The new policy was laid out in Hitler’s ‘Decree for the Strengthening of the German Volk’ of 7 October 1939. Good racial fences, he suggested, made good neighbours. With this in mind, Hitler undertook to retrieve ‘German people who have previously been compelled to live abroad’, to achieve ‘better demarcations’ with the other groups in ‘its’–that is Germany’s–‘space’.84 Himmler was tasked with job of ‘bringing back’ to the Reich the relevant Germans from abroad to facilitate the ‘establishment of a new German farmer class’, especially through the cultivation of ‘new German areas of settlement’ by returnees. Over the next fifteen months or so, a series of treaties was concluded with Estonia, Latvia, Romania, Hungary and the Soviet Union in order to facilitate the ‘return’ of their German populations.85 Their extent suggests that Hitler had pushed plans for an immediate attack on Russia to a more distant date, because it made no sense to withdraw Germans from thence only to return them a year later (unless he feared they might be used as hostages, but that concern was never mentioned, or even alluded to).86
Hitler’s remarks to Rosenberg around this time show that his timeframe had indeed expanded again. Immediate war with Russia was not on the agenda; the main concern was wrapping up the Polish campaign and dealing with Britain and France. More to the point, Hitler’s vision for Poland itself suggests that he did not necessarily expect to move east again in the near future. For a short period, the locus of Lebensraum, which had been firmly in Russia since the 1920s, moved west to Poland. The Führer announced his intention to build ‘an impregnable Ostwall on the Vistula, even stronger than in the west’. He also wanted to establish a ‘broad belt of Germanization and colonization’ at that border. This would be ‘an enormous task’, namely to create ‘a German granary’ with ‘a strong German farming class’ drawn from ‘good Germans from across the world’. The phrasing hints that Hitler may even have hoped to lure Germans back from overseas, including the United States. He concluded by remarking that only ‘the future’ would show whether it would be possible ‘to advance the settlement belt after several decades had passed’.87 In other words, Hitler was now thinking of a war with the Soviet Union only at some future moment, perhaps decades away.
The Führer’s second method of filling the space suddenly available to him was to take a closer look at the racial composition of the Polish people. Having lurched from friendship towards extreme hostility within a few months, he swung back a little in the other direction. Hitler had long rejected traditional Germanization programmes with their emphasis on language, and claimed that one could only ‘Germanize’ the land and not the people. Now, however, he spoke of assimilating as many Poles as possible.88 ‘Those elements which are considered racially valuable,’ Hitler stated, could be ‘Germanized’; this placed him closer to the more ‘moderate’ Gauleiter Förster of Danzig than to Gauleiter Greiser of the Wartheland, who relied on killings and deportations.89 ‘The basis’ on which the selection was made, he continued, must be ‘racial appearance and heredity.’ Hitler argued that the tribes originally inhabiting these areas had ‘in any case been half shot-through with Slavic and German blood’, because the German farmers who settled there hundreds of years ago had been short of women and therefore mated with ‘hot-blooded Slavic women’. The solution, Hitler proclaimed, lay in ‘language’, demanding that ‘children must forget Polish and only learn German’. Children thus became a particular focus of the occupation policy. Much could be made of a Pole, the Führer believed, if he were caught young.90
It was the start of the greatest assimilation project in modern German history, paradoxically carried out by the man who had condemned similar efforts by the Second Reich.91 This was less of a volte face than it appeared, however, because Hitler viewed the process of assimilation not as the cultural and linguistic Germanization of racial Slavs, but as the discovery and filtering-out of Germanic elements within the Polish and Czech peoples. In practice, though, the result was the same. Hitler had originally wanted to retrieve and retain the racial cream that had been skimmed off for generations by the Anglo-Americans. Now he found himself picking over what many in his entourage thought of as the central and eastern European dregs. He had little choice. In the absence of high-value colonists from the Reich, or better still returnees from Anglo-America, Hitler had to make do with what was available. These measures pointed to a trend which was to become ever more apparent as the war dragged on. While conflict initially put an end to positive eugenics, and privileged the instant gratification of negative eugenics through deportation, sterilization or murder, the longer it lasted, the lower Hitler’s own racial ‘standards’ fell.
Finally, the Führer sought to remedy the shortage of colonists by reforming German agriculture, especially in the west. This had long been characterized by subdivision and inefficiency. Hitler let it be known that he wanted families whose small holdings in western Germany had been rationalized and the younger sons of farmers to be settled in the east.92 The slogan for the east would be ‘settlement’ and in the west it would be ‘reallocation’, meaning rationalization; the two were closely connected in Hitler’s mind. Here the Führer ruled against Walther Darré, who wanted large numbers of smaller holdings, and in favour of Himmler, who desired larger ‘defensive farms’. In effect, he was attempting to replicate the primogeniture of the large British estates, the extensive farming of the United States, and perhaps also ancient Rome’s land grants to former legionaries. This was not an agrarian utopia, but an American-style vision. To Hitler, therefore, the modernization of German agriculture and the colonization of the east went hand in hand.
The second consequence of Chamberlain’s rejection of Hitler’s peace overtures, which he feared long before the final response became known, was that the Führer took off the gloves against Britain. ‘If the British don’t want peace,’ the Führer told Rosenberg in late September 1939, he ‘would fall upon them with every means at his disposal and destroy them.’93 He now wanted to do so without further delay. Despite the fact that Germany’s preparations were incomplete, Hitler believed that the ‘relative balance’ would ‘not shift to our advantage’, but rather that the ‘defensive power of the enemy’ would ‘gradually increase’. If the west was badly equipped with tanks, then this would probably ‘no longer be the case’ in ‘6–8 months’ time’.94 Besides, the Führer warned, as the war dragged on the British would be more likely to browbeat the Dutch, Belgians and other neutrals into taking their side. While Germany’s social and national cohesion waned as Allied propaganda took effect, Allied aircraft would attack the industry of the Ruhr, enabling Britain to bring the weight of the international economy on the Reich. ‘In this sense,’ the Führer concluded, ‘every further month’s delay’ in attacking the Anglo-French armies would make the Wehrmacht’s job more difficult. If Hitler could now wait in the east, time was running out in the west.95
Whatever Hitler may have said about British decadence before the outbreak of war, most of which was designed to disarm objections to his confrontational course, he continued to entertain a strong sense of Britain’s innate strength and racial value. The real danger, he told the senior military, was that increasing British mobilization would provide France with ‘additional military capacity of high psychological and material value’. Unlike much of the High Command, which was worried about the French army, the Führer saw the upcoming campaign primarily as a contest with Britain. Hitler therefore earnestly warned against the ‘under-estimation of British units’, particularly in a defensive role, because the ‘internal constitution of the Briton’ made him a tenacious fighter. This was an allusion to his experience of British toughness during the First World War. Six weeks later, Hitler returned to this theme. ‘I am worried by the ever greater presence of the British,’ he told the generals. ‘The Briton is a tough enemy, especially in defence,’ he warned.96
The only sphere in which Hitler felt superior to Britain was culture. ‘The cultural creativity of Britain,’ he rem
arked, ‘is a chapter in itself.’ ‘We Germans,’ he continued, ‘certainly do not need any lectures from the British in the field of culture.’ ‘Our music, our poetry, our architecture, our painting, our sculpture,’ he claimed in an enumeration reminiscent of the second verse of the ‘Deutschlandlied’, did not need to fear comparison with those of Britain. ‘I believe that a single German, let us say Beethoven,’ Hitler went on, ‘has achieved more musically than all Englishmen past and present put together.’ This was, of course, a familiar trope from German nationalist rhetoric of the nineteenth century, when patriots had sought to compensate for their manifest political weakness through claims of cultural supremacy.97 Ironically, Hitler was reprising these themes at a time when he had long since driven many of Germany’s most important cultural figures into exile in Anglo-America.
Politically, Hitler’s aim was the reversal of the Treaty of Westphalia, in his view the root of all evil in modern German history. The very first line of his memorandum on the forthcoming campaign in the west claimed that ‘the dissolution of the first Reich caused by the peace of Münster in 1648’ had led to the system of the European ‘balance of power’. This had enabled the emergence of the French but ‘especially’ of the British Empire. The ‘decisive characteristic’ of this settlement, which had also been desired by Britain, had been the ‘fragmentation of the German people’. Hitler thus transferred the primary responsibility for the maintenance of the Westphalian system from its originator, France, to its supposed principal current protagonist, Britain. This was a theme to which Hitler returned again and again over the next eight months or so.98 Hitler’s objection to Westphalia was partly territorial, in that he grieved over the loss of western lands to other countries, but his main concern was conceptual. To him, the treaties epitomized the internal fragmentation and external subordination of the Reich.99
The Führer was determined to attack in the west at the earliest possible opportunity. Despite the fact that the vast majority of enemy ground forces there were French, his main target was Britain.100 Failure to attack, he warned a fortnight later, would allow Britain to box in the German U-boats in the North Sea. To this end, Hitler repeated his demand for the ‘destruction of the Franco-British army’, which was ‘the precondition’ for a ‘brutal operation against the heart of the British will to resist’ in due course.101 The purpose of the offensive in the west was thus not so much the delivery of military force against the Allied field armies, as the delivery of political effect in London.
Hitler put his stamp on the planned western offensive from the start, both strategically and operationally. He was adamant that one would not simply repeat the ‘hackneyed’ Schlieffen Plan of 1914. He was already confident that tanks could be sent through the Ardennes, and planned to separate British and French forces.102 Hitler gave instructions for the capture of the bridges over the Meuse through a coup de main and for the use of airborne forces.103 He ordered that the operation should have no ‘established centre of gravity’ to begin with, but that it should acquire one in accordance with the ‘early successes’ to exploit any breakthroughs.104 Hitler also had a clear vision of the nature of the conflict to come. He demanded that the advancing German armoured spearheads should avoid being caught up in the ‘warren of endless terraces of Belgian towns’. The key thing was for them to maintain their ‘mobility’ and to prevent the enemy front from stabilizing. Hitler called for ‘improvisations’ and the ‘massing’ of tanks and guns. He predicted that the ‘effect of such a mass deployment, especially of the 8.8 mm [guns]’ would be ‘devastating’ for the enemy. Bombing was to be used not only to destroy enemy positions but also to ‘demoralize’ them.105 This was in fact almost exactly how the campaign unfolded.
The planning was accompanied by a renewed propagandistic bombardment of Britain, which was singled out for particular treatment; the French were criticized, if at all, more in sorrow than in anger. Hitler attacked the British Empire on two fronts. On the one hand, he argued that Germany was simply behaving in Europe as Britain had always done across the world, only with greater justification and effectiveness. He contrasted the mayhem in the British mandates over the Arabs of the Middle East with the order the Third Reich had swiftly established among the Slavs of central Europe.106 A month later, he elaborated on this theme. ‘If an Englishman argues today that he is responsible for the fate of peoples of central and eastern Europe,’ he argued, ‘then I can only answer that we are equally responsible for the fate of the peoples in Palestine, in Arabia, in Egypt, and even in India.’ The symmetry here was clear: if there were to be British mandates in the rest of the world, then why not German protectorates in Europe?
If Hitler wanted to hunt with the imperialist hounds, he was also increasingly running with the colonized hares. The idea that Germany had been enslaved by the British Empire and international high finance, which had been so prominent in his rhetoric throughout the 1920s, and had always been close to the surface after 1933, now returned with a vengeance. Even the simple pleasures of life, he complained, were at the mercy of the empire. Why should the British decide, Hitler asked, whether the Germans drank coffee? He condemned the British for ‘oppressing’ 350 million Indians, in ‘exactly the same way’ as millions of Germans were trodden underfoot.107 Hitler’s empathy extended to the other wretched of the earth. He lampooned British claims to be fighting for ‘the right to self-determination of the peoples’, for where were these rights more denied than in the British Empire, where the principle apparently did not apply? Remarkably, Hitler also rebutted British claims to defend ‘civilization’, given conditions in ‘British mining areas, slums in Whitechapel and in other areas of mass poverty and social degeneration’. For Hitler, the battle against the British Empire was an international class struggle, in which nations took the place of classes. The conflict was framed not just as a German war of national liberation against British domination of the continent, but as a global insurrection against Anglo-American capitalism and imperialism.
The Jews were central to this rhetoric, though they were by no means the Führer’s only target. He inveighed against the ‘money magnates’, the ‘Jewish and non-Jewish international bank barons’ who were trying to destroy the Germany of the ‘welfare laws for workers’ which had ‘removed class distinctions’ in the Reich and eliminated unemployment.108 So fearful were Germany’s enemies of this model of ‘welfare and social compromise’, he claimed, that they feared ‘that their own people might be infected by it’. In this respect, apparently, Nazism was for export after all. The regime attached such importance to this passage in Hitler’s speech that it was reprinted in the official journal of the Reich Labour Ministry shortly afterwards.109 Hitler was still trying to ‘internationalize’ the Jewish question. It was in this spirit that he described his ‘peace’ speech to the Reichstag as ‘an attempt to order and regulate the Jewish problem’.110
Hitler saw this campaign as an exercise in self-defence, retaliation against the fearsome British propaganda machine and its supposed Jewish allies in the world, especially the American press. He repeatedly referred throughout the conflict, as he had throughout his career, to ‘Jewish-international [capitalism and] journalism’ and ‘certain international press organs’.111 Hitler kept a close eye on what British and American magazines were saying from the start of the war, requesting to see the original copies.112 There were representatives of the Deutscher Nachrichtendienstbüro (DNB) stationed in the Führer’s Headquarters to supply the Führermaterialdienst with foreign news, military communiqués and press announcements at Dietrich’s request. One way or the other, Hitler’s enmity towards Britain had become all-embracing by late 1939. ‘I want to beat Britain, whatever it costs,’ he told Goebbels, ‘and all my thoughts and actions are geared towards that end.’113
British enmity was also the framework within which Hitler interpreted the attempt on his life by Georg Elser. The would-be assassin had concealed a bomb in a pillar of the Munich Bürgerbräukeller, timed
to explode as Hitler gave the traditional annual address to commemorate the failed putsch of 1923. That evening, however, the Führer left early in order to visit Unity Mitford in hospital. The change of plan saved his life, because the bomb went off as planned, causing extensive damage and loss of life. Despite the fact that Elser was a communist sympathizer, who was carrying an emblem of the Rotfrontkämpferbund when he was arrested, Hitler was convinced that British Intelligence was behind the plot. Goebbels claimed in the Völkischer Beobachter of 15 November 1939 that ‘the assassin is called Britain’. Later Hitler thought it might have been Bavarian monarchists, and for a while Goebbels even privately blamed Otto Strasser.114 In truth, there is no evidence of a link between British Intelligence and Elser, who appears to have acted completely alone.
Hitler was still relatively unconcerned by the Soviet Union. Elser’s manifest communist connections do not seem to have weighed heavily with him. Nor did he fear an immediate Russian attack. ‘Russia,’ he told the generals in late November 1939, ‘is currently no threat’, on account of its internal divisions and the weakness of the Red Army. Besides, Hitler added, ‘there was the treaty’. This might well change in the future, but he was not expecting any trouble at least for ‘the next one or two years’. Hitler was also unworried by Stalin’s ambitions in Scandinavia, which the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact greatly facilitated. As conflict between Finland and the Soviet Union loomed, the visiting Swedish explorer Sven Hedin found him obsessed with Britain.115 Hitler even described Stalin’s demands as ‘moderate’. He certainly showed no sense of racial solidarity with the ‘Nordic’ peoples or any interest in Scandinavia outside of his struggle with Britain.116 No significance should be attached to his very occasional loose use of the phrase ‘Greater German Reich’, which almost certainly referred to the Greater Germany of the nineteenth century rather than any ambitions in Northern Europe.117 Unlike Himmler, in fact, the Führer did not take Scandinavians–whom he considered harmless and dozy fishermen118–very seriously.
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