The Anglo-American capitalist world order against which Hitler revolted structured his entire political career. Sometime before he ever began to speak about the Jews, Hitler experienced the might of the British Empire in Flanders, the demographic and industrial power of the United States at the second Battle of the Marne and the economic stranglehold of global capitalism after the imposition of the Versailles Treaty. Shortly after, he became convinced that the Jews–whose relationship with Anglo-America was in his view essentially symbiotic–were the driving force behind international capitalism and the coalition which had brought down the Reich. Among the instruments used to undermine Germany from within, Hitler believed, was the virus of Bolshevism, which he regarded as a much greater threat than the Soviet Union itself. The root of his Jew-hatred, therefore, was primarily to be found in his hostility to global high finance rather than his hatred of the radical left. Those who do not want to speak about Hitler’s anti-capitalism should remain silent on his anti-Semitism.
Hitler’s solution to the perceived German predicament fell into two parts. First of all, he called for a programme of racial transformation within Germany, which eliminated ‘harmful’ elements, especially the Jews, and encouraged the ‘elevation’ of the racial ‘high value’ strands in the German Volk. Secondly, Hitler demanded the acquisition of Lebensraum in the east, which would provide the land and resources to offer a comparable living standard to the United States, and thus end the debilitating emigration of the nation’s best and brightest, who might return as enemy soldiers at some future date. It would also make Germany ‘blockade-proof’ in the event of a renewed round of warfare with Anglo-America.
If Hitler’s relationship with the British Empire and the United States was ultimately antagonistic, it was also admiring and entangled. He long hoped for a British alliance and he never ceased to exalt the supposed racial qualities of the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ on both sides of the Atlantic, and to believe that they represented Germany’s ‘better’ racial half. Anglo-America was Hitler’s model, much more so than Stalin’s Russia or even Mussolini’s Italy. The original for the Lebensraum project was the British Empire, and especially the American colonization of the west. Hitler and the Third Reich were thus a reaction not to the Russian Revolution but to the dominance of Anglo-America and global capitalism. The Holocaust was not a distorted copy of Stalin’s Great Terror, but a pre-emptive strike against Roosevelt’s America.
After he came to power, the British Empire and the United States remained the focal point of Hitler’s policies. His entire domestic programme was designed to match the ‘living standards’ offered by the ‘American Dream’. His true nemesis was the British Empire and especially the United States, against whom he battled for control of the ‘trophy’ of the ‘world’. It was Roosevelt’s hostility which caused Hitler to speed up his programme from late 1937, British resistance during the May crisis of 1938 which led him to bring forward the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. The struggle against Britain and America eventually ‘forced’ Hitler to go to war against them both, and then to extend the theatre of operations ever more widely. The quest for Lebensraum led to conflict with Britain over Poland, which in turn ‘required’ him to occupy much of Scandinavia, France, the Low Countries, the Balkans and North Africa. It drove the attack on Russia. Hitler had originally set out to make Germany a world power, not to achieve global domination, but each gain seemed to require another. By 1941–2, when he was directing operations on three continents, and across the seven seas, it seemed as if only the world would be enough for Hitler. But the prize eluded him: the trophy was lifted once more by the Anglo-Americans, with substantial help from their Soviet allies, of course.
Hitler thus proved no more successful against the ‘world of enemies’ than the Reich had been during the First World War. On this occasion, though, death and destruction were visited on the civilian population long before the front line reached Germany, not through a blockade, but by means of a relentless campaign of aerial terror. For all the Führer’s great architectural visions, the face of German cities after 1945 owed much more to Arthur Harris of RAF Bomber Command than Adolf Hitler. In 1938, Hitler joked that the building work at the new Imperial Chancellery made the area look like the forest of Houthulst in Flanders after four years of British bombardment during the last war. Seven years later, three years of bombing by the RAF and USAAF had reduced not only the Chancellery but huge stretches of urban Germany to a similar condition. In the first war, and immediately afterwards, the British Empire and the United States had starved and pauperized the Reich; in the second war, they pulverized it. The mills of the Anglo-Americans ground slowly, but they ground exceeding small.
Hitler made five key judgements throughout his career. Firstly, he was preoccupied by the power of ‘the Jews’. This he wildly exaggerated, to the extent that the centrality of anti-Semitism in his world view can only be described as paranoid. Secondly, Hitler largely discounted the Soviet Union, whose strength he massively underestimated. This was a miscalculation which came back to haunt him. Thirdly, Hitler was convinced of the overwhelming power of Anglo-America. This, as we have seen, he got exactly right. Fourthly and relatedly, Hitler believed that the Germans he actually ruled–as opposed to the people he planned to breed–were too weak and fragmented to prevail against the ‘Anglo-Saxons’, the global ‘master race’. This also turned out to be entirely accurate, although of course it is unlikely that he would have secured a better outcome for himself, even if he had had the ‘time’ to ‘elevate’ the German people at his leisure. Fifthly and finally, Hitler had predicted that the Reich would be a ‘world power’ or ‘nothing’, and here too he was vindicated, even if this was something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It is therefore a terrible irony that Hitler made the very same mistakes that he was determined to avoid after his searching inquest into the causes of the German defeat in 1918. He vowed never to fight a two-front war, but he did. He promised to find better allies than the Kaiser had, preferably the British, and dismissed the ‘Pan-Europa’ project of the 1920s, yet ended up facing much of the world with a rabble of mostly minor European statelets, and global non-state actors. The formidable Japanese aside, this was truly the ‘coalition of cripples’ he had lampooned in Mein Kampf. He wanted more than anything else to avoid another struggle with the children of German emigrants, or a production battle with the ‘German engineers’ on the far side of the Atlantic, and yet his Reich faced Carl Spaatz’s bombers in the air and Dwight Eisenhower’s armies on the ground. Thanks to Hitler’s policies, the sons of Germany returned once more to confront the Fatherland. If in 1917–18, they chastised the Reich with whips, in 1941–5 they scourged it with scorpions. Hitler’s second war was thus even more catastrophic than his first. History repeated itself, the first time as defeat, the second time as annihilation.
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Credit: DVA
Brendan Simms is a professor in the History of International Relations and fellow at Peterhouse College, Cambridge. He is the author of eight previous books, including The Longest Afternoon: The 400 Men Who Decided the Battle of Waterloo and Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, from 1453 to the Present, shortlisted for the Lionel Gelber Prize. He lives in Cambridge, UK.
Praise for Hitler
“Brendan Simms has a bold hypothesis—that it was Hitler’s fixation on the United States and Great Britain, and his fear of German decay and degeneracy, that drove his strategic thinking and behavior—and he argues it with exceptional eloquence and force. This fascinating book will force us to rethink the strategy of the Second World War in a way that none other has in more than a generation.”
—Eliot Cohen, Robert E. Osgood Professor of Strategic Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University
Notes
Prologue
1. Report F. Wiedemann (Brigade Adjutant), 17.7.1918, BayHSTA, no. 10, ‘Stab Juli 1918’, fo. 37.
2. Speech, 6.8.1927, RSA, II, p. 446. In a similar vein: Speech, 4.8.1929, RSA, III/2, p. 347; and Speech, 18.1.1928, RSA, II/2, p. 633.
Introduction
1. Frank Schirrmacher, ‘Wir haben ihn uns engagiert’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 6.10.1998.
2. Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (London, 1954), pp. 735–6.
3. Joachim C. Fest, Hitler. Eine Biographie (Frankfurt, 1973). For a recent critique see Magnus Brechtken, ‘Joachim Fest und der 20 Juli. Geschichtsbilder, Vergangenheitskonstruktionen, Narrative’, in Magnus Brechtken, Christoph Cornelissen and Christopher Dowe (eds.), Verräter? Vorbilder? Verbrecher? Kontroverse Deutungen des 20. Juli 1944 seit 1945, Geschichtswissenschaft 25 (Berlin, 2017), pp. 161–82, especially pp. 169–72. The influential German weekly Der Spiegel, 14.1.2008, describes the phrase ‘how it could have come to this’ as the ‘key question’ of German history (Königsfrage).
4. Ian Kershaw, Hitler: Hubris, 1889–1936 (London, 1998), and Hitler: Nemesis, 1936–1945 (London, 2000). See also his Hitler (London and New York, 1991). Some idea of the extent of the research on Hitler since Fest can gained from Gerhard Hirschfeld and Lothar Kettewacker (eds.), Der ‘Führerstaat’, Mythos und Realität. Studien zur Struktur und Politik des Dritten Reiches (Stuttgart, 1981); Gerhard Schreiber, Hitler-Interpretationen, 1923–1983. Ergebnisse, Methoden und Probleme der Forschung (Darmstadt, 1988); Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation (London, 2015); and Elizabeth Harvey and Johannes Hürter, Hitler: New Research (Berlin and Boston, 2018).
5. Thus Hellmuth Auerbach, ‘Hitlers politische Lehrjahre und die Münchener Gesellschaft 1919–1923’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 25 (1977); and Hermann Graml, ‘Probleme einer Hitler-Biographie. Kritische Bemerkungen zu Joachim C. Fest’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 22 (1974), pp. 76–92.
6. Kershaw, Hubris, p. xxvi. Richard J. Evans remarked that Kershaw had written ‘less a biography of Hitler than a history of Hitler’, ‘Review article: new perspectives on Hitler’, Journal of Contemporary History, 37 (2002), pp. 147–152 (quotation, p. 150).
7. See Neil Gregor, ‘Nazism–a political religion? Rethinking the voluntarist turn’, in Neil Gregor (ed.), Nazism, War and Genocide: New Perspectives on the History of the Third Reich (Exeter, 2008), pp. 1–21.
8. Ian Kershaw, The ‘Hitler Myth’: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford, 1987).
9. Ian Kershaw, ‘“Working towards the Führer”: reflections on the nature of the Hitler dictatorship’, Contemporary European History, 2 (1991), pp. 103–18.
10. E.g. Ralf Georg Reuth, Hitler. Eine politische Biographie (Munich, 2003).
11. Volker Ullrich, Adolf Hitler. Biographie, vol. 1: Die Jahre des Aufstiegs, 1889–1939 (Frankfurt, 2013), vol. 2: Die Jahre des Untergangs (Frankfurt, 2018).
12. Peter Longerich, Hitler. Biographie (Munich, 2015).
13. Wolfram Pyta, Hitler. Der Künstler als Politiker und Feldherr. Eine Herrschaftsanalyse (Munich, 2015).
14. Hans-Ulrich Thamer, Adolf Hitler. Biographie eines Diktators (Munich, 2018).
15. It does not answer most of the questions thrown up by Thomas Kühne, ‘Zwischen Akribie und Groteske. Variationen der “Normalisierung” Adolf Hitlers’, Historische Zeitschrift, 304 (2017), pp. 405–22.
16. For a range of contemporary views see Hermann Pölking, Wer war Hitler. Ansichten und Berichte von Zeitgenossen (Berlin, 2017), and Philipp Fabry, Mutmaßungen über Hitler. Urteile von Zeitgenossen (Düsseldorf, 1969).
17. For ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ eugenics, see Daniel J. Kevles, ‘International eugenics’, in Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race (Washington, DC, 2004), pp. 41–59, especially p. 50.
18. For example Sebastian Conrad, Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 10–11, 275–333 et passim; and Sebastian Conrad and Jürgen Osterhammel (eds.), Das Kaiserreich International. Deutschland in der Welt, 1871–1914, 2nd edn (Göttingen, 2006).
19. Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist and Alexander M. Martin (eds.), Fascination and Enmity: Russia and Germany as Entangled Histories, 1914–1945 (Pittsburgh, 2012). See also Stefan Ihrig, ‘Review article: the history of European fascism–origins, foreign relations and (dis-)entangled histories’, European History Quarterly, 41 (2011), 278–90, which is mainly about the connections to Spain, Turkey, Italy and Russia.
20. Thus Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat. A Brief History of the 21st Century (New York, 2005), p. 395.
21. E.g. Sven Beckert, ‘American danger: United States Empire, Eurafrica, and the territorialization of industrial capitalism, 1870–1950’, American Historical Review, 122 (2017), pp. 1137–70.
22. See Tim Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (London, 2015).
23. Duncan Bell, ‘Founding the world state: H. G. Wells on empire and the English-speaking peoples’, International Studies Quarterly, 62 (2018), pp. 867–79; Madeleine Herren, Internationale Oganisationen seit 1865. Eine Globalgeschichte der internationalen Ordnung (Darmstadt, 2009), especially pp. 73–84.
24. Thus John M. Hobson, ‘Re-embedding the global colour line within post-1945 international theory’, in Alexander Anievas, Nivi Manchanda and Robbie Shilliam (eds.), Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line (London and New York, 2015), pp. 81–97; Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900 (Princeton and Oxford, 2007); Srdjan Vucetic, The Anglosphere: A Genealogy of Racialized Identity in International Relations (Stanford, 2011).
25. James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (Oxford, 2009).
26. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York, 2000), p. 36. For an intriguing if eccentric subaltern interpretation of Hitler see Manuel Sarkisyanz, From Imperialism to Fascism: Why Hitler’s ‘India’ Was to Be Russia (Delhi, 2003), and Hitler’s English Inspirers (Belfast, 2003).
27. See Geoff Eley, ‘Empire, ideology, and the east: thoughts on Nazism’ spatial imaginary’, in idem, Nazism as Fascism: Violence, Ideology, and the Ground of Consent in Germany, 1930–1945 (London and New York, 2013), pp. 131–55.
28. E.g. Christopher Clark, Time and Power: Visions of History in German Politics from the Thirty Years’ War to the Third Reich (Princeton, NJ, 2019); and Allegra Fryxell, ‘Turning back the clock? The politics of time in Restoration Europe, 1815–1830’, in Michael Broers and Ambrogio Caiani (eds.), Restoration Europe (New York, 2018).
29. A good cross section of this work can be found in Gregor (ed.), Nazism, War and Genocide; and Devin O. Pendas, Mark Roseman and Richard Wetzell (eds.), Beyond the Racial State: Rethinking Nazi Germany (Cambridge, 2017).
30. Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe (London, 2008).
31. Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (London, 2006).
32. Mary Nolan, The Transatlantic Century: Europe and America, 1890–2010 (Cambridge, 2012); Philipp Gassert, Amerika im Dritten Reich. Ideologie, Propaganda, und Volksmeinung, 1933–1945 (Stuttgart, 1997); Stefan Kühl, The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism and German National Socialism (Oxford, 1994).
33. Johann Chapoutot, The Law of Blood: Thinking and Acting as a Nazi (Cambridge, Mass., 2018).
34. Lars Lüdicke, Hitlers Weltanschauung. Von ‘Mein Kampf’ bis zum ‘Nero-Befehl’ (Paderborn, 2016), p. 43 et passim.
35. Dirk Bavendamm, Der junge Hitler. Korrekturen einer Biographie, 1889–1914 (Graz, 2009); Brigitte Hamann, Hitlers Wien. Lehrjahre eines Diktators (Munich 1996).
36. Anton Joachimsthaler, Hitlers Weg begann in München, 1913–1923 (Munich, 2000).
37. Thomas Weber, Wie Adolf Hitler zum Nazi wurde. Vom unpolitischen Soldaten zum Autor von ‘Mein Kampf’ (Berlin, 2016); Othmar Plöckinger, G
eschichte eines Buches. Adolf Hitlers ‘Mein Kampf’, 1922–1945, 2nd edn (Munich, 2011).
38. Despina Stratigakos, Hitler at Home (New Haven, 2015).
39. Anna Maria Sigmund, Des Führers bester Freund. Adolf Hitler, seine Nichte Geli Raubal und der ‘Ehrenarier’ Emil Maurice–eine Dreiecksbeziehung (Munich, 2005).
40. Heike B. Görtemaker, Eva Braun. Ein Leben mit Hitler (Munich, 2010).
41. Bill Niven, Hitler and Film: The Führer’s Hidden Passion (New Haven and London, 2018); Timothy W. Ryback, Hitler’s Private Library: The Books that Shaped His Life (London, 2009).
42. Fritz Redlich, Hitler: Diagnosis of a Destructive Prophet (New York, 1999).
43. Johannes Hürter, Hitlers Heerführer. Die Deutschen Oberbefehlshaber in Kriey gegen die Sowjetunion 1941/42 (Munich, 2006).
44. Stephen G. Fritz, The First Soldier: Hitler as Military Leader (New Haven, 2018).
45. Christian Goeschel, Mussolini and Hitler: The Forging of the Fascist Alliance (New Haven and London, 2018). See also MacGregor Knox, Common Destiny: Dictatorship, Foreign Policy, and War in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany (Cambridge, 2000).
46. Kurt Bauer, Hitlers zweiter Putsch. Dollfuß, die Nazis und der 25. Juli 1934 (St. Pölten, Salzburg, Vienna, 2014); Kurt Bauer, ‘Hitler und der Juliputsch 1934 in Österreich’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 59 (2011), pp. 193–27.
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