The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (18 page)

Now, how was the new Reich to regain her position as a world power and then go on to world mastery? Hitler pondered the question in the first volume, written mostly when he was in prison in 1924, returning to it at greater length in Volume Two, which was finished in 1926.

In the first place, there must be a reckoning with France, “the inexorable mortal enemy of the German people.” The French aim, he said, would always be to achieve a “dismembered and shattered Germany … a hodgepodge of little states.” This was so self-evident, Hitler added, that “… if I were a Frenchman … I could not and would not act any differently from
Clemenceau
.” Therefore, there must be “a final active reckoning with France … a last decisive struggle … only then will we be able to end the eternal and essentially so fruitless struggle between ourselves and France; presupposing, of course, that Germany actually regards the destruction of France as only a means which will afterward enable her finally to give our people the expansion made possible elsewhere.”
²

Expansion elsewhere? Where? In this manner Hitler leads to the core of his ideas on German foreign policy which he was to attempt so faithfully to carry out when he became ruler of the Reich.
Germany, he said bluntly, must expand in the East—largely at the expense of Russia
.

In the first volume of
Mein Kampf
Hitler discoursed at length on this problem of
Lebensraum
—living space—a subject which obsessed him to his dying breath. The Hohenzollern Empire, he declared, had been mistaken in seeking colonies in
Africa
. “Territorial policy cannot be fulfilled in the Cameroons but today almost exclusively in Europe.” But the soil of Europe was already occupied. True, Hitler recognized, “but nature has not reserved this soil for the future possession of any particular nation or race; on the contrary, this soil exists for the people which possesses the force to take it.” What if the present possessors object? “Then the law
of self-preservation goes into effect; and what is refused to amicable methods, it is up to the fist to take.”
³

Acquisition of new soil, Hitler continued, in explaining the blindness of German prewar foreign policy, “was possible only in the East … If land was desired in Europe, it could be obtained by and large only at the expense of Russia, and this meant that the new Reich must again set itself on the march along the road of the
Teutonic Knights
of old, to obtain by the German sword sod for the German plow and daily bread for the nation.”
⁴

As if he had not made himself entirely clear in the initial volume, Hitler returned to the subject in the second one.

How much land are the German people entitled to? The bourgeoisie, says Hitler scornfully, “which does not possess a single creative political idea for the future,” had been clamoring for the restoration of the 1914 German frontiers.

Hitler’s “sample year” would go back some six centuries, to when the Germans were driving the
Slavs
back in the East. The push eastward must be resumed. “Today we count eighty million Germans in Europe! This foreign policy will be acknowledged as correct only if, after scarcely a hundred years, there are two hundred and fifty million Germans on this continent.”
⁷
And all of them within the borders of the new and expanded Reich.

Some other peoples, obviously, will have to make way for so many Germans. What other peoples?

Fate, Hitler remarks, was kind to Germany in this respect. It had handed over Russia to Bolshevism, which, he says, really meant handing over Russia to the Jews. “The giant empire in the East,” he exults, “is ripe for collapse. And the end of Jewish rule in Russia will also be the end of Russia as a state.” So the great steppes to the East, Hitler implies, could be taken over easily on Russia’s collapse without much cost in blood to the Germans.

Can anyone contend that the blueprint here is not clear and precise? France will be destroyed, but that is secondary to the German drive eastward. First the immediate lands to the East inhabited predominantly by Germans will be taken. And what are these? Obviously Austria, the Sudetenland in
Czechoslovakia
and the western part of
Poland
, including Danzig. After that, Russia herself. Why was the world so surprised, then, when Chancellor Hitler, a bare few years later, set out to achieve these very ends?

   On the nature of the future Nazi State, Hitler’s ideas in
Mein Kampf
are less concise. He made it clear enough that there would be no “democratic nonsense” and that the Third Reich would be ruled by the
Fuehrerprinzip
, the leadership principle—that is, that it would be a dictatorship. There is almost nothing about economics in the book. The subject bored Hitler and he never bothered to try to learn something about it beyond toying with the crackpot ideas of Gottfried Feder, the crank who was against “interest slavery.”

What interested Hitler was political power; economics could somehow take care of itself.

   Therefore, as Hitler said in a speech in Munich in 1923, “no economic policy is possible without a sword, no industrialization without power.” Beyond that vague, crude philosophy and a passing reference in
Mein Kampf
to “economic chambers,” “chambers of estates” and a “central economic parliament” which “would keep the national economy functioning,” Hitler refrains from any expression of opinion on the economic foundation of the Third Reich.

And though the very name of the Nazi Party proclaimed it as “socialist,” Hitler was even more vague on the kind of “socialism” he envisaged for the new Germany. This is not surprising in view of a definition of a “socialist” which he gave in a speech on July 28, 1922:

Considerable editorial advice and even pruning on the part of at least three helpers could not prevent Hitler from meandering from one subject to another in
Mein Kampf
. Rudolf Hess, who took most of the dictation first at
Landsberg prison
and later at Haus Wachenfeld near Berchtesgaden, did his best to tidy up the manuscript, but he was no man to stand up to the Leader. More successful in this respect was Father Bernhard Stempfle, a former member of the Hieronymite order and an anti-Semitic journalist of some notoriety in Bavaria. This strange priest, of whom more will be heard in this history, corrected some of Hitler’s bad grammar, straightened out what prose he could and crossed out a few passages which he convinced the author were politically objectionable. The third adviser was
Josef Czerny
, of Czech origin, who worked on the Nazi newspaper,
Voelkischer Beobachter
, and whose anti-Jewish poetry endeared him to Hitler. Czerny was instrumental in revising the first volume of
Mein Kampf
for its second printing, in which certain embarrassing words and sentences were eliminated or changed; and he went over carefully the proofs of Volume Two.

Nevertheless, most of the meanderings remained. Hitler insisted on airing his thoughts at random on almost every conceivable subject, including culture, education, the theater, the movies, the comics, art, literature, history, sex, marriage, prostitution and syphilis. Indeed, on the subject of syphilis, Hitler devotes ten turgid pages, declaring it is “
the
task of the nation—not just
one more
task,”
^*
to eradicate it. To combat this dread disease Hitler demands that all the propaganda resources of the nation be mobilized. “Everything,” he says, “depends on the solution of this question.” The problem of syphilis and prostitution must also be attacked, he states, by facilitating earlier marriages, and he gives a foretaste of the eugenics of the Third Reich by insisting that “marriage cannot be an end in itself, but must serve the one higher goal: the increase and preservation of the species and the race. This alone is its meaning and its task.”
¹¹

And so with this mention of the preservation of the species and of the race in
Mein Kampf
we come to the second principal consideration: Hitler’s
Weltanschauung
, his view of life, which some historians, especially in England, have seen as a crude form of Darwinism but which in reality, as we shall see, has its roots deep in German history and thought. Like Darwin but also like a whole array of German philosophers, historians, kings, generals and statesmen, Hitler saw all life as an eternal struggle and the world as a jungle where the fittest survived and the strongest ruled—a “world where one creature feeds on the other and where the death of the weaker implies the life of the stronger.”

Mein Kampf
is studded with such pronouncements: “In the end only the urge for self-preservation can conquer … Mankind has grown great in eternal struggle, and only in eternal peace does it perish…. Nature … puts living creatures on this globe and watches the free play of forces. She then confers the master’s right on her favorite child, the strongest in courage and industry … The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness. Only the born weakling can view this as cruel …” For Hitler the preservation of culture “is bound up with the rigid law of necessity and the right to victory of the best and strongest in the world. Those who want to live, let them fight, and those who do not want to fight, in this world of eternal struggle, do not deserve to live. Even if this were hard—that is how it is!”
¹²

And who is “nature’s favorite child, the strongest in courage and industry” on whom Providence has conferred “the master’s right”? The Aryan. Here in
Mein Kampf
we come to the kernel of the Nazi idea of race superiority, of the conception of the master race, on which the Third Reich and Hitler’s New Order in Europe were based.

And how did the Aryan accomplish so much and become so supreme? Hitler’s answer is: By trampling over others. Like so many German thinkers of the nineteenth century, Hitler fairly revels in a sadism (and its opposite, masochism) which foreign students of the German spirit have always found so difficult to comprehend.