Moreover, in Hitler’s view the war was by no means over. Germany was still the victim of international capitalism, whose continuing power he repeatedly attacked. He spoke of ‘international stock exchange and loan capital’ as the main ‘beneficiaries’ of the peace treaty. Ever since the ‘collapse of the Reich’, Hitler claimed, the country had fallen under ‘the rule of international, fatherlandless capital, independent of person, place and Nation’. International conferences–such as Genoa in April 1922–were simply condemned as ‘stock exchange conferences’. Hitler saw Jewish international capitalism and western democracy as linked. ‘International Jewish stock exchange capital,’ he believed, ‘was the driving force of these western-democratic states.’ He set up the ‘equation’ of ‘democracy-capitalism-Jew’. For all these reasons, he argued, National Socialism was a ‘new force whose aim could always only be anti-capitalist’.112
Hitler was not completely opposed to all forms of capitalism, though he sometimes gave that impression. He contrasted the blanket hostility of Social Democrats and Marxists to capitalism in general with his own distinction between allegedly pernicious and largely Jewish ‘international loan capitalism’ and nationally oriented ‘productive industrial capitalism’. ‘Factories and industrial capital,’ he told an audience of SA, ‘is national’ and ‘the capital of every country remains national’. For clarity, he stressed that National Socialism ‘struggled against every form of big capital, irrespective of whether it is German or Jewish, if it is grounded not in productive work, but in the principle of interest, of income without work or toil’. Moreover, Hitler added, the NSDAP ‘battled the Jew not only as the sole bearer of this [form of] capital’, but also because he ‘prevented’ the ‘systematic struggle’ against it. In Hitler’s view it was the determination of international capitalism to subjugate independent national economies which had led to the world war and the brutal peace settlement. This was the context in which he interpreted Allied attempts to control the Reichsbahn, the German national railways. Hitler accused the Jews of trying to ‘grab’ them, as part of a policy whose ‘final aim was the destruction of our national economy and the enslavement of our workforce’.113
The Allied determination to annihilate Germany, Hitler believed, was demonstrated by their continuation of the blockade after the end of hostilities. ‘One wants to destroy us completely,’ he claimed, ‘one wants to make our children sick and to allow them to waste away.’ He saw in the demands for reparations in kind by German agriculture a plan to reduce her population through ‘hunger’ in accordance with Clemenceau’s alleged policy to get rid of the ‘20 million excess’ Germans. The main culprit, however, was Britain, which Hitler regarded as the ‘master of the destruction of the health of peoples’, with the Germans only the latest victims of a much broader global hunger strategy. The Treaty of Versailles was thus merely the continuation of the wartime blockade by other means.114 In Hitler’s rhetoric, the alleged campaign to undermine the ‘substance’ of the German Volk as a whole weighed much more heavily than the territorial losses.
The main purpose of this strategy, Hitler claimed, was to reduce Germany’s population, partly through starvation but mainly through emigration. ‘The loss of [our] entire merchant fleet,’ he claimed, complements ‘the destruction of our industry, and that means cutting through the main artery of our whole economic life.’ ‘We no longer have any world trade,’ Hitler continued, ‘so that we have currently lost the possibility of feeding around 20 million people.’115 ‘The Entente,’ he lamented, ‘advises us to emigrate in order to feed ourselves, and to make way for the Eastern Jews.’116 Hitler, in other words, feared that Germany would become the victim of what is today called ‘population replacement’. He frequently urged his audience to think of the ‘thousands of German emigrants’.117 This was the great trauma underlying Hitler’s whole world view: the continued haemorrhaging of the best elements of the Reich who had left the Fatherland in order to enlarge the population of Germany’s rivals, with the fatal results that had been seen in the Great War. Worse still, he argued, these best elements were being replaced by the Jewish dregs of central and eastern Europe in a kind of negative selection, designed to further undermine the racial coherence of the German people.118
International capital and the victor powers–the two were indistinguishable in Hitler’s mind–had thus reduced Germany to the status of a ‘colony’. The purpose of Versailles, he argued, was ‘to make Germany ripe’ for its fate as ‘a colony of international capital’, to ‘soften up our people’ in order to make them ‘international slave workers’. He lamented that Germany was a ‘wage slave of international capital’. Germany was no more than a ‘colony of the international Jewish finance syndicate’, Hitler argued, thus making the German people ‘the slave of the outside world’. In April 1922, he fumed that ‘we practically no longer have an independent German Reich, but really just a colony of the world outside’. The reparations payments ordained by Versailles, he said, constituted the brutal theft of German labour. ‘Thus we have become the plaything of our enemies,’ Hitler concluded, ‘a slave people, of whom 10 million are working for the world outside for free.’119
All this was embedded in a broader, though idiosyncratic, critique of European imperialism. On the one hand, Hitler was bitterly critical of the British Empire. ‘Where was the law,’ he asked, ‘when England flooded China and India with opium and North America with spirits in order to undermine these people the better to dominate them?’ He also charged that Britain had ‘reduced the Irish people from 8.5 to 4.5 million [through the potato famine]’, and had ‘cynically allowed’ some 29,000 Boer women to die a miserable death in the ‘concentration camps of South Africa’. He paid black people the back-handed compliment that he would rather have ‘100 Negroes in the hall than one Jew’.120 On the other hand, Hitler objected not so much to colonialism as to what he would later call the ‘negrification’ of the Germans.121 ‘You don’t really need a pair of trousers,’ he had the Allies say, ‘the Negro doesn’t have one either.’ Germany itself, he complained, had become ‘the plantation of the interest of foreign capital’. It had fallen lower even than the ‘Negro Republic Liberia’, which at least enjoyed self-determination. Indeed, he lamented that ‘today any Hottentot state is able to dispose over Germany’, perhaps a reference to the fact that both Haiti and Liberia were signatories of the Versailles Treaty on the strength of their membership of the allied coalition. He feared, in short, that Germany would ‘soon be relegated to a position similar to that of India, Ireland or Egypt’. Germany, Hitler concluded, was completely enslaved, it was considered as ‘less than a Nigger [sic] state’.122
The notion that Germany was being enslaved and reduced to the status of an African colony was widespread at the time, not just in far right circles. Viktor Klemperer, a Jewish veteran of the same division in which Hitler had served, who was later a victim of Nazism, wrote that as ‘The way the Entente powers talk of and to Germany makes me as bitter as if I personally were being treated like a negro’;123 on another occasion he compared the situation of the Reich with that of the Congo. Many Germans experienced occupation, reparations and the presence of enemy colonial troops as a form not only of subjugation but of emasculation,124 a sentiment which extended from the far right to the SPD and even women’s rights groups concerned about sexual violence.125 The Weimar Germany in which Hitler operated was thus both colonized and post-colonial in an era of continuing western imperialism.126 Defeat by the western powers had turned the international racial order upside down.
There had in fact been long-standing Anglo-Saxon doubts about the whiteness of Germans. As far back as 1751, in his Observations concerning the increase of Mankind, peopling of countries etc., Benjamin Franklin had included them along with the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes as a people of ‘swarthy complexion’. He ‘excepted’ only the ‘Saxons’–probably meaning the Lower-Saxons, whose ancestors had settled England. These, Franklin said
, ‘with the English, make the principal body of White People on the face of the earth’. More recently, in 1916, the prominent American theorist Madison Grant published his lament for The Passing of the Great Race,127 which also identified Germans and Scandinavians as of clearly lower racial value than the Anglo-Celts, though preferable to eastern Europeans, Jews or blacks; of this, more later.
The sense of racial outrage at the treatment of Germany turned some National Socialists into anti-imperialists and sympathizers with the wretched of the earth, but not Hitler. In late 1922, British Intelligence reported that he attended a meeting of Egyptian, Turkish, Indian and Irish revolutionaries in Munich.128 He probably did so at the suggestion of Ernst Count Reventlow, an early Nazi who seems to have had some genuine regard for these movements as common victims of British imperialism. Karl Haushofer also supported the aspirations of Indian nationalists. Hitler, for his part, remained not only contemptuous of the rights of non-European peoples, but also sceptical of their political value in the contest against the might of Anglo-America.
Worse still than the old European imperialism of western powers, according to Hitler, was the Jewish aspiration to world domination, of which the Germans were the principal victims. Drawing on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, he claimed to see a grand plan to control the world. The ultimate aim of policy towards Germany and other independent states, Hitler stated at the beginning 1921, was the creation of a ‘Jewish world state’. He came back to this theme repeatedly over the next two years, when he spoke of the ‘Jewish-imperialist plans for world domination’, the ‘Jewish world dictatorship’ and the ‘final aim [of the Jews]: world domination [and] the destruction of the national states’. In his notes for one speech, Hitler made the connections absolutely clear in point form: ‘World domination with a Jewish capital–Zion–that means world enslavement: world stock exchange–world press–world culture. World language. All for slaves under one master.’129 In this way, Hitler closed the circle of western imperialist, Jewish and capitalist enemies of the Reich.
Germany was by no means the only victim. Russia was in an even less enviable situation. The ‘international money powers’, he claimed, were after ‘Russia’s natural resources’. Bolshevism was integral to this aim, as it was in the German case. It was part of the ‘intention of Jewish big capital, to destroy Russia completely in order to maximize profits’. This is further evidence of Hitler’s attitude to communism, which he regarded as a disease rather than a military threat in its own right. Bolshevism had ‘destroyed’ Russia, by establishing the twelve-hour day, imposing ‘the Jewish knout’ and conducting a ‘mass murder of the intelligentsia’. Russia was thus ‘completely abandoned to hunger and poverty’. ‘In Russia,’ Hitler warned with reference to the famine there, ‘30 million so-called “proletarians” are cast down and have to scrabble in the grass for roots’ to eat. When the Soviet foreign minister, Chicherin, announced at the Genoa conference that western governments could invest in Russia, Hitler remarked that ‘international world capital was receiving permission to exploit and plunder these areas’, reducing the ‘ordinary Russian to nothing more than a job number’. ‘The whole of Russia today’, he concluded, ‘is nothing more than a destroyed culture and a colony ripe for exploitation by foreign capital.’130
It is in this context that Hitler’s evolving attitude to communism and the Soviet Union should be seen. At times, he suggested that Bolshevism and international capitalism were working together. He spoke of the way in which Jewish capitalism allegedly used Chinese ‘cultural guardians’ in Moscow, and black ‘hangmen’s assistants’ on the Rhine, while the Soviets in Genoa ‘walked arm in arm with big bankers’. The Jews, Hitler claimed, ‘had their apostles in both camps’ and thus agents on both the ‘right’ and the ‘left’.131 From time to time, Hitler claimed that communism was the main threat.132 It is also true that after the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War, the threat of international communism loomed larger in his mind than it had in 1919.133 Hitler now called for ‘the overcoming and extermination of the Marxist world view’. ‘Developments in Russia must be watched closely,’ he warned, because once the communists had ‘consolidated their power’ they would ‘probably turn it against us’.134
Despite all this, Hitler still did not regard capitalism and communism simply as two equal sides of the same Jewish coin. He continued to see Bolshevism not so much as a threat in its own right as as an instrument of international Jewish capitalism to undermine the working of national economies and render them ripe for takeover by international finance capital (both Jewish and non-Jewish). Even after the end of the civil war, once Soviet power in Russia had been securely established, he saw Bolshevism primarily as a weapon in the armoury of international capitalism. ‘The north [of Germany],’ Hitler warned, was being assigned to ‘Bolshevism’, while the south was designated a ‘French Protectorate’. The purpose of the exercise, he claimed, was the ‘final subjection’ of 70 million Germans in order to turn them into the ‘worker for the whole world!’ ‘This,’ Hitler suggested, ‘is the final aim of the supranational stock exchange power.’135 More generally, his rhetoric and attention were still overwhelmingly directed towards the threat posed by the western powers and international finance capitalism.
For this reason, Hitler was bitterly opposed to any form of internationalism, not just because he despised it in principle, but because he considered it humbug. In part, this hostility was directed towards the German left, whose blind faith in universal principles, Hitler argued, had left Germany defenceless during the world war and its aftermath. For this reason, he argued, ‘[we should] free ourselves of the illusion of the [Socialist] International and [the idea of] the Fraternity of Peoples’. Hitler’s main objection to internationalism, however, was that it simply served the interests of the western imperial powers. Where was international law, he asked, when Louis XIV had plundered Germany in the late seventeenth century, when the British had bombarded neutral Copenhagen in 1807 and starved and oppressed the Irish, or when the Americans had displaced the native Indians. It had not escaped Hitler’s attention that ‘in the home of the inventor of the League of Nations [Wilson’s America] one rejects the League as a utopia, a madness’. There was not even a racial solidarity among whites, Hitler lamented, because France had sent ‘comrades from Africa in solidarity to enserf and muzzle the population on the Rhine’. For this reason, Hitler rejected the whole notion of international governance, claiming that ‘The League of Nations is only a holding company of the Entente which wants to secure its ill-gotten gains.’136
As if all this was not bad enough, Germany was also plagued by continuing internal weakness. Hitler condemned the ‘so-called battle against Berlin’–which was a staple of Bavarian rhetoric across the parties and classes–as a ‘cover for the aim of catapulting Germany back into its former impotence and fragmentation through the elimination of the imperial capital’, and to cause her to ‘bleed to death’ through the creation of ‘two equally large rival individual states’ doomed to a condition of ‘perpetual fraternal strife’.137 Nor was this hostility merely rhetorical. Hitler’s first appearance in a Munich court was the result of a physical confrontation with the Bavarian particularist Otto Ballerstedt. In a two-hour peroration, he condemned Ballerstedt’s press agitation and accused him of aiming for the dissolution and destruction of the Reich. The Bavarian League (Bayernbund), Hitler argued, claimed ‘only to want the federal development of the German Reich’, but ‘in reality’, Ballerstedt was striking at Germany itself and was thus ‘pursuing the same aim that France had done for three hundred years’.138
Significantly, the first mission of his new paramilitary formation, undertaken even before it was christened the SA, was an attack not on the Jews, communists or Social Democrats, but on a meeting of Ballerstedt’s Bayernbund in the Löwenbräukeller in the summer of 1921 under the banner ‘we will not betray Bavaria’.139 Hitler led an assault in which Ballerstedt was manhandled and the poli
ce were eventually called to break up the fight. His violent behaviour earned him a short jail sentence.140 By contrast, it is not documented that Hitler ever personally laid hands on an individual Jew, either then or subsequently. Hitler’s campaign against Bavarian federalism in general and his vendetta against Ballerstedt in particular continued throughout the 1920s and remained a preoccupation until he had him killed during the ‘Night of the Long Knives’.
Hitler’s view of foreign policy was, as we have seen, strongly ideological. That said, he was also beginning to develop a keen sense of geopolitics. In part, this followed the prevailing discourse of Germany’s central location in Europe and her consequent vulnerability to ‘encirclement’. He spoke of ‘the position of our fatherland, which was geographically one of the most unfortunate in Europe’. Hitler inveighed repeatedly against the ‘encirclement attempts of the Entente against Germany’. Where Hitler went much further than the nationalist mainstream was over the growing question of space, the Raumfrage, references to which increased exponentially during the early 1920s. In mid April 1920, Hitler lamented that ‘the world was so unjustly distributed’. Four months later, he noted that Germany suffered from a crippling lack of space by comparison with Britain, which controlled about one-quarter of the entire globe. By March 1921, Hitler decried the injustice that Britain, with a smaller population, controlled ‘three-quarters of the entire world’, while more populous Germany had to make do with considerably less space. This sense of connection between Germany’s ‘disadvantageous military location’ and the ‘impossibility of securing the food supply in Europe’141 stayed with Hitler to the end.
The cause of this unequal distribution, he believed, was global capitalism and its associated system of world governance. ‘The international exploitation of capitalism must be combated’, Hitler demanded, as well as that of ‘international loan capital’. ‘We want to turn world slaves into world citizens,’ he announced. This required ‘the liberation of our German people from the fetters of its international world enslavement’. This in turn meant that Germany would have to regain its military freedom of action. ‘The German is either a free soldier,’ Hitler argued, ‘or a white slave.’142 He therefore called upon the German people to relearn the old adage that ‘whoever does not want to be a hammer must be an anvil’, adding that ‘we are an anvil today, and were being beaten until the anvil became a hammer’, that is a ‘German sword’. The idea that Germany must become a ‘hammer’ to avoid remaining an ‘anvil’ was a common trope at the time and one to which Hitler returned on a number of occasions.143
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