All the elements worked together—anti-Bolshevism, anti-Semitism (as Hitler claimed the socialist movement was “Jewish”); Lebensraum to free the land from the Bolsheviks and Jews; German national fanaticism and liberation from control of the Allies and their (Jewish) financiers; and continued purification of German blood. The latter involved the dual removal of the Jews from German society and concentration of “racial” Germans inside “Greater Germany” (in other words, the concept of Anschluss or in Mein Kampf, “One blood demands one Reich”).63 Each part fed the other. Each demonic seed grew in perfect harmony, shaded and watered by the rest.
When Hitler was appointed chancellor, only a few Germans and even fewer non-Germans knew what he was up to, but large numbers (perhaps just shy of a majority) agreed with his nationalist impulses and his explanations of why Germany languished. Most thought reparations constituted not only an undue burden on the Weimar Republic, but also an immoral and unjust one. Quickly forgotten were the images of mutinies during the Great War and the public outcry over casualty lists, and in their place came a new wave of resentment and revenge. Betrayal, whether by Wilson promising “peace talks” that quickly became a surrender, or by the French, who hungrily grabbed Alsace-Lorraine and occupied the Ruhr, increasingly became a common explanation for German humiliation.
Each new government intervention or subsidy involving business brought more vigorous regulation and enforcement by Hitler’s government. On Hitler’s order, the Nazis also embarked on bloody internal purges, starting with the murder of Vice-Chancellor von Papen’s secretary and the arrest of his staff in June 1934 during Operation Hummingbird, better known as the “Night of the Long Knives.” Von Papen himself barely escaped assassination, but other high-profile former leaders did not. Conservative anti-Nazi former chancellor Kurt von Schleicher and his wife were killed, as was Gregor Strasser, who conceived the Nazi “Battle for Work,” the Bavarian officials who had suppressed the Beer Hall Putsch, and some eighty others; then the following month, in Austria, self-identified Nazis shot Austrian chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss.
Large numbers of Austrian Germans longed for a deeper relationship between the two nations, and the Nazis in particular stressed the concept of a “greater Germany” that would incorporate Austria. An Austrian version of National Socialists, founded in 1926, had splintered and failed to gain the widespread acceptance that its German cousin had. A decade later, the Austrian National Socialists attracted only 3.6 percent of the vote. Dollfuss, whose Christian Social Party had governed since 1932, banned the Austrian Nazis in 1933. His successor, Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg, faced rising domestic violence and hoped closer relations with Germany would ameliorate it. But he also genuinely felt an intense connection to Germany, and in the 1936 “July Agreement,” he released all imprisoned Nazis and allowed Nazi newspapers to reopen. From then on, many Austrians believed it only a matter of time before a complete reunification with Germany occurred.
Whether in Austria or Germany, it was tempting for ordinary people to ignore the violence of the Nazis in the early part of the 1930s. The threat of Bolshevism was real; the Communist street gangs were every bit as dangerous as the Nazis, and to some people, the Nazis merely constituted a homegrown defense mechanism. Many Germans, especially, hoped there was some justification in the name of national security and that genuine conspiracies were at work. After all, Europeans were accustomed to carrying a set of documents with them everywhere and registering and deregistering with police when changing residences, but Nazi Germany increased civilian control substantially. Life under Nazi rule became regimented and restricted. Attempts to regulate prices involved the Reichsnährstand (“Reich Food Production,” or RNS) in the most mundane of grocery shopping and meal preparation, and, just like in the Soviet Union, the growing and consumption of food became political acts. To Hitler, farming regulations were critical if he was going to realize his vision of Lebensraum. Where Stalin conducted nothing less than a war on his peasants, Hitler envisioned the farmers as the heroic class of Germans who would lead to a “new Germany” of vastly expanded borders. But his goal presented a paradox: to acquire lands for the Volk involved war; but to fight the war, Germany needed far more resources than it had—including agricultural resources and land. Resources demanded war, while war demanded new resources, meaning the “means and ends could no longer be separated [and] War now had to be contemplated…as the logical consequences of preparations being made.”64
Origins of the Nazi War Machine
Although the military had played only a peripheral role in the rise of Nazism up to the point Hitler became Fuehrer (leader), and while the Wehrmacht (literally “defense force,” but generally applied to the German army in particular) viewed Hitler with contempt, seeing him as an amateur, Germany quickly personified the perfect embodiment of a “military-industrial complex,” in which the need for military supplies drove the conquest of territory. Hitler had already insisted that a nation could “become” itself only through aggressive foreign policy and expansion; therefore it followed that “the first task of German foreign policy is the creation of conditions that will enable the reestablishment of a German army.”65 As the new chancellor, Hitler announced that he would spare no expense in making “the German people capable of bearing arms.”66 Hence from 1933 to 1935, German military spending as a share of national income increased tenfold.67 Germany continued to press for more American loans, rightly angering Roosevelt and his secretary of state Cordell Hull, both of whom viewed the appeals as a façade for financing further military expansion. Meanwhile, the Nazis actually provided less funding for such civilian-sector needs as housing than the Weimar Republic had, and housing finance fell by four fifths under Hitler.
Rearmament was only half the game. Hitler was busy rallying the Germans against the artificial borders created at Versailles. He also invoked an approach adopted by Lenin, namely the presumption that no nation’s borders could be considered fixed. “The German borders of 1914,” he wrote, were borders that “represented something just as unfinished as people’s borders always are. The division of territory on the earth is always the momentary result of a struggle and evolution that is in no way finished.”68 Support for Germany to expand her borders was found in unlikely places, in particular the British Embassy, where Ambassador Nevile Henderson said he realized that “a nation of 75 million must be allowed to expand economically somewhere.”69
Hitler’s rearmament relied heavily on existing companies and their ideas and engineering, sometimes meeting specifications developed by military personnel, but more often promoting their own designs and acquiring military approval. As a result, many of the German weapons were first-class, but the process played havoc with planning. The development of war matériel for the German air force or Luftwaffe (“air weapon”) in particular lacked direction as Hitler lurched from one concept and idea to the next. Probably the best two examples of this lack of planning to meet Hitler’s stated goals were the failure to put a long-range heavy bomber into production—only prototypes were ever produced—and the sidelining of jet fighter development and production when jets could have entered the war in 1942. German engineering was often spectacular, but German industry tinkered its way to defeat. The United States completed a design of a weapon and mass-produced it, whereas the Germans constantly improved their weapons, greatly lowering production rates and creating a nightmare in the field with each variation having different and noninterchangeable parts with other models. Consequently, the Germans never had enough of any particular weapon and were repeatedly overwhelmed by American and Soviet numbers.
While Hitler’s interference did saddle the development of some strategic Luftwaffe planes and weaponry, his support nonetheless made them the most aggressive arm when it came to mobilizing for war. Ratcheted up on Christmas Day, 1936, by Herman Göring, after years of preliminary development, the Luftwaffe reestablished its power quickly, making a mockery of Versailles’s ban on German military aviation.
For the next four years, the Luftwaffe enjoyed unrestricted budgets, consuming much of the Four Year Plan introduced in October 1936 that sucked up a quarter of all investment in the German economy. Among other goals, it placed the German economy on a timetable to be fit for war in four years; have the German army operational within the same time span; and to reject devaluation of the money. But of all the armed forces, the Luftwaffe was to receive special attention when it came to resources, and this objective immediately clashed with daunting shortages of rubber, iron ore, steel, and particularly oil, which were obtained only in Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Russia. Without “entry into foreign states or the attack and seizure of foreign property,” Hitler noted in May 1939, “the solution to [the problem of raw materials] is not possible.”70 None of these ideas were new. Prior to World War I Germans had lusted for French ores, sought iron in Sweden and Austria, and looked toward the east to supply all foodstuffs at some future point. What had changed was Hitler’s willingness to risk national existence to achieve a high standard of living (which up to that point had been necessary to mobilize civilian support for military expansion), and his unwillingness to tamper with that standard of living until well into World War II. Relentlessly, then, Germany’s insufficiency in raw materials gnawed at it, driving it toward martial conclusions. Having decided that the free market would not produce the desired outcome, Hitler set himself on a course of deceit and violence—but then again, many argue that was his intended path from the beginning.
Hindsight seems to make clear Hitler’s intentions. It is worth considering, though, that most of his actions were to be expected, not only in Europe, but in the United States as well. Hitler put his young men into his army, Roosevelt and Stalin theirs into massive civilian work camps—the incentives differed, but the programs themselves, and their intention of full employment, looked remarkably similar. Did French socialism differ significantly? Were not leaders everywhere threatening, bullying, and cajoling private industry with little complaint from the putative watchdog press? Through the prism of nearly universal and outrageous soft socialism of New Deal America and western European governments and the hard communism of Stalin, Hitler’s policies appeared, indeed, less radical than those of the Soviets. If Western intellectuals had praised Stalin and brushed off his murder and thuggery, why would they have raised any eyebrows to Hitler?
At any rate, Hitler seemed uncaring about the Western press. He marched ahead with his agenda. Whatever could not be obtained through diplomacy, trickery, and bluster would necessitate war with France and Britain, and to that end Hitler had already foolishly ordered an increase in naval construction, swelling spending on the Kriegsmarine (German Navy) to challenge Britain by 1939. A wary Britain and France responded to this buildup, France doubling her military budget in 1938 and Britain launching a new aircraft production program that would add twelve thousand combat planes to the RAF by 1940. From 1933 to 1939 the “democracies” outspent Germany, Japan, and Italy by 1.5 to 1.71 And whereas Britain and America could continue to ramp up their naval spending dramatically, such a level of expenditures on ships was unsustainable for Germany. Even later, after the 1939 “Pact of Steel” between Germany and Italy potentially supplemented the Nazi fleet with numerous warships from the Italian fleet, Germany never came close to challenging Britain or America in the Atlantic. In the end, monies poured into shipbuilding, except for the invasion of Norway and submarines, were thrown away.
In May 1938 Hitler ordered the economy to shift into wartime production as its primary objective. Civilian needs would take a backseat to the military, the exception being the Volkswagen, Hitler’s pet project to rival the productive genius of Henry Ford. A marketing plan was developed that allowed customers to set up a no-interest-paying bank account (the interest went to the bank), and when they had a balance of 750 Reichsmarks, they could order a Volkswagen. The goal was to achieve a price of 990 Reichsmarks per auto, but to meet that target, the Porsche factory had to produce 450,000 cars per year, or more than twice the entire German auto industry at the time. In the event, all the cars produced went to Reich officials until the factory was converted into military production. Except for military and governmental traffic the Autobahns saw little use, and Hitler’s “people’s car” never came close to reality.72 In contrast, with no government support at all, Henry Ford had succeeded in producing a car for the average American, while the Volkswagen, funded and marketed heavily by the government, never sold a single car to a civilian until long after the war.
Mobilization brought new financial pressures on the Third Reich, and escalating taxes had to be avoided to retain the support of the German middle class and industrialists. Citizens wishing to leave Germany had already been subjected to a “flight tax” in 1931, which by 1938—as Jews grew more desperate to leave—became a major source of revenue. Jews were fortunate to escape with 8 percent of their assets intact, and from 1938 to 1940 brought in almost 850 million Reichsmarks to the Nazi government, or about 5 percent of the Reich’s total income. Heightened persecution of Jews also brought unforeseen economic dislocations. Kristallnacht, a night of attacks against Jews and their property in November 1938 after a Jew assassinated a Nazi official in France, for example, cost the government three million Reichsmarks for clean-up expenses, and Jews had to rebuild their houses at their own cost and pay an “atonement fee” that amounted to a billion Reichsmarks.
News of Nazi violence against Jews began to reach other nations on a regular basis, permanently turning some in the upper echelon of the British government against Germany, such as Britain’s formerly appeasement-oriented foreign secretary, Lord Halifax. It generated a storm of protest in the United States, leading Roosevelt to recall the American ambassador from Germany, but otherwise taking no punitive action. Of course, this only served to reinforce in Hitler’s mind the fact that “international Jewry” was headquartered in the United States and to harden his long-term expectation of an inevitable war with America.
Eventually, after the invasion of Poland in September 1939, Hitler drafted a memo to the commander-in-chief of the German army, General Walther von Brauchitsch, and his chief of staff, Franz Halder, providing his strategic assessment of a western war, which he insisted needed to begin immediately because of the expected intervention of the United States. “Because of its neutrality laws, America is not yet dangerous to us,” he wrote a few weeks later. While the “reinforcement of our enemies by America is not yet significant,” he noted, it soon would be, and although at that time the situation was “propitious, in six months, however, it may not be.”73 Fritz Todt, the Reich minister for armaments and munitions, told General Georg Thomas, head of the Wehrmacht’s Defense Economy and Armaments Office, that the “Fuehrer has again emphasized energetically that everything is to be done so that the war [against England and France] can be ended in 1940 with a great military victory. From 1941 onwards, time works against us (USA-potential).”74 Even after the Battle of Britain in the fall of 1940—with a massive invasion of the USSR looming before them in May of the next year—Luftwaffe leadership focused as much on “the industrial prerequisites for the coming war with Britain and America as on the imminent invasion of the Soviet Union.”75 As early as July 1940 after the fall of France, Hitler instructed the high command to “consider seriously the Russian and American question (emphasis ours),” indicating that one full year before invading Russia, Hitler was already planning for a war against both the USSR and the United States.76
Some German opponents of Hitler based their positions on the fear that America would quickly enter a European war. General Ludwig Beck, chief of the German General Staff from 1935 to 1938, opposed a war from the beginning and enlisted Graf Schwerin von Krosigk, the finance minister of the Reich, to prepare such a memo for Hitler in June 1938. Krosigk warned of the “soon-expected active participation of the United States of America in the war,” calling it the British “trump card.”77 Thus, at an early stage, the stars were aligning in Germany fo
r an eventual conflict with the United States. America’s alliance with Britain, combined with (from Hitler’s perspective) the manipulation of Roosevelt’s government by a Jewish cabal and the realities of Allied rearmament, all meant that for Germany, the sooner war came, the better. If Germany acted quickly enough, Britain and possibly the Bolshevik Soviet Union could be knocked out before American power might be brought to bear.
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