3
The ‘Colonization’ of Germany
The immediate post-war years were a period of national disgrace for Germany. Its monarchy banished, shorn of large tracts of territory by the Versailles settlement and saddled with a huge reparations bill, the Reich was plunged into profound economic, political and psychological dislocation. Foreign soldiers, some of them men of colour, occupied substantial parts of the country. Germany had fought the world and lost; now many felt she was a colony of the global system. The very biological substance of the German people seemed to be at stake, as they grappled with the continuing blockade and then the prospect of long-term immiseration. Hitler experienced these travails both personally and politically. His own situation was even more marginal than most. He found his way through the turbulent aftermath of war with difficulty. Hitler was also even more exercised than most Germans about the state of the Reich. He looked for answers, and he soon found them. Hitler identified the root cause of Germany’s humiliation as the power of Anglo-American and Jewish international capitalism, which used various instruments, in particular revolutionary communism, to keep the Reich in subjection. With the help of others, but essentially under his own steam, Hitler began to develop an ideology to make sense of the world around him. By the end of this period, Hitler had undertaken a comprehensive diagnosis of the Reich’s ills, though he had yet to suggest a cure. Given the depths to which Germany had fallen, Hitler expected that national revival would take generations.
Shortly after the war ended, Hitler was discharged from hospital. He returned to the Bavarian capital, not as a matter of individual choice, but because he was ordered to do so. He would in any case have had to return to the city for the formal disbandment of his unit. Unlike most German soldiers, Hitler did not seek early demobilization.1 Instead, he was assigned to the Replacement Battalion of the Second Bavarian Infantry Regiment in Munich. Hitler later referred to his six years in uniform,2 rather than four years at war, suggesting that he regarded his continued struggle after November 1918 as part of his military service. Like many of those still in uniform, and many in civilian life, Hitler was still psychologically on a war footing. This was unsurprising given the continuing Allied blockade and the possibility of a return to war should the peace terms prove too onerous.3 Significantly, he did not join either a paramilitary Freikorps or one of the border-guard formations battling Germany’s neighbours to the east, the usual havens for those of a robustly ‘national’ disposition.4 Hitler made no attempt to resist the short-lived radical left-wing Council government of Kurt Eisner in April–May 1919, and may even have been sympathetic to it.5
Three formative events then supervened. First, Hitler was selected by his officers to serve in the section of the army devoted to propaganda and ‘enlightenment’ under the direction of Captain Karl Mayr.6 This indicates an understanding on their part of his aptitude for such work. He spent part of the summer of 1919 taking a Reichswehr training course for his new posting, which included a spell auditing a series of lectures at the University of Munich.7 This ‘education’ involved warnings about the perils of Bolshevism, lamentations about Germany’s fall from great power status, which was partly blamed on the machinations of the Jews, but also classes by Gottfried Feder on the need to break ‘debt serfdom’, and attacks on finance capitalism. Others lectured on the economic strangulation of Germany by the west.8 The historian Karl Alexander von Müller spoke on the overwhelming power of Anglo-America, and the dangers of ‘Anglo-Saxon world domination’.9 That said, Hitler was not simply the passive recipient of a Reichswehr message, if only because the lecturers often contradicted each other.10 As we shall see, his emerging ideology differed from it in important respects, notably in the even greater emphasis on anti-capitalism and his distinctive foreign policy views.
Secondly, Hitler was elected by the enlisted men as a Vertrauensmann–a soldier’s representative (literally ‘person of confidence’ or ‘trusted person’)–a post created by the High Command to improve communications and relations with the rank and file.11 This shows that he must already have commanded the support of a substantial body of his peers.
The third development was the news of the final humiliating terms of the Treaty of Versailles in late June 1919; their general outlines had been known since early May.12 One of Hitler’s former comrades later recalled seeing him study the treaty as soon as it became public.13 The details were crucial for until that point the dire territorial and financial consequences of the war were not yet apparent. Moreover, even after the terms became known, many believed them so onerous that the Reich government would resume the war rather than submit to them.14 It was on this basis, as an act of war, rather than out of pique, that the commander of the fleet interned at Scapa Flow in the Orkneys decided to scuttle his fleet rather than let it be used to coerce Germany. The National Assembly only accepted the treaty after a furious debate in July 1919. Massive public order problems followed in many German cities, including Munich.
On 20 August 1919, Hitler made his first contribution to a discussion in his Reichswehr unit; three days later, he delivered a whole speech on ‘Peace Terms and Reconstruction’. This is the first known major political statement by Hitler. The text, unfortunately, has not survived, although its likely gist can be derived from remarks made not long after; for this, see more below. A day later, Hitler is recorded as speaking on the issue of ‘Emigration’.15 Two days later, a Reichswehr report describes him as having given ‘a very good, clear and spirited lecture… on capitalism, during which he touched, indeed he had to touch, on the Jewish question’.16 This was Hitler’s first recorded reference to the Jews, and it was made very clearly in the context of capitalism,17 rather than Bolshevism or the German Revolution. That this was no coincidence is shown by the now-famous letter he wrote to Adolf Gemlich three weeks later, on 16 September 1919.
The ‘Gemlich letter’, which is the first surviving longer political text by Hitler,18 defined the Jewish ‘problem’ partly as a medical issue. Hitler dubbed the Jews the ‘racial tuberculosis of the peoples’. Partly, the ‘problem’ was defined in political terms, with the Jews cast as the ‘driving forces of the revolution’, which had laid Germany low. Here he was referring not to the events of 1917 in Petrograd, but to the workers’ and soldiers’ councils of 1918 in Germany. But Hitler’s primary emphasis was another aspect of the ‘problem’ entirely. His initial anti-Semitism was profoundly anti-capitalistic, rather than anti-communist in origin.19 He spoke of the ‘dance around the golden calf’, the privileging of ‘money’, the ‘majesty of money’, the ‘power of money’ and so on. Hitler emphasized the transnational affinity between German Jews and those of Poland and the United States. The Jew, he claimed, did not describe himself as a Jewish German, Jewish Pole or Jewish American but ‘always as a German, Polish or American Jew’. As yet, two years after the Russian Revolution, he seems to have nothing to say about communism, Bolshevism and the Soviet Union.20 Hitler, in other words, became an enemy of the Jews before he avowedly became an enemy of Russian Bolshevism.
None of this is particularly surprising. Anti-Semitism in general, and anti-capitalist anti-Semitism in particular, had been a staple of German politics and political thought since the later nineteenth century.21 It had an established presence in German right-wing parties and organizations such as the Deutsch-Nationale Volkspartei (DNVP), the Thule Society and the Pan-German League. Some groups, such as the Kampfbund gegen Zinsknechtschaft (League for the Breaking of Debt-slavery) and the Völkische Gewerkschaften (People’s Trade Unions), were specifically directed against ‘Jewish’ capitalism.22 More to the point, hostility to international capitalism, the force to which Germany’s defeat was attributed, dominated the message which Hitler was subjected to by the Reichswehr indoctrinators. One way or the other, in Germany, and perhaps in Europe more generally, anti-Semitism and anti- (international) capitalism have historically been joined at the hip. With Hitler there is little point in talking about the one
without the other.
Between his opening lectures to the Aufklärungskommando and his letter to Gemlich, Hitler had also made his first intervention in a quasi-public debate at the Sterneckerbräu in Munich. On 12 September 1919 he was sent to observe a meeting of the fringe ‘German Workers’ Party’ (DAP). When one of the audience, Professor Adalbert Baumann, argued in favour of the Bavarian-led separation of southern Germany from the Reich,23 Hitler attacked him vigorously and effectively drove his antagonist out of the room. The chairman of the Munich chapter of the DAP, Anton Drexler, subsequently remarked with admiration, ‘Goodness, he’s got a gob. We could use him.’24 The encounter was significant in two ways. Firstly, it led to the entry of Hitler into the party towards the end of the month, possibly at Mayr’s behest,25 but more likely his own independent decision.26 He quickly became one of its most important speakers, though at the beginning he was overshadowed by Dietrich Eckart and Gottfried Feder. Secondly, the exchange with Baumann was the first in what would become an increasingly bitter confrontation between Hitler and Bavarian separatists and particularists outraged at the reduced rights accorded by the Weimar Constitution to what had been the constituent states of Imperial Germany.27
From mid November 1919, Hitler mounted a series of full-scale attacks in public speeches on the main enemy–‘absolute enemies England and America’. It was Britain which had been determined to prevent Germany’s rise to world power, in order not to jeopardize their ‘world monopoly’. ‘That was also the reason,’ Hitler claimed, ‘to make war on us. And now America. As a money country it had to intervene in the war in order not to lose the money they had lent.’28 Here he explicitly made the link between his anti-capitalist critique and the hostile behaviour of the western coalition. This was closely connected to Hitler’s anti-Semitism. ‘The Americans put business above all else. Money is money even if it is soaked in blood. The wallet is the holiest thing for the Jew,’ he claimed, adding: ‘America would have struck with or without U-Boats.’29 What is remarkable here is that the terms ‘the Americans’ and ‘the Jews’ were used almost interchangeably.
If Hitler’s profound hostility to the Anglo-Saxon powers was shaped by his anti-Semitism, it was also distinct and, crucially, anterior to it. He had, after all, spent almost the entire war fighting the ‘English’, and latterly the United States. Hitler became an enemy of the British–and also of the Americans–before he became an enemy of the Jews.30 Indeed, he became an enemy of the Jews largely because of his hostility to the Anglo-American capitalist powers. Hitler could not have been clearer: ‘We struggle against the Jew,’ he announced at a public meeting in early January 1920, ‘because he prevents the struggle against capitalism.’31
The rest of Germany’s adversaries, by contrast, fell into a second and milder category. The Russians and the French, so the argument ran, had become hostile ‘as a result of their unfortunate situation or some other circumstances’.32 Hitler was by no means blind to the extent of French antagonism, but it is striking that he discoursed at much greater length about the financial terms of the treaty, and the blockade, than the territorial losses to Germany’s immediate neighbours. This focus on Anglo-American, and increasingly on US, strength, with or without anti-Semitism, was by no means unusual in Germany, or even Europe generally. It reflected a much broader post-war preoccupation with the immense global power of the United States.33 As we shall see, Hitler’s entire thinking, and the policies of the Third Reich after 1933, were in essence a reaction to it.
Hitler put the inquest into the defeat at the heart of his world view. The alleged fractures in German society played an important role here, the ‘inner internationalism’ to which he had referred during the war itself. By this Hitler primarily meant the Social Democrats and Independent Socialists (USPD), who allegedly put loyalty to their class comrades over that to the nation; it was their internationalism, not their socialism, that he objected to. It was the same anxiety as over capitalism, which Hitler rejected in its global, but, as we shall see, not necessarily in its local ‘national’ form. He also took aim at German particularism, especially in Bavaria, which threatened the integrity of the Reich. The principal internal enemy, however, was the Jews, who had ‘stabbed Germany in the back’, although Hitler rarely used this precise phrase.34 All this has given the impression that Hitler, like so many other Germans, sought to blame the defeat primarily on internal scapegoats rather than facing up to the strength of the Entente. In fact, Hitler never subscribed to a monocausal domestic explanation for the disaster and much of his thinking, especially the later quest for Lebensraum, would be inexplicable if he had. Eliminating the Jews and healing the domestic rifts inside Germany were necessary conditions for the revival of the Reich, but not sufficient ones.
Hitler was well aware of the industrial strength of the British Empire and the United States, but in his view the struggle against the Anglo-Americans during the First World War was not decided solely by material factors. His vision of international politics was essentially human-centred. On Hitler’s reading, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had been an epic demographic contest which the German Empire had spectacularly lost. She had failed to provide an outlet for her excess population either through economic or through territorial expansion, with the result that millions of Germans had emigrated. Meanwhile, her enemies built up huge empires which they could parlay into strength on the European battlefield. Hitler lamented ‘that the Entente sent alien auxiliary peoples to bleed to death on European battlefields’.35 He had personal experience of this, having confronted (British) Indian troops in 1915 and (French) Algerian Zouaves in 1918. Hitler’s anxiety deepened on beholding the Africans and Moroccans who formed part of the French occupation forces in the 1920s. He accused France of ‘only waiting for the warm season to throw an army of 800–900,000 blacks into [our] country to complete the work of the total subjugation and violation of Germany’.36 Hitler’s concern was thus not only racial, but strategic: that France would use the human reserves of Africa to oppress Germany, a weapon no longer available to Germany as she had lost her much smaller overseas empire as a result of the war.
The main threat posed by the European empires, however, was not the deployment of men from the ‘subject races’, but from the white settler colonies. Some of the most formidable British troops on the western front had come from Canada, Australia and New Zealand. They were numerous, well fed, fit, highly motivated, and often extremely violent.37 Worse still was the fact that the Germans whom the Reich had exported in the nineteenth century for want of land to feed them had come back to fight against her as American soldiers during the war. In later speeches, as we shall see, Hitler repeatedly came back to the moment he had encountered his first American prisoners. The emigration question was the subject of his second known major speech in September 1919, and it also underlay his next disquisition, which was on the internal colonization of Germany. His thoughts on that subject so impressed his sponsor Captain Mayr that he announced his intention ‘to launch this official report abridged or in full in the press in a suitable manner’.38 Emigration was part of daily life in post-war Germany, so much so that a whole newspaper in Munich, Der Auswanderer (‘The Emigrant’), was devoted to the topic.39 That said, although contemporary concern with the emigration issue went well beyond Hitler, it does not seem to have enjoyed a particular salience in the broader inquest into the war. It thus represents his distinctive contribution to the debate on German revival and one of the most important lessons he drew from the war. Henceforth the emigration question, and the associated American problem, lay at the very heart of Hitler’s thinking.
Strikingly absent from Hitler’s thinking immediately following the war, and indeed for some time thereafter, was any serious anxiety about Russian power or the Soviet Union.40 This is not surprising, given that Germany’s main enemy had been the western allies, and the fact that Russia had been defeated by 1917. Hitler was not even worried about communism as an external threa
t. The impact of the Baltic émigré and ferocious anti-Bolshevik Alfred Rosenberg during this period was not significant and, in any case, the two men did not even meet until a few months later.41 Like many Germans,42 Hitler saw Bolshevism as a disease, which had knocked Russia out of the war, and then undermined German resistance a year later. He did not fear a Soviet invasion, not even after the victory of the Reds in the Civil War. Instead, Hitler fretted that communism would destroy the last vestiges of German sovereignty in the face of the Entente. ‘The threatened Bolshevik flood is not so much to be feared as the result of Bolshevik victories on the battlefields,’ he warned, ‘as rather as a result of a planned subversion of our own people’, which would deliver them up to international high finance.43 Significantly, Hitler wasted no words on the Soviet Union in his early statements from 1919 save to predict that it was set to become a ‘colony of the Entente’. This means that capitalism and communism were not simply two equal sides of the anti-Semitic coin for Hitler. Bolshevism was clearly a subordinate force. Its function in the Anglo-American plutocratic system was to undermine the national economies of independent states and make them ripe for takeover by the forces of international capitalism.
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