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
- A. J. P. Taylor: The Origins of the Second World War. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1961.
- See “Fascists” on this website under the category, “Nations.”
- 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.
- 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.”
- 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.”
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