The Vision

They had better realize that we see events in terms of a historical vision.

Adolf Hitler

 

The laurel wreath Hitler hung on his wall in the Landsberg fortress-prison was more than a token that his spirit was unbroken. The forced isolation from political activity was of benefit to him politically and personally. For one thing, it permitted him to escape the aftermath of the disaster of November 9. He could follow the wrangles of his embittered and scattered adherents from the sidelines, while remaining the untarnished martyr of the nationalist cause. It also gave him time for introspection after years of almost mindless unrest and excitement. He recovered his faith in himself and in his mission. And, as his turbulent emotions died down, he felt himself strengthened in his role as leader of the völkisch right wing. He had at first claimed this role hesitantly, but in the course of the trial he became more confident, and finally he boldly came forth as the divinely appointed one and only Führer. Filled with this consciousness, Hitler managed to impress this image of himself upon his fellow prisoners. From this time on, the sense of mission never left him. It froze his features in that mask which no smile, no altruistic gesture, no moment of spontaneity ever softened. Even before the November putsch Dietrich Eckart had complained of Hitler’s delusions of grandeur, his “messiah complex.” Now Hitler hardened more and more into the monument that corresponded to his notions of what a great man and a Führer would be like.

Thus his imprisonment in no way hampered the process of self-stylization. In a subsequent trial some forty more participants in the putsch were convicted and sent to Landsberg. They included members of the “Hitler shock troop,” Berchtold, Haug, Maurice, Amann, Hess, Heines, Schreck, and the student Walter Hewel. Hitler now had what amounted to an entourage. The prison authorities were highly accommodating to the special requirements of their prisoner. When he took his meals in the large common room, at a special table with his followers, he was allowed to sit at the head of the table under a swastika banner. Fellow prisoners were assigned the task of cleaning and tidying his room. He himself was not required to participate in the work program or the prison athletics. It was taken for granted that his followers, on arrival at the prison, were to “report to the Führer without delay.” Every morning at ten o’clock, moreover, they came in for the daily “conference with the Chief.” Hitler devoted much of his time to his extensive correspondence. One adulatory letter he received came from a recent Ph.D. in philology named Joseph Goebbels, who commented on Hitler’s closing address at the trial: “What you stated there is the catechism of a new political creed coming to birth in the midst of a collapsing, secularized world. . . . To you a god has given the tongue with which to express our sufferings.^* You formulated our agony in words that promise salvation.” He also received a letter from Houston Stewart Chamberlain.

Hitler often took walks in the fortress garden. He was still having his old trouble arriving at a consistent style, for he combined his airs of a Caesar with Lederhosen, a Bavarian peasant jacket, and often a hat. When he spoke at the so-called comradeship evenings, we are told, “all the officials of the fortress gathered silently in the stairwell outside and listened.” As if wound up by his defeat, he continued to elaborate his legends and visions and to work out practical plans for the state, whose dictator he still expected to be. Supposedly the idea for the building of the autobahns and the creation of the Volkswagen dated from this period. Although visiting hours were officially restricted to six hours weekly, Hitler received visitors for up to six hours a day—adherents, petitioners, and friendly politicians, all of whom made the pilgrimage to Landsberg. The visitors included many women, for which reason the prison had been jokingly referred to as the “first Brown House.”¹ On Hitler’s thirty-fifth birthday, with the trial not far behind him, the flowers and packages for the famous prisoner filled several rooms.

But principally he used his time for taking stock. He attempted to give some rational form to his jumble of emotions and to combine all the scattered pieces of earlier readings and half-baked ideas with his most recent literary gleanings into an organized ideological system. “This period gave me a chance to obtain clarity on certain concepts which I had previously understood only instinctively.”²

We know about Hitler’s reading matter only through what others have reported, for he himself very seldom spoke of books or favorite writers; like so many self-educated people, he was afraid of being considered derivative in his ideas. The only writer he mentioned fairly often and in various connections was Schopenhauer, whose works he claimed to have taken to the front with him, and from whom he could quote longish passages. He also referred to Nietzsche, Schiller, and Lessing. In an autobiographical sketch written in 1921 he maintains that in his youth he “thoroughly studied economic theory, as well as the entire anti-Semitic literature available at the time,” and he comments: “From my twenty-second year on, I threw myself with special eagerness upon writings on military and political matters, and I never ceased my probing preoccupation with general world history.” Yet he does not name a specific work in these fields. It was part of his character always to try to create the impression that he had mastered whole areas of knowledge. Similarly, he goes on to speak of his deep study of art history, cultural history, the history of architecture, and “political problems.” Yet it seems all too probable that up to the time of his imprisonment Hitler had acquired his knowledge of those areas only from second- or third-hand digests. Hans Frank mentions Hitler’s reading Nietzsche, Chamberlain, Ranke, Treitschke, Marx, and Bismarck, as well as war memoirs of German and Allied statesmen—all this during the period in Landsberg. Yet he went on extracting the elements of his world view from pseudoscientific secondary works: tracts on race theory, anti-Semitic pamphlets, treatises on the Teutons, on racial mysticism and eugenics, as well as popular treatments of Darwinism and the philosophy of history.

In all that various witnesses have said about Hitler’s reading, the one detail that rings true is the description of his intensity, his hunger for material. Kubizek reports that back in Linz the young Hitler had cards at three separate libraries and never appeared before his mind’s eye other than surrounded by books. Indeed, Hitler’s vocabulary reflects extensive reading. Yet his speeches and writings, right up to the table talk, as well as the memoirs of his entourage, show him to have been remarkably indifferent to intellectual and literary questions; in the good 200 monologues that make up his table talk, the names of two or three German classics turn up casually; Mein Kampf refers to Goethe and to Schopenhauer only once, and that in a somewhat tasteless anti-Semitic connection. In actual fact, knowledge meant nothing to Hitler; he was not acquainted with the pleasure or the struggle that go with its acquisition; to him it was merely useful, and the “art of correct reading” of which he spoke was nothing more than the hunt for formulations to borrow and authorities to cite in support of his own preconceptions: “correctly coordinated within the somehow existing picture.”³

 

At the beginning of July Hitler plunged into the writing of Mein Kampf in the same immoderate spirit he had shown in his reading. He finished the first part in three and a half months. He later commented that he had had “to write in order to get everything off my chest.” “The typewriter rattled late into the night, and he could be heard in his little room dictating to his friend Hess. On Saturday evenings he usually read. . . the finished passages to his fellow prisoners, who sat around him like disciples.” The book was originally conceived as an account and evaluation of “four and one half years of struggle.” But it more and more developed into a mixture of autobiography, ideological tract, and theory of tactics; it also helped complete the Führer legend. In Hitler’s mythologizing self-portrait, the unhappy and vacant years before his entrance into politics are boldly filled out with elements of want, asceticism, and solitude to represent a phase of inner growth and preparation, a sojourn, so to speak, in the desert. Max Amann, the book’s publisher, had apparently expected a memoir of quite another sort, full of political revelations. He was at first terribly disappointed by the stiff, long-winded, and boring manuscript.

Konrad Heiden, Hitler’s biographer, believed that Hitler had made a pact with the authorities not to divulge too much about the recent conspiracy. That may or may not be so. But in any case, it seems certain that Hitler’s ambition aimed higher than the kind of recital that Amann envisaged. Hitler saw his chance to give a deeper rationale to his recently developed claim to leadership and to show himself as that compound of politician and theoretician that he had invoked as the only possible savior for the country. Here, in an inconspicuous spot midway in the first part, is a passage that reveals his true aims:

 

For if the art of the politician is really the art of the possible, the theoretician is one of those of whom it can be said that they are pleasing to the gods only if they demand and want the impossible. . . . In long periods of humanity, it may happen once that the politician is wedded to the theoretician. The more profound this fusion, however, the greater are the obstacles opposing the work of the politician. He no longer works for necessities which will be understood by any shopkeeper, but for aims which only the fewest comprehend. Therefore, his life is torn by love and hate. . . .

The rarer [is] success. If, however, once in centuries success does come to a man, perhaps in his latter days a faint beam of his coming glory may shine upon him. To be sure, these great men are only the Marathon runners of history; the laurel wreath of the present touches only the brow of the dying hero.⁴

 

The book constantly reinforces the insinuation that Hitler is in fact this prodigy. The image of the dying hero can be construed as an attempt to give a cast of tragic nobility to the recent defeats. Hitler went at the job with an application that was rare for him. Here was his chance to prove that despite his lack of schooling, despite his failure to be admitted to the Academy, despite his humiliating past in the home for men, he had reached the lofty heights of bourgeois culture. It may have seemed that he was doing nothing, but all through the years he had thought long and hard and could offer not only an interpretation of the present but also an outline for the future. Such were the pretensions that went into the making of Mein Kampf.

Behind the front of bold words lurks the anxiety of the half-educated author that his readers may question his intellectual competence. He tries to make his language imposing by stringing together long series of nouns, many of them formed from adjectives or verbs, so that they sound empty and artificial. Taken as a whole, it is a language that lacks all natural ease; it can scarcely move or breathe:

 

I again immersed myself in the theoretical literature of this new world, attempting to achieve clarity concerning its possible effects, and then compared it with the actual phenomena and events it brings about in political, cultural and economic life. . . . Gradually I obtained a positively granite foundation for my own convictions, so that since that time I have never been forced to undertake a shift in my own inner view on this question.^*5

 

Several of Hitler’s followers put in long hard hours editing the book, but they could not weed out the stylistic slips and infelicities that were part and parcel of Hitler’s verbose, pseudoeducated manner. Thus we find the text studded with such phrases as “the rats that politically poison our nation” gnawing the meager education “from the heart and memory of the broad masses,” or “the flag of the Reich” springing “from the womb of war.” Rudolf Olden has pointed out the numerous absurdities of Hitler’s overwrought style. The following, for instance, is a typical Hitlerian metaphor. He is speaking of privation: “He who has not himself been gripped in the clutches of this strangulating viper will never come to know its poisoned fangs.” Olden comments: “That one sentence contains more mistakes than one could correct in an entire essay. A viper has no clutches, and a snake which can coil itself around a human being has no poison fangs. Moreover, if a person is strangled by a snake, he never comes to know its fangs.”⁶

Yet, along with all the pretentious and disordered thoughts, the book contains some deep insights, born directly of Hitler’s profound irrationality, as well as many sharp formulations and striking images. Hitler’s stiffness and doggedness make a strange contrast with his longing for the flowing period, as does his search for stylization with his lack of selfcontrol. His attempts at logic are at variance with his dull repetitiousness, and the one element in the book that nothing counteracts is the monotonous, manic egocentricity. This corresponds only too well with the lack of human feeling and human beings in its many pages. The book may be tedious and hard to read. Yet it does convey a remarkably faithful portrait of its author, who in his constant fear of being unmasked actually unmasks himself.

Probably realizing that the book betrayed him, Hitler later tried to disassociate himself from it, describing it as a stylistically unfortunate collection of editorials for the Völkische Beobachter and dismissing it as “fantasies behind bars.” “This much I know, that if I had suspected in 1924 that I was to become Reichskanzler, I would not have written the book.” But at the same time he implied that his reservations were purely tactical or stylistic in nature: “As to the substance, there is nothing I would want to change.”

The book’s convoluted style militated against it; the almost 10 million copies ultimately distributed suffered the same fate as all works bought out of duty or to show political orthodoxy. It remained unread. Another discouraging element may have been the grim, compulsive quality of Hitler’s mind. As a speaker, amidst the fanfare of carefully prepared appearances, Hitler was apparently able to cover this up. But a curiously nasty, obscene odor emanates from the pages of Mein Kampf. It is strongest in the incredible and revealing chapter on syphilis, but it also rises out of the grubby jargon, the stale images, and the poor-mouth attitudes that represent his stylistic stance. The mixed-up young man, who throughout the war and the frenzied activity of the following years never managed to find more than motherly woman friends, and who, according to someone close to him, “was terrified of even chatting with a woman,” projects his own starvations and repressions onto the world. Stamped on his concepts of history, politics, nature, or human life, are the anxieties and lusts of the former inmate of the home for men. He is haunted by the images of puberty: copulation, sodomy, perversion, rape, contamination of the blood.

 

The final Jewish goal is denationalization, is sowing confusion by the bastardization of other nations, lowering the racial level of the highest, and dominating this racial stew by exterminating the folkish intelligentsias and replacing them by members of his own race. . . . Just as he himself [the Jew] systematically ruins women and girls, he does not shrink back from pulling down the blood barriers for others, even on a large scale. It was and is Jews who bring the Negroes into the Rhineland, always with the same secret thought and clear aim of ruining the hated white race by the necessarily resulting bastardization of other nations, lowering the racial level of the highest, and himself rising to be its master. . . . If physical beauty were today not forced entirely into the background by our foppish fashions, the seduction of hundreds of thousands of girls by bow-legged, repulsive Jewish bastards would not be possible. . . . Systematically these black parasites of the nation defile our inexperienced young blond girls and thereby destroy something which can no longer be replaced in this world. . . . The folkish ideology must at last succeed in bringing about that nobler age in which men will no longer see it as their concern to breed superior dogs, horses and cats, but in the raising of man himself. . . .⁷

 

The book’s peculiarly neurotic aura, its queerness, its fragmentary and disorganized quality, help account for the disdain so long accorded to the doctrines of National Socialists. “No one took it seriously, could take it seriously, or even understand this style at all,” wrote Hermann Rauschning.^* He asserted, on the basis of his intimate background knowledge: “Hitler’s real goals. . . are not to be found in Mein Kampf.”⁸ With a good deal of persuasive brilliance Rauschning formulated a theory that widely influenced later historians, the theory that National Socialism was a “Revolution of Nihilism.” Rauschning maintained that Hitler and the movements he led had no ideas, no systematic ideology; the Nazis merely exploited existing moods and trends that would help to swell their membership rolls. A joke current in the 1930’s made a similar point: National Socialist ideology was referred to as “the World as Will without Idea.”^† Rauschning felt that all the tenets of Nazism, nationalism, anticapitalism, the cult of ritual, foreign-policy goals, even racial theory and anti-Semitism were the sport of Hitler’s completely unprincipled opportunism. Hitler the opportunist, Rauschning argues, respected nothing, feared nothing, believed in nothing, and broke the most solemn oaths with never a qualm. To Rauschning, the perfidy of National Socialism was literally boundless. All its ideology was merely sound and fury to mesmerize the masses. Central to it was a will to power that craved for nothing but power itself and regarded every success merely as a step to new and ever bolder adventures—without meaning, without goals, without the possibility of satisfaction. “This movement is totally without ideals and lacks even the semblance of a program. Its commitment is entirely to action; its crack troops are instinctively geared for mindless action; the leaders choose action on a cold, calculating and cunning basis. For National Socialists there was and is no aim which they would not take up or drop at a moment’s notice, their only criterion being the strengthening of the movement.”

Rauschning was right in recognizing that as a movement National Socialism always manifested a great willingness to adapt and that Hitler himself was remarkably indifferent to programmatic and ideological issues. He admitted that he adhered to his twenty-five points, even when they were obsolete, only for tactical reasons. Any change, he had observed, breeds confusion in the popular mind, and it really did not matter what one’s program was supposed to be. Of Alfred Rosenberg’s magnum opus The Myth of the Twentieth Century, widely considered one of the basic works of National Socialism, he openly stated that he had “read only a small part of it since it is. . . written in a style too hard to understand.” But even if National Socialism did not develop a true party line and was content to accept certain gestures and formulas as sufficient proof of orthodoxy, it was not entirely ruled by cynical considerations of success and power. National Socialism combined the practice of total control with the doctrine thereof; the two elements were continually intertwined, and even as Hitler and his cohorts confessed on occasion to the simplest and most unscrupulous power mania, they always revealed themselves the prisoners of their own prejudices and baleful utopias. Hitler’s astonishing career can be seen as the triumph of his tactical genius. Time and again he owed his salvation to some inspired tactical move. Yet his success in a deeper sense emanated from the entire complex of national anxieties, hopes, and visions that Hitler shared, even as he manipulated it. Nor can we overlook the compelling force he managed to impart to his thoughts on certain basic questions of history and politics, power and human existence.

Inadequate and clumsy Mein Kampf may have been. But it set forth, although in fragmentary and unorganized form, all the elements of National Socialist ideology. Here Hitler spelled out his aims, although his contemporaries failed to recognize them. As one begins to arrange the scattered sections and grasp their inner logic, one comes upon “a scheme of thought so consistent as to take one’s breath away.” In the following years Hitler did tinker somewhat with the text, rounding it off and making it more systematic, but on the whole the book evolved no further after his imprisonment at Landsberg. The phenomenon of early ossification, which stamps so much of this man’s life, is nowhere so evident as in the field of ideology, where ideas espoused in youth persist, down to their very phraseology, throughout the rise to power and the years of dictatorship, and even when the end is in sight retain their crippling hold. Nationalism, anti-Bolshevism, and anti-Semitism, linked by a Darwinistic theory of struggle, formed the pillars of his world view and shaped his utterances from the very first to the very last.

 

Hitler’s world view did not contain any new vistas or a new concept of social well-being. Rather, it was a synthesis of all that Hitler’s “spongelike memory” had soaked up in his early years of voracious reading. The material appears, however, in startling permutations and relationships. Hitler’s originality manifested itself precisely in his ability to force heterogeneous elements together and to impose solidity and structure on the patchwork creed. His mind, one might say, hardly produced thoughts, but it did produce energy. It concentrated and shaped the variegated ideas, pressing them into a glacial mass that from the very beginning clearly portended conquest, enslavement, mass murder. Hugh Trevor-Roper has described the cold insanity of this world in a telling image: “imposing indeed in its granite harshness and yet infinitely squalid with miscellaneous cumber—like some huge barbarian monolith, the expression of giant strength and savage genius, surrounded by a festering heap of refuse—old tins and dead vermin, ashes and eggshells and ordure,—the intellectual detritus of centuries.”⁹

Of special significance was Hitler’s way of perceiving everything from the angle of power. In contrast to the spokesmen of the völkisch movement, whose failure was in no small part due to their love for ideological subtleties, Hitler regarded ideas in themselves as “mere theory” and only took up those that lent themselves to useful practical application. When he spoke of “thinking in party terms,” he was describing his own habit of casting all ideas, trends, and beliefs into a form that fitted the needs of power, and was political in the true sense.

In fact he was formulating a last-ditch ideology for a bourgeoisie long on the defensive; he took its beliefs, diluted and coarsened them, and overlaid them with an aggressive and purposeful theory of action. His philosophy was a compound of all the nightmares and intellectual fads of the bourgeois age: the fear of revolution from the Left, a threat that had haunted Europe since 1789 and had actually been realized recently in Russia and, briefly, in Germany. Then there was the German Austrian’s psychosis about being overrun by foreigners; this emerged as an obsession with racial and biological questions. Then came the fear of the völkisch group, expressed in any number of ways, that awkward, dreamy Germany would be the loser in the contest of nations; this emerged as nationalist feeling. And finally there was the historical angst of the bourgeoisie who felt their period of greatness coming to an end and whose sense of security was eroding. “Nothing is anchored any longer,” Hitler declaimed. “Nothing is rooted within us any longer. Everything is superficial, flies away from us. The thinking of our people is becoming restless and hasty. All of life is being torn asunder. . . .”¹⁰

Hitler himself had soaked up this basic mood of angst, and with his disposition to drive things to extremes, to see periods in terms of eons, he felt that the fate of mankind was at stake. “This world is at an end!” He was obsessed by the notion of a world-wide disease, by viruses, termites, and the tumors of humanity. He later turned to Hörbiger’s world ice theory, which held that fire and ice had always struggled for supremacy in the universe, and his imagination was caught by the idea that the history of the planet and the evolution of man could be traced back to massive cosmic cataclysms. With deep fascination he anticipated the fall of nations and civilizations, and this cataclysmic view of history came to be coupled with his belief in messianic figures and his sense of his own great destiny. Students of the period have marveled at the determination with which he pursued his program for destroying the Jews right up to the last possible moment during the war, without regard for military necessities. This determination cannot be explained as mere obstinacy. Rather, Hitler was convinced that he was in the midst of a titanic struggle whose importance outweighed any events of the moment. He felt himself to be that “other force” which hurls evil “back to Lucifer” in order to save the universe.¹¹

The concept of a cosmic struggle runs all through Mein Kampf. However absurd or fantastical this may appear in retrospect, we cannot deny the metaphysical earnestness of Hitler’s thinking. “We may perish, perhaps. But we shall take a world with us. Muspilli, universal conflagration,” he once said in one of his apocalyptic moods. There are many passages in Mein Kampf that soar into universal dimensions. “The Jewish doctrine of Marxism,” he asserts, “. . . as a foundation of the universe. . . would bring about the end of any order intellectually conceivable to man.” The very illogic of such a thesis, which raises an ideology to the level of a principle of order in the universe, demonstrates Hitler’s urge to think in cosmic terms. It was necessary for “the stars,” “the planets,” “the world ether,” and the “light years” to take part in his personal struggle, for which “creation,” the “planet Earth,” and the “Kingdom of Heaven” served as backdrop.

These terms could readily be combined with the principle of the struggle for life and of the survival of the fittest, resulting in a sort of eschatological Darwinism. “The earth,” Hitler was fond of saying, “is like a chalice passed from hand to hand, which explains the efforts to always get it into the hand of the strongest. For tens of thousands of years. . .” He discerned a sort of fundamental law of the universe in the perpetual and deadly conflict of all against all:

 

Nature. . . puts living creatures on this globe and watches the free play of forces. She then confers the master’s right on her favorite child, the strongest in courage and industry. . . . Only the born weakling can view this as cruel, but he after all is only a weak and limited man; for if this law did not prevail, any conceivable higher development of organic living beings would be unthinkable. . . . In the end, only the urge for self-preservation can conquer. Beneath it so-called humanity, the expression of a mixture of stupidity, cowardice, and know-it-all conceit, will melt like snow in the March sun. Mankind has grown great in eternal struggle, and only in eternal peace does it perish.

 

This “iron law of nature” represented the beginning and end of all his lucubrations. From it he drew such lessons as that “all imaginable means” were permissible in the struggle for survival of nations: “persuasion, cunning, cleverness, persistence, kindness, wiliness, and brutality,” or that there was basically no contradiction between war and politics, rather that “the ultimate goal of politics” was war. The idea of such an iron law pervades Hitler’s concepts of justice and morality, which he tried to pattern on what happened in nature. It also underlies his belief in the Führer principle as well as his concern with nationalistic and openly bellicose racial selection. He boasted of his intention of marching over Europe in great “blood-based fishing expeditions” to help blond, pale-skinned human material “spread its blood” and thereby win dominance. Within this philosophy of total struggle, obedience ranked far higher than intelligence, readiness for action far higher than insight, while fanatical blindness became the highest virtue. “Woe unto him who lacks faith!” Hitler sometimes cried. Even marriage was seen as a union for purposes of selfperpetuation, while the home was defined as a “fortress from which the battle of life is waged.” Using rough analogies between the animal world and human society, Hitler pronounced the superiority of the ruthless over delicately structured organisms, of strength over mind. The apes, he claimed, trampled every outsider to death as an enemy of the community, “and what was right for apes must be even more applicable to men. . . .”¹²

One might suspect a trace of irony in such statements, but that is belied by the earnest tone of conviction with which Hitler cites the eating habits of apes as confirmation of his own vegetarianism; the apes showed the way. And, he continued, a glance at nature reveals that the bicycle, for instance, is correctly conceived, whereas the airship is “totally insane.” Man has no choice but to look to the laws of nature and follow them; there can be “no better system” than the merciless principles of selection prevailing among wild animals. Nature is not immoral: “Who is at fault when the cat eats the mouse?” he asks scornfully. Man’s so-called humanity is only “a tool of his weakness and thus in actuality the most cruel destroyer of his existence.” Struggle, conquest, destruction are immutable. “One being drinks the blood of another. By dying, the one furnishes food for the other. We should not blather about humanity.”

Hitler’s complete blindness to the rights of others and others’ claim to happiness, his utter amorality, are nowhere revealed so clearly as in this “unconditional reverence for the. . . divine laws of existence.” There is surely an element of late-bourgeois ideology here, which tried to compensate for the decadence and feebleness of the age by glorifying mindlessness and equating brutality and primitiveness with the natural and primeval state of things. It would also seem that such a creed provided Hitler with a lofty justification for his personal coldness and lack of feeling. He could better deal with his aggressive impulses by converting struggle, murder, and “blood sacrifice” into acts of obedience to a divine command. “By defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord,” he wrote in Mein Kampf, and almost twenty years later, in the midst of war and extermination, he asserted with considerable complacency: “I have always had a clear conscience.”

War and destruction were essential to restore the shaky balance of the world: that was the morality and the metaphysics of his policies. Pursuing his favorite game of letting the epochs of history unreel before his eyes in broad vague outline, mulling over the reasons for the decline of peoples and cultures, he always discovered the cause of their downfall in their failure to obey their instincts. The crumbling of mighty systems of power could be traced to a flouting of Nature, especially to miscegenation. For although all creatures adhere strictly to the instinct for racial purity, and the “titmouse seeks the titmouse, the finch the finch, the stork the stork, the field mouse the field mouse,” man is prone to act contrary to the laws of nature and to commit biological adultery. Impotence and the death of nations from old age were simply the revenge taken by Nature for the denial of her primal order: “Blood mixture and the resultant drop in the racial level is the sole cause of the dying out of old cultures; for men do not perish as a result of lost wars, but by the loss of that force of resistance which is contained only in pure blood. All who are not of good race in this world are chaff.”¹³

 

Behind this stood the doctrine of creative racial nuclei: since primeval times small Aryan elites have prevailed over the dull, slumbering masses of historyless inferior peoples, using them to further those abilities that are the mark of the Aryan genius. Aryans are the Promethean bearers of light. They alone are capable of establishing states and founding cultures, “forever kindling anew that fire of knowledge which illumined the night of silent mysteries and thus called man to climb the path to mastery over the other beings of this earth.” Only when the Aryan nucleus began mingling with the subject people did decline and downfall follow. For “human culture and civilization on this continent are inseparably bound up with the presence of the Aryan. If he dies out or declines, the dark veils of an age without culture will again descend on this globe.”¹⁴

This was the very peril mankind was once again confronting. Unlike the times of demise of the great empires of antiquity, what was now threatening was not just the extinction of a culture but the end of all higher humanness. The decay of the Aryan nuclear substance had gone further than ever before. “Germanic blood on this earth is gradually approaching exhaustion,” Hitler warned. He saw the forces of darkness pressing in from all sides, as if aware of impending victory. “I tremble for Europe!” he exclaimed in one speech and conjured up a vision of the old continent “sinking into a sea of blood and grief.” Once again, “cowardly know-it-alls and critics of Nature” were undermining Nature’s elemental laws. These scoundrels were agents of an “all-embracing general offensive” that appeared under numerous guises: Communism, pacifism, the League of Nations, all international movements and institutions in general. Similarly, the Judaeo-Christian morality of pity and its verbose cosmopolitan variants tried to persuade man that he could overcome Nature, raise himself up to be master of his instincts, and achieve eternal peace. But the truth was that no one could “rebel against a firmament.” The indubitable will of Nature determined the existence of nations, their clashes in war, the division of mankind into masters and slaves, the brutal preservation of the species.

It is not difficult to discern the mark of Arthur de Gobineau upon this system. In his doctrine of the inequality of races Gobineau had first formulated the anxiety connected with the modern age’s racial conglomerations. The downfall of all cultures could be traced to promiscuous racial mixing, he had argued. This French aristocrat’s race complex, his aversion for the “corrupt blood of the rabble” clearly sprang from the resentments of an abdicating ruling class. Nevertheless, his doctrine was taken up by certain literary sects of the period and spawned a whole literature along similar lines. Significantly, Hitler simplified Gobineau’s elaborate doctrine until it became demagogically usable and offered a set of plausible explanations for all the discontents, anxieties, and crises of the contemporary scene. Versailles and the excesses of the Bavarian soviet republic, the evils of the capitalistic system, and the outrages of modern art, night life and syphilis—all became aspects of that age-old struggle whereby the lower races attempted to destroy the noble Aryan. And hidden behind it all, instigator, mastermind and power-greedy archfoe, a bugbear of mythological dimensions, stood the Eternal Jew.

He was an infernal, crazily grimacing phantom, “a growth spreading across the whole earth,” the “lord of the antiworld,” a complex product of obsessions and clever psychology. In keeping with his theory of focusing upon a single opponent, Hitler made the figure of the Jew the incarnation of all imaginable vices and dreads, the cause and its opposite, the thesis and the antithesis, literally “to blame for everything,” for the tyranny of the stock market and for Bolshevism, for humanitarian ideology and for 30 million victims tortured to death in the Soviet Union “in veritable slaughterhouses.” In a conversation with Dietrich Eckart, published after Eckart’s death but while Hitler was still in Landsberg prison, Hitler expounded the identity of Judaism, Christianity, and Bolshevism by references to Isaiah 19:2–3 and Exodus 12:38.¹⁵ He showed that the Jews had been expelled from Egypt because they had tried to produce a revolutionary mood by inciting the rabble with humanitarian phrases (“just as they do here”). From this it followed that Moses was the first leader of Bolshevism. And just as Paul virtually invented Christianity in order to undermine the Roman Empire, so Lenin employed the doctrine of Marxism to bring about the end of the present system. Thus, Hitler argued, the Old Testament already provided the pattern of the Jewish assault upon the superior, creative race, a pattern repeated again and again down the ages.

To be sure, Hitler never lost sight of the propaganda value of his anti-Semitism. He was highly aware of that aspect of things. If the Jew did not exist, he remarked, “we would have had to invent him. A visible enemy, not just an invisible one, is what is needed.” But at the same time the Jew was the focus of his emotions, a pathological mania; the form the Jew took in Hitler’s own mind did not differ greatly from the diabolical propaganda image he had created. The Jew was the grotesque projection of everything Hitler hated and craved. Certainly the thesis that the Jews were striving for world domination made good propaganda; but over and beyond such Machiavellian considerations he really believed this thesis, saw it as the key to all sorts of phenomena. He clung more and more to this “redeeming formula,” convinced that through it he understood the nature of the great crisis of the age that he alone could cure. Toward the end of July, 1924, a Nazi from Czechoslovakia, who had come to Landsberg for an interview with the Führer, asked Hitler whether his attitude toward. Judaism had changed since his imprisonment. He replied: “Yes, yes, it’s quite right that I have changed my mind about the way to fight Judaism. I have realized that hitherto I have been much too mild. In the course of working out my book I have come to realize that in the future the most stringent methods of struggle must be employed if we are to fight through successfully. I am convinced that this is a vital question not only for our people, but for all peoples. For the Jews are the pestilence of the world.”¹⁶

Though he pretended that these more relentless views had come to him during his imprisonment in Landsberg, in fact this aggravation of his hate complex had already taken place. As early as May, 1923, during a speech in the Krone Circus, Hitler had cried out: “The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but not human. They cannot be human in the sense of being an image of God, the Eternal. The Jews are the image of the devil. Jewry means the racial tuberculosis of the nations.” But when he began organizing his many scraps of ideas and feelings into something resembling a coherent system, they took on a different cast. Henceforth, when he denied that the Jews were human, it was not just the ranting of the demagogue but deadly earnest and fanatical belief. He borrowed his rhetoric from the language of parasitology: the laws of nature themselves demanded that measures be taken against the “parasites,” the “eternal leeches” and “vampires upon other peoples.” Such measures would have their own irrevocable morality. Once he had cast the problem in such terms, annihilation and mass murder came to seem the extreme triumph of this morality. To the last Hitler insisted that his services to mankind lay in his recognition of the “true role” of the Jews and his courage in pushing that recognition to its consequences. It wasn’t as if he had merely sought the glory of a conqueror like Napoleon, who after all had been “only a human being, not a worldshaking event.”¹⁷ At the end of February, 1942, shortly after the Wannsee conference at which the “final solution” was ordained, he declared to his table companions: “The discovery of the Jewish virus is one of the greatest revolutions which has been undertaken in the world. The struggle we are waging is of the same kind as, in the past century, that of Pasteur and Koch. How many diseases can be traced back to the Jewish virus! We shall regain our health only when we exterminate the Jews.” With the directness and determination of one who had thought more deeply and seen more clearly than all others, he had recognized his true mission, his “cyclopean task.”¹⁸

For that was the other key correction he made in Gobineau. He not only personalized the process of racial and cultural death in the figure of the Jew as the prime mover of all decline; he also restored utopianism to history by transforming Gobineau’s “melancholic and fatalistic pessimism into aggressive optimism.” In contrast to the French aristocrat, he held that racial decadence was not inevitable. Of course, the Jewish world conspiracy would see Aryan hegemony in Germany as the crucial enemy. In no other country was biological contamination or the interplay of capitalistic and Bolshevistic machinations carried out so systematically with such dire results. But for this very reason Hitler could appeal to the redeeming will: Germany was the world’s battlefield on which the future of the globe would be decided.

And now it became obvious to what extent his anti-Semitism went beyond the traditional European brand; his fantasies about the Jews have a manic dynamism far surpassing all his visions of national grandeur. “If our people and our state become the victim of these bloodthirsty and avaricious Jewish tyrants of nations, the whole earth will sink into the snares of this octopus; if Germany frees herself from this embrace, this greatest of dangers to man may be regarded as broken for the whole world.” And with that operation out of the way, he already saw dawning the Millennial Kingdom, the Thousand-Year Reich, which he was impatiently hailing when he had taken only a small step toward it. Then order would once again arise out of chaos, unity would be achieved, masters and slaves would hold their proper places, and the wisely led “nucleus peoples of the world” would respect one another and live in peace, since the root of the world’s ills would at last have been eliminated.

It was this ideology, well developed though never spelled out as a coherent system, that gave his career what he himself was fond of calling its “somnambulistic sureness.” Things might look fairly sanguine at the moment, but he would not allow this to alter his picture of the state of the world and his sense of being engaged in a life-and-death struggle. This interpretation and this feeling were what gave his politics such savage consistency. His indecisiveness, which almost all his associates report, always involved tactical alternatives; he was never in doubt on questions of principle. And in spite of his bent for postponements and temporizings, he pushed dauntlessly toward the great final confrontation. In trying to explain away many of the inhumanities of the regime, common folk would naively say, “If only the Führer knew!” But there they showed how utterly they misunderstood their ruler. In fact, he knew far more than anyone suspected, in a way far more than actually happened. As one of his close followers commented, Hitler himself was “the most radical Nazi of all.”

 

These theories particularly shaped his thoughts on foreign policy, which he expounded in Mein Kampf and was to pursue right to the end. But no one realized that the seemingly fantastic goals he set forth in his book were meant as a concrete political program. It all revolved around the premise that the plight of Germany was caused by racial factors and that its salvation would come only when it had restored its racial integrity. He argued: “If the German people in its historical development had possessed that herd unity which other peoples have enjoyed, the German Reich today would doubtless be mistress of the globe.” He took the traditional nationalistic phrase Volk ohne Raum (“people without space”) and turned it around into Raum ohne Volk. The pressing domestic mission of the National Socialist Party was, he considered, “to establish a nation in the empty space between the Meuse and the Memel.” For “what we see there today are Marxist human herds, but no longer a German nation.”

The concept of revolution that he had dimly in mind also had a strongly elitist, biological cast. He thought of revolution as aiming nol only at new forms of rule and new institutions but also at a new type of man. In many of his speeches and proclamations he hailed the emergence of that new type as the dawn of a “vertitable golden age.” One of his oft-repeated statements was: “Anyone who understands National Socialism only as a political movement knows virtually nothing about it. It is even more than religion; it is the will to a new creation of man.” Thus one of the most pressing tasks of the new state would be to bring to a halt “further bastardization,” to “lift marriage from the level of continual miscegenation,” and enable it once more “to beget images of the Lord and not abortions midway between man and ape.” The pure Aryan type could be recovered by breeding back in a series of “regression crossings.” By such biological and pedagogical procedures, the German people could once more be restored to its pristine purity. In a secret speech to the 1938 officer class he spoke of a development continuing for a hundred years, at the end of which a majority would possess those select characteristics that would enable it to conquer and rule the world.

The living space that he continually called for was not intended merely to provide food for a surplus population, to insure against “starvation and misery,” and to receive a peasantry threatened by industry and trade. Rather, these territorial demands were a prelude to a program for world conquest. Every ambitious nation needed a certain amount of territory, enough to make it independent of alliances and the political alignments of a given period. Historical greatness was intimately connected with geographic extension. To this idea Hitler clung to the very last. Brooding in the bunker shortly before the end, he complained that fate had forced him into premature conquests because a nation without great space could not even set itself great goals.

He early saw four ways to meet the future threat of overpopulation. Three of these—restriction of births, internal colonization, overseas colonialism—he rejected as timid dreams or “unworthy tasks.” With explicit reference to the United States, he then argued that the only acceptable course was a continental war of conquest. “What is refused to amicable methods must be taken by force,” he wrote in Landsberg and made no secret of what he had in mind: “If land was desired in Europe, it could be obtained by and large only at the expense of Russia, and this meant that the new Reich must again set itself on the march along the road of the Teutonic Knights of old.”¹⁹

Underlying such pronunciamentos was, once again, the concept of a great turning point in the history of the world. A new age was beginning; history was once more setting the mighty wheel in motion and apportioning lots anew. An end was coming to the era of sea powers who conquered distant lands with their navies, heaped up riches, established bases, and dominated the world. In the pretechnical age the sea had been the road to expansion. But under modern conditions that had totally changed. Colonial greatness was anachronistic and slated for destruction. Present-day technical capacities, the possibility of pushing roads and railways into vast, still unopened areas and linking these by a network of strongpoints, meant that the old order was being reversed. The empire of the future, Hitler held, would be a land power, a compact, integrally organized military giant. The age was already moving in that direction. Undoubtedly Hitler’s way of conducting foreign policy in later years—as a succession of surprise blows—sprang from his inward restlessness. But he was also waging a desperate battle against time, against what he regarded as the course of history. He was forever seized by fear that Germany might for the second time arrive too late at the distribution of the world’s goods. When he considered the powers who might compete with Germany for future mastery, his thoughts repeatedly returned to Russia. Racial, political, geographic, and historical indications coincided: everything pointed to the East.²⁰

In line with prevailing sentiment, Hitler had begun as a revisionist, demanding annulment of the Versailles Treaty, restoration of the borders of 1914, by force if necessary, and the joining of all Germans in one mighty great power. To this school of thought the main enemy was France, and Germany’s best hopes lay in exploiting the difficulties France was in increasing measure having with Italy and England. But Hitler did not keep to this view. True to his bent for thinking in larger terms, he was soon contemplating the Continent as a whole, and replacing border politics with area politics.

The core of his thesis was that Germany, in her militarily, politically, and geographically threatened middle position, could survive “only by ruthlessly placing power politics in the foreground.” In an earlier discussion of Germany’s foreign policy in the age of Kaiser Wilhelm, Hitler had held that Germany should either have renounced sea trade and colonies in order to join England against Russia or, alternatively, if she sought sea power and world trade, she should have joined Russia against England. In the early twenties Hitler favored the second course. He viewed England as one of the “principal” opponents of the Reich, and on this basis developed a marked pro-Russian bias. Under the influence of the emigré circle around Scheubner-Richter and Rosenberg, he looked toward an alliance with a “nationalistic” Russia, one “restored to health” and freed from the “Jewish-Bolshevik yoke.” Teamed with this new Russia, Germany would confront the West. Neither the concept of Lebensraum nor the inferiority of the Slavic race—which later was to be the basis for his expansionist Eastern policy—seems to have entered his head at this time. It was not until the beginning of 1923, probably in view of the stabilization of the Soviet regime, that he began to think of taking the opposite course and forming a pact with England against Russia. The sources seem to suggest that Hitler weighed this idea for more than a year, considered its ramifications, its consequences, and its chances of being realized. The fruit of this thinking appears in the famous fourth chapter of Mein Kampf, where he speaks of a war for living space fought against Russia.

In presenting this program, Hitler certainly had not abandoned the idea of a war against France. That remained one of the primary points of his foreign policy right down to the last monologues in the bunker. But it now assumed another character. Just as Italy was to be placated by Germany’s renouncing the South Tyrol and England was to be wooed into an alliance by Germany’s dropping all colonial demands, war with France became simply another step that would allow Germany a free hand in the East. By the time he was writing the second volume of Mein Kampf in the course of 1925, Hitler forcefully assailed the revisionist approach; it aimed, he argued, at the restoration of wholly illogical, accidental, far too constricted borders, which, moreover, made no sense in terms of military geography. Worse still, such demands would stir up all of Germany’s former Wartime foes and lead them to revive their crumbling alliance. “The demand for restoration of the frontiers of 1914 is a political absurdity of such proportions and consequences as to make it seem a crime,” Hitler declared in italics. National Socialism, on the contrary, aimed at securing land and soil for the German people. “This action is the only one which, before God and our German posterity, would make any sacrifice of blood seem justified.” Such broad gains would “some day acquit the responsible statesmen of blood-guilt and sacrifice of the people.”²¹

Henceforth, the idea of attacking Russia, of a mighty Teutonic expedition to establish a vast continental empire in the old “German area of command in the East,” became the central tenet of Hitler’s foreign policy. He assigned it epoch-making importance:

 

And so we National Socialists consciously draw a line beneath the foreign policy tendency of our pre-War period. We take up where we broke off six hundred years ago. We stop the endless German movement to the south and west, and turn our gaze toward the land in the east. At long last we break off the colonial and commercial policy of the pre-War period and shift to the soil policy of the future.²²

 

How he arrived at this concept, as logical as it was monstrous, really does not matter. Some of it was original, some of it an extension of current theories. The notion of living space seems to have been a borrowing from Rudolf Hess. Thanks to his adulation of “the man,” as he called Hitler, Hess had gradually won himself an important place among the group at the Landsberg prison. In particular, he replaced Emil Maurice in the position of Hitler’s secretary. Hess also brought Hitler into personal contact with his teacher, Karl Haushofer, who had taken the highly suggestive subject of political geography, the “geopolitics” expounded by Sir Halford Mackinder, and shaped it into a philosophy of imperialistic expansion.

Mackinder had already drawn attention to the basic strength of what he called “the heartland”: Eastern Europe and European Russia, protected by huge land masses, were destined to be the “citadel of world rule.” The founder of geopolitics had decreed: “Whoever rules the heartland rules the world.” As we have seen, such pseudoscientific formulas had a special appeal to Hitler’s mind. But with all due credit to outside influences, Hitler’s version of these ideas was distinctively his own. Seldom had his “combinative talent” operated so brilliantly, for he drew the outlines of a foreign policy that not only guided Germany’s relations with the various great powers of Europe but satisfied her craving for revenge upon France, her desire for expansion and conquest, and his own miscellaneous ideological fixations, including his sense that a new age was dawning. To give this scheme the final fillip, it was made to fit into a pattern of “racial” history.

 

Here Fate itself seems desirous of giving us a sign. By handing Russia to Bolshevism, it robbed the Russian nation of that intelligentsia which previously brought about and guaranteed its existence as a state. For the organization of a Russian state was not the result of the political abilities of the Slavs in Russia, but only a wonderful example of the state-forming efficacy of the German element in an inferior race. . . . For centuries Russia drew nourishment from this Germanic nucleus of its upper leading strata. Today it can be regarded as almost totally exterminated and extinguished. It has been replaced by the Jew. Impossible as it is for the Russian by himself to shake off the yoke of the Jew by his own resources, it is equally impossible for the Jew to maintain the mighty empire forever. He himself is no element of organization, but a ferment of decomposition. The giant empire in the east is ripe for collapse. And the end of Jewish rule in Russia will also be the end of Russia as a state. We have been chosen by fate as witnesses of a catastrophe which will be the mightiest confirmation of the soundness of the folkish theory.²³

 

Out of theories of this sort Hitler had formed, by the mid-twenties, the essentials of the foreign policy he later put into practice: the early attempts at alliance with England and the Rome-Berlin Axis, the campaign against France and the vast war of annihilation in the East to conquer and take possession of the world’s “heartland.” Moral considerations played no part in these plans. “An alliance whose aim does not embrace a plan for war is senseless and worthless,” he declared in Mein Kampf. “State boundaries are made by man and changed by man.” They seem unalterable “only to the thoughtless idiot”; the conqueror’s might adequately demonstrates his right; “he who has, has.” Such were his maxims. And however extravagant the program he patched together out of his nightmares, his theories of history, his distorted view of biology and his situation analyses, in its hyperactive radicality it held greater promise of success than the temperate revisionist demands for the return of West Prussia or South Tyrol. Unlike his nationalist partners, Hitler had realized that Germany had no chances within the existing world political system. His profound emotional bias against normality served him well when he set out to challenge the normal ideas of foreign policy from the very roots. The game could be won only by refusing to play it. By turning in another direction, against the Soviet Union, which was felt as a threat by other respectable nations, he made these nations his confederates and rendered Germany “potentially so strong. . . that the conquest of an empire was in a very precise sense easier than the isolated recovery of Bromberg or Königshutte.”²⁴ He had a better chance to seize Moscow than Strassburg or Bozen.

Along with the goal, Hitler recognized and accepted the risk. It is astonishing to see how directly, in 1933, he began to put his program into effect. The alternative for him was never anything but world power or doom in the most literal sense. “Every being strives for expansion,” he told the professors and students of Erlangen in a 1930 speech, “and every nation strives for world dominion.” That proposition derived, he thought, straight from the aristocratic principle of Nature, which everywhere desired the victory of the stronger and the annihilation or unconditional subjugation of the weak. From this point of view he was entirely consistent at the end, when he saw the whole game lost and doom impending, and remarked to Albert Speer, who found the sentiment profoundly shocking: “If the war is lost, the people will be lost also. It is not necessary to worry about what the German people will need for elemental survival. On the contrary, it is best for us to destroy even these things. For the nation has proved to be the weaker, and the future belongs solely to the stronger eastern nation.”²⁵ Germany had lost far more than a war; he was entirely without hope. For the last time he bowed to the law of Nature, “this cruel queen of all wisdom,” which had imperiously ruled his life and thought.

 

Toward the closing days of 1924, after approximately a year, the imprisonment that Hitler ironically called his “university at state expense” approached its end. At the request of the state prosecutor, prison warden Leybold on September 15, 1924, drew up a report that made the granting of parole a virtual certainty. “Hitler has shown himself a man of order,” the report states, “of discipline not only in respect to himself, but also in respect to his fellow inmates. He is easily content, modest and desirous to please. Makes no demands, is quiet and sensible, serious and quite without aggressiveness, and tries painstakingly to abide by prison rules. He is a man without personal vanity, is satisfied with the institution’s food, does not smoke and drink, and though comradely, is able to exert a certain authority over his fellow inmates. . . . Hitler will attempt to revitalize the nationalist movement according to his own principles, but no longer, as in the past by violent methods which if necessary (!) may be directed against the government; instead, he will work in league with the concerned governmental bureaus.”

Such model behavior and political change of heart were the conditions for parole, the court having held out some prospect for this after Hitler had served a mere six months of his five-year-sentence. We may well wonder how the Nazi leader who had already violated one parole, had escaped another prosecution by the intercession of a government minister, had for years instigated riots and meeting-hall rows, who had deposed the national government, arrested cabinet ministers and been responsible for killings, could possibly be granted so early a release. And in fact a complaint from the office of the state prosecutor had for the time being delayed the court’s action. But the state authority was inclined to pardon the lawbreaker for sharing its own bent. Consequently, it put very little pressure behind the obligatory deportation of Hitler. In a letter to the Ministry of the Interior dated September 22, 1924, the Munich police commissioner’s office had referred to this deportation as “essential,” and Prime Minister Held, the new Bavarian governmental chief, had even sent out feelers to discover whether the Austrians would be willing to take Hitler if he were deported. But nothing further had been done. Hitler himself was extremely worried; he tried in every conceivable way to prove his docility. He was angry when Gregor Strasser arose in the Landtag to denounce the continued imprisonment of Hitler as a disgrace for Bavaria and splutter that the country was being ruled by a “gang of swine, a mean, disgusting gang of swine.” He was also displeased by Röhm’s underground activity.

Once more, circumstances were working in his favor. In the Reichstag elections held on December 7, the völkisch movement was able to garner only 3 per cent of the votes. It had previously had thirty-three deputies in the Reichstag; of these, only fourteen returned after the election. The results seemed to indicate that the radical Right had passed its peak. Apparently the Bavarian supreme court saw it that way, too, for it supported the lower court’s decision to grant Hitler parole, despite the protest of the state prosecutor. On December 20, while the inmates in Landsberg were already preparing to celebrate Christmas there, a telegram from Munich ordered the immediate release of Hitler and Kriebel.

A few friends and followers, who had been informed beforehand, appeared with a car outside the prison gate. They were a disappointingly tiny group. The movement had fallen apart, its members scattered or at odds. Hermann Esser and Julius Streicher were waiting at Hitler’s Munich apartment. There was no grand scene, no triumph. Hitler, who had put on weight, seemed restive and tense. That Very evening he went to see Ernst Hanfstaengl and at once asked him: “Play the Liebestod for me.” Even while in Landsberg, such sorrowful moods had taken hold of him. Die Weltbühne carried an ironic obituary reporting the early demise of Adolf Hitler and adding that the Germanic gods had no doubt loved him too well.