Ostkrieg (91 page)

If Soviet forces fought on a few days after the official end of the war in order finally to destroy the Nazi beast, the question remains as to why the Germans fought on in such hopeless circumstances. Hitler, of course, had vowed no repetition of November 1918 and had held to his
conviction with extraordinary determination, long after prospects for a military victory had vanished. But that begs the question of why he was able to continue fighting, of why his system did not collapse. In part, he profited from the caution of his enemies. The broad front strategy that both pursued in 1944 was militarily and politically cautious. In this fear of taking any risks, both the Soviets and the Anglo-Americans betrayed great respect for the Wehrmacht, which, although battered, was still capable of springing nasty surprises. Terror and the willingness of the Nazi regime to inflict it on its own citizens also played an important role. Average Germans, in contrast to the Soviet population under Stalin's arbitrary and violent rule, had hardly been exposed to systematic terror during the course of the Third Reich, but now, at the end of a lost war, they experienced a noticeable increase in violence and coercion. Despite signs of apathy, war-weariness, and resignation, they nonetheless responded not by revolting (as in 1918) but by continuing the struggle. Certainly, in the east, Soviet atrocities and Goebbels's lurid propaganda played a role in stiffening the backs of people who might otherwise have given it up. The very brutalization of war seemed to play a role as well, as many Landsers, their feelings stunted by the hardships they had suffered, lacked empathy for German civilians as they retreated. Not only did they seem indifferent to the destruction around them, but it was also hard for them to visualize an alternative. Although some acted to defend their homes or allow their compatriots to get to the west and others, especially officers and younger Landsers, resisted from ideological conviction or Nazi indoctrination, most simply sought to escape war with their own lives. Beyond Hitler, the key responsibility for the senseless continuation of war, however, lies with the weak and irresponsible military leadership that failed to act to oppose his obviously destructive plans and orders. In this, they were abetted by people such as Albert Speer and other technocratic and industrial figures who at all costs kept the armaments economy producing the weapons necessary to maintain the fight. Ultimately, then, the Third Reich expired, not with the “magnificent mystery of the dying hero,” or as a result of “heroic idealism,” but as a sordid act of Hitlerian willed self-destruction in which far too many people who knew better participated.
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Its impressive blitzkrieg triumphs over Poland and France obscured the reality that, when the war began in September 1939, Germany had no clear economic, military, or technical superiority over its Western adversaries. The furious rearmament effort of the 1930s had simply allowed the Germans to make up the vast gulf produced by the Treaty of Versailles and the Great Depression of the early 1930s. Further, the war that did result was, from the perspective expressed in
Mein Kampf
, the wrong war. Hitler had originally intended an Anglo-German alliance to confront the Judeo-Bolshevik threat but in 1939 reversed himself and allied with the Soviet Union in an effort to forestall an Anglo-French declaration of war. After the quick destruction of Poland, then, the war that followed was in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and against the wrong enemy. This conjunction of circumstances has led many historians to conclude one of two things: either rapid rearmament generated an overheated economy that threatened a domestic crisis and, thus, pushed Hitler toward war, or he simply gambled that, having failed to oppose earlier territorial grabs and with little leverage now that Germany's pact with the Soviet Union made it blockade-proof, the Western democracies would once again stand aside in the face of aggression. Both interpretations contain a kernel of truth, for Hitler did make a rational assessment of economic and strategic factors before plunging ahead, but both are incomplete. What they lack, as Adam Tooze has suggested, is the racial-ideological dimension.

Hitler, as has long been known, was obsessed with the alleged Jewish world conspiracy and its threat to Germany. The trauma of the war experience, the revolutionary upheavals and destruction that shook Central and Eastern Europe (especially the triumph of Jewish-Bolshevism in Russia), and the sense of threat and opportunity created by the collapse of empires all left an indelible impression on him. His toxic sense of conspiratorial anti-Semitism reinforced his belief that the Jews had somehow fomented and uniquely profited from the upheavals all around.
Further, the threatened German nationalism he had imbibed as a youth in Vienna was further exacerbated by the outcome of the war, when not just the Habsburg Empire but Germany itself seemed on the verge of destruction. Lost territory represented more than just a province or two changing colors on the map; for Hitler and other racial nationalists, it meant not only a truncation of the German racial body but also an opportunity, in the tangle of ethnic groups and lack of clear boundaries in Central Europe, for other nationalities to profit at Germany's expense. Nor was Hitler in any doubt as to who was responsible for this destruction. In February 1945, in one of his last conversations with Martin Bormann, he remarked, “An unfortunate historical accident fated it that my seizure of power should coincide with the moment at which the chosen one of world Jewry, Roosevelt, should have taken the helm in the [United States]. . . . Everything is ruined by the Jew, who has settled upon the United States as his most powerful bastion.” At the very end of a lost war, in which his plans for a great continental empire had been foiled in large part by the relentless resistance of the Soviet Union, it was the pivotal role of Roosevelt and the Jews to which Hitler assigned blame for the German defeat.
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Hitler's obsession with the power and strategic potential of the United States had, we now know, emerged as long ago as the late 1920s in his unpublished
Second Book
. The perceived threat from the United States to a large extent also determined, from his point of view, the purpose of the war. America, to Hitler, represented more than just an economic or strategic challenge; its liberal, capitalistic, democratic, pluralist vision, behind which lurked the malevolent Jew, posed an existential threat to his own vision of a homogenous racial community unified in a common vision and led by a strong Führer. Germany, after all, had not lost the Great War but been undermined by jealous enemies. Unable to shed his wartime mind-set, Hitler fully subscribed to the
Dolchstoss
(stab in the back) myth, not least because it neatly encapsulated two key ideas: solidarity and betrayal. In this view, the trench experience had forged a unique “community of the front,” itself a microcosm of a new, unified society, while the huge popular investment in the war domestically had been undermined by the “internal enemy.” The “real Germany,” then, had not lost the war but been betrayed by Jewish war profiteers. Although the myth initially obscured the reality of total war, that Germany had lost a drawn-out war of attrition because it lacked manpower, raw materials, and industrial and financial resources, by the late 1920s Hitler had come to appreciate the importance of these material factors. The only logical response to this situation, as sketched first in
Mein
Kampf
and then in the
Second Book
, was to create a new unified society within Germany, then carve out a Lebensraum for the German Volk sufficient to allow it to compete with the United States in the struggle for global preeminence. The only such vast spaces available in Europe lay in the east and could be taken only by force. The mission of conquest, for economic and racial reasons, thus formed the central core of Hitler's ambition. For him, after all, the purpose of a state was nothing less than to secure the existence of the Volk. It also fit well with his fundamentalist social Darwinism: either the German Volk struggled for Lebensraum and assured its existence, or its racial enemies would deny it the means to life and, thus, assure its extinction.
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By the summer of 1939, however, Germany's ability to conduct that existential struggle seemed in doubt. Rapid rearmament had, indeed, provoked an economic crisis, although this was not in itself the key reason for war. More importantly, Hitler's actions had prompted accelerated rearmament efforts by Great Britain, France, and the United States as well as a hardening of the global diplomatic constellation against Germany. Not coincidentally, Hitler's famous threat on 30 January 1939 to annihilate the Jews, to which he returned with such obsessiveness in subsequent years, was intended as a precise warning to Roosevelt to stay out of Germany's “legitimate” affairs in Europe. As before 1914, Hitler saw the hand of the Jewish conspiracy in the effort once again to isolate and encircle Germany. Ironically, Stalin's gamble on provoking an intracapitalist war offered Hitler a way out of his dilemma. Faced with an enemy coalition allegedly orchestrated by world Jewry, he needed to strike hard and fast, an opportunity now available because of the pact with Stalin. In the interim, he could fight a war in the west with no threat of a second front and protected against the worst effects of the much-feared British blockade.
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The result, although spectacular, also reinforced the economic and racial logic of Hitler's ideological vision. Great Britain, influenced and supplied by the United States, chose to continue the war rather than settle with Germany, while Roosevelt launched a truly enormous rearmament effort in America that would, in a few years, produce a military force that would swamp the Wehrmacht. Moreover, although Germany's conquests in the west contained valuable industrial and human resources, they lacked precisely the things that Germany most needed and the British proceeded to blockade: raw materials, food resources, and, most importantly, coal and oil. Once more, the logic of the situation forced Hitler to turn his eye to the east—only the raw materials, food supplies, and oil of the Soviet Union would allow Germany to organize
an integrated continental economy that could compete with America. Nor would further trade agreements with Stalin suffice. Behind Stalin, Hitler believed, lurked another tentacle of the Jewish conspiracy. Economic dependence on the Soviet Union would result in the same fate for Germany as reliance on the Anglo-American global market: extinction. Propelled by a peculiar combination of racial arrogance (the notion of Slavic inferiority), the sense that the borderlands of the former Russian Empire were up for grabs (Germany, after all, had seized them in World War I), and urgency (a belief that time was against Germany), Hitler saw the only solution to the German dilemma in securing the necessary resources by conquest. If Germany acted immediately, a short window of opportunity existed since the American rearmament program would not bear fruit until 1942, while the spectacular victory over France offered the means: a short blitzkrieg campaign. Barbarossa was, thus, planned as a swift operation that would allow Germany access to the vital resources of the Soviet Union even as it continued preparations for the ultimate struggle against America.

Unable, or perhaps unwilling, to concentrate all its resources on Barbarossa, as early as Smolensk in July–August 1941, and certainly no later than Moscow that autumn, Germany found that blitzkrieg had run aground. Not only did it face the prospect of two wars, but Hitler also initiated actions for a third war as well, that against the Jews of the Soviet Union. If the enormous extent of the Nazi project is to be comprehended, it must be understood in its interrelated political, economic, social, cultural, racial, and military contexts, as a grand mission of colonization, economic exploitation, and racial recivilization. Hitler prided himself on being a
Raumpolitiker
, a geopolitician who thought in imperial terms, rather than merely a
Grenzpolitiker
, one concerned only with border revisions. Expansion was, thus, intended not just to rectify the injustices of Versailles but also, as he put it to the Reichstag after the conquest of Poland, to create “a new order of ethnographic conditions . . . , a resettlement of nationalities.” This untangling of ethnic groups, predicated on the establishment of a racially cleansed German community at the heart of a larger European empire, formed the context in which his racial ideas should be understood. The first test case for this racial restructuring was Poland, where efforts began almost immediately to repatriate Volksdeutsche from the Baltic states and the Soviet Union to the Wartheland, the part of western Poland to be annexed to Germany. At the same time, room had to be made for the new arrivals, so ethnic Poles and Jews had to be removed. The Poles could simply be dumped in the General Government, but the Jews, as a perceived racial menace, had
to be watched and, thus, were concentrated in a few urban ghettos or, as part of another experiment, sent to the Nisko reservation, an inhospitable border area southeast of Lublin. In all these actions, the Nazis learned a number of things: war legitimized harsh measures against enemies; disentangling populations was a messy, often brutal, business; territorial expansion and ethnic untangling offered vast opportunities for ambitious, ruthless underlings; and Jews had no place in the anticipated New Order.
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As Nazi planners confronted the prospect of further expansion to the east, they recognized another problem, one that defied easy solution: greater success in territorial conquest would bring with it more racial inferiors and Jews, thus intensifying the demographic dilemma. The solution lay not merely in shoving people around on a limited scale but in a truly ambitious and revolutionary socioeconomic and demographic project. This formed the context for Generalplan Ost, which was nothing less than a utopian vision of transplanting ethnic Germans and related Aryan peoples into the vast expanse of European Russia. While Western Europe's industrial capacity would be integrated into the German economy, Eastern Europe would be the scene of a complete agricultural and demographic restructuring. Urban areas would be greatly reduced, while a neofeudal system of Germanic farms and villages would be established along key transportation routes. The logic of this “settler colonialism” also involved, as it had in North America and Australia, the large-scale removal of the native population from the land: those who could not be incorporated, above all the Jews, but also large parts of the Polish population, were to be expelled across the Ural Mountains into Asia, left to starve, or both. Although efforts were made to implement some pilot schemes, Generalplan Ost largely fell victim to changing developments in the war. In any case, the most grandiose schemes were always intended to take place after a successful conclusion to the war, when Generalplan Ost would be merged within a broad consolidation of all conquered areas in a general settlement plan.
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