Hitler also saw war and conflict as a threat to the German people. Here there was a clear contradiction in his thinking. On the one hand, Hitler saw ‘struggle’ as central to the life and survival of a people. On the other hand, he believed that war killed the best and the bravest, sparing the weakest and most cowardly. ‘The nature of war is such,’ he wrote, ‘that it leads to a racial selection in a people which involves the disproportionate destruction of its best elements.’ This could lead ‘in 100 years to the gradual bleeding to death of the best [and] most valuable part of a people’. For this reason, Hitler damned unnecessary wars as ‘crimes against the body politic, as in against the future of a people’. On the one hand, Hitler would with pathos invoke the memory and sacrifice of the front; on the other hand, he repeatedly stressed the horrors of war and injury, which he had experienced at first hand. Contemptuously dismissing a familiar civilian trope, he candidly described his preference for mutilation over death. ‘At home they said [it was] wonderful to die a hero’s death,’ Hitler remarked, but ‘the frontline soldier took a different view.’ ‘If someone at home said that they would rather be dead than lose a limb,’ Hitler continued, the truth was that the men in Flanders would have gladly sacrificed their hand or another limb in order to receive a ‘blighty’ which would get them out of the fighting and give them a chance of survival. ‘For those who have themselves served as soldiers,’ he said, war ‘was not something beautiful’ but something ‘terrible’.39
The greatest challenge to the coherence of the German people, however, was their shortage of living space in central Europe and resulting lack of food security. Here again Hitler was rehearsing familiar themes from Mein Kampf, but in his speeches of the late 1920s and in the Second Book he took the argument a stage further. Bismarck might have united ‘the mass of the German people in central Europe’, but he had not solved ‘the second question of the German people in Europe’, which was ‘the question of future food supply’. So when British tariffs had ‘cut off’ the ‘economic opportunities’ open to the Reich, the ‘pot boiled over and [we] had 20 million people too many’. The excess population, Hitler claimed, had been compelled to emigrate, partly to the British Empire and South America but mainly to the United States. ‘For three hundred years,’ he claimed, ‘we have sent out 10,000 people a year, so that virtually the entire continent of North America became [demographically] German.’40
The background to Hitler’s claims is the fact between 1820 and 1930 about 5.9 million Germans settled in the US.41 In the period 1860–90 they were the largest group of immigrants. By 1900, around a tenth of the population of the US was of German descent,42 among them one Friedrich Drumpff, who registered at Ellis Island as ‘Frederick Trump’, Donald Trump’s grandfather, who arrived in 1885. Richard Wagner often spoke of emigrating to America, and even wrote a march to mark the centennial of the Declaration of American Independence in 1876.43 In Canada, Germany was the third-largest source of emigrants after the United Kingdom and France.44 Those who left often stayed in close touch with the old country, and a substantial proportion–about 25 per cent–returned, often with tales of success in the New World.45 North America was thus a huge and largely positive presence in the German imaginary of the 1920s, looming much larger than Soviet Russia.
To make matters worse, Hitler continued, emigration was not only quantitatively but qualitatively a threat to the German people. It was invariably the best and fittest who left. Nor did Hitler hold back with his view of those who remained. ‘The coward and weakling would rather die at home,’ he said, ‘than pluck up the courage’ to move and better his lot. In numerous speeches throughout the late 1920s, Hitler hammered this theme home again and again. Germany had ‘sent [America] her best selection for centuries’. ‘Only those who emigrate,’ he claimed, ‘who resist deprivation’, were of ‘value’. ‘It is the most resistant, the most energetic,’ he lamented, ‘who emigrate’, with the result that in the event of conflict a people that consists of emigrants will ‘triumph over the motherland’. In racial terms, Hitler warned, this amounted to the ‘gradual de-Nordification of our people’, and to ‘the general reduction of our racial value’; it meant that the worst remained.46 The implication of all this was bleak: the German people of Hitler’s time in his view consisted of the dregs left after North America had taken the cream.
Of course, Germany’s perceived loss was Anglo-America’s gain. Hitler repeated his claim that, after independence, the American Congress had only adopted English as the language of the new union by one vote, ensuring that the United States would remain part of what one might loosely call the Anglosphere. ‘A whole continent,’ he claimed, ‘became British as a result of this decision.’ Hitler feared the power of what he called ‘Anglicization’ on Germans. He lamented that Germans tended to ‘Anglicize more and more’ in ‘Anglo-Saxon countries’ and were therefore ‘presumably lost’ to our people not just in terms of their ‘practical capacity for work’ but also ‘spiritually’. ‘For that reason,’ Hitler argued, ‘the initiative’ was passing from the ‘mother states to the colonies’, because that was where one found a ‘concentration of people of the highest value’. ‘The motherland’s loss,’ he lamented, ‘was the new country’s gain.’ The result, Hitler lamented, was that ‘Germany is sinking more and more while a new continent is rising across the ocean, settled with German blood.’47
All these racial chickens, Hitler continued, had come home to roost in the First World War. Right from the start, Germany had faced the full might of the British, French and Tsarist empires, though it was the first that Hitler really feared. Moreover, he argued in a newspaper article, in 1917 ‘The American Union was determined to throw its own power into the scales in support of the world coalition threatening Germany.’48 This was the decisive moment which made German defeat inevitable, and Hitler never forgot it. He personally experienced the meaning of it in the summer of 1918, remembering the date correctly to the day nearly ten years later. ‘Germany sent away its best sons for 300 years,’ he recalled. ‘When the year 1918 came around we suddenly saw south of the Marne on 17 July the descendants of our people, our emigrants. They were powerful sturdy people, who stood opposite us as enemies.’ ‘They were the representatives of the new continent,’ Hitler continued. ‘It was our own blood. The blood that we let go.’ Moreover, he went on, nobody had yet registered that this encounter had been ‘a presentiment of’ the ‘battle of the peoples’ (or racial battle: Volkskampf) to come. Here Hitler was once again referring to the final showdown he expected between Germans and Anglo-Saxons.49
Hitler rejected some of the common cures on offer. He did not believe that Germany could export its way to a secure food supply. Picking up a remark made by Chancellor Caprivi in the 1890s, Hitler said of Weimar politicians, ‘one does not want to export people, rather one says that we export goods’. In reality, Hitler warned, the British had cut off German goods through high tariff walls before 1914, and continued to enslave Germany today through Versailles and the reparations settlement. The nostrums offered on the left were also rejected, especially the plan to seek salvation in instruments of international governance. On the one hand, Hitler shared the widespread view that the League of Nations was a toothless tiger. ‘A League of Nations without a League of Nations police force,’ he claimed, ‘is a state without a legal system and without police authority.’ On the other hand, Hitler continued to see the League as a device for the subjection of Germany. ‘The League of Nations is dominated by the saturated nations, indeed it is their instrument.’ These nations, he claimed, had no interest in addressing international injustice, in particular the ‘spatial distribution of the world’. This meant that the world was run in accordance with not international law, but the law of capital: ‘not the right of the peoples’, as he put it, ‘but the rights of the bankers of the peoples’.50
The Führer reserved a special scorn for those who thought Germany should seek salvation in ‘Europe’. Here his words were di
rected against high-level attempts to integrate the continent by people like Aristide Briand, and Count Coudenhove-Kalergi’s Pan-Europa Union, but also elements of the National Socialist ‘left’ such as the Strasser brothers and even Goebbels. He trenchantly entitled the ninth chapter of the Second Book ‘Neither border policy nor economic policy nor Pan-Europa’.51 Hitler’s objection was not to the idea of containing the United States as such, but to the desirability and practicality of doing so through European integration. He conceded that ‘the pan-European movement does really seem to have some at least apparently appealing aspects’. Unsurprisingly, though, Hitler reacted allergically not only to Coudenhove’s own mixed racial heritage, but also to his vision for a United Europe as a kind of Habsburg Empire writ large. ‘The Pan-Europa envisaged by the global bastard [meaning mixed-race] Coudenhove,’ he thundered, ‘would eventually play the same role against the American Union as the old Austrian state played against Germany or Russia.’52
He rejected the various ‘mechanistic’ calculations of combined European economic and demographic potential arrayed against the US. ‘In the lives of the peoples,’ he reminded his readers, ‘values not figures are decisive.’ Not only was the United States made up of ‘millions of people of the highest racial value’, some of the best blood from Europe, but the old continent was left with the inferior residue. This, on Hitler’s reading, was the result of European susceptibility to ‘western democracy’, ‘cowardly pacifism’, Jewish subversion, ‘bastardization and niggerification’, which not only enabled the Jews slowly to assume ‘world dominance’, but also weakened the continent fatally in the face of the American challenge. Given that the strength of the United States was primarily a product of its racial value, Hitler argued, ‘then this hegemony will not be overcome through a purely formal unification of European peoples’. ‘The idea of resisting this Nordic state [the US],’ he continued, ‘with a Pan-Europa made up of Mongols, Slavs, Germans, Latins, etc.’, in other words an entity dominated by ‘anyone but Germanic elements’, was a ‘utopia’. Pan-Europa, in short, could be no more than a ‘merger under Jewish protectorate at Jewish instigation’, and would ‘never create a structure which would be able to stand up to the American Union’.53
Hitler claimed there was another way of dealing with the challenge of the United States. ‘North America can in future only be resisted by a state,’ he argued, ‘which has understood how to raise the value of its people and to create the necessary state form’ for this task. This required a combination of domestic and diplomatic measures. ‘Domestic policy,’ Hitler wrote in the Second Book, ‘should secure a people the internal power for its foreign-political assertion’, while ‘foreign policy must secure the life of the people for its internal development’. The two were those ‘complementary activities’. If, on the one hand, he insisted that diplomatic successes without internal strengths were pointless, he also argued that a mistaken system of alliances could have harmful domestic effects ‘because the order was sent from outside that the people should be educated in a pacifist manner’.54
On the domestic front, Hitler aimed at a thoroughgoing racial regeneration of the German people. This was only partly a matter of eliminating the allegedly pernicious influence of the Jews. It was, he asserted, primarily a question of raising the general racial level of the German people to that of their Anglo-American rivals. Education was central to this project. Hitler spoke of establishing a ‘boarding school on the British model’ to train German youth. 100 million Reichsmarks on universities, he believed, were better spent than the same sum on a battle cruiser. Hitler also wanted to overcome Germany’s historic fragmentation. He spoke of his desire to rebuild Berlin as ‘a great metropolis of the new German Reich’ to provide a counterbalance to ‘small statery’. At the same time, Hitler sought to make up what Germans lacked in natural coherence through discipline. It was for this reason, as well as for reasons of party discipline, that he stressed the importance of obedience to the leadership.55
The long-term answer to Germany’s predicament, however, remained the capture of Lebensraum in the east, a theme which Hitler had already elaborated at length in Mein Kampf, and which he repeated throughout the Second Book and in many speeches. Colonial expansion was once again roundly rejected.56 This capture of space was partly in order to eliminate Germany’s geopolitical vulnerability, which would remain even if the borders of 1914 were restored. It would improve the food supply situation in the event of war, and give Germany more room to manoeuvre militarily. ‘Above all,’ Hitler argued, only the acquisition of space in Europe would ‘preserve the [necessary] people’ from emigration so that they would be ‘available as millions of soldiers for the next decisive moment’.57 Moreover, only more living space would enable the Germans to resist the lure of the American way of life. ‘Neither the living space of today, nor the reconstitution of the borders of 1914,’ Hitler warned, ‘will enable us to lead a life analogous to that of the American people.’58 This connection between (the lack of) Lebensraum and emigration, albeit with regard to overseas colonies rather than eastern lands, was a staple of late nineteenth century and early twentieth century German discourse.59
As in Mein Kampf, Hitler continued to argue that the necessary living space was to be found in the east in the ‘thinly populated’ Russian western lands bordering Germany. The key to this Raumpolitik, he explained, was that one could only Germanize ‘space’, not the people living in it, as imperial Germany had mistakenly attempted to do with the Poles they had ruled over before 1914. The National Socialist movement, Hitler continued, was not interested in ‘Germanization’ but ‘only in the expansion of its own people’. ‘The existing population’, Hitler insisted, should not be assimilated. Instead it was a question of ‘either shutting out these alien elements, in order to prevent the further corruption of our own blood’ or ‘simply removing them and allocating the land which thereby became available to our own people’. As the Bolsheviks consolidated their hold on power, Hitler increasingly regarded the Soviet Union as a vacuum crying out to be filled.60 Once again, Hitler sought living space in Russia, not because he specifically targeted the Slavs, but because their territories were geographically contiguous and they had been so corrupted by Bolshevism as to render them ripe for hostile takeover.
Hitler knew that Germany would not ‘be able to confront fate on her own’ and ‘would need allies’. He admired the spirit of the soldiers who had scrawled ‘We accept declarations of war’ on the railway carriages taking them to the front, but he damned such behaviour as ‘a mad stupidity’ in terms of a ‘political creed’. He devoted an entire chapter of the Second Book to that subject. As in Mein Kampf, Hitler rejected the alliances secured by the German Reich in 1914, whose low value he had seen during the First World War. Here Hitler primarily had the Habsburgs in his sights. He was less opposed, at least in principle, to a Russian alliance. If Russia achieved an ‘internal change’, he wrote, ‘then it could not be excluded that Russia,’ which was ‘today in reality Jewish-capitalist’, would become ‘national-anti-capitalist’ and thus a worthy partner for Germany. The danger, Hitler argued–and here he was echoing a widespread strand of contemporary thinking–was that an alliance with Russia would expose Germany to a pre-emptive strike by the west.61 The long and short of this was that Hitler, his eye firmly on putting the Russophile wing of the NSDAP in its place, firmly rejected alignment with Soviet Russia. It was a subject on which he would brook absolutely no argument.
He was not only clear about the need for allies, but remarkably candid about the kind of concessions necessary to secure them. Reprising a theme from Mein Kampf, Hitler derided the idea that Germany should not ally with any of its enemies from the First World War, or those states with whom she had border disputes. If that were so, he pointed out, there could be no alliance with France, because of Alsace-Lorraine and its attempts to grab the Rhineland, none with Belgium, over Eupen-Malmedy, none with Britain, because of the robbed colonies, none w
ith Denmark, because of North Schleswig, none with Poland, over West Prussia and Upper Silesia, none with Czechoslovakia, because it was oppressing 4 million Germans, none with Yugoslavia, because it was sitting on 400,000 Germans, and none with Italy, because of South Tyrol. In other words, Hitler continued, according to the national bourgeois camp there could be no alliance with anybody in Europe, leaving Germany dependent on the ‘din of their huzzas’ and their ‘big mouths’ to regain the lost status and territories.62
In considerably greater detail than in Mein Kampf, Hitler developed the idea of an Italian alliance in the Second Book. This made ideological sense, given the similarities between fascism and National Socialism, but the main object of the connection was geopolitical: to break open the encircling ring of hostile powers. To ram home his argument against internal Nazi critics, the relevant sections were published as a separate pamphlet. Hitler also attempted to reach out to Mussolini directly. A hoped-for meeting in February 1928, however, never came to pass.63 In an earnest of his good intentions in this matter, and in order to make the party’s official position crystal-clear, Hitler met with Ettore Tolomei, the hammer of the Germans in South Tyrol, in the Munich suburb of Nymphenburg, in late 1928. In the following year, he met for the first time with Mussolini’s confidant Giuseppe Renzetti, also in Munich.64 Although most members fell into line eventually, the issue continued to be very divisive within the NSDAP, and it gave other elements of the German right a convenient stick to beat Hitler with.
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