Hitler

by Peter Longerich

  Mein Kampf

  The ‘substantial book’, which, according to his ‘assistant’, Fobke, Hitler began during his imprisonment, has been interpreted by historians primarily as a programme; thus Mein Kampf is seen as evidence of Hitler’s early aims, which he then, during the 1930s and 1940s, endeavoured more or less systematically – and that remains in dispute – to put into practice.78 However, his decision to write a book was in the first instance clearly prompted by his need to explain the defeat of 9 November and to underpin his projection of himself as the leader of the extreme Right.

  While during his trial he had presented himself as the leader of the extreme Right, possessing superhuman abilities, now, in the process of writing Mein Kampf, he managed to invent a background story that made sense of his lack of youthful success. In the ‘mundaneness of everyday life’, he wrote in Mein Kampf, often ‘important people’ appear ‘unimportant’; it is only when confronted with exceptional challenges, by which Hitler primarily meant war, that ‘someone ordinary and unprepossessing’ emerges as ‘a genius’. In the case of these special individuals the ‘hammer blow of fate’ that fells most people ‘suddenly lands on steel’, and now, ‘to the astonishment of the onlookers, the core that has hitherto been hidden’ becomes visible. It is not difficult to see that he is referring here to 9 November, during which his heroic genius became apparent for the first time. Hitler emphasized, however, that the individual’s ‘genius’ ‘did not suddenly appear at this moment’; in the case of ‘truly creative people’ it was naturally inborn.79 In his lean Vienna years he had laid the foundations for his career as a leader of genius, and Schopenhauer, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and Wagner always provided him with the models for this self-image. He also borrowed from Wagner and Chamberlain the anti-Semitic line according to which true genius must succeed in defeating the Jews, the ‘destroyers of genius’.

  The failure of his artistic ambitions to be a painter or architect thus became a magnificent failure. Hitler now claimed to have transferred basic elements of the heroic artist–genius to his new role as ‘Führer’; in this way he could still fulfil his alleged destiny to be an exceptional individual, albeit in another sphere. For he believed that, as an artist, he was bringing valuable abilities into politics: the strength of will and resolution with which he was following the path set out for him by ‘destiny’; a particularly marked intuition, in other words his sensitivity to the psychological weaknesses of other people, but also to the depths of the ‘soul of the masses’; the emotion he could generate in order to release the emotions of the masses. He already saw himself as the superman, predestined to be a genius in his role as ‘Führer’ and certain of success.80

  When it came to his decision to write a political polemic, a mixture of autobiography and programme, his supporters would undoubtedly have preferred him to continue with the strategy pursued at his trial, namely of portraying himself as the victim of a political intrigue, who nevertheless was going to carry on the fight. Originally, in fact, the book was going to end with the 1923 putsch,81 but, surprisingly, there is no mention of 9 November and its immediate pre-history. Hitler’s ability to avoid these topics is tied up with the history of its publication. While in prison he postponed publication because of the danger of his imminent release being delayed, which was still theoretically possible.82 During the months after his release, he continued work on the manuscript, but, after being banned from speaking in March 1925, decided to include the particularly sensitive parts in a second volume. In May 1925, he finished work on the first volume, which appeared in the same year.83

  The first volume mainly contains an extremely self-aggrandizing autobiography of Hitler up until his early years in the DAP/NSDAP, interspersed with chapters containing general reflections on the ‘World War’, ‘War Propaganda’, ‘Revolution’, the ‘Causes of the Collapse’, and ‘Nation and Race’. The claim contained in the subtitle, ‘A Reckoning’, is hardly realized, as his account ends in 1920.

  The second volume, The National Socialist Movement, written between August 1925 and November 1926 and published at the end of 1926, continues the autobiography and the history of the Party in a rather haphazard way. The chronological account finally peters out and is replaced by (often indirect) references to and comments on all kinds of topics, including current affairs.84 The structure of this volume shows very clearly that Hitler had abandoned his plan to continue his full-scale autobiographical account of the nobody who, while making great sacrifices, set out to save the fatherland, taking it stage by stage up to the decisive point of November 1923. Nor was he able to turn his extensive reflections into a coherent manifesto. It is, therefore, difficult to distil anything like a political programme from his long-winded and confused observations. At the end of the volume he took up his autobiography once again, describing the crisis of 1923 up until the end of passive resistance in the Ruhr in September 1923. He did not want to continue with the story: ‘I do not wish to because I do not see any future benefits from it and, above all, because it is pointless to reopen wounds that are only just healing.’85 However, Hitler’s decision not to seek a further ‘reckoning’ with the right-wing establishment in Bavaria was definitely not influenced merely by such tactical considerations; the most decisive factor must have been his personal difficulty in coping with his defeat. He was simply not prepared to accept that he had miscalculated in November 1923. Instead, he attempted to obscure it with grandiose visions of his ‘mission’. During his trial, he had portrayed himself as the victim of an intrigue and, at the same time, tried to shed this victim role through his behaviour during the proceedings, in which he portrayed himself as the leader of ‘young Germany’, whose heroic deed, in historical perspective, must appear entirely justified. He maintained this line during the coming years, a reinterpretation that, after 1933, culminated in the annual ceremony associated with 8/9 November, in which he created a kind of resurrection myth of the ‘dead heroes’. The overarching message was: ‘The deed was not in vain!’

  By not dealing with November 1923 in Mein Kampf, Hitler failed to give the work a clear focus. For it was supposedly intended to be a piece of confessional writing, whose plausibility depended essentially on being rooted in the autobiographical basis of the ‘programme’ that was being put forward. And yet the author had nothing to say about what had been hitherto the high point of his career or about its provisional failure. This fact and his lack of ability to give his ideas a systematic focus and his tendency to engage in monologues produced a conglomeration of flattering autobiography and political tirades that was hard to unravel. The result was confused and unreadable.

  The second volume of Mein Kampf was largely written in the seclusion of Berchtesgaden.86 In it Hitler, for the moment a failed politician, adopted the role of a political visionary with a programme containing a set of ideas of world historical importance. In doing so, he was once again escaping into his typical overblown fantasies and megalomaniacal dreams, now designed to help him come to terms with the shame of November 1923. The contrast between the down-to-earth Hitler, who in 1925 was busy trying to rebuild the split NSDAP, and the theoretician [Programmatiker] speculating in world historical dimensions could hardly have been greater.

  His ‘programme’, although it can be elicited only by careful analysis of the second volume, was a repetition and expansion of the ideas that he had already been putting forward before 1923. In addition to his notorious virulent anti-Semitism and his identification of Jews with Bolsheviks/Marxists, he now introduced another important theme, ‘the question of space’. During his imprisonment, Hitler had become interested in ‘geopolitics’, the study of the dependence of politics on geographical space. This was probably under the influence of his fellow-prisoner, Rudolf Hess, whose academic supervisor, Professor Karl Hofer, was an exponent of the theory.87 By combining these ideas with his anti-Semitism and racism, Hitler developed the thesis of the eternal struggle between nations for ‘living space’, in which superi
or racial qualities would triumph. In this ‘world view’ the Jews played the role of a ‘counter-race’ that was diametrically opposed to the superior ‘Aryan race’ and trying to undermine the ‘Aryans’ attempt to ‘gain space’. As parasites, they must, therefore, be removed from the Aryans’ ‘national body’. That had to be the prerequisite for any kind of revisionist foreign policy.

  He did not make clear how in practice he envisaged the ‘removal’ of the Jews. However, a few passages reveal violent fantasies. Thus, for example, he wrote: ‘we shall only succeed in persuading our masses to become nationalists if, in addition to a positive struggle for the soul of our people, their international poisoners are exterminated’.88 Elsewhere, he complained about the ‘Marxist’ workers’ leaders’ behaviour during the World War, noting: ‘If at the start and during the course of the war twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as was the case with hundreds of thousands of the best of our German workers from all walks of life on the battlefield, then the sacrifice of millions of those killed at the front would not have been in vain.’89 Although the mention of poison gas leaps off the page, such threats and fantasies do not mean that he already had a plan for the systematic murder of European Jews.

  What emerges clearly from Mein Kampf is that the main goal of a future Nazi foreign policy was to be the conquest of living space in eastern Europe. Hitler relied on ideas that before and during the war were being put forward by the Pan-Germans. They were modelled on the ‘great Eastern solution’, which Ludendorff, among others, had planned in 1918 following the advance of German troops into the Ukraine. Up until spring 1922, Hitler had been open to the idea of an alliance with a Russia liberated from ‘Jewish Bolshevist’ rule; he even thought a combined expansion by the two powers was feasible. In a speech in October 1922 he maintained that had Germany made an alliance with Russia against Britain before the war, it would have ‘created the opportunity for an unlimited eastwards expansion’.90 However, as the Soviet regime consolidated its position during 1922/23 he changed his view. He now began to contemplate the idea of an alliance with Italy and Great Britain, transforming his previous notion of securing ‘the East’ for German settlers with the aid of Russia into its opposite: this goal was now to be achieved by destroying the Soviet Union.

  The basic issues determining Hitler’s views on the relationship with Italy were the question of the South Tyrol and his old dream of an Anschluss with Austria. Hitler had initially not been prepared to accept Italy’s annexation of the South Tyrol;91 the 1920 NSDAP programme demanded the ‘unification of all Germans . . . in a greater Germany’. No exceptions were envisaged. However, Hitler altered this position at the end of 1922. No sooner had the Fascists seized power in November 1922 than Hitler claimed that it was essential that ‘Germany [should] clearly and decisively abandon the Germans of South Tyrol’. The giving up of the South Tyrol was the precondition for Italy’s agreement to the Anschluss of Austria with the Reich.92 However, since this demand was unacceptable to the majority of nationalist Germans and supporters of a ‘greater Germany’ who wanted to integrate Austria including the South Tyrol into the Reich, Hitler did not make any further public statements on this issue. At the end of 1922, he told Eduard Scharrer, co-owner of the Münchener Neueste Nachrichten and a Nazi sympathizer, in confidence, that for the time being they should play down the South Tyrol issue; it might be possible to solve it later ‘through a form of compensation’.93

  As far as the western powers were concerned, in the light of the 1923 Ruhr crisis, Hitler began to bank on a clash developing between British and French interests. He was working on the assumption that, given its traditional foreign policy principles, Britain would not stand idly by and watch France finally gaining hegemony on the continent. At the end of 1922, he was already contemplating Anglo-German cooperation against France and Russia as well as the idea of ‘colonizing the East’. In December he told Scharrer they should try for ‘the destruction of Russia with the aid of England. Russia had enough land for German settlers and provided big opportunities for German industry; England would then not get in our way when we come to deal with France’.94 But Hitler did not publicly demand an alliance with Britain nor did he develop the idea of conquering ‘soil’ in Russia any further. In 1924, when he was already in prison, he published an article in which he simply criticized pre-war German foreign policy as hopelessly indecisive. There had been two alternatives: ‘. . . they should have either decided to conquer farmland, dispensing with overseas trade, colonies, and excessive industrialization, in which case the German government should have recognized that this could only be achieved in alliance with Britain against Russia; or, if they wanted sea power and overseas trade, this would only be possible in alliance with Russia against England’. But, at the time, they had been unable to decide between the two alternatives. Hitler does not let on that at this point he was already leaning towards an alliance with Britain.95

  During his imprisonment Hitler had the opportunity for a more thorough consideration of this whole set of issues. In particular, he began to combine the ‘space question’ in a systematic way with the ‘race question’. Already in the first volume of Mein Kampf, which had been largely written in Landsberg, he had developed the idea of an alliance with Britain, in order ‘with our backs covered’ to be able to launch ‘the new German drive to the East’ in the direction of Russia. However, once again he expressed these ideas within a critique of pre-1914 German policy.96 It was only after his release and with his obsessive urge to communicate curbed by a speaking ban, that he wrote down the basic ideas of a future foreign policy unequivocally in the second volume of Mein Kampf. He returned to his ideas about pre-war German foreign policy, now openly advocating alliances with Britain and Italy97 and stated that abandonment of the South Tyrol was the precondition for the improvement of relations with Italy.98 He then devoted a lengthy section – typical of his linking of foreign policy issues with his racial obsessions – to the question of whether the influence of international Jewry would prevent these alliances; his response was a lengthy emotional declaration, culminating in the claim that in the end the ‘evil enemy of humanity’ would be overcome.99

  The next chapter – ‘Eastern Orientation or Eastern Policy’ – focused on the core of his ideology: ‘We shall stop the endless German drive to the South and West and direct our gaze towards the lands in the East. At long last we shall bring to an end the colonial and commercial policy of the pre-War period and shift to the territorial policy of the future. . . . Neither western nor eastern orientation should be the future goal of our foreign policy but an eastern policy in the sense of acquiring the necessary soil for our German people.’100 The ‘destruction of the Soviet Union’ would, however, not only result in the acquisition of ‘soil’ but also a further vital goal would have been achieved. Since he saw in ‘Russian Bolshevism . . . the attempt by the Jews during the twentieth century to secure world domination’, the ‘end of Jewish hegemony in Russia’ would simultaneously destroy the basis of these plans for world domination, whose next target was, in his opinion, definitely Germany.101

  In this way he was able to combine his imperialist and racist goals. Radical anti-Semitic aims were the link between his future domestic and foreign policy objectives. The violent ‘removal’ of the Jews from Germany was now supplemented by a war of conquest, which was intended to put an end to ‘Jewish rule in Russia’. However, on the publication of the second volume in 1926, such far-reaching views must have appeared completely unreal and utopian.

  In the second volume Hitler also develops another element in his ideology for the first time in a systematic manner: his views on ‘racial hygiene’ [i.e. eugenics]. During his imprisonment he had evidently studied the relevant literature and adopted central demands of ‘racial hygiene’, which in Germany (but not only there) was, at the time, considered a science. This was noted with considerable satisfact
ion in a journal article published in 1931 by its leading proponent, the Munich professor, Fritz Lenz.102 Basically, it involved subjecting the population to eugenic assessment, with the hope of identifying the ‘racially valuable’ elements, on the one hand, and the ‘inferior’ and ‘hereditarily diseased’ elements, on the other. The aim was then to ‘improve the racial value’ of the German nation by introducing measures to encourage the former to reproduce and to prevent the latter from doing so. Hitler now confirmed that in a future völkisch state this would be taken care of: ‘the demand that defective people should be prevented from begetting defective offspring is a totally rational demand and its systematic implementation represents a most humane act.’103 This formulation was chosen with care and implied that ‘inferiors’ should be compulsorily sterilized, as was indeed the aim of radical exponents of racial hygiene at the time. Hitler continued: ‘The prevention of the ability and opportunity to procreate on the part of physically degenerate and mentally sick people, over a period of only six hundred years, would not only free mankind from an immeasurable misfortune, but would lead to a recovery which appears scarcely conceivable today.’104 Professor Lenz was delighted: ‘Hitler is the first politician, possessing considerable influence, who has recognized that racial hygiene is a crucial political task and is prepared actively to support it.’