42: Hitler's Struggle

While serving his prison sentence for his failed beer hall putsch, Adolf Hitler made some adjustments to "world-view."

 By Ian Kershaw

Ideas which had been taking shape in his mind since late 1922, if not earlier, on the direction of future foreign policy were now elaborated into the notion of a quest for "living space," to be gained at the expense of Russia. Blended into his obsessive antisemitism, aimed at the destruction of "Jewish Bolshevism," the concept of a war for "living space" -- an idea which Hitler would repeatedly emphasize in the following years -- rounded off his "world view." Thereafter, there would be tactical adjustments, but no further alteration of substance.

The modifications in Hitler's "world-view" that were already forming in the year before the putsch are clearly evident in Mein Kampf. Hitler's book offered nothing new. But it was the plainest and most expansive statement of his "world view" that he had presented. He acknowledged that without his stay in Landsberg the book would never have been written.

No policy outline was offered in Mein Kampf. But the book did provide, however garbled the presentation, an uncompromising statement of Hitler's political principles, his "world-view," his sense of his on "mission," his "vision" of society, and his long-term aims. Not least, it established the basis of the Führer myth. For in Mein Kampf, Hitler portrayed himself as uniquely qualified to lead Germany from its existing misery to greatness.

Mein Kampf gives an important insight into his thinking in the mid-1920s. By then, he had developed a philosophy that afforded him a complete interpretation of history, of the ills of the world, and how to overcome them. Tersely summarized, it boiled down to a simplistic, Manichean view of history as racial struggle, in which the highest racial entity, the aryan, was being undermined and destroyed by the lowest, the parasitic Jew. "The racial question," he wrote, "gives the key not only to world history but to all human culture." The culmination of this process was taken to be the brutal rule of the Jews through Bolshevism in Russia, where the "blood Jew" had, "partly amid inhuman torture killed or let starve to death around 30 million people in truly satanic savagery in order to secure the rule over a great people of a bunch of Jewish literati and stock-market bandits." The "mission" of the Nazi Movement was, therefore, clear: to destroy "Jewish Bolshevism." At the same time -- a leap of logic that moved conveniently into a justification for outright imperial conquest -- this would provide the German people with the "living space" needed for the "master race" to sustain itself.

He held rigidly to these basic tenets for the rest of his life. Nothing of substance changed in later years. The very inflexibility and quasi-messianic commitment to an "idea," a set of beliefs that were unalterable, simple, internally consistent, and comprehensive, gave Hitler the strength of will and sense of knowing his own destiny that left its mark on all those who came into contact with him. Hitler's authority in his entourage derived in no small measure from the certainty in his own convictions that he could so forcefully express, Everything could be couched in terms of black and white, victory or total destruction. There were no alternatives. And, like all ideologues and "conviction politicians," the self-reinforcing components of his "world-view" meant that he was always in a position to deride or dismiss out of hand any "rational" arguments of opponents. Once head of state, Hitler's personalized "world-view" would serve as "guidelines for action" for policy-makers in all areas of the Third Reich.

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Hitler's book was not a prescriptive program in the sense of a short-term political manifesto. But many contemporaries made a mistake in treating Mein Kampf with ridicule and not taking the ideas Hitler expressed there extremely seriously. However base and repellent they were, they amounted to a set of clearly established and rigidly upheld political principles. Hitler never saw any reason to alter the content of what he had written. Their internal coherence (given the irrational premises) allows them to be described as an ideology (or, in Hitler's own terminology, a "world-view"). Hitler's "world-view" in Mein Kampf can now be more clearly seen than used to be possible in the context of his ideas as they unfolded between his entry into politics and the writing of his "Second Book" in 1928.

On Hitler's central, overriding, and all-embracing obsession, the "removal of the Jews," Mein Kampf added nothing to the ideas he had already formulated by 1919-20. Extreme though the language of Mein Kampf was, it was no different to that which he had been proclaiming for years. Nor, for that matter, did the inherently genocidal terminology substantially vary from that of other writers and speakers on the völkisch Right, extending well back beyond the First World War. His bacterial imagery implied that Jews would be treated in the way germs were dealt with: by extermination.

Already in August 1920, Hitler had spoken of combating "racial tuberculosis" through removal of the "causal agent, the Jew." And there could be little doubt whom Hitler had in mind when, four years later in Mein Kampf, he wrote: "The nationalization of our masses will succeed only when, aside from all the positive struggle for the soul of our people, their international poisoners are exterminated." The notion of poisoning the poisoners ran through another, notorious, passage of Mein Kampf, in which Hitler suggested that if 12-15,000 "Hebrew corrupters of the people" has been held under poison gas at the start of the First World War, then "the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain."

These terrible passaged are not the beginning of a one-way track to the "Final Solution." The road there was "twisted," not straight. But however little he had thought out the practical implications of what he was saying, its inherent genocidal thrust is undeniable. However indistinctly, the connection between destruction of the Jews, war, and national salvation had been forged in Hitler's mind.

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The initial anti-capitalist coloring of Hitler's antisemitism had given way by mid-1920 to the connection in his mind of the Jews with the evils of Soviet Bolshevism. It was not that Hitler substituted the image of the Jews behind Marxism for that of the Jews behind capitalism. Both coexisted in his fixated loathing. It was a hatred so profound that it could only have been based on deep fear. This was of a figure in his mind so powerful that it was the force behind both international finance capital and Soviet Communism. It was the image of a "Jewish world conspiracy" that was almost unconquerable -- even for National Socialism.

Once the link with Bolshevism was made, Hitler had established his central and lasing vision of a titanic battle for supremacy, a racial struggle against a foe of ruthless brutality. What he visualized, he had stated in June 1922, was a fight to the death between two competing ideologies, the idealistic and the materialistic. The mission of the German people was to destroy Bolshevism, and with it "our mortal enemy: the Jew." By October the same year he was writing of a life and death struggle of two opposed world-views, incapable of existing alongside one another. Defeat in this great showdown would seal Germany's destruction. The struggle would leave only victors and the annihilated. It meant a war of extermination.

By now Marxism and the Jew were synonymous in Hitler's mind. At the end of his trial, on 27 March 1924, he told the court that what he wanted to be was the breaker of Marxism. The Nazi Movement knew only one enemy, he had emphasized the following month -- the mortal enemy of the whole of mankind: Marxism. There was no mention of the Jews. Some newspapers picked up the change of emphasis and claimed Hitler had altered his position on the "Jewish Question." There were Nazi followers who were also puzzled. One, visiting him in Landsberg at the end of July, asked Hitler whether he had changed his views about Jewry. He received a characteristic reply.

Indeed his position on the struggle against Jewry had altered, Hitler remarked. He had realized while at work on Mein Kampf that he had up to then been too mild. In future, only the toughest measures could be deployed if success were to be attained. The "Jewish Question," he declared, was an existential matter for all peoples, not just the German people, "for Juda is the world plague." The logic of the position was that only the complete eradication of the international power of Jewry would suffice.

Hitler's obsession with the "Jewish Question" was inextricably interwoven with his notions of foreign policy. Once his antisemitism had, by the middle of 1920, fused with anti-Bolshevism into the image of "Jewish Bolshevism," it was inevitable that his thinking on foreign policy would be affected. However, not only ideological influences, but questions of pure power politics shaped Hitler's changing position. In their concentration on France as the arch-enemy, hostility to Britain, recovery of colonies, and the restoration of Germany's borders of 1914, Hitler's early views on foreign policy were conventionally pan-German. They were no different from those of many nationalist hotheads. In fact, in essence they were accorded with a revisionism that enjoyed wide popular backing. Nor, in his emphasis on military might to overthrow Versailles and defeat France, however unrealistic it sounded in the early 1920s, did he differ from many others on the Pan-German and völkisch Right.

Already in 1920, before he had heard of Fascism, he was contemplating the value of an alliance with Italy. He was determined even then that the question of South Tyrol -- the predominantly German-speaking part of the former Austrian province of Tyrol lying beyond the Brenner, ceded to Italy in 1919, and since then subjected to a program of "Italianization" -- would not stand in the way of such an alliance. By late 1922, an alliance with Britain, whose world empire he admired, was in his mind. This idea had sharpened in 1923 when the disagreements of the British and French over the Ruhr occupation became clear. The presumed rule of the Jews in Russia stood, on the other hand, as Hitler had pointed out as early as July 1920, firmly in the way of any alliance with Russia.

Russia was coming already before the putsch to loom larger in Hitler's thoughts on foreign policy. He had somewhat vaguely mentioned the "land question," comparing Germany unfavorably with Russia in its relation of population to the land at its disposal, as early as December 1919. He hinted in a speech on 31 May 1921, through praise of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty of 1918 for giving Germany the additional land it needed to sustain its people, at an expansion of German "living space" at the expense of Russia. On 21 October 1921 he was still speaking, somewhat cryptically, of an expansion with Russia against England opening up "an unlimited possibility of expansion towards the east."

Such remarks indicated that at this time, Hitler still shared -- even if vaguely expressed -- the Pan-German view on eastern expansion. This amounted broadly to the notion that eastern expansion could be carried out through collaboration with a non-Bolshevik Russia, whose own territorial demands would be settled also through looking eastwards, towards Asia, leaving the former Russian border areas in the west to Germany. It would have amounted, essentially, to something like a resurrection of the Brest-Litovsk arrangement, while Russia would have been left to find compensation in the lands on its own eastern borders.

By early 1922, these views had shifted. By now, Hitler had abandoned any idea of collaboration with Russia. He saw no prospect of Russia looking only eastwards. Extension of Bolshevism to Germany would prove an irresistible urge. The logic of the changed position was evident. Only through the destruction of Bolshevism could Germany be saved. And at the same time as this -- through expansion into Russia itself -- would bring the territory which Germany needed.

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The imperialist and geopolitical ideas that went to make up the idea of Lebensraum were, in fact, common currency on the imperialist and völkisch Right in Weimar Germany. The idea of Lebensraum had been a prominent strand of German imperialist ideology since the 1890s. It had been strong represented in the Pan-German League under Heinrich Claß, supported by the press controlled by the founder-member of the League, director of Krupp's, and media tycoon Alfred Hugenberg. For Pan-Germans, Lebensraum could both justify territorial conquest by evoking the colonizing of Slav lands by Teutonic knights in the Middle Ages and, emotively, conjure up notions of united in the Reich what came to be described as Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans) scattered throughout eastern Europe.

For the most part these constituted fairly small minorities, as in parts of Poland  (outside the towns) which Prussia had ruled before 1918. But in a number of areas -- Danzig, for example, parts of the Baltic, ore the area of Czechoslovakia later known as the Sudetenlan -- the German-speaking population was sizeable, and often vociferously nationalist. The idea of Lebensraum symbolized, then, for Pan-Germans the historic conquest of the East while at the same time, in emphasizing German alleged over-population, cloaking real, modern, power-political imperialist ambitions. It existed alongside, rather than blending with, the mainstream imperialist concentration on overseas trading colonies, encapsulation in the slogan Weltpolitik. Hitler could scarcely have avoided the imperialist and geopolitical writings in circulation on "living space."

[In the second volume of Mein Kamp] mainly written in 1925, the enemy in the short term was still seen as France. But in the baldest language, the long-term goal was now stated to be the attaining of "living space" at the expense of Russia. The mission of the National Socialist Movement was to prepare the German people for this task.

Source:

Kershaw, I. (2008). Hitler: A Biography. London: W. W. Norton and Company.