In short, Hitler saw the root of Germany’s evils in her external subjection. ‘Without liberating Germany from the chains of the peace treaties,’ he claimed, ‘there could be no chance of economic development for the nation.’ ‘The liberation of Germany,’ Hitler continued, was ‘only possible through national political cohesion at home and abroad.’144 To that extent he was an exponent of the traditional primacy of foreign policy, and his emphasis on Germany’s geopolitical exposure and her lack of ‘space’ was a commonplace of the time. It is also clear that he saw the enslavement of the Reich as the product not merely of enemy strength but of German weakness. This dictated a different sort of primacy of foreign policy, this time directed towards the mobilization of all the nation’s domestic resources against the external enemy, another familiar theme in Prusso-German political thinking.145 Any prospect of a vigorous German foreign policy, Hitler claimed, ‘is predicated on a radical domestic political change’.146
In this context, the defeat of 1918 could be put to good use. Just as the catastrophe of 1806 had led to the Wars of Liberation in 1813, Hitler hoped that defeat in 1918 and the humiliation of Versailles would be followed by a national revival; ‘fall’, ‘purification’ and ‘rebirth’ were common tropes in Weimar Germany.147 Hitler’s rhetoric consciously mimicked that of the great patriotic martyr Palm, a Nuremberg bookseller who was executed by Napoleon in Hitler’s hometown of Braunau for penning the rousing tract ‘Germany in its deepest humiliation’. It was probably in this context that Hitler was first exposed to Carl von Clausewitz’s notion that the failure to put up a strong resistance to the foreigner would make subsequent revival more difficult. He strongly believed that Germany’s capitulation in 1918 had been premature, that her leaders should have mobilized a last-ditch French-style levée en masse which would have inspired later generations to resist. This belief was to remain with Hitler throughout his career, and became relevant again as military defeat beckoned once more in 1944–5.148
Hitler rejected the standard solutions to Germany’s predicament. He wondered whether Zionism might be a solution to the ‘Jewish Question’, but quickly came down against the idea. Hitler saw in Jewish aspirations for statehood proof of their sense of national identity, despite all their international rhetoric. ‘The Jews,’ he wrote, were ‘one people’, who ‘identified themselves as a people (Zionists)’. The ‘proof’ of this, Hitler continued, was ‘Palestine’. Hitler was deeply sceptical, though, that the Zionist project could succeed, because it was completely inimical to the nature of Jewry. The ‘Aryan’ concept of the state, he claimed, was ‘territorial’, while the parasitic Jews could only feed off existing states, not establish one of their own. The Jew ‘cannot build a state’, he argued, because he was ‘incapable of building a state’. Moreover, even if such a state could be erected, Hitler believed that it would merely increase the Jewish threat. ‘The planned Zionist state “Jerusalem”,’ he argued, should not be regarded as an area of Jewish national settlement, but rather as ‘the headquarters for Jewish world power plans for exploitation and nefarious activity’. For the rest of his life, in fact, Hitler stuck to the view that the establishment of a Jewish state, in Palestine or anywhere else, would simply create another focal point for world Jewry.149
He was also deeply critical of the plans of past imperial and present Weimar governments to grow or trade their way out of Germany’s predicament. In the 1890s, Chancellor Caprivi had famously said that Germany must export goods if it were not to export people. In the 1920s, Stresemann and other leaders urged Germans to seek fulfilment through economic activity, and argued in favour of what we would today call a more geo-economic strategy to defend the national interest. Hitler rejected the ‘purely economic way of looking at things’, which he called the ‘greatest mistake of German policy in the past decades’. ‘The hoped-for peaceful seizure of [world] power through our economy,’ he continued, ‘has been a failure.’ ‘Industrialization [and] the peaceful capture of the world,’ Hitler claimed, were doomed to fail, because one ‘did not consider that there can be no economic policy without the sword [and] no industrialization without power’. ‘The economy,’ he explained, ‘is only of secondary importance.’ ‘The main thing,’ Hitler stressed, ‘is national pride, [and] love of country.’150 The primacy of politics in Hitler’s thinking could not have been more clearly expressed.
Nor did Hitler want a restoration of the Second Empire. He was strongly critical of the failure of the traditional right to reach out to the alienated German working class and re-integrate them into the national fold. ‘Why did one not give the people universal franchise’, he asked with reference to the restrictive pre-1918 Prussian ‘Three Class’ electoral law, which advantaged the propertied elite, given that one was asking them to sacrifice their lives on the battlefield. The key question, Hitler stated, was not the state form itself, but what arrangement served the German people best in its quest to escape external subjection. Here there was remarkably little shift in his views throughout the early 1920s. The issue was not, he argued in April 1920, whether Germany should be ‘a monarchy or a Republic’, but rather ‘which state form was best for the people’. ‘We need a dictator of pure genius if we want to rise again.’ ‘We do not fetishize forms of government,’ he explained in November 1921, ‘the only thing that is decisive is the spirit which sustains it. The only consideration must be the welfare of the entire German people. In July 1922 he called for ‘a German Reich, a Germanic state, and for all we care a German Republic’. In 1923, as Germany was racked by internal unrest, separatist movements, and renewed foreign occupation, he said that ‘the form of the state took second place to the necessity of the fatherland’.151 Hitler’s constitutional thinking was not indebted to the glories of the imperial past, but focused on the needs of the present and the future.
Germany’s salvation, he claimed, must begin with a profound inner transformation. ‘First the internal enemy must be destroyed’, he claimed, ‘then it will be easy to crush the external enemy.’ Hitler’s domestic economic policy was vague at this stage, almost skeletal, but its general drift was unmistakable. He called for the nationalization of the entire banking and financial system, and thus the ‘breaking of interest slavery’, a term he had borrowed from Gottfried Feder.152 His aim here was not so much public ownership in the Marxist sense, as national control over the levers of international financial manipulation. Hitler had not yet called for the physical destruction of world Jewry, but the elimination of German Jewry was already implicit, at least in the context of a future war, in case they might once again act as fifth columnists.153 In the Gemlich letter of September 1919, he had already called for the ‘complete removal of the Jews’,154 and in a letter of August 1920, one correspondent reports that Hitler believed that ‘the bacillus’ must be ‘exterminated’ in order to ensure the survival of the German people.155 One way or the other, his domestic policy was essentially foreign policy.
Hitler was much more detailed on the need to rebuild the inner unity of Germany, especially relations between the classes. The reconciliation of the German worker to the nation after his exclusion in the Second Empire was at the heart of this project. Hitler defended the workers against standard conservative charges that they were ‘knaves without a fatherland’ who had shirked in the war. There should ‘finally’ be a struggle, he called, against the destructive spirit which Germany absorbed in the course of the century, which was ‘the spirit of class interest and pride of rank’. For this reason, Hitler was a strong supporter of Bismarck’s pioneering social legislation, though he felt it had not gone far enough. One listener reported how Hitler ‘blamed the old state’ for having ‘treated its advanced social legislation as a matter of charity rather than entitlement’, and for having ‘failed to bridge the gap between mental and physical workers’, and instead made itself the ‘advocate of the established order’. As a result, the Kaiser’s Germany had failed to protect the people from the corruption of ‘Jewish mammon
ism’.156
Hitler therefore espoused ‘socialism’, but not as the Social Democrats, the Independent Socialists or the communists knew it. ‘National’ and ‘social’, he argued, were ‘two identical terms’. ‘True socialism teaches the most extreme performance of one’s duties,’ Hitler explained, ‘real socialism in the highest form of the Volk.’ ‘Marxism is not socialism,’ he claimed, ‘I shall take socialism away from the socialists.’ This was what the words ‘worker’ and ‘socialist’ in the party’s name meant. There was ‘no room’, Hitler said, for ‘class-conscious proletarians’ in the party, just as there was no place either for a ‘class-conscious bourgeois’.157 He repeatedly reached out to workers.158All this explains Hitler’s ambivalence towards communists, whom he regarded not only as good men led astray, but as temperamentally more congenial than the lukewarm bourgeois who clove to the safe middle path. ‘I would rather be strung up in a Bolshevik Germany,’ he averred, ‘than be made blissful in a French southern Germany.’ One observer noted that Hitler ‘was courting the communists’, saying that ‘the two extremes, communists and students, should be brought together’. The centre ground, he claimed, was full of useless ‘lickspittles’ (Schleimsieder), whereas ‘the communists had fought for their ideal with weapons and only been led astray’. They only need to be led towards the ‘national cause’.159 With German communists, Hitler hated the sin, but loved the sinner.
If Hitler saw Germany’s salvation in a domestic revival, this did not make him blind towards foreign models. Indeed, the international context within which all his thinking was embedded made him particularly interested in the strength of rival powers. Hitler’s principal model here was Britain. ‘The British,’ he admitted, ‘are entitled to feel proud as a people.’ Britain’s vitality was based on the ‘extraordinary brilliance’ of her population. They had the ‘British national sentiment which our people lacks so much’ and they had maintained ‘racial purity in the colonies’, by which he meant the general absence of intermarriage between settlers and colonial administrators and the native population. Unlike the belated German national state after 1871, Britain enjoyed ‘a centuries-long political-diplomatic tradition’. Unlike Germany, she had grasped the true connection between politics and economics. ‘England has recognized the first principle of state health and existence,’ Hitler argued, ‘and has acted for centuries according to the principle that economic power must be converted into political power’ and ‘that political power must be used to protect economic life’. ‘There are things that permit the British to exercise world domination,’ he explained: ‘a highly developed sense of national identity, clear racial unity, and finally the ability to convert economic power into political power, and political power into economic power’.160
There were, however, two profound contradictions in Hitler’s thinking about Britain. First of all, he dubbed the country a ‘second Jewry’,161 which sat ill with his otherwise respectful attitude. Hitler regarded British Jews as primarily urban, and so well integrated ‘that they appeared to be British’, which prevented the growth of anti-Semitism there. If true, then this might–in Hitler’s reasoning–account for British hostility to the Reich, but he did not explain why this uniquely high level of Jewish penetration did not render her even weaker than Germany. This paradox at the heart of Hitler’s view of the United Kingdom was never resolved. Secondly, there was the apparent contradiction that Britain had risen to greatness under the parliamentary system he so despised. There are grounds for believing, however, that he believed representative government suitable for the British but not for the Germans. ‘If all Germans belonged to the tribe of the Lower Saxons [that is the tribe from which the English trace much of their descent–and the only one which Benjamin Franklin had considered fully white]’, he remarked, ‘the republican state form might be the most suited’ to enabling the state ‘to weather all storms and to draw on the best elements for running the country’. ‘Because that is not the case [in Germany],’ Hitler continued, ‘the German people will always need an idol in the shape of a monarch.’162 It was an early indication of Hitler’s profound anxiety about German racial fragmentation in the face not so much of Jewry, as of the globally dominant Anglo-Saxons.
Hitler was also increasingly interested in the United States, which he came to regard as the repository of (in his view) all the best European racial elements, including the supposedly better sort of Germans. He remarked that, unlike Germany, which admitted swarms of eastern Jews, ‘yellow people are not allowed to settle in America’.163 In August 1922 he was introduced to Kurt Lüdecke, who had spent some time on business in the United States and whom Hitler would later send as an emissary across the Atlantic.164 In the middle of that month, Rudolf Hess wrote on Hitler’s behalf to the legendary automobile manufacturer, and fervent anti-Semite, Henry Ford for support.165 Moreover, Anglo-America was also becoming interested in Hitler. He had appeared on the radar of the British Foreign Office as early as 1920, and by later 1922 he was firmly established in their minds as a figure to be reckoned with, but there was no attempt to make contact with him.166
By contrast, the United States embassy, probably influenced by Mussolini’s coup in Italy, decided to take a closer look at this rising politician. In November 1922, the US assistant military attaché to Germany, Captain Truman Smith, came down from Berlin and met with Hitler on 20 November. Hitler argued that he was America’s best chance of keeping the Bolsheviks out of Germany, condemned monarchy as ‘an absurdity’, claimed that ‘dictatorship’ was the only answer, denied any plans for a war against France and railed against ‘the present abuse of capital’.167 To be sure, these were all things that the American wanted to hear–apart from the remarks on capitalism–but they also represented Hitler’s genuine views. One way or the other, the two men–both Wagnerians–seem to have hit it off. A ‘marvelous demagogue’, Smith wrote a few days later. ‘I have rarely listened to such a logical and fanatical man. His powers over the mob must be immense.’168
It was Smith who put Hitler in touch with Ernst ‘Putzi’ Hanfstaengl immediately after their meeting. Hanfstaengl epitomized the relationship between Germany and the United States, which was to play such a central role in Hitler’s thinking and policy over the next twenty years or so. Hanfstaengl’s maternal grandfather, Wilhelm Heine, had emigrated to America as a liberal refugee from the failed 1848 revolution. He reached the rank of brigadier-general in the Union Army and served as a pallbearer at Lincoln’s funeral.169 Hanfstaengl’s father owned a large art business in Munich. Hanfstaengl himself was partly brought up in the United States, where he attended Harvard University and was personally acquainted with the young Franklin Delano Roosevelt. From 1912, he had run the New York branch of his father’s business. Hanfstaengl spent the war–which killed a brother fighting on the German side–in America. The business was ruined by the American entry into the conflict and the associated ‘Trading with the Enemy Act’. Hanfstaengl became an enemy alien: the insider had become an outsider.
Over the next year, Hanfstaengl and Hitler were in almost daily contact. Hanfstaengl impressed upon Hitler not only the immense industrial and demographic power of the United States, but the fact that every German had a close relative there or in some other part of the world, something of which Hitler was already well aware. He argued that the party needed to reach out to the world through a coordinated foreign press policy.170 Hanfstaengl now became effectively the NSDAP’s external media liaison officer. He also entertained Hitler with his piano, playing from a repertoire which included not only Wagner but Harvard football marches. Captain Mayr later recalled the ‘American methods of salesmanship’ used to push out the Nazi message.171 The United States thus increasingly became a model as well as a rival. Of course, as with Great Britain, Hitler’s simultaneous insistence on the power of Jewry in the United States and the underlying racial power of the United States contradicted his own theories.172 Once again, this paradox was never resolved, though it is the key
to understanding both the origins of his whole world view and the events twenty years later which led to his downfall.
More immediately relevant to Germany’s predicament were the dramatic recent examples of national revival, where peoples had bounced back from decline or catastrophic defeat. Perhaps surprisingly, Hitler was open to inspiration from France. ‘The French Revolution was national and constructive,’ he argued, ‘whereas the German one wanted to be international and to destroy everything.’ Hitler took a similarly positive view of later French radicalism. ‘When France collapsed at Sedan,’ he wrote, ‘one made a revolution to rescue the sinking tricolour!’ ‘The war was waged with new energy,’ he continued, and ‘the will to defend the state created the French Republic in 1870’, thus restoring ‘French national honour’. This shows that Hitler’s fundamental objection was not to the ‘ideas of 1789’, which he hardly ever mentioned. His real trauma–to which we will return later–was the fragmentation of Germany beginning with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.173
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