FOR a believer, the racial theory justifies the ‘liberation’ of Germans from foreign sovereignty and the incorporation into greater Germany of territories largely inhabited by Germans. Racial self-determination brought Danzig, Memel, Upper Silesia, the Polish Corridor, the Sudetenland, and the province of Posen into the Reich. In its more recent stages, racism could even serve as an ideological weapon against England and the United States, for the National Socialists announce the new World War to be a struggle between a proletarian race and the plutocratic democracies.*
By no stretch of the imagination, however, can racism or the doctrine of social imperialism justify Germany’s ‘new European order,’ the conquest of unquestionably non-German, backward states. Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Rumania, and Yugoslavia are even more ‘proletarian’ than Germany and their peoples are not German by ‘race’ or by history. Their incorporation into the Reich requires other ideological weapons, the doctrine of living space (Lebensraum). Hitler himself expounded this notion in an address to the Reichstag on 28 April 1939. The occasion was President Roosevelt’s peace telegram, expressing the belief that all international problems can be amicably settled by discussion. In the twelfth point of his reply, Hitler said:
I answer: Theoretically, we should believe that this is feasible, for in many cases common sense would indeed plainly show the justice of the demands made by one side and the compelling necessity for concessions by the other side. For example, according to common sense, logic, and all the principles of human and of higher justice, nay, even according to the laws of a Divine will, all nations ought to have an equal share in the goods of this world. It should not be the case that one nation claims so much living space that it cannot get along when there are not even 15 inhabitants to the square kilometer, while other nations are forced to maintain 140, 150, or even 200 on the same area. But in no case should these fortunate nations further curtail the living space of peoples who are already suffering, by robbing them of their colonies, for example. I should, therefore, be happy if these problems could really be solved at the conference table.1
Living space has been the major slogan of German political thinking ever since the partition of Czechoslovakia. ‘The revolt of the continent,’ says the influential Frankfurter Zeitung, ‘consists in the final exclusion of England from Europe. Europe has begun to emancipate itself from the economic and political hegemony of England.’2 Living space is a very complicated notion, requiring important changes in population policy and a complete revision of traditional conceptions of international law. It derives an allegedly scientific dress from geopolitics, and its roots in German tradition go back to Middle Ages.
Closely linked with the idea of living space is the concept of the grossdeutsche Reich. In characteristic fashion, the National Socialists seized upon this concept, with its traditional and romantic appeal, and developed it into the ideological basis of their new order.
The appealing qualities of this slogan are undeniably strong. Through all the struggles of the past six or seven centuries of European history, men have never abandoned their longing for a unified Europe, under one political leadership, united not by brutal military strength and economic exploitation but by a common philosophy. The manifestations of this yearning have changed from period to period and from country to country. But its basic appeal has been fundamentally unchanged.
One of the earliest and most profound expressions is Dante’s idea of an imperial rule that would be the expression of a humana civilitas.3 Humanity is a political unity based on the conscious devotion of the individual to this unity, embodying a common culture and a common philosophy of life. The incarnation of unity should be an emperor, residing in Rome and directing his efforts to the achievement of peace and order. He would embody the vis coactiva; the pope the vis contemplativa. Under completely different circumstances, the nineteenth-century German poet Novalis (Fried-rich von Hardenberg) sought a similar escape from the contradictions, disharmonies, and pettiness of the real world. In a beautiful essay, ‘Christianity or Europe,’ he too found the possibilities for an orderly, unified world in a romantic revival of the medieval idea of universalism embodied in the person of the Christian emperor.
The greatest twentieth-century German poet, Stefan George, made the same theme the center of his work. The activity of the George circle, which had great influence upon post-war German culture (upon historical writing, for example; the school produced important biographies of Caesar, Shakespeare, Goethe, Napoleon, Nietzsche, Kleist, and Frederick II Hohenstaufen), was an unceasing protest against the mechanization and commercialization of contemporary life, against bourgeois civilization with its shopkeeper’s spirit and its cheap pleasures and satisfactions. With Dante and Novalis as their recognized predecessors, they dreamed of the revival of an empire combining the universalism of the church and the authority of the Roman Empire. George’s long poem, The Seventh Ring, idealizes the return to the days of the greatest of German emperors, Frederick II Hohenstaufen.4
All this was grist for the National Socialist mill. The imperial idea goes back to the Holy Roman Empire, it found new expression among the greatest literary works of modern Germany, and it inspires the common man. What better weapon could there be, ready to hand to be transformed and adapted to the aims of the new empire?
The going has been extremely rough, however, for the idea of the Reich is actually incompatible with National Socialism. Alfred Rosenberg was once honest enough to say so. National Socialism, he wrote, is not the heir of the Holy Roman Empire: quite the contrary; it is the heir of the struggles of the German people against the universalism of that empire.5 And even in its own day the medieval empire foundered in a maze of contradictions. There could be no unity of the Christian concept of world order, the hegemony of the German emperor, and the democratic strivings of the Italian communes. Against the papal claims of universal authority, resting upon the Thomist notion of a hierarchy of orders culminating in one universal order, the emperors presented the ‘constitutional’ authority of ancient Rome. Both claims conflicted with the Roman idea of popular sovereignty. In actual fact, the Holy Roman Empire as the organizing force of a German nation remained a myth except for a few brief years.6
The case of Stefan George offers a striking illustration of the inability of the National Socialists to resolve this age-old conflict. At first sight; George seems & true precursor of National Socialist ideology; and that characterization of his work is a common one. The organ of the George circle, the Blätter für die Kunst, carried on an unceasing struggle against naturalism and realism in literature.7 Not a struggle against the hated real world, however, for that very process would amount to contamination with reality. Instead, George and his followers fled into the realm of art for art’s sake. The heroic individual must transform himself, not the world. He should put his trust in faith instead of reason, in blood rather than intellect, in nature and not society.8
The kinship of this heroic figure with National Socialist ideas is obvious. More than that, it was George who revived the term the Third Reich (his last work, and, ironically, one of his poorest, is entitled The New Reich). For him, however, the concept is exclusively a cultural one. It does no: imply the acceptance of Prussian hegemony over Europe, When it came to the final test, Stefan George could not accept National Socialism. He left Germany for Switzerland in the company of a close friend, the poet Karl Wolfskehl, a Jew. He never returned. When he died in Locarno in 1935, he exacted a pledge from his friends, according to one account, never to permit his body to be returned to a National Socialist Germany.
After George, German writers became increasingly preoccupied with the idea of the Third Reich. It was Moeller van den Bruck who adapted it to the needs of the new German imperialism.9 Though he insisted that the ‘continuity of German history’ must not be forgotten in the program of the Third Reich, Moeller van den Bruck cannot properly be classed with the revivalists of the old imperial idea. He was, rather, the most articulate spokesman for the new theory of social imperialism.*
With the publication in 1938 of Christoph Steding’s posthumous work, The Reich and the Sickness of European Culture,10 with a preface by Walter Frank, president of the Institute for the History of New Germany, Stefan George’s concept of the Third Reich was completely reversed. Steding was driven by an almost pathological hatred for culture and ‘neutrality.’ His book is a wholesale attack upon knowledge, education, and the intellect, upon the endless ‘palaver’ of the democracies. There is a reality—the Reich—which is more powerful than any philosophy or theory. Any cultural contributions that do not recognize the imperial idea must be rejected as worthless and often dangerous. And since, Steding argues, unpolitical culture is a foreign importation from the neutrals, the neutrals must share the onus. Neutrality means avoidance of political decisions. The neutral is a born Pharisee; like a commission agent, he protests against the barbarism of the Reich and withdraws his own ‘culture.’ ‘It is not virtuous [for the neutral] to stand on both feet. It is virtuous rather to limp on both feet’ (p. 71).
Steding’s book thus conceives the whole of European culture as a gigantic conspiracy against the Reich and its destiny. And this hostility to the Reich is the sickness of European culture. Cultural historians—men like the Swiss Jakob Burckhardt or the Dutchman Huizinga—are enemies; they discuss table manners and the history of the Reich with the same earnestness. Did not Burckhardt reduce the state itself ‘to a mere work of art, a mere neutralizing expression’ by his endless concentration on ‘intimate things, on internal processes,’ rather than on politics (p. 207)? Along with the cultural historians and with Nietzsche and the Scandinavian playwrights, Ibsen and Strindberg, Steding’s hatred is directed particularly against the exponents of dialectical theology (Barth, Overbeck, Thurney-sen, Brunner, Kierkegaard). ‘The Young and Dawes Plans,’ he writes (p. 97), ‘the bank for international settlements and the dialectical theology of Karl Barth are one and the same.’ Such crushing criticism leaves one speechless. After all, not only is the culture of the neutrals dualistic and mediating, it is also deviationist (p. 201). In other words, to be neutral is to deviate from everything that is essential for the Reich.
Only a strong Reich can guarantee the reality of Germany and of Europe, can guarantee ‘that an English consul general will not do as he pleases with a country like Norway’ (p. 269). Only the Reich can restore to science its proper character—objectivity. By ‘objective’ is meant political in character, for only thus does science ‘live from the polis, the state, the Reich’ (p. 299). This Reich, it is true, rests on the tradition of the Holy Roman Empire; as a political reality, however, and not as a cultural idea (p. 350). It is no wonder therefore that Steding relegates Stefan George, and Moeller van den Bruck too, to the philosophy of the Second Reich. They are not sufficiently integrated for the reality of the Third. Even a National Socialist like the psychologist Jung (not to mention Nietzsche) is condemned for the dualism of his thinking (p. 127).
Just what Steding himself means by the Reich is entirely obscure. Since the book was published in 1938, the editor Walter Frank carefully announces in the Preface that Steding ‘is not concerned with the revision of political frontiers but with the revision of spiritual horizons’ (p. xlvii). This obvious distortion, stemming from equally obvious motives, would have been rejected by Steding as intellectual nonsense, of course. It is precisely the incorporation into Germany of Europe, or at least of the ancient territories of the Holy Roman Empire, with which he is supremely concerned.
We thus have one more illustration of the difficulties raised by the concept of the Reich for National Socialist ideology. Racism fares badly in Steding’s book. Though he throws an occasional compliment to the official philosophy, he has nothing but contempt for the anthropologists burrowing in the past in the search for specific racial traits. ‘They who often speak of the folk hate the state; the “politicals” do it just as their opponents who speak of the state and hate the people’ (p. 555). Race is not the creative element; it is only the raw material from which the Reich must be formed.
What is left as justification for the Reich? Not racism, not the idea of the Holy Roman Empire, and certainly not some democratic nonsense like popular sovereignty or self-determination. Only the Reich itself remains. It is its own justification. The philosophical roots of the argument are to be found in the existential philosophy of Heidegger. Transferred to the realm of politics, existentialism argues that power and might are true: power is a sufficient theoretical base for more power. Germany lies in the center, it is potentially the greatest power in Europe, it is well on its way toward becoming the mightiest state. Therefore, it is justified in building the new order. An acute critic has remarked about Steding: ‘From the remains of what, with Heidegger, was still an effective transcendental solipsism, his pupil constructs a national solipsism.’11
Even the ‘national solipsism,’ however, creates difficulties for the National Socialists. This is well illustrated in a recent work, Hegemony: A Book about Leading States, by Heinrich Triepel.12 The book presents a realistic analysis, by a reactionary but by no means National Socialist constitutional lawyer, of the legal and sociological characteristics of hegemony. Hegemony is defined as the leading character of one state against another (p. 343), and thus stands midway between influence and outright domination. Starting with an entirely different approach, Triepel none the less parallels Steding in defining hegemony in straight power terms, stripped of all cultural props. The medieval empire was a dual hegemony; the Third Reich is largely a continuation of the Prussian tradition. Because it is the most powerful state in Europe, the new Germany can legitimately claim still more power.
As a good conservative, steeped in the tradition of German idealism, Triepel must nevertheless seek a moral basis for leadership and hegemony. He finds it in the voluntary consent of the followers (p. 44). Leadership is simply the exercise of ‘energetic but moderate might’ (p. 41); the political leader is merely one among many (p. 16). The phenomenon of leadership and free consent permeates all social and political relations. Triepel’s silence on the racial identification between leader and follower and on the metaphysical qualities of leadership is devastating. He creates a simple equation: hegemony is power. Hence the great value of the book lies in its debunking function. Official National Socialism, with its grotesque metaphysics and its pseudo-anthropology, greeted the work coldly.13
A second, and far more important, ideological prop for the expansionist program of National Socialism is geopolitics. Geopolitics is supposed to be the scientific basis for the concept of living space. The term Lebensraum, as matter of fact, was apparently first used by the father of geopolitics, the geographer Friedrich Ratzel, in a little work with that title published early in the present century. Even with Ratzel, however, this ‘science,’ which he called anthropogeography, was not so much geography as a philosophy of history. Subsequent developments have succeeded in stripping away every scientific element and substituting political arguments, metaphysical considerations, and a lot of meaningless verbiage.
The complete subjugation of political geography to the needs of German imperialism was the work chiefly of two men: Rudolf Kjellen and Karl Haushofer. Kjellen was a Swedish political scientist (died 1922) whose works were widely translated and circulated in Germany. He coined the term geopolitics and made it fashionable. One scholar reports the following story: ‘At the Leipzig fair in the spring of 1924 one could see an effective poster in the exhibition hall of the publishing houses: a hard working man was drilling into a globe lying below his knee and above was the caption, “Political Geography—Good Business.” ’14 Good business not merely for publishers but also for German imperialists! For that poster attests to more than merely the new popular interest in geopolitics. In 1924 Germany overcame the devastating post-war inflation and her imperialists began to put the fashionable new ‘science’ to use. It was in that year, too, that the geopolitical school began to organize into a working group and that the first number of the Zeitschrift für Geopolitik appeared.
The most tireless spokesman of the geopolitical school is Karl Haushofer, professor of geography at the University of Munich, founder of the German Academy, retired major general, world traveler—and teacher and friend of Rudolf Hess. Beginning before the First World War, Haushofer had written a stream of books and articles on frontiers, power and earth, space-conquering powers, the geopolitics of the Pacific, and on general theoretical questions.15 His most popular book is Weltpolitik von Heute, published in 1934 with a dedication to Hess and another friend. The preface defines its purpose as ‘thinking in large spaces.’ The Zeitschrift für Geopolitik is a house organ for Haushofer and his disciples. There is also available to them Raumforschung und Raumordnung, monthly organ of the government agency, Reichstelle für Raumforschung (Federal Bureau for Space Research).
The history of geopolitics has more than passing interest for us because it offers another excellent illustration of the way in which the National Socialists have twisted and altered already existing doctrines to fit them into their own scheme of ideas and actions. They did not invent geopolitics any more than they invented the idea of a grossdeutsche Reich. What they have done is to exploit it far more successfully than earlier German imperialists.
Ratzel coined the term anthropogeography to designate the subject that deals with the natural factors in man’s life. The interest in climate and other geographical factors was always considerable in historical writing. It is very tempting to fall back upon Mother Earth, permanent, stable, unchanging, as the outstanding element in the making of human culture. What Ratzel sought was a ‘mechanical anthropogeography,’16 laying bare the laws regulating the ‘simple relation of the static earth surface and the changing humanity on it.’17 Its main theme is the relation between mobile man and the immobile earth: ‘Life is movement.’18
Two geographical factors, location and space, play a major role in determining the laws of anthropogeography, and both of these factors have a categorical character in National Socialist ideology. Location is by far the more important of the two for Ratzel.19 The term covers the size and form of a given territory, its attributes, such as climate or vegetation, and its relation to neighboring spaces, its separating and connecting properties. Location will determine whether a territory should be on friendly or hostile terms with its neighbors. It helps determine culture: isolated location offers security but also makes for cultural sterility; central location alone makes a strong country most influential; it places a weak country like Germany in mortal danger.20 And the paramount importance of the sea in this connection is obvious.
Though far less significant,21 the concept of space also gives rise to certain important laws. Ratzel lays great stress on the law of the growth of spaces, that is, the trend toward giant empires. Like location, space too is correlated with culture. The smaller the space the more intensive the culture on the one hand, whereas in large spaces culture is slow to penetrate toward the center. Large races with specific characteristics must inhabit large spaces, however, to prevent the inevitable race mixture from corrupting the racial kernel at the center.
Special mention must be made of Ratzel’s idea of the ‘inrooting’ (Einwurzelung) of the people in the soil. In its historical and political implications, this is one of the most significant of the laws regulating the relation between man and the earth. People with lower cultural standards, Ratzel says, are generally far less dependent on the earth than people of higher levels. The more intensive the cultivation (in its broadest sense, including, but extending beyond, mere agricultural cultivation), the more the population becomes ‘inrooted.’
Traditional conceptions of the state are shattered by Ratzel’s anthropogeography. The laws of movement, location, and space cannot be reconciled with the notion of a unified legal and political sovereignty over a specific area. For then space would be nothing more than the object of rule, whereas for Ratzel space and location become the very essence of the state. The union betwen man and the earth is an organic bond;22 not merely an analogy, as in the various biological organic theories of society, but as a real union, a scientific truth. Ratzel’s working out of this theory need not concern us. The absurd lengths to which he went are sufficiently illustrated by one example. To justify the continued existence of Prussia after its territorial mutilation in 1806, he compared the state with organisms of the lower order: only on lower levels of life can the body continue to live even after the destruction of a vital organ.
Of major political significance is the implication of Ratzel’s organic theory for the theory and practices associated with the concept of nationality. A frontier is not an arbitrarily fixed line, but a strip or band marking the meeting between a movement and a counter-movement. It is the result of a long process of ‘inrooting,’ during which space becomes increasingly valuable. A frontier may even form an independent organism within the state. Furthermore, the fundamental law of the growth of spaces—illustrated by the incomparably greater extent of Russia or the British Empire as against Persia or Rome, for example—runs counter to the principles of nationality.23 Even the high seas are subject to this law. The Atlantic has displaced the Mediterranean; some day it may be dethroned in turn.
The policies of nationality are thus regressive. They may be retained only where they can serve as an aid to territorial acquisition. In our day we have developed ‘space-conquering forces’ (raumüberwindende Mächte), a term of Ratzel’s that has become part of the official National Socialist language. One of the great tasks before us is to develop a popular consciousness of large spaces. A people whose horizon remains that of the small space will inevitably decay.
Kjellen24 provides the bridge from Ratzel to National Socialism. He had a knack for popular, concretely documented presentation, which gave him a much more important role in the development of geopolitical ideology. And at one point he makes a significant departure from Ratzel’s analysis: he restores nationality, or rather, he combines the national and territorial elements. Not the nineteenth-century nation, however, but the folk. Nationality, says Kjellen, is the manifestation of the ‘folk individuality’ of the state. The national state is therefore the natural, organic form of the state. Folk and state, organically different, are merged into one union.
For all its ‘empiricism’ and supposed realism, and despite certain important departures, Kjellen’s theory remains basically a re-hash of the organic theory of Ratzel. States, he writes, are ‘super-individual organisms that are as real as individuals, only far bigger and mightier in their developmental processes.’25 The state is a biological phenomenon, a ‘form of life’ (p. 44), The individuality of the state is a natural unity, expressed in the economic field as autarky, demo-graphically as nationality, socially as the solidarity of all groups, and politically as loyalty to the rulers (pp. 142-3).
Anyone can see that Kjellen’s theory is not simple geopolitics, but a composite. It is equally obvious that he has anticipated the National Socialist theory of European expansion. His state is an autarkic economy within which the masses are incorporated under the slogan of a people’s community. It demands unconditional allegiance to the ruling class and it justifies Germany’s expansion and foreign conquests by her central location in Europe and her need for living space. The organic theory stands revealed as pure Machiavellianism. As a class, organic theories of society are absurdities if they are conceived as anything more than analogies. Biological laws are not reproduced in social life. As ideology, however, organic theories can be powerful instruments, for all their absurdity. Kjellen, as we may note finally, insists that political expediency, determined by natural factors, is the sole determinant of a state’s policies (p. 38). Legal and moral reasons have no validity.
Two other names deserve mention in the pre-history of National Socialist geopolitics: “Sir Halford MacKinder and Friedrich Naumann. Their major contribution—one that Haushofer openly recognizes—is the formulation and popularization of the notion of a Central Europe (Mittel Europa). According to Haushofer, MacKinder actually coined the phrase shortly after the turn of the century,26 and stimulated Partsch, the world renowned German geographer, to design a map of Central Europe, made up of Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria-Hungary, and Rumania. In 1919, MacKinder published a book under the title, Democratic Ideas and Realities, urging the Peace Conference to discard sentimental ideas of democracy and to recognize geographical realities. He wanted especially to prevent a joining of the Russian and German spaces, because such a union could rule not only Europe but the entire world.
In Germany, the idea of a Central Europe naturally became very popular during the First World War.
We may mention Paul de Lagarde (Bötticher) 1827-91, professor of oriental languages at Göttingen University. Lagarde was primarily responsible for shaping Rosenberg’s ideology, and Rosenberg frequently acknowledges his indebtedness to him and shares with him a hatred of Catholics and Jews, of popular franchise and enlightenment, and demands the eradication of all Semitic and Roman elements from the German language and culture. Lagarde was also the precursor of the Central Europe concept; he saw Germany’s future in its expansion into Poland and West Russia and advocated a Middle Europe reaching from the mouth of the Ems to the mouth of the Danube, from Memel to Trieste, from Metz to the River Bug.27 Even Rosenberg’s idea of deporting the Jews to Madagascar derives from Lagarde.
Perhaps the chief popularizing agent was Friedrich Naumann’s book, Mitteleuropa, published in 1915.28 Though not a geopolitical treatise properly speaking, the work falls very definitely within the trend we are discussing. Its significance was tremendously enhanced by the position the author occupied in Germany. A member of the Reichstag, Naumann was the founder of the Democratic party in 1918 which framed the Weimar constitution. His great prestige as a ‘democratic’ leader lent a halo of liberalism and democracy to the social imperialism he had learned in his early training under the crudely Anti-Semitic Stöcker.
Naumann’s major proposal was the establishment of a federated superstate (Oberstaat), completely integrated economically and surrounded by a tariff wall (p. 289). It would be called Central Europe. Its spirit would be the spirit of a new Germany (Neudeutsches Wesen), in which all economic activity would be collectively organized. As one justification for his proposal, this liberal democrat alleged the existence of a peculiarly German economic psychology. If a French businessman, he argued, were to receive an order requiring the enlargement of his plant employing fifteen men, he would sub-contract rather than enlarge. And if he did the latter, it would inevitably turn out that he was no real Frenchman but an Alsatian or Swiss. The German, on the other hand, would invariably enlarge his plant in these circumstances. The German businessman is enterprising, scientific in his approach, and disciplined. His workers support him loyally, for are not the German workers the most educated in the world, trained in the trade unions and the Social Democratic party?
English capitalism is doomed. Germany’s time will come. ‘For this our time, Frederick II, Kant, Scharnhorst, Siemens, Krupp, Bismarck, Bebel, Legien, Kirdorf, and Ballin have educated us. For this Fatherland our dead have died in battle. Germany must go forward in this world!’ (p. 113). A new economic era will arise. Hungary will be the granary of Central Europe, and other products will be allocated to each section. Jewish businessmen will play an important role in extending the already predominantly German character of Central European economy. In the end, world power will have been concentrated in a few centers, London, New York, Moscow (or St. Petersburg), and perhaps China or Japan (p. 161). Other states will be mere satellites, reinforcing ‘the leading group to which they belong.’ Today the neutrals are like ‘asteroids or comets’ outside the constellation. They must be drawn in, for there is no place for neutrality in a world of giant sovereigns (p. 172). This is the mission of the new Germany. ‘In this task all economic organizations of entrepreneurs and workers will help us. That will become our political, world-economic socialism’ (p. 197).
All these strains reach their ultimate formulation with Karl Haushofer.29 His ideas can be studied briefly in his most popular work, the book he dedicated to his friend Rudolf Hess, Weltpolitik von Heute. Let us follow them in Haushofer’s own sequence.
To begin with, a German who wishes to understand the geopolitical basis of contemporary world politics must place himself in the center of the ‘folk’ and cultural space. Here Haushofer is of course much closer to Kjellen than to Ratzel. Racial determinants, the ‘racial will,’ are dynamic elements within the ‘static world of international agreements’ (pp. 16-17). But within what ‘folk’ space shall one stand? The Germany of 1932 was the product of Versailles, and the treaty was based on gross geopolitical errors. In fact, geopolitics is one weapon in the fight to correct such errors as the division of Europe into colony-possessing powers in the West, space-possessing powers in the East, and strangulated states in the center.
It was the Versailles Treaty, too, which brought about the autonomous development of America, the weakening of the British Empire, the return of Russia to Asia, and the gradual revival of self-determination in southern and eastern Asia. Ultimate political decisions will be made within these groups, and they will depend upon a clear insight into the relations between power and state. ‘Primal geopolitical drives’ (geopolitische Urtriebe) are at work within this spatial framework, thrusting from the continent to the coast and beyond the coast to the domination of the opposite coast. Ratzel’s law of growing spaces is not limited to continental masses: it also crosses the sea (p. 49).
From the German standpoint, the central space must be Central Europe (Haushofer would prefer the term ‘Inner Europe’ as more precise geopolitically). The first political task is to restore the space of the German Reich. There are five different German spaces: (1) the military space, which in 1934 was even smaller than the territory of the Reich; (2) the territory of the Reich; (3) the corn-pact mass of the German ‘folk’ soil—Germany, the Polish Corridor, the Sudetenland, Upper Silesia, Teschen, Austria, Alsace-Lorraine, and southern Denmark; (4) the sphere of influence of German language and culture; and (5) the independent Dutch-Flemish spaces.
The main powers of the world fall into distinct categories. The fundamental opposition is between the ‘renaissance’ powers, Germany, Italy, and Japan, and the powers of ‘perseverance,’ England and France. The United States, Russia, Brazil, and China operate ‘between the tides’ (p. 76). In addition, there are spaces like India and Mongolia, which possess a future but no present, and like the Baltic sea space, Spain, and Portugal, which are mere remnants of the past. The solution to these oppositions and political conflicts does not lie in internationalism. The League of Nations, the British Commonwealth of Nations, the Federation of Soviet States, Pan-America, Pan-Europe, Pan-Pacific, Pan-Africa—they are all of no avail. An old German proverb says: Wer auf sich selber ruht, steht gut (Self-help is the best help) (p. 105). In 1931, the Sudeten deputy Hans Krebs, writing in a National Socialist publication, attacked Coudenhove-Kalergi’s idea of a Pan-Europe with similar arguments. Against Pan-Europe he sets Central Europe. A federation of Europe within the League framework is incompatible with National Socialist ideas of space and living space.
Turning to immediate practical considerations, Haushofer’s first problem is to work out the spatial margin necessary for a state to live. His solution justifies the destruction of France and England and the incorporation of the smaller states. On the one hand, there is the law of growing spaces. The space of the British Empire has reached its maximum and therefore decay is inevitable. France has lost the will to live, for a country that has begun to surrender is through (pp. 110-11). On the other hand, there is a minimum spatial limit. Therefore small states must be incorporated into larger spaces. Two exceptions—the Vatican City and Switzerland—are allowed because of their long tradition of independence.
The category of great power must be replaced by world power. A great power is determined solely by the ‘will to power’—otherwise China and Brazil would be great powers. It was a category of the era of the ‘concert of powers,’ when the great powers cooperated in dividing up the world among themselves (p. 129). Now that co-operation has given way to antagonism, world powers have become geopolitically decisive. Since Germany has not yet attained the status of a world power, it need not be concerned with the frictions between the powers. Germany must work carefully, utilizing the existing antagonisms by ‘a surprisingly decisive interference of counsel and action’: everything will fall into the lap of him who waits (p. 135). This analysis of Germany’s role in the struggle of world powers is the kernel of the book, according to Haushofer.
A further invaluable weapon in Germany’s struggle for living space is racism, and Haushofer presents an amazingly frank analysis. ‘Master races’ must remain pure; race mixture has brought about the decay of many a great empire (p. 151). France, for example, carries the seeds of its own destruction. Among non-Germanic people, significantly enough, race and class become synonymous and it is essential to prevent the rise of lower classes and races to the level of the master race.
Today we see the suppression of racial minorities everywhere—a golden opportunity for political and propagandist manipulation of the slogan of self-determination. ‘A far-seeing policy opens enormous possibilities to us . . . if we esteem the principle of self-determination of the large and small peoples . . . with the slogan “honor, freedom, equality” . . . The condition, however, is superior knowledge of the state of pressure upon the people [Volksdruckverhältnisse] and of the forms of political domination throughout the world, which long ago became a unified power field’ and within which nothing can happen without producing repercussions elsewhere (p. 152). Nothing could be more frank. Self-determination is merely a weapon. Take advantage of every friction growing out of the minority problem. Stir up national and racial conflicts where you can. Every conflict will play into the hands of Germany, the new self-appointed guardian of honor, freedom, and equality all over the world.
Ethical and military considerations are weapons too. Germany has the right to base its policy on the immorality of territorial acquisitions by other powers. They were robberies concealed and justified by international law. The mandates, for example, were nothing other than ‘spatial fraud’ (p. 155). The redistribution of space will be accomplished in new and entirely different ways. Germany will make use of ‘spiritual warfare’ (propaganda); new military techniques including the use of aeroplanes and tanks as loosening (auflockernde) forces against both troops and civilians; and morale-destroying lightning blows by small highly specialized bodies of soldiers; supplementary weapons like the boycott now practiced in India and China and capable of greatly intensified force if co-ordinated into the National Socialist movement. By such means, ‘culture-people without colonies’ may even be able to acquire tropical territories without bloodshed (pp. 158-9). Frontiers are not ‘soulless lines’—they are organisms and they too will be changed at will.
Germany’s world mission can be understood only in terms of the long-term aims of the world powers.30 Great Britain’s long-term aim is merely conservation of what she now possesses. The British Empire will therefore be dismembered. France, too, will fall. Only Russia and the United States, Japan and Germany, and, to a lesser extent, Italy will remain as world powers. Just what Germany’s short-term aims are is never clearly revealed, but it is not hard to deduce them from the rest of the discussion.
One example will suffice to illustrate the hold of geopolitics in official German circles (especially in the army and navy). ‘Today we must choose,’ wrote Alfred Rosenberg in 1927, ‘between Crusade politics and space politics; between world imperialism and the racial will of the state; between Barbarossa and Henry the Lion; between the Stresemann-League of Nations and the racial National Socialist Germanic state.’31 It is geopolitics versus medieval universalism as the base of the new Reich.
The most outspoken representative of geopolitics mixed with racism is the famous Ewald Banse, who quite naively stated the need for imperialistic war and, from geography, racism, military science, and the Reich idea, elaborated Wehrwissenschaft as that academic discipline which ‘is the systematic application of every branch of human thought and human endeavor to the end of increasing the defensive strength of our people.’32 This new science receives the rank of a ‘national philosophy.’ In a little-known book33 written for the layman, Banse analyzed the whole world, each country in turn, its geography, its ‘blood and character,’ its political organization, according to the tenets of geopolitics of learning and utilizing every conflict of whatever nature in each part of the world for German aims.
Much of the general popularity of geopolitics can be found in the same element that underlies the success of any pseudo-scientific theory of society or politics: the possibility of attributing all evils to a single and seemingly objective factor. In Hans Grimm’s novel, Volk ohne Raum (A People without Space), for example, we are given a popular emotionalized treatment of geopolitics.34 The entire 1200 pages constitute one long outcry against British power and a preparation for German imperialist expansion. This is an adequate description of Haushofer’s book, too. In one map (p. 120), England is depicted as an enormous spider seated in the British Isles and sucking up blood from all corners of the earth. Toward Russia, on the other hand, Haushofer is rather ambivalent. He speaks of Germany squeezed between France and the Soviet Union. Yet the reference to MacKinder’s notion of the Russo-German space as the geographical pivot of history could equally be preparation for the signing of the non-aggression pact or for war against Russia.
In the final analysis, geopolitics is nothing but the ideology of imperialist expansion. What little intelligible geography it has retained, as in the arguments for certain frontier rectifications, is neither new nor particularly important within the whole structure. The bulk of geopolitics is a hodgepodge of ethical, military, economic, racial, demographic, historical, and political considerations. It offers a fine illustration of the perversion of genuine scientific considerations in the interests of National Socialist imperialism.
As a scientific justification for expansion, geopolitics is nonsense, of course.35 It could have validity only if the entire world were centered around one focal location. Since more than one central location does in fact exist, however, how do we determine which shall swallow which? Why should Alsace-Lorraine be incorporated into Germany rather than have France swallow Germany up to the Rhine? Should Germany or the Soviet Union incorporate Poland? Or to put it more generally, from the argument that the frontier is a band or organism and not a line, how does one determine in whose favor the frontier should be rectified? Canada or the United States? The United States or Mexico? Obviously, the answer does not lie in geography—it lies in power.
Both Germany and Italy have made extensive use of a pro-natalist population policy as a further basis for their claim for more living space. The very success of the policy—despite the difficulty in obtaining official statements regarding its purpose, especially for Germany, birth rate statistics leave no doubt as to its success35—at once exposes the fraudulent nature of the claim, however. In his reply to President Roosevelt, Hitler complained bitterly about the overcrowded population of countries without living space. Yet his regime moved heaven and earth to increase the size of the German population.
Republican Germany had already taken steps to increase the birth rate. Article 119 of the Weimar constitution promised special protection to large families. Private organizations like the League of Large Families (founded in 1919) put constant pressure on the legislature. Wage differentials based on family status were universal for civil service employees and common among some of the salaried employees. On the other hand, the manual workers’ unions opposed family allowances partly for ideological reasons (desire for a class wage) and partly from fear lest the differential drive heads of families out of jobs. Birth-control information was widely disseminated. Fifteen organizations were active in this field and many of the sick funds gave their members advice on contraceptives.36 Leniency by the courts, especially in the Protestant regions, helped bring the number of abortions to an estimated 800,000-1,000,000 yearly. In general, pro-natalism was very much on the defensive under Weimar.
The National Socialists lost little time in reversing the picture. Minister of the Interior Frick announced the change in a speech in June 1933.37 Birth-control centers were closed, leniency toward abortion was brought to a sharp halt, and the advertising of contraceptives stopped.38 The party took over the League of Large Families, making it a section of the race-policy department. It now has a membership of some 300,000 families. By a law of 1 June 1933 (taking effect within two months), couples about to marry could obtain interest-free loans up to 1,000 marks if they fulfilled certain conditions. They must be politically reliable and racially, physically, and morally eligible citizens. The bride must have been gainfully employed for at least six months during the two years preceding marriage. She must cease working and must pledge not to take another job unless her husband is unable to support the family. The loans are given in the form of coupons to be used in purchasing furniture and household equipment and are to be repaid in small monthly instalments over a period of eight years. One-quarter of the loan is cancelled at the birth of each child. The purposes of the law are clear from its provisions: reduction of unemployment by eliminating married women whose husbands are employed (a continuation of the reactionary policy introduced over widespread protest toward the end of the Republic), and stimulation of the birth rate.
As the military preparedness program brought full employment in its wake, the program of stimulation of marriages and large families was directed more and more exclusively toward pro-natalism. By act of 3 November 1937, the requirement that women who receive marriage loans cease working was dropped. A measure adopted about one month earlier provided that the money turned back in repayment of the loans be used to provide special allowances and grants to families with dependent children, and particularly as settlement grants to build up the rural population. Other measures discriminated in favor of large famiiles in income tax rates and in various other ways.
National Socialist pro-natalism has undoubtedly been successful. By the end of 1938 there had been 1, 121,707 marriage loans granted and 980,365 cancellations because of births.39 These stimulants together with a general economic improvement pushed the birth rate up, though it is impossible to say which factor played the more important part.
Now what does the demand for an ‘adequate space for the population’ really mean? Its supposed scientific basis is virtually nonexistent.40 It would be absurd to argue that because Germany (including Danzig and the Sudetenland) has 4 per cent of the world population, her 0.5 per cent of the world area should be increased to a corresponding 4 per cent. There are tremendous variations in the value of different sections of the earth. Furthermore, an industrial nation may need less territory than an agricultural or nomadic country. If the argument is that a nation requires enough space to overcome structural employment, Germany has herself answered by attaining full employment at a time when many ‘have’ nations were unable to do so. And even ascribing Germany’s success to the temporary panacea of armaments and war does not save the population argument. Colonies are notoriously unfit for large-scale settlement. Eastern and southeastern Europe is overcrowded so that German settlement there is possible only by driving out the present inhabitants. What is really responsible for overpopulation is a non-or mal-functioning economic system. Therefore it can be overcome only by a functioning international division of labor, not by acquisition of more territory. To hold overpopulation responsible for unemployment is sheer demagogy designed to conceal the inner antagonisms produced by capitalism.
The inescapable conclusion is that regarding population the living-space doctrine has a merely ideological function in the interest of imperialism. A comparison with earlier population theories is very revealing. The early nineteenth-century policy was dominated by a single fear, succinctly expressed by the Prince of Oettingen-Wallerstein before the Bavarian Second Chamber in 1834: ‘One must close the road to revolution by making it difficult for those without property to marry.’41 By a series of acts (1828, 1833, 1852), the duchy of Württemberg required governmental permission for marriage and enumerated a long list of prohibitions. This marked a sharp reversal from early mercantilism, which had repealed marriage restrictions and even encouraged illegitimate children in order to build up the labor supply. Many other states, including Bavaria, followed the example of Württemberg.
One writer in 1827 even went so far as to make the cynical proposal that all young men be required to submit to infibulation, the metal rings preventing sexual intercourse not to be removed until the man could prove his ability to support a wife and children.42 Even the famous liberal constitutionalist Robert von Mohl found it necessary to argue against unrestricted marriages, though he himself included marriage among the original rights of man.43 Others proposed’ measures discriminating against illegitimate children or requiring various financial guarantees for permission to marry.44 Anything to prevent a further growth of the population and its supposed threat to the safety of the ruling classes.
How different is National Socialism’s technique. By its racial imperialism, it seeks to incorporate the masses into the new authoritarian structure of society, promising them a share in the coming profits of world conquest. The living-space doctrine prepares the way ideologically, while the population policy prepares the way materially by increasing the size of the master race.
The ideology of expansion is not complete with tradition, geopolitics, and pro-natalism. A new international law is needed too; more correctly, perhaps, a new one at each stage in international relations. National Socialism has made many contributions to international law, to the surprise of those who believe that National Socialist political theory is simply state absolutism. Why not, after all? National Socialism has, prior to 1933, always utilized liberal democratic forms where they could be useful in attaining certain objectives. Before seizing power, did not the National Socialists take full advantage of civil rights, especially freedom of the press and of parliamentary government? After coming to power, having destroyed civil rights at home, they could still make use of international law in their dealings with the outside world. And they were nothing if not frank. One National Socialist international lawyer wrote: Tor specific reasons, international lawyers of repute should prove that the old concept of international law is compatible with the National Socialist philosophy of life.’ ‘At present,’ he continued, ‘Germany must still try, using international law among other means, to make certain that the dictates imposed upon her give way to a better order.’45 What is surprising is that outside Germany, especially in England, experts in international law were seemingly unaware of the game that was being played.
The alternative for the National Socialists would have been to revive the old Prussian doctrine of Philipp and Andreas Zorn, that international law does not exist, that the body of alleged international law is merely external state law subject to the sovereign power of the state. Alternatively, they might fall back on the clausula rebus sic stantibus: fundamentally changed circumstances allow a country to withdraw from all existing international obligations. One attempt was actually made in this direction by a National Socialist lawyer named Schecher.46 He undertook to prove that the National Socialist philosophy inevitably gave the internal law of the state unlimited precedence over international law. The latter is valid only in so far as it forms part of the domestic legal system, and the state alone determines that. The official theorists were much more clever than Schecher, and his views have been rejected almost unanimously.
Equally unsuccessful was the notion of geo-jurisprudence,47 worth mentioning because it has been strongly supported by Haushofer. Geo-jurisprudence seeks to reformulate international law in terms of vassals, dependencies, protectorates, and federations worked out on geopolitical principles. The crux of the argument is that space can make juristic independence meaningless. When one can shoot clear across a state, Austria or Switzerland for example, the independence of such a state has no meaning. On the other hand, Danzig, Memel, the Saar, and even the southwestern neck of Bavaria are spatially insecure for the same reason and need added protection. (The only comment necessary is that this is a military argument, with space drawn in as a blind.)
The use of international law to overcome the ‘dictates imposed upon’ Germany, to break the ‘fetters of Versailles,’ is, then, officially approved. Germany must regain equality with other great powers by re-arming, militarizing the Rhineland, removing ‘colonial injustice’ and ‘territorial shame.’ That is what most German international lawyers have been saying ever since the end of the First World War, as a matter of fact. ‘Wiping out the shame of Versailles’ was a stock phrase in the Weimar Republic. They always believed that the Versailles Treaty was invalid because it was a dictated peace, arguing either on the analogy of civil law, where contracts made under duress are null and void, or by invoking the clausula rebus sic stantibus, or by charging non-fulfilment of the promises of the Fourteen Points and of Lansing’s note of 5 November 1918. Others said that the Treaty ran counter to the eternal ideas of justice. After Hitler took power, of course, the wraps were taken off and the attack gained enormously in vigor and vituperation.48 The overwhelming majority of the German people unquestionably supported the revisionist demands, provided that they could be achieved peaceably.
The leading voice in the Nationalist Socialist revisionist chorus is Carl Schmitt’s.49 As the leitmotif he introduces natural law, a concept that the National Socialists rigorously excluded from their domestic law. ‘It is not man’s will and man’s rules,’ writes a colleague of Schmitt’s, ‘but nature which is man’s law and the limit of his powers.’50 The term ‘natural law’ is generally avoided for rather obvious reasons, but the insistence upon justice and morality and the very form of the argument is nothing but the rationalistic natural law that goes back to Grotius.
The rationalist element is dressed in the terminology of irrationalism.51 Not man but the community is placed in the center of the system. Since the essence of the community is to prevent one member from prevailing over another, and since international society is a community, the argument runs, international inequality violates the essence of international law. Germany rightly claims her rights to equality. The trick and the sham of the argument lie in the word equality. There can be no quarrel with the argument that by their very sovereignty all states are equals. International law could not exist without recognizing this principle, provided equality is understood as a juristic category. In the same way, equality of all men in our legal system means legal equality, that is, the illegality of slavery and so forth. The National Socialists, however, do not stop with this formal concept. For them, equality also means the right of each state to adequate living space. It has all sorts of moral and political implications.52 Carl Schmitt enumerates a whole catalogue of rights, such as the eternal right to existence, self-determination, defense, and so on.53
The whole chain of reasoning is neither very original nor essentially valid. Its exponents admit that they are wiping out the boundary between ethics and law.54 If we agree with a recent American work that holds this to be progress,55 then we can refute the National Socialists in political or ethical terms, not in terms of law. However, if we retain the traditional separation between law and morals as essential,*—as I do—the purely arbitrary character of the reasoning becomes clear. Perhaps Germany should have been allowed to rearm, militarize the Rhineland, and occupy the Corridor and Danzig. That is not the question. To justify these acts by international law makes law a mere prostitute of politics.
The argument unquestionably has a popular appeal. It duped the civilized world quite successfully. The National Socialist propaganda machine knew how to get the writings of its international lawyers into respectable foreign periodicals. That helped. Their trick of excluding Soviet Russia from the international community helped too. They maintained that membership in the international community requires homogeneity, a number of common features and beliefs.56 This argument is obviously borrowed from the doctrine that a democracy can function only if there is a certain degree of homogeneity within its borders.57 Just what the elements of this international homogeneity are is never made clear. What is made crystal clear is the fact that the Soviet Union shares none of the features of the civilized world, and so stands outside the pale of international law.58
The excommunication of Soviet Russia was decreed by Hitler in his speech to the 1936 party congress. That speech brought a flood of literature in its wake.59 Absurd as the arguments are, they were an unquestioned aid to the success of National Socialist foreign policy. Statesmen in parliaments and in the League loudly denounced the militarization of the Rhine and the introduction of universal conscription in Germany. These denunciations did not come from the heart, however, and were not followed by action. Neither British labor nor liberals or appeasers denied the validity of the German claims.
In other situations, notably on the neutrality question, the blending of law and ethics led to the wrong solution. Then the National Socialists reverted to strict traditionalism. Recently English and American international lawyers have revived the medieval and early liberal concept of a just war and they separate the rights and duties of neutral states according to the character of the war. Perhaps the best expression of this view was given by the then Attorney-General, Robert H. Jackson, in his address before the International Bar Association on 27 March 1941. Mr. Jackson attacked those who have ‘not caught up with this century which, by its League of Nations Covenant with sanctions against aggressors, the Kellogg-Briand treaty for renunciation of war as an instrument of policy, and Argentine Anti-War treaty, swept away the nineteenth-century basis for contending that all wars are alike and all warriors entitled to like treatment.’60 Neutrals must assist those nations who are fighting to ward off aggression—a just war. In the same vein, there is a considerable body of literature holding that neutrals may discriminate against any nation violating the Kellogg-Briand pact. Two important contributions in the 1936 British Yearbook of International Law, for example, go even further.61
This new theory, especially in the Jackson formulation, ought to be quite acceptable to German philosophy of law. Yet they attack it, invoking the oldest and most rationalistic arguments in existence. The same Carl Schmitt who invented ‘thinking in concrete words,’ to replace abstract, rationalistic thought, has devoted many articles to combating the new theory of war and neutrality. He denies the distinction between just and unjust wars, and that neutrality can be ‘halved.’62 Either war is still a legal institution, he argues, in which case preference for either side on the part of a neutral makes it a belligerent; or war is simply a police measure taken by some super-national agency.
German lawyers maintain further that the English declaration of war on Germany violated the League Covenant and that the Kellogg-Briand pact is rendered invalid by the many reservations that destroy its universality.63 No legal basis exists, therefore, for discrimination against Germany. It is with great satisfaction that they cite the views of Borchard and Lage on the British reservations to the Kellogg-Briand pact.64 We might note, finally, that the opposing view has not won universal approval in the United States by any means. In a lengthy and widely discussed communication to The New York Times, for example, Hyde and Jessup maintained that the repeal of the old Neutrality Act was unneutral and violated the principle of impartiality.65
While the Germans were developing their new theories of international law, the French and British governments destroyed the League of Nations. In a speech on 10 October 1936, Leopold II of Belgium announced the severance of ‘one-sided’ obligations and the adoption of a policy of absolute neutrality patterned after the Dutch and Swiss models. English public opinion clearly recognized this as the death blow to collective security. But at least one English international lawyer was sufficiently pleased to indicate his approval in a German journal to which he contributed frequently.66 England, he thought, would still fight to maintain Dutch and Belgian independence—not for the sake of international law or the League of Nations, however, but solely to protect the interests of the empire. He was equally confident that Britain would not take part in any conflict arising out of the Franco-Soviet pact.
Elsewhere on the continent we find Switzerland—never too friendly to the League and partly exempt from the obligations of the Covenant after the London declaration of 13 February 1920—returning to a position of absolute neutrality on 22 December 1937/14 May 1938. A similar development took place in Scandinavia.67
German theory had scored another victory, not on its merits but for reasons of political expediency. It goes without saying that the neutral states were not the beneficiaries, except perhaps Sweden and Switzerland for a brief time. The German attack on the theory of just war and discriminatory neutrality was nothing more than part of the preparation for the new World War.
With the coming of the present war, however, a completely new pattern of international law has been developed: the Germanic Monroe Doctrine. Geopolitics and international law have been joined.
The ‘large space’ theory need not necessarily bring about a transformation of accepted international law. If one holds that states are the sole subjects of international relations, it does not matter whether the subjects are small- or large-space states, whether they give themselves the fancy title of Reich or remain content with mere ‘state.’ That is still the view of many German international lawyers.68 But the dominant school has abandoned both traditional concepts, state and international law. One writer posed the problem this way: ‘If the development really tends toward large spaces, is “international law” then that concerned with the relation between the large spaces or is it the law of the free people living in one common large space?’69 The very framing of the question reveals the basic motive. It not only stamps Poles, Czechs, Dutch, Belgians, and Jews as ‘free’ people, but it also justifies the hierarchy of races within the German realm by a body of rules, called international law but in fact nothing other than the law governing the empire. In other words, the relation of individual states to one another no longer comes within the scope of international law. On the contrary, the sanctity of international law is rejected as applying only to the position within each of the empires.70
This scholastic strategy has still further consequences. The trend toward large spaces, conceived by Ratzel merely as a geographical phenomenon, now becomes an historico-political process. Large-space economics precedes large-space politics. Large spaces have been made mandatory, it is argued, by the trustification, monopolization, electrification, and rationalization of German industry.71 The integrating function of technology is not seen within the framework of a program of territorial division of labor but within a program of territorial expansion great enough to absorb the products of the economic giants. The intrinsic connection between a monopolistic economy and territorial conquest stands fully revealed.
Traditional international law is condemned as the creation of Jews72 and as a cloak for British imperialism. Space must become the primary basis of international order73—in other words, a return of regionalist ideas. It is National Socialist regionalism against the universalist international law of British imperialism and interventionism. ‘Behind the façade of general norms [of international law] lies, in reality, the system of Anglo-Saxon world imperialism.’74 Universalism works on the assumption that the equality of all this is implied in the very notion of sovereignty. Since states no longer stand in the center of international law, the ideas of state sovereignty and state equality must fall. Universalism must be replaced by thinking in ‘concrete orders’ and the most concrete of all orders existing is the grossdeutsche Reich. Steding’s book comes close to this conception, and, though it has found few other echoes in Germany, the National Socialist international lawyers have given it much attention.75
As precedents for their new regionalism, the Germans point to such spatial consequences of modern warfare as the idea of danger zones expressed in the American Neutrality Act and of security zones in the Panama Convention of 3 October 1939. In the German view, the former is particularly significant because it abandons the freedom of the seas, the basic principle of international universalism, and substitutes the principle of zones. Similarly, the three-hundred-mile zone proclaimed in the Panama Convention is regarded as a necessary consequence of the large-space idea underlying the Monroe Doctrine, as irreconcilable with neutrality.76 German theorists are gleeful over the new elaboration of the Monroe Doctrine into Pan-Americanism. ‘This principle of order,’ writes one, ‘has been declared valid for the whole world.’77 After all, it was an American expert, Quincy Wright, who said of the Havana Pact: ‘Whereas formerly the Monroe doctrine dealt only with land areas in the Western hemisphere, it is now proposed to extend it to the seas. Formerly the Monroe Doctrine was linked with the general assertion of the freedom of the seas, but in its new form, it has some resemblance to the doctrine of mare clausum by Spain and Portugal in the sixteenth century against which Grotius launched the principle of mare liberum.’78 That, National Socialists claim, is identical with the basic idea of the German-Italian-Japanese pact of 27 October 1939.
German doctrine thus contrasts two approaches: the regional, anti-universalist space principle and the universalist British principle of securing the life lines of the empire in every part of the world. The Monroe Doctrine becomes ‘the most successful example of a large-scale principle in international law.’79 Arguing that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, Ribbentrop made good use of the Monroe Doctrine in replying on 1 July 1940 to Secretary Hull’s warning that the United States cannot ‘acquiesce in any attempt to transfer any geographic region of the Western Hemisphere from one non-American power to another non-American power.’80 Ribbentrop first denied the validity of such an interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine, and then closed with the following: ‘The government of the Reich would like to take this opportunity to point out that, as a matter of principle, non-interference by European states in the affairs of the American continent cannot be justified unless the American states, for their part, likewise refrain from interference in the affairs of the European continent.’
Ever since the first Hague Peace Conference of 1909, the United States has insisted that the Monroe Doctrine occupies an exceptional position.81 American jurists have always questioned whether it may properly be classed as international law at all. They have preferred to regard it as an expression of the right to self-defense, in no way conflicting with the universality of international law. In German hands, the exception now becomes the rule. There is no longer one international law but as many as there are empires, that is, large spaces. The grossdeutsche Reich is the creator of its own international law for its own space. Interventionists must keep their hands off.
The postulates of the Germanic Monroe Doctrine seem convincing at first sight. Hardly any other ideological element is held in such profound contempt in our civilization as international law. Every generation has seen it break down as an instrument for organizing peace, and a theory that disposes of its universalist claims has the obvious advantage of appearing to be realistic. The fallacy should be equally obvious, however. To abandon universalism because of its failures is like rejecting civil rights because they help legitimize and veil class exploitation, or democracy because it conceals boss control, or Christianity because churches have corrupted Christian morals. Faced with a corrupt administration of justice, the reasonable person does not demand a return to the war of each against all, but fights for an honest system. Likewise, when we have shown that international law has been misused for imperialistic aims, our task has begun, not ended. We must fight against imperialism.
That what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander is, indeed, what we understand by justice. But are the sauces really identical? No one can deny that the Monroe Doctrine was once an ideological basis for American imperialism. In his presidential message of 1904, Theodore Roosevelt claimed for the United States the position of supreme arbiter for the whole American continent. Frequent intervention, especially in the Caribbean, has made the doctrine unpopular in Latin American countries. With the administration of Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, however, the Monroe Doctrine began to lose its interventionist and imperialistic sting, and during the present Roosevelt administration it is being merged with the principle of Pan-American solidarity. Secretary of State Hull formulated the new conception in his press release commenting on the exchange of notes with the German government:
It [the Monroe Doctrine] contains within it not the slightest vestige of any implication, much less assumption, of hegemony on the part of the United States. It never has resembled and it does not today resemble policies which appear to be similar to the Monroe Doctrine, but which, instead of resting on the . . . respect for existing sovereignties, seem to be only a pretext for the carrying out of conquest by the sword . . . and of complete economic and political domination by certain powers.82
We may be readily prepared to admit that Pan-American solidarity is not merely a lofty ideal. Nevertheless, economic penetration of a country is still very different from complete political and economic control by another nation. The resistance of a number of Latin American countries to American leadership at all the recent hemispheric conferences offers ample proof. Once the United States fully understands Pan-American solidarity, she will realize that it must be rooted in co-operation among large masses of workers, peasants, and middle classes, and not merely in dealings with Latin-American ruling groups, ready to ally themselves with a great power willing to guarantee their political status, prerogatives, and luxuries. Solidarity between the governments must be cemented by a solidarity of the peoples. That is America’s greatest political task. And even in its present rudimentary form, Pan-Americanism is utterly different from the Germanic concept of a Monroe Doctrine. The American basis is democratic consent by sovereign states; Germany knows nothing but conquest and domination.
At first sight, one might suppose that there would be no place for the racial theory in the large space doctrine of international law. It is precisely here, however, that the concepts of Reich and race merge.
There is a popular notion that the National Socialist insistence on a racial law is mere ideology with practical consequences only for the Jews, that the German practice of international law operates with the old concepts. A similar idea is widely held about German political theory. Both are dead wrong. The decline of the state in domestic as well as international law is not mere ideology; it expresses a major practical trend. We have already seen that Carl Schmitt and his followers refuse to call the legal relations between the rival empires international law but restrict that term to the law between the racial groups within each empire. This theory, in other words, takes the denial of the state and of state sovereignty seriously. The ideological aim is clearly to give the German solution of the problem of racial minorities the sanctity of international law. The main political consequence is the abandonment of the principle of minority protection for the so-called Volksgruppenrecht, the law of ‘folk groups.’
The way religious, national, racial, and cultural minorities are treated can be taken as an index of the moral and cultural level of a state. It became evident during the Paris Peace Conference that the Wilsonian principle of self-determination, by itself, was not sufficient to solve this most pressing of European problems. Military, economic, geographic, and historical considerations interfered. Minorities remained. Their protection could not be left to the discretion of the states in which they lived. The framers of the Treaty of Versailles and of the League of Nations Covenant therefore established a system of international regulations under the guardianship of the League. As a matter of fact, provision for international protection first appeared in the treaty concluded by the Allied and Associated Powers with Poland, and this agreement served as a model for all other eastern European states, who had to accept similar obligations before they could gain admission to the League.
The idea of minority protection reflects the best heritage of liberalism.83 The legal and political equality of all citizens is guaranteed ‘without distinction as to birth, nationality, language, race, or religion.’ There shall be unrestricted use of any language in private life and adequate facilities for its use in the law courts. Wherever a minority constitutes ‘a considerable proportion of the inhabitants,’ the state is obliged to provide elementary education in the language of the minority and to defray the cost of educational, religious, and welfare services. At their own expense, minorities may establish and conduct their own schools and other social and cultural institutions. Freedom of worship must be unrestricted. Disputes could be brought before the League and ultimately to the World Court at the Hague.
The minority treaties thus aimed primarily at equality and only secondarily at the protection of any specific national character and culture. The chief practical difficulty in carrying out their provisions was that the minorities had no collective rights, and could not act as the guardians of their own interests. At its best, therefore, international protection was not really the protection of a national minority as such, but of each of its members.84 Moreover, the League too often found it expedient to side with the sovereign states. Even so brutal an action as the Polish punitive expedition against the Ukrainians in eastern Galicia, the aftermath of which I had the opportunity of witnessing personally, did not evoke serious League protests. In the final analysis, legal protection by treaty was no more successful than the efforts by the minorities to organize and hold annual conferences in all European countries except Soviet Russia. The effort broke down completely with the decline of the League, and its underlying principles were finally abandoned by the British government during the Sudeten crisis of September 1938.
Needless to say, National Socialist theory and practice have a completely new approach—the folk group law.85 Its aims may be summarized by contrasting them with the abortive pattern of international minority protection.
INTERNATIONAL MINORITY PROTECTION |
THE FOLK GROUP LAW |
1. Aims at the equality of all members of the minorities with other citizens; |
1. Aims at differentiating the political and legal status of each group according to its specific character; |
2. protects minorities by an international guarantee; |
2. anchors the protection solely in the mother country; |
3. is individualistic in that it does not recognize minorities as legal entities but recognizes the individual rights of members of the group; |
3. recognizes the group as an entity and does not recognize individual rights of its members; |
4. sees the determinant character of a minority in an objective factor (race, religion, language) or in the subjective factor of the conscious adherence of individuals to a group. |
4. sees the determinant character of the folk group in the objective factor of race or the subjective factor and in the acceptance of the member by the group. |
The National Socialist rejection of egalitarianism is unquestionably a backward step, a denial of the very principle that has distinguished Western civilization from preceding societies. The National Socialists seize upon the obvious inadequacy of mere legal and constitutional equality, and charge that formal equality tends only to conceal socio-economic privilege and exploitation. We must concede some justice to their accusations. The ‘concrete personality’ of a folk group must certainly be taken into account. Legislators and governments must consider the actual economic, cultural, and social situation of each minority, without, however, sacrificing the basic principle of legal and constitutional equality. The idea of the folk group might imply, furthermore, the right of the minority to appear before national and international tribunals as counsel for its members or even on behalf of the group as whole. And there is the characteristic trick of every National Socialist criticism of traditional Western conceptions. For they make no attempt to transform the socio-economic structure so as to make the formal equality real. Instead, they use a legitimate critique to abolish even legal equality. This technique characterizes the whole conceptual and intellectual framework of National Socialism. In their hands, the ‘concrete personality’ of the folk group really means differentiation among the groups so as to play one off against the other. The conqueror imposes a hierarchy of races. The folk-group idea is nothing but a device to hold some groups down while inviting others to share in the spoils of the conquest.
The abandonment of international guarantees and the substitution of protection from the mother country were accepted by Lord Runciman and Neville Chamberlain in the sinister autumn days of 1938.86 It was a crime against international law and minority protection, though an inevitable consequence of the collapse of the League. Were it only a temporary measure, the loss of rights by minorities might be accepted without great objection. National Socialism, however, considers the new system to be the permanent solution. Carl Schmitt denies the very existence of international law among the rival empires. Hasselblatt, who had the greatest share in drafting the proposals of the Sudetendeutsche party, calls his draft bill of 27 April 1937 ‘inner state international law.’87 We are clearly faced with one of the most ominous aspects of the new German theory. Acceptance of the principle that the mother country is the political guardian of the minorities means not only the rejection of rational international relations but also the end of internal unity in every state having sizable minorities. It makes the mother people the arbiter of disputes between the state and the minorities living therein. Instead of intervention by the international community based on rational norms and procedures, the National Socialists demand the arbitrary intervention of the mother state—racial imperialism, in other words. The alleged racial ties shall be stronger than juristic or political allegiance. Descent takes precedence over citizenship. Racial Germans throughout the world remain Germans, members of the folk group, subject to its law. The fifth column is elevated to an institution. (Minority groups inside Germany are the exception, of course.)
Recognition of the racial German group as a corporation under public law is coupled with the demand for full autonomy and an equal share in the government. That was the explicit meaning of the Sudetendeutsche party proposals of 27 April 1937.88 The six bills they introduced, especially the draft penal statute against the ‘misuse of denationalization,’ subjected the Czechoslovak state to the pressure of its German minority. The Runciman proposals went still further and actually removed the Germans from Czechoslovakian sovereignty.89 Recognition of the minority as a public corporation, as the Germans understand it and have applied it in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Rumania,90 thus creates a state within a state and exempts the German group from the sovereignty of the state.
In the Netherlands, Dutch penal law and administration have been replaced by German law in all cases of crimes committed by Germans, former German citizens, or citizens of the protectorates of Bohemia and Moravia.91 German penal law also applies to anyone who commits a crime against ‘the grossdeutsche Reich, the German people, the National Socialist party, its groupings or affiliated organizations,’ against a German citizen, against anyone employed by the Reich or in the service of German authorities; or if the crime is committed in buildings and plants serving the Reich, the party, and so on.
It might be argued that the regulations for Holland are special measures originating in the harsh conditions of occupation. Unfortunately, identical provisions exist for the protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia,92 and these areas are not occupied zones, but, so we are led to believe, ‘a dependent, original territory within the grossdeutsche Reich created solely by the will of the Leader.’93 The constitutional basis derives from Hitler’s edict of 16 March 1939. The protectorate is thus not the successor to the Czechoslovak Republic and its pre-incorporation law is not valid as part of Czechoslovakian law. Of course, the Leader has left intact that body of law which does not ‘contradict the essence of the assumption of protection by the deutsche Reich.’ Nevertheless, the exemptions granted to Germans in the protectorate far exceed the infamous capitulations, the privileges enjoyed by foreigners in the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, China, and Morocco.94
Hitler’s edict (article 11, section 1) makes ‘every folk-German inhabitant of the protectorate’ a German citizen and subject to the German administration of justice exclusively. The penal system has been set up by a series of decrees, the aim of which is not to protect the folk-German groups but rather ‘to bring the Germans in the protectorate into a close and direct relation with the Reich, and thereby to strengthen the development of their racial characteristics.’95 A completely German administration of justice has been created, which is simply a copy of the system prevailing in the Reich itself.
The German civil judiciary has jurisdiction over all Germans, whether they are plaintiffs or defendants. By a significant fiction, all partnerships, limited liability companies, joint stock corporations, foundations, and institutions are classed as German citizens if their central office is in the Reich and sometimes even if their headquarters are in the protectorate. German courts have jurisdiction in all marital disputes if the wife is a racial German, even if the husband is a citizen of the protectorate. Only in the most exceptional cases can a German be a party to an action before a protectorate court. Much of the substantive law of the Czechoslovak Republic has been retained, yet even here a number of exceptions have been made for racial Germans. The most important is the introduction of German marriage law and certain changes in labor and patent law.
Criminal law in the Netherlands follows closely after the protectorate system. There is a noticeable tendency to extend German substantive penal law into the protectorate (a list of the relevant statutes would fill many pages). Finally, the protector has the discretionary right to set aside any decision of a protectorate court and bring the case before a German tribunal.
What folk-group law means in countries dominated by Germany is quite clear from these illustrations. The German minority receives the status of a dominant majority, while the majority, Bohemians and Moravians for example, acquire the impotence of a minority. The view that Germans are racially superior and Czechs inferior, that each folk group is a legal entity, an ‘autonomous unit’ as the Germans call it, living under a law adapted to its specific character, has completely destroyed what little protection had been given by the international minority treaties. The anti-rationalist, anti-egalitarian, anti-normative theory that considers only the ‘concrete personality’ and refuses to accept the universalist principle of equality before the law, has reduced the majorities in the conquered territories to the status of slaves.
What determines a folk group anyway? A minority was constituted by race, religion, nationality, or language. The conscious decision of the individual was decisive, as in the admirable 1922 German-Polish treaty relating to Upper Silesia, which expired in 1937. The National Socialists reject this method of determining a minority. In the recent treaties with Hungary and Rumania, both objective and subjective criteria are deemed insufficient. The former were rejected because the state in which the minority lives might scrutinize each case to see whether or not the objective conditions were fulfilled, might deny their existence in certain cases and thereby jeopardize the rights of a minority member. The subjective test is invalid because it admits many who have nothing in common with the folk group and who join it merely for material gain. The protocol to the German-Hungarian treaty introduces a combination of two conditions for membership in the German folk group in Hungary: desire and acceptance.96 The leadership of the group thus becomes the arbiter, and the composition is ultimately determined by the mother country, which exercises complete control over the folk group through the leadership principle, money, propaganda, and terror. It is thus possible to stifle at birth any divergent political opinions within the German folk groups, and the group can be transformed into an obedient tool of the mother country.
This imperialistic trend is not bound by any international law and needs no justification. The Reich exists, and that fact is sufficient justification. That is the second consequence of the new doctrine of international law.
The German word for international law is Völkerrecht. The new National Socialist theory takes this word in its literal meaning, ‘law of the peoples.’ Rejecting the idea that states are the subjects of international law, they maintain that only the people are subjects. As long as the state is considered the subject of international law, it is still part of the tradition of Western civilization.97 Even restrictive qualifications, such as the claim that the vital interests of a state may supersede international obligations, or that immoral treaties are void, or that the clausula rebus sic stantibus dispenses with international obligations—all devices clearly artificial—imply a continued recognition of the two fundamental concepts of international law, state sovereignty and state equality.
Liberal international lawyers are accustomed to blame the present world chaos on unlimited national sovereignty. They believe that a rational international order cannot be established until state sovereignty is either restricted or abolished altogether. Some even maintain that the individual citizen is already—or ought to be—a subject of international law, and is thereby bound to two organizations, the state and the international community.98 If the international community should apply sanctions, for example, in this view the punitive action would be directed not against the state but only against a law-breaking government. The citizens could then rise against the government without violating their allegiance to the state.99 By creating divided loyalties, the dichotomy will provide the psychological basis for international solidarity.
We need not dwell on the methodological difficulties arising from the theory of dual sovereignty. We can readily admit that any future international order set up after the destruction of fascism must have a proper psychological basis as well as the material means of maintaining an international community. That is not the present problem, however. However passionately we may desire the elimination of fascism, we cannot close our eyes to the possibility that it may not be wiped out. It is therefore of the utmost importance to lay bare the propagandist character of National Socialist conceptions of international law and the dangers inherent in the doctrine of dual loyalty. The following pages might well be entitled: In Defense of State Sovereignty.
It is still useful, even though tautological, to define sovereignty as the highest power. Since highest power and highest right are incompatible, the limits of sovereignty do not lie in the law, but in the bases on which sovereignty rests, in the area in which it is effective, and in the people from whom the state can command obedience. Sovereignty is a polemical notion, directed against other equally sovereign powers. A more complete definition would therefore be the potentially highest power over a specific territory and over a specific category of people. Conceived in this manner, the notion of sovereignty is today a progressive one for two negative reasons: the juristic equality of all states and the consequent rationality of international relations. If every state is sovereign, all states are equal. As a juristic category, equality is, of course, incomplete and lame. Nevertheless, it prevents the misuse of international law for imperialist expansion. Sovereignty thus establishes formal rationality in an anarchic world, creates a clear-cut delineation of the spheres of power, and subjects to the power of the state only those who live within its territory and a select few (citizens) outside. It creates a barrier, so to speak, which, though hindering the establishment of a just international order, seriously limits the extent of state power at the same time.
In international relations, sovereignty can be attributed only to the state as such, as a legal entity, never to its organs. It is logically impossible to speak of the sovereignty of the monarch or of the government. This approach is also progressive in a negative way, more progressive than the institutional, sociological, and pluralistic theories that reject the concept of state sovereignty and attribute power only to organs or social groups within the state. It is true that talk of the state as such has the ideological function of concealing the ruling power of specific social groups. But that does not prevent us from detecting the real bearers of power behind the mask, whereas abolition of the sovereign state does. If the state is no longer an abstract legal entity but merely the structure of the folk or the race, if sovereignty no longer resides in the state but in race or folk, as in the National Socialist theory, two consequences are apparent. In the first place, the negatively progressive character of the concept of state sovereignty is destroyed. The sovereign race knows no territorial limits, and there are then no barriers to the highest power. The sovereignty of the Germanic race exists wherever there are racial Germans. The juridical fact of citizenship cannot abrogate the natural fact of membership in a race. The sovereignty of the race is the ideological basis for the fifth column and for imperialism. National Socialism points to the fact that when circumstances require it, other states, too, pay far more regard to racial descent than to the juridical fact of citizenship. They refer to the fact that Australia, for instance, in 1914, imprisoned 3,866 Australian citizens born in Germany and 61 German-Australians born in Australia.100 That regrettable fact may or may not have been justified by political expediency. Nevertheless, it has not induced Australia to raise the exception to the rank of a principle.
By removing the mask of the state, furthermore, we can no longer detect the actual focus of political power. The race does not rule, of course, nor has the folk any political power. Who does rule in Germany? Where does the political power actually reside? The answers to these questions are difficult enough to find within the framework of traditional jurisprudence. They are even harder to find in the National Socialist ideology, and precisely that difficulty is the essential purpose of the doctrine. Its aim is to hide the fact that the new German state has amassed enormous political and social power without the limits traditionally imposed on the powers of the state.
National Socialism similarly rejects the state as the subject of international law and substitutes the sovereign racial people. This development was prepared in stages, becoming more and more audacious as German power expanded. In 1934, one of the leading younger theorists, for example, announced international law to be nothing but the law of war.101 Since war is the central phenomenon of inter-state relations, he argued, all doctrines that regard international law as an instrument for peace are Utopian.102 The sole function of international law is to regulate and discipline war according to the principles of honor and the duel.102 This approach is a timid step toward the complete rejection of international law, by denying its major function, the organization of peace. As a matter of fact, there is nothing fundamentally wrong in it from a narrowly ‘realistic’ point of view. When we examine the consequences of the underlying premise, however—the rejection of collective security, of sanctions, of pacts of mutual assistance, of mediation and arbitration—it becomes apparent that the theory is no more than a peculiar formulation of Hitler’s foreign policy, directed against the League and the Franco-Russian and other non-aggression pacts.
A closer approach to the racial theory is found in the famous book, Die rassengesetzliche Rechtslehre (the Race-Law Theory of Law), written by the now deposed but still relevant National Socialist lawyer, Helmuth Nicolai.103 As the title indicates, Nicolai sought to develop a race-law theory embracing the whole field of law (not merely international). He was unsuccessful because he lacked both knowledge and imagination and did not go beyond the assertion that law derives its validity from a common feeling of right, which, in turn, springs from common racial traits. The possibility of international law is thus still affirmed, though its content is reduced to a minimum.
The next step toward a pure racial doctrine was taken by Norbert Gürke,104 the most original of the National Socialist international lawyers. He too begins with the same assumption that community of racial descent produces, and racial differences condition, international law. He does not fully eliminate the concept of the state, but retains it as the historic form that a race gives itself.105 There still remains the possibility of international law between different racial states.
The radical implications of the racial doctrine were finally and fully drawn by Werner Best,106 a high S. S. functionary who was responsible during the Weimar Republic for the attempted coup that resulted in the discovery of the so-called Boxheimer documents. Law is a fact of life, says Best. Since life is organic and hostile to abstract norms and since it means life within a people, law always appears as a concrete rule, the sole aim of which is the furtherance of life, or, in his own terms, the regulation of ‘the inner folk processes of life.’ Law can be posited only by the Leader, who is the concrete head of the people. The external field of the operation of law is not humanity (the liberal conception), but the concrete people. ‘On the basis of the racial concept of law, the relations between states, hitherto called international law, cannot be called law.’107 In the internal field of operation, the liberal finds an enormous variety of forms of law, based on the assumption that man is free. For the racialist, on the other hand, the internal efficacy of law depends upon the ‘transpersonal and transtemporal’ structure of the people. International law is therefore inconceivable from this approach as well. Best admits that there may operate from time to time certain rules in international relations. Since they can be abandoned at any time, however, it would be mere verbal formalization to call these rules international law.
In sum, the National Socialist theorists agree that obstacles to imperial aggrandizement cease to exist when the people demand it. By furnishing the basis for expansion, the racial theory is fundamentally different even from those conservative and absolutistic doctrines that construe international law merely as external state law. The latter are reactionary doctrines, but they still retain remnants of rationality in so far as they place legal limits on the sovereignty of the state. The racial theory is dynamic: Its function may be summarized as follows:
(1) By denying that states are subjects of international law, it denies the equality of all states and allows differentiation among them. (2) By denying that states have sovereignty, it destroys the last element of rationality in international relations. The spatial and functional limits inherent in the notion of state sovereignty disappear. (3) By proclaiming the sovereignty of the race, it subjects all racial Germans, whatever their nationality, to the law of the Germanic race. (4) By denying that international law exists among rival empires, it rejects any legal frontier to aggression, while at the same time it defends its own empire by a perverted Monroe Doctrine. (5) By applying the term international law to the relations between the folk groups within its empire, it destroys the last remnants of minority protection and invests minority oppression with the sanctity of international law.
The ideology and structure of the grossdeutsche Reich are relatively easy to determine from the plans of National Socialism, but not the ultimate scope of the Reich. It would be fatally wrong to assume that National Socialist leadership has pre-determined the final limit to German domination over Europe or the eventual form of its empire. The boundaries are being determined by the political situation, by military success, by strategic motives, by economic considerations, which may or may not coincide.
An illustration will suffice—the work of Werner Daitz. His name is unknown to the American public, but he has great influence within the National Socialist party, as well as with industry and banking. A chemist and engineer by profession, Daitz108 has always been closely connected with private industry, at present with the Possehl combine and the Blast Furnace Works, both in Lübeck. He is one of the few men whose picture and biography had been published in 1934 as exerting decisive influence in the National Socialist party on economic questions.109 He works closely with Kurt Weigelt, one of the managers of the Deutsche Bank, a member of the supervisory board for the German Asiatic Bank, of the German East African Corporation, and others, and a member of the colonial office of the National Socialist party. Daitz has been a member of the party leadership since 1931, as the deputy for economic questions and now in the foreign political office of the party. He is obviously a man whose theories reflect important elements at the top of the present German regime.
Daitz’s plan for European organization is a synthesis of racism, geopolitics, and large-scale economics. Thus, he holds that living space is determined not merely by geographic but equally by racial considerations. It serves to extend the European orbit of German domination to the utmost limit. The key of the theory is his definition of ‘racial kernel’ or ‘nuclear spaces.’
The world of today is divided into various racially determined living spaces. ‘The basic law of a racial order of life’ is ‘that a race cannot abandon its original living space without more or less abandoning itself.’110 This decisive original space is the racial kernel, or nuclear space. Colonial and frontier spaces can never take its place. Blood, soil, and law are the constituent elements of the new order, which requires the destruction of universalism and its replacement by continental orders. The future division of the world is expressed in the ‘fanfares of a racial Monroe Doctrine,’ in the slogans: Europe for the Europeans, America for the Americans, India for the Indians. Whereas the European, the Japanese, and Indian Monroe Doctrines are properly biological, the American is also imperialistic, because of its exclusively geographic character. Just why that should be the case is never made clear in Daitz’s analysis. It would seem much more reasonable to argue the reverse, that geographic limits are genuine and natural and are violated by biological considerations.
The definition of the European nuclear space is most revealing. ‘Considered as an indispensable nucleus space of the white race, Europe reaches from Gibraltar to the Urals and from the North Cape to North Africa.’111 Its natural supplementary and colonial spaces extend far into northern Asia to the Okhotsk and the Behring seas and far into Africa to the south. Italy and Russia are the doorkeepers of the white race in the south and east, a position formerly held by Italy and England. That regard for the whole of Europe alone induced the Leader to attempt to establish good relations with England.
The obvious question then arises: Who has the responsibility for this new huge space? The answer is equally obvious. ‘Germany is responsible not only for itself but, because of its natural weight, for Europe and the European community of people.’ (This is Fried-rich List’s idea with one important change—Germany replaces England.) ‘Under Adolf Hitler, the great Germanic Empire rises anew with its spatial political basis in the north Baltic sea space, its soldierly style of life, and its foreign political duty.’ By German political duty, Daitz means the establishment of a continental policy. The North and Baltic Sea spaces, the Mediterranean space led by Italy, and the Russian space join into a unit for the ‘strengthening of Europe.’ By concluding the German-Soviet non-aggression pact, Russia has returned to Europe.
This interesting theory brings out three leading ideas: Europe is a unit comprising the whole European geographic area joining the African and north Asiatic regions. The leadership of Europe belongs to Germany. Russia and Italy, so long as they play ball with Germany, may share in this task. But should her allies disagree with Germany, then Germany will naturally assume exclusive guardianship of the whole of Europe, together with its supplementary and colonial spaces.
Daitz’s thesis is the clearest expression of the scope of Germany’s ambitions. It is as concrete as National Socialism can be. Whether Germany will extend its grasp beyond the space he has defined will depend upon both strategic opportunities and the internal antagonisms within the new Reich.
At this time it is also impossible to predict whether or not the forms of political rule which the National Socialists have worked out before and during the war will be retained afterwards. The following political patterns in the relation between Germany and the rest of her empire can be distinguished:
1. Military rule is particularly characteristic of northern France and Belgium.112 Power is vested in the military authorities. In northern France, they are set up in an hierarchical structure, Oberfeldkommandanturen, Feldkommandanturen, and Ortskommandanturen, though the military distinction between the first two was largely abolished on 1 December 1940. Each now administers a province,113 whereas the third is only a local military agency. National Socialist military administration far exceeds the scope of traditional military occupation. Its aim is to transform the structure and policies of the occupied territories so as to synchronize them with those of the Reich itself. That is especially noticeable in the handing of the Jewish question (decree of 28 August 1940, establishing a Jewish registry, requiring registration of Jewish property, and levying a special Jewish property tax), and in the close ties between German and French business.
2. The second type is best represented by the Netherlands and Norway. The highest authority in the Dutch territory is a federal commissioner appointed under the Leader’s edict of 18 May 1940. The commissioner (Dr. Seyss-Inquart for Holland, at present) exercises all constitutional functions of the king and his government. He legislates, appoints, and dismisses, utilizing Dutch officials for the execution of his orders. His immediate subordinates are four German general commissioners, one for administration and judiciary (Dr. Wimmer), one for security (S.S. Leader Rauter), one for finance and economics (former minister Dr. Fischboeck), and one without portfolio (S.S. Leader Fritz Schmidt), who carries out the anti-Jewish and anti-Freemason policies among other duties. The general commissioners could be compared to cabinet ministers. The Leader’s edict retains Dutch law in so far as it is compatible with German needs; in part it has been superseded by German law,* and, for political purposes, the German S.S. may be used wherever needed. The actual policy is one of a still closer incorporation of the Netherlands into the orbit of the German Reich.114
The administration of Norway differs only slightly.115 When the attempt of Quisling to form a Norwegian government failed because of lack of support not only from the Norwegian people but apparently also from the German military authorities, Hitler, by an edict of 20 April, installed the National Socialist district leader Josef Terboven as federal commissioner. He was faced with an already existing and popularly supported administrative council composed entirely of anti-Quisling Norwegians. Terboven and Quisling first tried to institute a kind of indirect rule whereby the Germans would merely assume the role of protector. They asked the Storting to call a meeting to depose the king and elect a state council. The whole effort was a failure. Thereupon Terboven dissolved all the existing parties (25 September 1940) and the old council of administration, and appointed commissioners, chosen exclusively from the ranks of the Quisling National Union party, as directors of the thirteen government departments. According to Terboven’s decree of 28 September 1940, the department heads have absolute control over their divisions and are responsible only to the commissioner. They may issue and implement administrative decisions that previously would have been promulgated by the king, the Storting, or the council of state. They are the leaders of their departments in the German sense. The federal commissioner himself is, of course, the supreme legislator and administrator. His commissariat is organized into three functional departments and eight regional offices. In addition, the German terroristic machinery has been introduced—not only the S.S., which exercises the political power in all the occupied territories, but also the people’s courts.116 By September 1940, authoritarian control became almost complete from top to bottom, and the Germans boast of it.117
The difference between the military and civil types of administration is considerable. The latter exercises a much stronger form of authoritarian control and is far more concerned with the complete synchronization and assimilation of the whole of political and social life.
3. The Germans regard the protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia as the model for the eventual administrative system of the grossdeutsche Reich. The type they have in mind rests on a perversion of Lord Lugard’s famous principle of ‘indirect rule’: give the natives a semblance of independence but retain the key positions in the hands of the whites. This principle works out badly enough in colonial countries, keeping the native population at a given social and economic level and preventing them from advancing. When applied to a nation that in Europe is second only to the Germans in industrial efficiency, the result is stark tragedy. The Germans have run into one serious difficulty. Lugard’s formula can only be applied if at least one important section of the population is willing to run the government under outside tutelage. In Czechoslovakia, the leading industrialists and agrarians were always anti-democratic and ready to sell themselves to the highest bidder. They have cooperated very willingly with the National Socialist regime and the Germans were fortunate to find in Hacha a man weak enough to undertake the task of governing. In no other country, however, has the attempt been successful. Not even in Poland were the Germans able to find a political group willing to act as their tool; that is a sure sign among other things that the scorned Wilsonian principle of self-determination is deeply rooted in the consciousness of the people.
4. Colonial methods have been introduced in their worst form in Poland in the Generalgouvernement, as it is called by the Nazis.118 Those portions of Poland that were formerly German were incorporated into the Reich proper (9 October 1939; in force since 26 October): West Prussia, Poznan (later called Warteland), Upper Silesia, and the region of Zichenau in East Prussia. The rest has become a German colony, covering 100,000 square kilometers and including 10,000,000 people. The constitutional basis is the Leader’s edict of 12 October 1939, creating the post of Generalgouverneur and appointing to the office Dr. Hans Frank, minister without portfolio and leader of the National Socialist lawyers’ union. Occupied Poland is now merely an occupied territory, in both German theory and practice. The Polish state has ceased to exist and the Generalgouvernement is ‘a constitutional structure completely dissolved from the former Polish state.’119 The very name of the territory was changed in August 1940 from ‘Generalgouvernement of the occupied Polish territory’ to simple ‘Generalgouvernement.’ The territory is under German sovereignty, though not part of the grossdeutsche Reich. In contrast to the Bohemian protectorate, the Generalgouvernement is considered a foreign country and is excluded from the German customs and currency area.
The administration, most recently fixed by decree of 16 March 1941, is carried on by the governor general and a government that is an executive organ as well as an advisory body. The government is headed by a secretary of state and is divided into two sections, the secretariat of eight officials (office of the governor general, of the government, of legislation, of price formation, of spatial order, of personnel, of management, and of archives), and twelve departments: interior, finance, justice, economics, food and agriculture, forests, labor, propaganda, building, railroads, and post.
In its advisory capacity, the government is composed of the governor, the secretary of state, the directors of the currency bank and of the auditing office, the twelve departmental chiefs, the directorate of the state monopolies, and the chiefs of the order and security police.
The colony is divided into four districts headed by district chiefs (governors). Each region is in turn divided into rural and urban units. The police power is in the hands of a high S.S. leader directly responsible to the governor. Within the lower administrative ranks, a special police force has been created (6 May 1940) of racial Germans between eighteen and forty years of age.120 Until 31 July 1940 the governor was also head of the Four Year Plan office for the area; thereafter, he has utilized the general framework of his administration to carry out the tasks of the Four Year Plan. He is assisted in that work by an economic council for the Generalgouvernement, which he also heads. In addition, he is head of the council for the defense of the realm and leader of the party in the Generalgouvernement. There is thus no Polish administration. All that is left to the Polish people is a ‘natural autonomy,’ as Frank formulated it,121 without legal or constitutional rights. The administration of the 1148 cities and villages is, on paper, left to Poles, but it is subject to the discretion of the governor general and is actually under German control.
A typical example of the colonial status of the territory is the decree of the governor general on 13 September 1940, instituting a system of administrative penal law.122 S.S. and police leaders have power to assess fines up to 1000 zlotys and impose terms up to 3 months. The accused need not necessarily be heard. Appeal can be made only if the sentence emanates from the lowest administrative chief. All other officials are simultaneously prosecutors, judges, and executors, and there is no appeal from their decisions. Authoritarian administration in Poland is thus thorough and complete, the status of the territory is that of a colony pure and simple, and there is no indication that this territory will ever become a new independent or even semi-independent Poland.
The variety of patterns in the political organization of the grossdeutsche Reich does not follow any predetermined plan, but reflects the different problems the conquerors have faced. Every pattern is one of conquest, even in those states that, like Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Rumania, retain their legal independence. Propaganda, economic penetration, corruption of the ruling groups, fifth columns, and military intervention were all utilized. The seedbed had long been made fertile by the sharp racial and social antagonisms that prevented the growth of a strong democratic consciousness in eastern and southeastern Europe. Small ruling cliques, often composed of absentee owners, needed dictatorship and outside assistance and they supported anyone who could pay better and ensure their rule. The agrarian problem, particularly acute in these regions, had never been dealt with adequately. Save in Czechoslovakia, minorities were handled with bayonets, not gloves. The French and British had made the fatal error of not basing their policies in eastern Europe upon the support of the masses and the minorities. The way was therefore clear for German propaganda among the oppressed sections of the population. (The parallels with Latin America merit serious considerations.)
The economic pattern of the grossdeutsche Reich is not so clear as its political set-up. It is here that the lack of a rational conception of the New Europe becomes most apparent. One wing of the National Socialists insists that the German Reich proper must be the productive center of Europe; that within this area the process of industrialization should be intensified; that by becoming the sole producer for the whole of Europe, the Reich will raise the living standards of its own people; that the surrounding countries should supply raw materials and labor and produce agricultural goods. The former Jugoslav minister of agriculture, Otto von Frangés, on the other hand, argues in a detailed discussion of the relation of southeastern Europe to the German Four Year Plan, that the southeastern countries are dangerously overpopulated and must be industrialized.123 The former Rumanian minister of trade, M. Manoilesco, had, in his book, Théorie du protectionisme et de l’échange international (Paris, 1929), insisted on the utilization of protective tariffs for industrializing Rumania.
Frangés represents a whole school of southeastern European economists.124 Though they agree that by an intensification of agricultural cultivation, the Danube states could readily supply Germany with most of its wheat, corn, wool, cattle, and vegetable oils, they insist on industrialization of the region as the central need. As early as 1929, former Rumanian Minister of Trade Manoilesco argued, for example, that the Danube states should not export ores but only semi-refined or fully refined metals. Obviously these economists wish to raise the living standards of their own people, although in more recent years their demands have become rather moderate. They now limit their program to the establishment of industries in which unskilled labor with low productivity and with but little training can be set to work. They even admit that although the incorporation of the Danubian states into the large space might lead to further industrialization, ‘no high expectations can be placed upon it.’125
The Heidelberg economist, Carl Brinkmann, rejects industrialization.126 He wants a solution like Friedrich List’s economic theory, or Hamilton’s ‘American plan.’ Napoleon’s continental blockade failed, he argues, because Russia was not incorporated in it and because the plan did not repay the effort. The economic structure of southeastern Europe was based upon the exploitation of the ‘peasantry for unnatural experimentation in industrialization,’ especially in Rumania. On the other hand, Brinkmann also rejects the notion of mono-cultural states with the sole function of supplying raw materials and food stuffs for Germany. He demands the highest amount of ‘autonomous industrialization’ warranted by the specific character of each country. Only exchange of goods should be centralized within the one large area of Middle Europe.
As a matter of fact, there is little point in searching for discussion of the way the grossdeutsche Reich should be organized economically. The economic position of the conquered states will not be determined by a preconceived plan but by the inner dynamics of totalitarian monopoly capitalism. Present German policies give no indication of the future economic structure. They are conditioned by the immediate requirements of warfare and aim at the highest productivity of all those industries that are essential for the prosecution of the war, while cutting down on consumption or luxury goods industries unless necessary for export.
The one feature common to all conquered territories is the treatment of Jewish business. Apart from the many problems raised by the process of Aryanization, which are solved in the same way as in Germany proper, the economy of the grossdeutsche Reich is devoted exclusively to supplying the needs of the German Reich proper. In nearly all the occupied territories increasingly large numbers of workers are being sent into the Reich, and thus compulsory or formally voluntary labor service has been introduced.* Direct requisitioning of goods and exploitation by exchange manipulation is an equally important method of utilizing the occupied territories. Wherever sale is resorted to, the rate of exchange for foreign currencies is fixed arbitrarily.127 The protectorate is incorporated into the currency union of the grossdeutsche Reich, but Poland is not (currency decree of 15 November 1939128), so German currency in the Generalgouvernement must be exchanged through the currency office in Cracow.
Two problems remain to be discussed: the control of business in the occupied territories and structural economic changes. There is not the slightest doubt that German business has acquired and extended its control over foreign enterprises in the occupied areas. German newspapers and periodicals conscientiously report the new acquisitisons, but without indicating the methods used. Four techniques stand out.* One is the incorporation of foreign business into the German cartel structure. In some cases, German cartel legislation, especially concerning compulsory cartellization, has been introduced into the new territories (protectorate, 10 January 1940);129 elsewhere foreign firms have simply been joined to the German cartels. Since all the important cartels are quota cartels, this means that the production or sales quotas allocated to foreign plants are determined by the German majority. On occasion, the German writers even admit that they have considerably strengthened their influence in specific industries through this device.130 A foreign enterprise can be killed in this way or blackmailed until it surrenders to its German competitors. The final effect is an intensification of the process of monopolization within Germany proper.
This steady Germanization of business is frequently referred to as ‘simplifying the structure of the combines.’ A large and ever increasing number of foreign enterprises have found their way into German combines.131 The Bohemian coal and iron industry has thus been consolidated. Banks have been merged.132 Large holdings of foreign, especially French, banks in southeastern Europe have been taken over, often with the consent of the owners in return for a share in the victor’s spoils. Where that is not possible a very ingenious device has sometimes been used. (This is the second technique.) The Dutch Philips Bulb factory in Eindhoven, Holland, which controls many German corporations, was and still seems to be inaccessible to German business. The Germans proceeded to establish the Alldephi limited liability corporation, exclusively German, and then by law gave it a proxy for all the shares in German corporations held by the Dutch Philips group. As a result, the Dutch or other foreign owners were represented by a German corporation in the meetings of the shareholders of the German corporations.133 The dominating influence of the Dutch Philips corporation has been effectively eliminated. (One of the firms profiting most from economic Germanization in Austria and protectorate is, of course, the Hermann Göring Works.) Increasingly (this is the third technique) Germans have been appointed trustees for foreign property, such as over the world famous Unilever combine in Holland134 or the Lorraine iron and steel works.135 The fourth major technique, the establishment of special corporations for the exploitation of conquered territory, will be discussed later.*
As for state property, clear reports are available only from Poland. State monopolies of alcohol, salt, tobacco, matches, mineral oil, sugar, and lotteries have been re-established and even extended, and the profits accrue to the conquerors.136 The Generalgouvernement has established its own currency bank (Emissionsbank in Poland), directed by a governor responsible only to the governor general of Poland. Property owned by the former Polish state is distributed as spoils. A decree of 15 November 1939 first attached all Polish state property; and in 24 September 1940 it was transferred to the Generalgouvernement. Since the new administration is not regarded as the successor to the Polish state, it refuses to assume any liability for obligations upon this property.137 A special corporation has been founded (Werke des Generalgouvernements, A.G.), with a capital of 1,000,000 zlotys, to administrate some portions of the former Polish state property. Other portions are administered directly by the governor general, while still others have been leased to German private business. And it is announced that ‘the subsequent transfer of one or the other work into private property is not excluded.’138
We can therefore conclude definitely that business in the occupied territory has been largely acquired by German industrialists, and that Germanization, like Aryanization, has accelerated the process of concentration of capital. For the masses of the people in these territories, one problem is crucial. Will Germany carry on the process of industrialization, accelerate, perfect, and rationalize industry and thereby raise the standard of living; will it allow only such productive efforts as will supplement German production; or will it reverse the trend of industrialization and throw the populations back to the level of a starving peasantry supplying the needs of the master race? The answers to these questions cannot be based on the ideological prono incements of National Socialism. After all, does not the National Socialist ideology of ‘blood and soil’ envisage a country of peasants, while the urbanization of the German population has proceeded more rapidly under this slogan than ever before?
The structure of the grossdeutsche Reich will be determined by the inner antagonisms of the German economy. These inner antagonisms, inherent in every capitalistic system, will become even more apparent in Germany and will be further complicated by the national antagonisms produced by the policy of the grossdeutsche Reich. Germany will not be able to carry out the tremendous task of transforming a war economy into an economy of peace except by transforming conquered Europe into a vast reservoir of man power, of producers of food stuffs and raw materials. The standard of living of the inhabitants will thereby be lowered in order to keep the German working class satisfied.* Little can be learned from today’s experience. Some industries have been closed down, chiefly those in direct competition with German industry or producing only consumers’ goods. Others have been rebuilt and expanded. There is no doubt that water power will be fostered in Norway139 and oil production in Poland. Roads are being built.140 These steps are necessary for military efficiency. We have no way of knowing if the Germans have carried out a wholesale destruction of industrial enterprises, though it would seem unlikely.
Should it be victorious, the grossdeutsche Reich will be based upon the most gigantic economic and political exploitation of all history. It will be impossible, at least for many decades, for a future German government to justify her influence in Middle Europe. Germany, as the most highly developed industrial machine in Europe, must, of course, play a decisive role in the European economic structure. How Germany will be able to justify this claim after National Socialism has reduced millions to starvation is a question to which we cannot now foresee the answer. Exploitation—and nothing else—is the common denominator of all economic, political and social measures taken in the conquered territories. Hitler, on 27 January 1932, in the speech which he delivered at Düsseldorf before Western industrialists on Thyssen’s invitation, made this crystal clear. ‘The white race,’ so he said, ‘can maintain its position in practice only if the differences in the living standards in the world are retained. Give to our so-called export markets the same living standards that we have, and you will find that the preponderance of the white race, which is expressed not only in the political might of the nation but also in the economic position of the individual, can no longer be retained.’141 The promise which Hitler held out to Western industry has been fulfilled to a degree which exceeds the expectations of probably the most aggressive industrialists.
* See page 184 for a detailed discussion.
* Discussed in the next chapter. See page 198.
* See p. 443.
* See p. 164.
* On the problem of foreign labor, see also page 341.
* On the Continental Oil Corporation, see pages 276, 356. On Germanization, see also pages 180, 275.
* See p. 276
* See also p. 329.