Will Morrisey Reviews

François-René vicomte de Chateaubriand: Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem. A. S. Kline translation. London: On-Demand Publishing, 2011.

Part One: Greece.

Part Two: The Archipelago, Anatolia, and Constantinople.

 

Having voyaged to the westernmost frontier of European civilization, the United States of America, in 1791, meeting George Washington (“There is virtue in the gaze of a great man”), and finding material there for his novel, Les Natchez, in 1806 Chateaubriand undertook a similar journey for a similar purpose, from Paris to Jerusalem, returning through Egypt, Tunisia, and Spain. The literary result was Les Martyrs, a prose epic intended to complement his 1802 treatise, The Genius of Christianity. [1] His bête noir, Napoleon, had crowned himself Emperor of France two years earlier and had defeated Austria at Austerlitz in 1805; Napoleon would go on to ally France with the Ottoman Empire, a political liaison that may account for some of Chateaubriand’s asperity in his portrait of the Turks. While “in the deserts of America I had contemplated the monuments of nature”—complementing his earliest major work, Essai Politique, Historique, and Morale, sur les Revolutions Anciennes et Modernes considerés dans leurs Rapports avec la Révolution Français de nos Jours, in which he presented a theory of natural right [2]—and while he already “knew two of the realms of antiquity,” the Celts, ancestors of the French, and the Romans, their civilizational ancestors, he had never seen Greece, the civilizational cradle of Rome, or Jerusalem, cradle of the Christendom that had pervaded Greece, Rome, and France. “I may be the last Frenchman to leave my country to travel to the Holy Land with the ideas, aim and sentiments of the pilgrims of old, but if I have not the virtues that once illuminated the Lords of Coucy, de Nesles, de Chatillon, and de Montfort, at least their faith remains to me.” In this enterprise, Chateaubriand never strays far from the spirit of Jerusalem Delivered, Tasso’s epic poem of the Crusades. 

Arms and religion. In Greece under the Turks, he will meet a man who cannot understand why he would travel “to see the various peoples, especially those Greeks who were dead,” but when he describes himself as “a pilgrim on my way to Jerusalem,” the man “was fully satisfied.” “Religion is a sort of universal language understood by all men. The Turk could not understand that I had left my homeland out of a simple motive of curiosity”—Aristotle’s dictum, “Man wants to know,” having no echo in his soul—but “he found it quite natural that I should undertake a long journey to pray at a shrine.” Nor was this only a Muslim assumption, as “I had found the savages of the New World indifferent to my foreign manners, but solely attentive like the Turks to my weapons and my religion, that is to say, the two things that protect mankind in regard to body and soul.” [3]

Leaving French soil proper, he spends five days in Venice, then part of Napoleon’s Kingdom of Italy, a client state ruled by the Emperor’s son-in-law. He then embarked to Trieste, which had been returned to Austrian control by France only a few months earlier. “The last breath of Italy expires here on this shore where barbarism begins”—that is, modern Greece, under Ottoman rule. On the Austrian ship taking him to Messenia, during a storm, the Catholic captain hangs a light in front of an image of the Virgin Mary, reminding Chateaubriand of “the affecting nature of this cult that yields empire over the seas to a weak woman,” reminding him that “what unsettles human wisdom is the proximity of danger; at that moment mankind becomes religious, and the torch of philosophy reassures less in the midst of the tempest that the lamp lit before the Madonna.” With the captain and the sailors, he prays “for the Emperor Francis II, for ourselves, and for the sailors…drowned in those sacred waters.”

Having “found ourselves at the gates of the Adriatic,” “I was there, at the frontier of Greek antiquity and the border of Latin antiquity”; “Pythagoras, Alcibiades, Scipio, Caesar, Pompey, Cicero, August, Horace, Virgil, had crossed this sea.” After all, “I journeyed to seek the Muses in their own country.” Chateaubriand does not travel in the manner of today’s tourist ‘sightseer.’ When he sees a site, he hears the voices of poets and historians. “Woe to him who sees not nature with the eyes of Fenelon or Homer!” Or the occasional philosopher: “climate more or less influences the tastes of a people,” Montesquieu observes, in Chateaubriand’s words. “In Greece, for example, everything is smooth; everything is softened; everything is as full of calm in nature a in the writings of the ancients”; this is “why ancient sculpture is so little troubled, so peaceful, so simple.” “In that land of the Muses, nature suggests no abrupt departures,” bringing “the mind to a love of consistent and harmonious things.” “Nothing would be more pleasant than natural history, if one were to relate it always to human history: we would delight in seeing the migratory birds forsake the unknown tribes of the Atlantic shores to visit the famed peoples of the Eurotas and Cephissus, and “perhaps some bird of the Americas attracted Aristotle’s attention on the waters of Greece, that philosopher failing even to suspect the existence of the New World,” and “often the marches of peoples and armies followed the wanderings of a few solitary birds, or the peaceful migrations of camels and gazelles.” “Long before mankind,” God’s creatures knew “the extent of man’s abode.”

The sea is another matter. There, the sublimity of nature rivals the beauty of the land. On the island of Corfu, west of the Greek mainland, “Odysseus was hurled after his shipwreck,” Aristotle came in exile and, under the Romans, Cato met Cicero after the battle of Pharsalia. (“What men! What suffering! What blows of fortune!”) And “it was from Corfu that the army of crusaders departed that set a French nobleman on the throne of Constantinople”—the Count of Flanders, who led the Fourth Crusade in 1204, who reigned as Baldwin I, the first Latin emperor. Despite the glory of the ancients (that “glory must be something real, since it makes the heart beat in one who is only a spectator of it”), Christian martyrs have equaled or perhaps excelled them: “Is a martyr to freedom any greater than a martyr to truth? Is Cato, devoting himself to the liberation of Rome, more heroic than Sosipater, allowing himself to be burnt in a brazen bull, in order to announce to men that they are brothers; that they should love each other; help each other; and rise nearer to God through the practice of virtue?” The superiority of the Christians to the ancients will be the theme of The Martyrs.

Chateaubriand landed at Methoni, on the western Peloponnese. Greece is now ruled by the Turks or, as Chateaubriand insists throughout, misruled. Yes, the chief civilian official of the city, the Agha, had cleared the roads of bandits, but his methods were not scrupulous. “It would have been too slow and too boring for a Turk to distinguish the innocent from the guilty: they killed, with a knock on the head as one kills wild beasts, all those hunted down by the Pasha. The robbers perished, it is true, but along with three hundred Greek peasants who had nothing to do with the matter.” When Chateaubriand sees the Christian and Muslim graveyards set next to each other, the Christian graveyard “dilapidated, without gravestones, and without trees,” “we see even in the freedom and equality of death a distinction between tyrant and slave.”

Under this regime, Chateaubriand maintained vigilance, as even “the slightest sign of fear or even of caution, exposes you to their contempt.” “A Turk is as pliable if he sees that you do not fear him, as he is offensive if he discovers that he has inspired fear in you.” He had French honor to uphold. At the city of Coroni, he recalls the Frenchmen who participated in its retaking from the Turks in 1685. “I enjoyed discovering these traces of the path of French honor, from my very first entry to the true home of glory, and to a people whose people are such good judges of worth.” Of course, “where does one not find such traces!” Throughout his journeys he found them: “The Arabs showed me the graves of our soldiers beneath the sycamores of Cairo, and the Seminoles beneath the Florida poplars.” “If I myself have followed, without glory, though not without honor, those twin careers in which the citizens of Athens and Sparta acquired so much renown, I console myself by reflecting that other Frenchmen were more fortunate than I.” But now the Turks possess the olive trees of Coroni. “Tears came to my eyes seeing the hands of an enslaved Greek bathed in vain by those streams of oil that brought vigor to the arms of his forefathers so they might triumph over tyrants.” At once tyrannical and largely impotent, the Turkish state cedes effective rule to individual Muslims. The establishment of a public institution such as a drinking fountain or a caravanserai results from “the religious spirit, and not the love of country, since there is no country.” But even the religious spirit has waned. “It is remarkable that all these fountains, all these caravanserais, all these bridges are crumbling, and date from the early days of the empire: I do not think I encountered one modern construction along the way; from which one must conclude that religion is enfeebled among the Muslims and, along with that religion, Turkish society is on the point of collapse.” The regime will offer no help, however, as the state apparatus consists of “tyrants consumed with the thirst for gold, who shed innocent blood without remorse in its pursuit.” “If I had ever thought, with those whose character and talents I otherwise respect, that absolute government is the best form of government, a few months’ sojourn in Turkey would have completely cured me of that opinion.”

In southwest Peloponnese, where the ancient Spartans had ruled, “I could scarcely convince myself that I breathed the air of the homeland of Helen and Menelaus.” Sparta now consists only of a single white cottage. “Tears sprang to my eyes, as I fixed my gaze on that little hut, which stood on the deserted site of tone of the most famous cities of the world, and which served only to identify the location of Sparta, inhabited by a single goatherd, whose only wealth is the grass that grows on the graves of King Agis, and Leonidas.” Not long after, his Turkish escort brought him to another site, with “ruins everywhere, and not one human being among the ruins”—Sparta having been not only deserted by the modern Greeks but forgotten. He recalls the Spartan prayer, “Let virtue be added to beauty!” But now, “the sun blazes down in silence, and ceaselessly devours the marble tombs,” the only remaining life being the “thousands of lizards, noiselessly climbing and descending the burning walls.” While “I hate the Spartan moral code, I cannot fail to understand the greatness of a free people, and I cannot tread that noble dust without emotion,” its nobility confirmed by “a single fact”: when the dissolute Roman tyrant Nero came to Greece, “he dared not venture to Sparta,” the memory of whose austerity remained as a silent rebuke of his life and rule. There is an ironic coda to Chateaubriand’s visit. The Spartans’ statues and altars honoring Sleep, Death, Beauty, and Fear (“which the Spartans inspired in the enemies”) have disappeared, but he finds what may have been the pedestal of the statue of Laughter “that Lycurgus erected among those grave descendants of Hercules.” “An altar of Laughter remaining alone in the midst of buried Sparta offers a gloriously triumphant subject for the philosophy of Democritus”—the philosopher of atomism who snickered at the human failure to acknowledge the inevitable dissolution of all things.

Despite the rule of the Turks, Christianity has fared somewhat better. At Corinth, Chateaubriand recalls the Apostle Paul: “That man, ignored by the great, scorned by the crowd, rejected as ‘the sweepings of the world, only associating at first with two companions, Crispus and Gaius, and with the household of Stephanus: such were the unknown architects of an indestructible temple and the first Christians of Corinth. The traveler casts his eyes over the site of this famous city: he sees not a remnant of the pagan altars, but he sees a number of Christian chapels rising from the midst of the Greek houses. The Apostle can still give, from heaven, the sign of peace to his children.” Still, regarding Greece generally, “What silence! Unfortunate country! Unhappy Greeks! Will France lose her glory thus? Will she be thus devastated, and trampled, in the course of centuries?” Wherever he goes on this journey, Chateaubriand registers this strong sense of Sic transit gloria. “The Lord killeth and maketh alive: he bringeth down to the grave, and bringeth up” (1 Samuel 2:6), he recalls. “This changeability in human affairs is all the more striking because it contrasts with the immobility of the rest of nature,” inasmuch as “wild animals experience no alteration in their empires or change of habits.” “I saw, when we were on the Hill of the [Athens] Museum, storks forming their battalion and taking flight for Africa.” “For two thousand years they had made the same journey, and were as free and happy in the city of solon as they are in the city of the commander of the black eunuchs. To the heights of their nests, that revolution cannot reach.”

The impermanence of human things may be seen at Salamis, which “is now almost completely erased from the Greek memory.” “The indifference the Greeks show concerning their homeland is as shameful as it is deplorable; not only are they unaware of their own history, but they virtually ignore…the ancient language which is their glory.” At Piraeus, now deserted, “I walked a while beside the sea which bathed the tomb of Themistocles; in all probability, I was at that moment the only person in Greece thinking of this great man.” And “though one could still recognize Athens from its ruins, one could also see from the overall architecture and the general character of the monuments, that the city of Athene was no longer inhabited by the same people.” He is left with the Athens of antiquity, where “the higher sentiments of human nature acquire something elegant…that they lacked at Sparta.” At Athens “love of country and freedom…was not a blind instinct, but an enlightened sentiment, founded on that taste for beauty in all its form, that the sky had so liberally disposed.” While “I would have wished to die alongside Leonidas,” I would “live alongside Pericles.” At the ruins of the Areopagus, he recalls not only Pericles but Alcibiades and Demosthenes, who spoke there “to the most thoughtless yet most intelligent nation on earth,” men who issued “many cruel and iniquitous decrees” but also “generous speeches against the tyrants of their country.”

Chateaubriand prefers the Parthenon to the Areopagus. “The greatest masterpiece of architecture among both ancients and moderns,” the Parthenon’s harmony and strength [remain] visible in its ruins.” Modern architecture, “slender…when we aim at elegance,” “heavy, when we pretend to majesty,” cannot match the rule of reason, of mathematical balance, seen in the Parthenon. “We should not conceal from ourselves the fact that architecture considered as an art is in its principles predominantly religious; it was invented for the worship of the deity.” Moderns introduce its features into their homes, “ornamentation fitted only for the house of the gods.” And while Gothic architecture, the style which “is ours,” French, born “to speak with our altars,” elicits Chateaubriand’s praise, his fundamental sensibility leans toward the beautiful, not the sublime, despite his Christian convictions. “If after seeing the monuments of Rome, those of France seemed coarse to me, the monuments of Rome in turn seem barbaric now I have seen those of Greece.” And speaking of barbarism, “the Parthenon survived in its entirety until 1687, when the commercial Venetians “bombard[ed] the monuments of Pericles.” “A year of our warfare destroys more monuments than a century of fighting among the ancients. It seems that everything opposes perfection of the arts among the moderns: our nations, manners, customs, dress and even our inventions.” Continuing the ruin, Lord Elgin, citizen of still another modern commercial nation, “ravag[ed] the Parthenon” in order to transfer its bas-reliefs to the British Museum. “Only light reveals the delicacy of certain lines and colors,” but “this light is lacking beneath English skies.” In a larger sense, “What can have destroyed so many monuments of gods and men? that hidden force that overturns all things, and is itself subject to the unknown God whose altar St. Paul saw at Phaleron.”

Not without human assistance. Chateaubriand recalls that after the Romans conquered Athens, “gladiators mounted their blood-stained games in the Theater of Dionysus,” replacing “the masterpieces of Aeschylus Sophocles and Euripides,” as Athenians “flocked to such cruelties with the same zeal with which they had flocked to the Dionysian rites.” “Perhaps nations, as well as individuals, are cruel in their decrepitude as in their childhood, perhaps the spirit of a nation exhausts itself; and when it has created everything, traversed everything, tasted everything, filled with its own masterpieces, and unable to produce new ones, it becomes brutalized, and returns to purely physical sensation.” So far, Christianity has prevented “modern nations from ending in such a deplorable old age: but if all religion were extinguished among us, I would not be surprised if the cries of dying gladiators were to be heard on those stages which today echo to the grief of Phaedra or Andromache” in the plays of Racine. In an echo of his argument in The Genius of Christianity, Chateaubriand remarks that even the ruins of ancient Greece found their first students among the Jesuits and the Capuchins. When later travelers visited the Parthenon, “already the priests, religious exiles among those famous ruins hospitable to new gods, awaited the antiquary and artist.” The priests “did not parade their knowledge: kneeling at the foot of the cross, they hid, in the humility of the cloister, what they had learned, and above all what they had suffered…amidst the ruins of Athens.”

“In Greece, one indulges in illusions in vain: sad truth pursues one. Huts of dried mud, more suitable as the dens of animals than the homes of men; women and children in rags, fleeing at the approach of stranger or Janissary; even the goats frightened, scattering over the mountainside, and only the dogs left behind to welcome you with howls: such is the spectacle that robs you of memory’s charms.” There, under the Ottoman Turks, “a minaret rise[s] from the depths of solitude to proclaim slavery.” “These people destroy everything, and are a veritable scourge.”

Chateaubriand traces the beginning of Greek decline to the Peloponnesian War. “The vices of Athenian government,” the regime of democracy, “prepared the way for the victory of Sparta,” since “a purely democratic state is the worst when it comes to fighting a powerful enemy, and when a unified will is necessary to save the country”—precisely the argument Charles de Gaulle would make against parliamentary republicanism, a century and a half later. “Obedient to the voices of factious orators, they suffered the fate they had earned for their follies.” Then it was Sparta’s turn, in its case succumbing to the vices of a military aristocracy, where the women, untouched by the military discipline undergone by the men, “became the most corrupt women in Greece,” and the children, imitating their fathers, gave themselves over to “tearing each other with tooth and nail.” Further, the Spartan regime made no effort to unite Greece under its sway, preferring to retreat back behind its walls, once Athens had been defeated. Had they “incorporat[ed] within it the peoples conquered by its arms,” they “would have crushed Philip [of Macedon] in his cradle.” “With nations it is not as it is with men; moderate wealth and love of ease, which may be fitting in a citizen, will not take a State very far”; “not knowing how to take advantage of one’s position to honor, expand, and strengthen one’s country is rather a defect of spirit in a people than a sense of virtue.”

Although “I still think that there is plenty of spirit left in Greece,” thanks to human nature itself, “I am convinced that the Greeks are not likely to break their chains in the near future,” and even if liberated, “they would not immediately lose the marks of their irons.” The Ottoman Empire “has not brought them the harsh and savage customs of men of the North,” as the barbarians brought to Italy, “but the voluptuous customs of those of the South.” And the Koran, the other element brought them by the Turks, “preaches neither the hatred of tyranny, nor the love of liberty.”

Departing the mainland for the Cyclades archipelago, “a kind of bridge over the sea linking Greek Asia Minor to the true Greece,” Chateaubriand arrived at the harbor of Zea, known in antiquity as Ceos, whose most renowned son was the lyric poet Simonides, considered by Plato’s Socrates to be a precursor of the Sophists and confident of Hiero, tyrant of Syracuse. [4] Chateaubriand judges him “a true genius, though his mind was nobler than his heart,” a man who sang the praises of the ruler Hipparchus and then “sang the murderers of that prince.” [5] “One must accommodate oneself to one’s times, said that wise man: the ungrateful soon shake off their feelings of gratitude, the ambitious abandon the defeated, and the cowards join the winning side. Wondrous human wisdom, whose maxims, always superfluous to courage and virtue, serve merely as a pretext for vice, and a refuge for cowardly hearts!” Chateaubriand has in mind the accommodations of his own generation of sophists, who accommodated themselves to the tyranny of Napoleon. He also thinks of the “eloquent sophist” of the previous century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who wrote that he wished to be exiled on an island in the Cyclades. Had this happened, “he would soon have repented of his choice”: “separated from his admirers, relegated to the company of coarse and treacherous Greeks, he would have found, in valleys scorched by the sun, neither flowers, nor streams, nor shade; he would have seen around him only clumps of olive trees and reddish rocks, covered with wild sage and balsam; I doubt that he”—the solitary walker—would have “liked to continue his walks for long, to the sound of wind and sea, along an uninhabited shore.”

He finds Smyrna similarly bleak, having been fought over twice by the Turks and the Greeks, then “continually plundered” until, by the thirteenth century, “only ruins existed.” Recovering after the Ottoman Empire established itself firmly there, it was then ravaged by “earthquake, fire, and pestilence.” “There was nothing to see in Smyrna.” To those who might view this report with disappointment, he can only reply, “I have a confounded love of truth, and a fear of saying what is not, that in me outweighs all other considerations.” Smyrna did feature a civil society (“I was obliged to resume the aspects of civilization, to receive and pay visits”) but “it was not what we call society that I had come to the East to seek: I longed to see camels and hear the cry of the mahout,” the elephant-driver). 

His spirit rebounds when he considers that in arriving at Smyrna he was, “for the first time, treading the plains of Asia Minor,” feeling “imbued with respect for that ancient land where civilization began, where the patriarchs lived, where Tyre and Babylon rose, where Eternity summoned Cyrus and Alexander, where Jesus Christ accomplished the mystery of our salvation.” And where Homer lived (would that “I might have acquired Homer’s genius merely by experiencing all the misfortunes by which the poet was overwhelmed”). And it is where Alexander the Great, a figure worthy of Homer’s art, defeated the army of Persia’s Great King in the fourth century BCE. “Alexander committed great crimes: his mind could not withstand the intoxication of success; but with what magnanimity he purchased his life’s errors!” Chateaubriand praises the “two sublime comments” Alexander made. At the beginning of his campaign against Persia, he gave his territory to his generals and when asked what he would keep, he replied, “Hope!” And on his deathbed, asked to whom he left the empire, he replied, “To the most worthy!” “His untimely death even added something divine to his memory; because we always see him as young, beautiful, triumphant, with none of those infirmities of body, with none of those reversals of fortune that age and time bring.” 

Constantinople brings him back to melancholy. The former capital of the Christian Roman Empire, it has been ruined by the Turks, its rulers since 1453. Amidst the “packs of masterless dogs,” “you see around you a crowd of mutes who seem to wish to pass by without being noticed, and have the air of escaping the gaze of their masters: you pass without a break from a bazaar to a cemetery, as if the Turks are only there to buy and sell, and to die…. No sign of joy, no appearance of happiness reveals itself to your eyes: what you see are not people, but a herd that an Imam leads and a Janissary slaughters,” a land with “no pleasure, but debauchery” and no punishment, but death.” “From the midst of prisons and bathhouses rises the Seraglio, the Capitol of servitude: it is there that a sacred guardian carefully preserves the germs of plage, and the primitive laws of tyranny.” “Such vile slaves and such cruel tyrants ought never to have dishonored so wonderful a location,” but so they have done. “I could not help pitying the master of this empire,” whose “unhappy end”—Selim III was deposed by the Janissaries, then murdered—justified Chateaubriand’s pity “only too well.” “Oh, how wretched despots are in the midst of their happiness”—once again, glancing at Napoleon—and “how weak amidst their power!” They cannot “enjoy that sleep of which they deprive the unfortunate,” their subjects. “I only like to visit places embellished by the virtues or the arts, and I could find, in that land of Phocas and Bajazet neither the one nor the other.” He embarked for Jerusalem “under the banner of the cross which floated from the mast of our vessel.”

 

Notes

1. See “Chateaubriand’s Defense of Christianity,” on this website under the category, “Bible Notes.”
2. See “Chateaubriand and Political Philosophy,” on this website under the category, “Philosophers.”
3. That it is a Turkish Muslim assumption, reflecting Islam’s turn away from philosophy and ‘secular’ learning generally, may be seen in Chateaubriand’s account of a village in which an orphaned girl, sent to Constantinople, returned having mastered Italian and French and with manners of civility, “which made her virtue seem suspect.” The villagers “beat her to death” and collected monetary reward “allotted in Turkey to the murder of a Christian.” The Pasha of Morea took his share of the blood money and then, claiming that “the beauty, youth, learning, and travels of the orphan gave him legal right to compensation,” that is, extra money. Thus did religion and corruption collaborate in murderous tyranny.
4. Xenophon’s Hiero, a dialogue between the tyrant and the poet, occasioned an exchange between Leo Strauss and the Hegelian polymath, Alexandre Kojève. See Leo Strauss: On Tyranny: Including the Strauss-Kojève Correspondence, Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth, eds. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015) and Timothy W. Burns and Bryan-Paul Frost, eds.: Philosophy, History, and Tyranny: Reexamining the Debate between Leo Strauss and Alexnder Kojève. (Albany: State University Press of New York, 2016). See also “Tyranny and Philosophy” on this website under the category, “Philosophers.”
5. In Felled Oaks André Malraux judges Napoleon to have been a man of great mind but small soul (a judgment de Gaulle does not share); Malraux was an admiring reader of Chateaubriand, and his allusion suggests that Chateaubriand may be thinking of Napoleon in this passage.

Sebastian Haffner: The Meaning of Hitler. Ewald Osers translation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979.

Jochen Thies: Hitler’s Plans for Global Domination: Nazi Architecture and Ultimate War Aims. Ian Cooke and Mary-Beth Friedrich translation. New York: Berghahn Books, 2012. (Originally published in Germany in 1976).

 

On Hitler, opinions vary. Many consider him the worst tyrant of the catastrophic twentieth century—worse, even, than Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot. Others say he was no worse than they but nonetheless intended to lead Germany toward a worldwide empire. Others still maintain that he merely wanted a European empire. And then there was the British historian A. J. P. Taylor, who claimed that Hitler was a normal German statesman, intending to revive the Kaiser Reich, which, in the Führer‘s estimation, hadn’t lost the Great War militarily but was betrayed by the surrender of the political classes. [1]

Sebastian Haffner was a journalist and contemporary of Hitler, witness to his meteoric rise to power, haunted by the question, ‘How did this happen?’ The man was a failure until the age of 30, having moped through school no real friends, avoiding any real job, winning no wife, producing no children. “Apart from politics and political passion, his was an empty life.” Born in Austria, despising the thought of serving in the army of such a polyglot thing, he fled to Germany, where he eagerly volunteered for military service at the outset of the Great War. “Strange though it may sound, his frontline experience was probably his only education.” And even in politics he wasn’t really political, having no taste for ruling and being ruled, only for ruling; “later he was quite simply the Führer, not answerable to anyone.” In his first and only political office, Reich Chancellor, “his political mode of working was never that of the top public servant but that of an unfettered independent artist waiting for inspiration, seemingly idle for days and weeks on end, and then, when the spirit moved him, throwing himself into a sudden frenzy of activity.” He was “the earliest, most persistent and most passionate devotee” of a cult he formed around himself.

Hitler’s Austrian origin turned out to be decisive, despite his aversion to the place. (The old joke is, ‘The Austrians are the smartest people in Europe; they’ve convinced the world that Beethoven was an Austrian and that Hitler was a German.’) His hatred of Jews probably originated not from Germany, where “antisemitism was on the wane about the turn of the century” as “assimilation and integration of the Jews was desired and was in full swing,” but from Central and Eastern Europe, the atmosphere of Vienna not Berlin. His first public expression of antisemitism occurred after the war, however, when the November Revolution of 1918 and the subsequent victory of the German Democratic Socialists over the Communists allowed a foreigner like Hitler to begin a political career under laws guaranteeing freedom of speech. Hitler nonetheless denounced the revolution as the “November Crime,” given the crucial role played by Marxists in it. He objected to Marxism not because it was socialist but because it was Jewish and internationalist—the Jews being a people or ‘race’ without a country, seeking to dominate national governments everywhere, as per the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which Hitler read around this time. The workers, now pawns of ‘international Jewry,’ must be won over to a new, national socialism, persuaded that the revolution had caused the German defeat in the war rather than having been the result of it. To reverse this catastrophe, Germans needed to effect a new revolution, a new war, and especially a war against the Jews, as outlined in his 1925 book, Mein Kampf. In the meantime, his “breakthrough experience was his own discovery of his power as an orator,” his “ability to transform rallies of the most varied individuals—the bigger and more motley the better—into a homogeneous pliable mass” by a sort of alchemy of “mass hypnotism,” proved that “he could do something no one else could.” He could become Der Führer.

That he gave Germans something they longed for may be seen in the example of poems by Stefan George, a contemporary who prophesied the coming of “the Man” who will found “the New Reich”: “The man! The deed! Thus pine both people and High Council.” Hitler’s oratorical powers made enough Germans believe him to be that Man that he could begin his own party in the Reichstag, a party revolving around himself, a party whose decidedly modest successes at the polls improved only thanks to the weakness of his opponents and the financial disaster of 1929. He also discovered in himself a talent for political organizing, which served him well once he came to power. Haffner reminds his readers that Nazi rule coincided with an “economic miracle”: full employment in Germany after only three years in office. “It is difficult to picture adequately the grateful amazement with which the Germans reacted to that miracle, which, more particularly, made vast numbers of German workers switch from the Social Democrats and the Communists to Hitler after 1933.” Having reversed the November Revolution, ending the Weimar regime, having recouped German economic strength, he could now remilitarize and rearm the country, which became the strongest European power by 1938, poised to invalidate “vital sections of the Versailles Treaty,” thereby achieving “a political triumph over France and Britain, and a radical transformation of the balance of power in Europe.” Germans reveled in it all, and indeed it was “a colossal achievement to have united virtually the entire nation behind him,” “not by demagogy but by achievement.” He had taken the postwar democratization of German society and politics, its “cult of the body and sex,” its emancipation of women and turned them into a “great social transformation that was Hitler’s personal work, what he called the “socialization of people.” That is, he had caused Germans to be “firmly fitted into a discipline from which they cannot escape.” In Haffner’s words, “if the goal of socialism is the liquidation of human alienation, then the socialization of people will attain that goal far more effectively than the socialization of the means of production” advocated by the Marxists.

Hitler intended not only to unite German in Germany but ‘Aryans’ everywhere, with Germans as the elite among that racial elite in a “Greater Germanic” Reich, “an empire to which he did not even set geographical bounds in his mind but only a continually advancing ‘military boundary’ which might perhaps find its final place on the Volga, perhaps along the Urals,  or perhaps only on the Pacific.” Pace, Professor Taylor, but “in that respect there could be no greater contrast than between Hitler and Bismarck” or even Napoleon I—empire builders to be sure, but also institution builders. Hitler wasn’t a constructive statesman but a sort of embodiment of the Heraclitean flux, albeit with the drive for racial domination as its logos. “From 1930 until 1941 Hitler succeeded in practically everything he undertook.” By the end of that time, he ruled Europe. 

Up until then, all his enemies were weak. “All his successes were scored against opponents who were unable or unwilling to offer real resistance.” His primary domestic opponents, the conservatives “who for a while challenged his succession to the Weimar Republic lacked a political concept, were divided amongst themselves and psychologically vacillated between resistance to and alliance with Hitler”; having denigrated ‘civilization’ and valorized ‘culture,’ Germans were no more political than Hitler himself, although far less fanatic. The Weimar Republic’s principal supporters—the “Weimar Coalition” of Social Democrats, Left liberals, and Catholics—enjoyed no parliamentary majority after the regime’s first year. It was a parliamentary regime, with no strong executive, although for most of the Twenties it did have “a capable Foreign Minister” in Gustav Stresemann and a competent bureaucracy, which actually ran the country. By the end of the decade, “even the Catholic Center” wanted a new, “authoritarian regime.” They got a tyrant instead. 

Haffner distinguishes Hitler’s Nazis from Mussolini’s Fascists. “Fascism is upper-class rule, buttressed by artificially manufactured mass enthusiasm”; “nothing is more misleading than to call Hitler a Fascist.” [2] Nazism more closely resembled Stalinist Communism, substituting ‘race’ for ‘class’ in its analysis of politics, society, and economics while taking on its ‘totalitarian’ characteristics. 

Hitler’s foreign rivals were equally ineffective. The European international system framed at the Versailles Conference “suffered from the same congenital weakness as the Weimar Republic”: “just as the Republic suffered shipwreck because, from the outset, it failed either to strip the German Right wing (still the strongest power group and one that was indispensable to the functioning of the state) of its power for good…or permanently to integrate it into the new republican state, so the Paris peace system foundered because it neither stripped the still strongest European power, the German Reich (still indispensable to European stability) permanently of its power, nor permanently integrated it,” as “Metternich had done with France following the Napoleonic Wars.” Instead, they chose a policy of humiliation while “allow[ing] it to keep its unity and independence,” the means by which Germans might take revenge for their humiliation. The Weimar politicians wanted to get out from under “what they had signed under duress” as much as Hitler did, and the other Europeans lacked the military power to stop them. The British policy of “appeasement” began not at Munich in 1938, under Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, but at Locarno in 1925, “under his half-brother, Austen Chamberlain.” Weimar had whittled away at the Versailles impositions and, once in office, Hitler continued to do so (here, Taylor and Haffner agree), although the Brits “could not fail to notice that he was increasingly withholding from them the hoped-for collateral, participation in the consolidation of peace in Europe and shared support for a peace system revised in Germany’s favor.” “He had in reality accepted to increase his strength for a new war.” The war came, and his “greatest success,” the conquest of France, came against the advice of his generals, who “all had before their eyes the specter of the French campaign of 1914,” with its years of paralyzing trench warfare. In all of this, “Hitler invariably only toppled what was tottering and killed what was already dying,” having “less in common with the eye of the eagle than with the nose of the vulture.”

Hitler “wanted to be not only the Lenin but the Marx of Hitlerism.” And indeed, his “mixture of swaggering superiority and intolerance is found equally among convinced Marxists and convinced Hitlerites.” “His doctrine centered on race”—in his words, “the aristocratic basic idea of Nature,” racial hierarchy. Races engage in what Hitler called an “existential struggle” for survival and dominance, a struggle conducted primarily through wars for territory, “living space.” “Ultimately, the perpetual warlike struggle between nations is about world domination”: “Every being,” he wrote, “strives for expansion and every nation strives for world domination.” “We all feel,” he continued, “that in the distant future man will find himself confronted by problems which only a supreme race, a master nation based upon the resources and facilities of an entire glove, can be called upon to solve,” a nation empowered by “a state which, in an age of racial poisoning, devotes itself to the cultivation of its best racial elements.” That race-nation-state “must one day become master of the earth.” Exactly what a race or nation is, and exactly who is an Aryan, stayed a bit undefined, Haffner remarks, but Hitler evidently supposed his notion close enough for government work. That work’s primary aim was to de-toxify the Aryan race by ridding Europe of ‘international Jewry.’ In Hitler’s words, “If the Jew with the aid of his Marxist creed remains victorious over the nations of this world, then his crown will be the wreath on the grave of mankind, then this planet will once more, as millions of years ago, move through the ether devoid of human beings.” Near the end of his life, he told his personal secretary, Martin Bormann, “People will be eternally grateful to National Socialism that I have extinguished the Jews in Germany and Central Europe” because Jews, whether Communists or bankers, weaken the superior races, conspire against them, seek their destruction. For Aryans, it is kill or be killed. This doctrine is what distinguishes Hitler from the Pan-Germans of the Kaiser Reich, who indeed wanted an empire, a ‘place in the sun’ for Germany, but scarcely envisioned genocide or rule of the world following from genocide. 

After conquering Europe, including Russia, and ruling the nations there either directly or as satellites, Germanized Europe would then challenge “America and Japan in a struggle for world domination,” “doing so with good prospects of success.” He failed, in part because he alienated Jews of German origin in the United States and elsewhere. Prior to Hitler, “German Jews in their great majority,” inside and outside Germany, “were positively in love with Germany.” “Jewish influence in the world had predominantly been a pro-German element, a fact which Germany’s opponents in the First World War were only too well aware of”; “in America it had long and effectively opposed the country’s entry on the side of the Entente.” German Jews had “played an outstanding part, during the first third of the twentieth century, in helping Germany—for the first time—to outstrip Britain and France in the intellectual and cultural sphere as well as in science and economic life.” Jews who escaped to America on the whole strengthened America at Germany’s, at Europe’s expense, enabling their new country to defend a Europe weakened by the war Hitler started against the Soviet Russia he hated and failed to crush.

In the meantime, he did a lot of damage. The 1938 Munich Agreement not only solemnized “the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, which had relied in vain on its alliance with France,” but it effectively “mean Britain’s and France’s political withdrawal from the Eastern half of Europe and the recognition of Eastern Europe right up to the Russian frontier as a German sphere of influence,” exactly as Hitler had envisioned things, years earlier. Had Hitler taken the time to “consolidate this new Greater German East European empire,” he or his successors might well have been able to take Russia. But that would have taken “constructive statesmanship…and patience,” and Hitler “lacked just these two qualities.” He moved into Poland, rightly calculating that neither France nor Great Britain was prepared for war, then took France down. Once again, however, he pushed ahead, touching off his futile air war against the British and then, even more catastrophically, invading Soviet Russia, which appeared weak because its troops had performed poorly against Finland in 1939. (As early as the 1920s, in Mein Kampf, he had deemed “the giant empire in the east” to be “ripe for collapse.”) He lacked “the constructive imagination of the statesman, the ability to build enduring structures,” because for this modern Heraclitean, war was the norm, not peace. Insofar as peace was possible or desirable, it meant the annihilation of the enemy. Once understood by his enemies, this intention stiffened resistance against him. His “crowning mistake” was to declare war on the United States, a few days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. “There is to this day no comprehensible rational explanation for what one is tempted to describe as an act of lunacy.” Japan had just diverted American attentions away from Europe, and the Triple Alliance of Germany, Japan, and Italy committed the parties only to a defensive alliance. “Moreover, he could do nothing to give Japan any kind of active assistance.” As it happened, he couldn’t give adequate assistance to himself, either, as the (now) two-front war loomed.

No matter? Late in 1941, told a pair of foreign visitors, “If one day the German nation is no longer sufficiently strong or sufficiently ready for sacrifice to stake its own blood for its existence, then let it perish and be annihilated by some other stronger power.” Germans were failing him. 

He could still succeed in one thing, however: the mass murder of Jews. “Hitler’s mass murders were committed during the war, but they were not acts of war” or, more accurately, not acts of war against the Allies. Jews, Gypsies, invalids (he killed 100,000 of these “useless eaters”), Poland’s educated classes (3 million non-Jews, along with 3 million Polish Jews), Russians (another 3 million): all of them deserved to die, in the Führer’s estimation, and he persecuted merciless war against them. In effect, he sacrificed his dream of world empire in order to concentrate on his dream of genocide. If race is the ultimate driver of ‘History,’ and Aryan victory is ‘History’s’ ultimate prize, then the lunacy (and the evil) serves as a pragmatic means to winning the prize of racial purification, since a Germany that cannot yet dominate the world will at least be ‘Jew-free.’ Even while losing to the Allies, “he was now able to indulge the delights of the killer who has shed his last restraints, has his victims in his grip and deals with them as he wishes”: “Who would reach his goal sooner, Hitler with his extermination of the Jews or the Allies with their military overthrow of Germany?” 

Hitler’s “Final Solution to the Jewish Problem” thus entailed a three-stage end game. From August to October 1944 “he successfully prevented the discontinuation of the lost war and made sure there would be a fight to the finish”; from November 1944 to January 1945, “he made a surprising last sortie” not to the east but to the west in the Ardennes offensive; from February to April 1945, “he pursued the total destruction of Germany,” which deserved to be ruined, given Germans’ failure to live up to the demands he had placed upon them. This contrasts with the policy of Paul Ludendorff in the fatally weakened Kaiser Reich, who made peace in 1918 by uniting with his political opponents and requesting an armistice in order to preserve Germany from further destruction. (This policy was so successful that many Germans, including Hitler, couldn’t understand how it could be said that they’d lost the Great War.) Hitler did the exact opposite, arresting as many former Weimar officials as he could find. “His determination never again to allow a November 1918 [surrender] to happen was the main original impulse that drove him to become a politician.” By these last months of World War II, “the force of Hitler’s hatred, the homicidal drive in Hitler which had raged for years, against Jews, Poles and Russians, was now quite openly turning against Germans.” In March 1945, he issued an order to destroy all “material assets” within the Reich “which the enemy might in any way whatever make use of for the continuation of his struggle, either now or in the foreseeable future.” When his most-favored architect, Albert Speer, ventured to remark that this would injure Germans, Hitler explained, “If the war is lost then the nation will be lost also. There is no need to show any consideration for the foundations which the German nation needs for its most primitive survival. On the contrary, it is better to destroy those things ourselves. Because this nation has shown itself the weaker, and the future belongs exclusively to the stronger nation from the East. In any event, what remains after this struggle are only the inferior, for the good have died in battle.”

Jochen Thies cites the work of his former teacher, Andreas Hillgruber, who regarded Hitler’s intention to rule the world as “the only logical consequence of Hitler’s biological thinking process, which was fueled by overpopulation and, the resulting need for more living space as well as continued population growth” among Aryans. Hillgruber eventually discovered documents showing that Hitler regarded 1941 as the decisive year, the year in which he planned to conquer the Soviet Union in three to four months; destroy Great Britain’s empire in the Middle East and occupy Afghanistan in preparation for pressuring the Brits out of India, later, in connection with Japan’s occupation of Singapore, approaching India from the east; taking Gibraltar and, subsequently, part of Northwest Africa “to create a war front position against the United States”—somewhat like the goings-on portrayed in the contemporaneous Hollywood movie, Casablanca. Hillgruber suspected that Hitler’s met with the Germanophile Japanese ambassador and Imperial Army general Hiroshi Ōshima in July 1941 in order to plan coordinated military efforts against the Allies. 

Well before that, Hitler gave a speech in 1930 before faculty and students at the university in Erlangen, Franconia, proclaiming that Germany was “destined for global supremacy.” Earlier still, he had argued in Mein Kampf that Jewish internationalism, whether capitalist or socialist, required a worldwide movement by the “Aryan core races” to defeat it. Jewish guilt went back to Paul the Apostle, whose call for Christian missionary work led eventually to the destruction of the only genuine world empire, Rome. The Germans rose up to meet this threat the Holy Roman Empire, in fact a Teutonic empire originating in the meeting of Roman imperial rule with strong German blood, might have continued its sway, had it not been for the Thirty Years War, in which Christianity, that product of Judaism, “had robbed Germany of its chance to claim world supremacy” by shattering the empire into more than thirty mostly petty states. But this crime can be, must be, reversed, so that (as Hitler writes) “the highest form of human specimen has conquered and subjugated the world in which a way that he is sole ruler of the Earth.” Since the western democracies are controlled by Jews, this worldwide racial struggle is also a regime struggle. Thies makes the important point that “it is futile to analyze his possible plans based on the military potential that actually existed,” since one of his principal tactics was to undermine the political will of his enemies by the use of quislings and psychological warfare. “We can find men of this sort” in “every country,” Hitler calculated, men whose “ambition and illusion” bring them to aid the Nazis. “It is our strategy…to destroy the enemy from within to let him destroy himself.” In Czechoslovakia, he bragged to journalists, “the key to success was propaganda.”

Similarly, those who say that German lacked the manpower to rule such an empire, even if it could obtain it, overlook the contemporary British and Soviet empires: “England with her few million people rules one-fifth of the world,” he complained but carefully noted, thanks to its nationalism, racial unity, and the political brilliance of its ruling class. Communist power and influence were equally pervasive. “Strength does not lie in the majority,” a democratic principle, “but rather in the pureness of will to make sacrifices!” The Bolsheviks enjoyed the advantage of “hordes of people possessed by a fanatical belief,” a fanaticism that must be matched by the Aryans, the Germans above all. Repeatedly, “Hitler demonstrated his idea of the world as a ‘challenge cup’ which Germany could win forever.” German quality can defeat the sheer quantity marshaled by Soviet dictators and American democrats, with the help of temporary coalitions with foreign countries. Of these, he regarded Americans as the more formidable, the country having been supplied with sound Aryan stock from the Europe it now rivals. But that stock had been corrupted by Jewry, and so can be defeated, eventually, by racially purer Germans, although nothing is certain. The choice, Hitler insisted was between “world supremacy” and “decline.” “The Nordic race has a right to rule the world, and we must make this right the guiding star of our foreign policy”; instead of the proletarian vanguard of Bolshevism, there must be an “Aryan vanguard.” “All of National Socialism would be worth nothing if it were limited only to Germany and if it didn’t seal its rule over the whole world for this highly valuable race for at least one to two thousand years,” a world in which the remaining populations would survive as helots.

One of the main propaganda tools Hitler deployed in Germany and elsewhere was architecture, which lasts so much longer than any newspaper or radio broadcast. Thies emphasizes its importance. “Architecture enlarges and completes the area of constant influence.” In Nazi Germany, Hitler himself took the position of “master architect.” In this as in so much else, Hitler publicly explained his view of the importance of architecture as a crucial component of regime politics. And once again, his model was Rome, inheritor of Greek culture. Rome was no unheroic commercial empire, Jewish in spirit, like Great Britain but one, as he put it, “founded on the blood of Roman citizens.” In Hitler’s telling, “there is an ‘eternal’ form of art: the Greek-Nordic type.” Squabbles over artistic ‘styles’ bespeaks the decadence of Paris and Weimar Berlin, not the nobility of “Nordic and National Socialist” beauty. 

Accordingly, “all government buildings were to be built in granite so that they could be expected to last from three to four thousand years.” Churches must be replaced with Nazi Party buildings, assembly halls, massive squares and long, wide avenues for parades. Such grand architectural gestures would impress the idea of “the German people [as] the world’s master race,” first of all upon the Germans themselves. They would buttress the authority of the Nazi Party at home and make it seem more formidable to foreigners. Intended to span ten thousand by six thousand meters, the Nazi Party convention complex at Nuremberg embodied national unity against foreign envy. “The important point, both in Nuremberg and other places, was Hitler’s pseudo-religious role: despite the enormous dimensions, the architecture always emphasized the spot where Hitler would be,” giving him “the aura of the ‘Übermensch.'” As for Berlin, in Mein Kampf Hitler had already proposed that it be rebuilt to exert “the magical charm of Mecca or Rome”—the new “capital of the world.” Second only to Hitler as Germany’s master architect, Albert Speer described the world war as a struggle “being waged in order to gain world supremacy,” first prefigured and finally to be symbolized by its monumental edifices.

Early in his reign, Hitler delivered an address to the highest-ranking army and navy commanders, outlining a two-step strategy. The first task was to defeat the Marxist regime in Russia, “one of the largest empires in the world” and “the most immediate threat to Germany and the world.” Thies recalls that this followed from his public speeches in the previous decade, with their theme of “an Aryan raiding party, representing the rest of the world, at war with Marxism.” In this stage, Germany would invite allies among the liberal democracies or, at the minimum, attempt to gain assurances of their neutrality. Once Bolshevism had been defeated, it would be the democracies’ turn. “We must simply hope that this conflict will not happen today, but that it will take years before it comes. The later the better.” But come it will. In a 1938 speech to army generals, he expressed his hope that the “unified bloc” of German people “in central Europe will one day own the world.” In Germany, he told the German press late in 1938, “there are 80 million people of one race, and surrounding us another eight million who from a racial point of view belong to us,” whereas there are only 60 million Anglo-Saxons in America (among a much larger overall population), 46 million in the British Empire, 37 million “real Frenchmen” (mostly in northern France), and 55 million “real Russians.” [3] Eighty million united Germans concentrated in one area, strategically crucial Central Europe, can defeat some 200 million ‘racially pure’ types scattered over thousands of miles, some of them in the Marxist regime that threatens the others. And fortunately, America was distant from Europe, so those 60 million potential enemies, likely kept neutral during a European war, raised no immediate concern. Once consolidated, Europe under Nazi rule would have a population of 500 million facing off against 230 million Americans—an even more advantageous ratio than that enjoyed by the Germans against the French in 1870 and the world wars. One of Hitler’s ambassadors in the United States looked to the future with confidence: “I am sure that the low morale in America sooner or later will settle among this politically stupid people,” with “far-reaching consequences.”

Thies remarks the dissimilarity between the Bismarck policy and Hitler’s. “In the place of the Prussian officer…Hitler had offered the model of the ideological ‘fighter,’, a trusting functionary who would always obey the party in military questions and who would always be ready to follow his Führer.” [4] “One can do anything with a German soldier. It has to be determined who will dominate Europe and thus the world.” And again, now in 1940, “The Earth is there for whoever will take it for his own,” a “challenge cup that is snatched from those who become weak.”

While the army would extend German rule in Europe, to extend it further would obviously require a much-expanded navy. Hitler detailed Speer to design and build a huge naval base at Trondheim; with a planned population of 300,000, it would make Singapore “look like a ‘toy town.'” From there, “super warships” could extend their range into a network of German colonies in Africa and to naval bases in the north Atlantic, a move “which would entail the complete suppression of North, Central, and West European countries to Germany.” “Germania” would provide the base for “Aryan global rule in the form of a colonial regime that would spread throughout the second half of the twentieth century, similar to British rule in India,” which it would replace. The Aryan emigrants to North America would return to their homeland, eager to rejoin the new land of opportunity.

Overall, while Hitler held his intention throughout, he was capable of altering his plans readily, and he kept them fairly broad (Thies calls them “scenarios”) in keeping with his ‘Heraclitean’ sense of historical flux. By the 1940s, he envisioned a Germany ruling Europe directly or through satellites. Most of Africa would belong to Germany, as would the former Soviet Union. With those territories in hand, Germany would move into the Caucasus and the Middle East. Finally, “with the help of the system of naval bases in the Atlantic,” Germany would be “able to take the war to the coast of North and South America” with the naval forces augmented by long-range bombers then under development. Great Britain and its powerful fleet stood in the way; eventually, the battle for the Atlantic Ocean sea lanes would be on. In April 1941, he told the Japanese Minister for Foreign Affairs of this intention “to wage an ‘energetic war’ against the U.S.,” which would be considered in the autumn. That never happened, largely as a result of Germany’s loss of the Battle of Britain; Hitler had to settle for sending submarines to prowl America’s Atlantic coast. A year later, he admitted to his admirer Ōshima that he “did not yet know how to beat the United States,” but preparations for an air war against the enemy continued, with hoped-for targets ranging as far inland as the Great Lakes. He finally gave up only in 1944, when more pressing concerns piled in on him. By then, he dreamed of “miracle weapons” that would somehow reverse Germany’s fortunes, but the German-Jewish physicists who were developing the atomic bomb had fled to America, years earlier.

In the event, the democracies sided with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany, not with Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union. The hoped-for rift between the Americans and the British (“the second-largest core of the Aryan race in Europe”) never occurred, either, nor did the conquest of the British Isles or of Russia. He grossly underestimated U. S. capacity for weapons manufacturing, both in terms of quantity and (especially) of quality. His planned counterstrikes with long-range bombers on American cities, “in order to teach the Jews living there a ‘lesson,'” proved infeasible in the time frame he needed but miscalculated. 

Had his war plans succeeded, how could Germany expect to rule a global empire? An engineer like Herbert Hoover wanted to see a real plan, devils being in the details. [5] But Hitler didn’t ‘think like an engineer,’ didn’t plan things out in detail before taking his first steps. He had intentions but thought more like the architect he had aspired to be, leaving the plumbing to less visionary minds. And that was when he engaged in anything resembling planning at all. Race above all, but also the cult of the heroic death and the Übermensch: Thies writes, “Hitler’s thought were dominated by myths right up to his death.” “The lack of a war plan against the United States or Japan is not surprising” (emphasis added) and the lack of “plans in the traditional sense” for the invasion of Soviet Russia, should come as no surprise, inasmuch as “even the war of 1939 had the character of something that was improvised.” 

“The motto ‘world power or defeat’…didn’t mean the fulfillment of the goals of Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm, but as Hitler had clearly stated in public long before his seizure of power, meant either world domination or the demise of the German people,” all or nothing.

 

Notes

1. A. J. P. Taylor: The Origins of the Second World War. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1961.
2. See “Fascists” on this website under the category, “Nations.”
3. The concentration of ‘Nordic’ Frenchmen in the north of France may explain why the Nazis ruled that region directly, leaving the ‘inferior’ racial stock of southern France under the rule of the puppet government at Vichy.
4. For a similar assertion of strict ruling party control over the military, see “The Comprehensive Strategy of Xi Jinping,” on this website under the category, “Nations.”
5. See Herbert Hoover: Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover’s Secret History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath, reviewed on this website as “Herbert Hoover’s Despairing Verve,” under the category “American Politics.”