's ideology its manic dynamism, it was Lebensraum that provided the vital link between dogma and a pragmatic program of territorial expansion. Notions of living space and expansion in the east were common currency in Germany both before and especially after World War I. Based on work by geopolitical theorists such as Friedrich Ratzel and Karl Haushofer, and popularized in the 1920s by Hans Grimm's best-selling novel
Volk ohne Raum
(People without space), Lebensraum stressed the necessity of a policy of expansion in order to achieve a positive ratio between population and resources. Ratzel emphasized that healthy states needed to expand and grow in order to survive, an idea hardly unique to Germany at the turn of the century. The British “hunger” blockade between 1914 and 1919, a plebeian form of killing that nonetheless had a profound impact on shaping Hitler's ideas, seemed to confirm the truth of these notions. Responsible for the death by starvation of perhaps 750,000 civilians, and regarded by many Germans as the main culprit in the collapse of the war effort, the blockade reinforced and gave legitimacy in the minds of millions of Germans to the urgency of securing living space. For Hitler, it provided proof of his contentions and justification for his actions: the decisive factor in the struggle for survival was obtaining the means by which the German nation could sustain itself. The Great War had clearly demonstrated that Germany, a resource-poor nation surrounded by hostile powers, possessed insufficient resources and was, thus, vulnerable to the murderous actions of its enemies. If Germany was to survive, it had to gain living space.
⁹