Counter-Currents
4,403 words
Mark Mazower
Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe
New York: Penguin, 2008
The image of Nazi Germany as a well-oiled, unconquerable machine is hard to forget, but so many books in recent years have given a more honest evaluation of the Third Reich. Mark Mazower’s 2008 book Hitler’s Empire, while not really breaking any new ground, is a strong compendium of the flaws, inner turmoil, and seething disputes among the Nazi hierarchy over how to run and strengthen their empire. In fact, as empires go, it was more shadow than substance.
Nazi Germany’s ephemeral life had much to do with its creator’s aspirations. Adolf Hitler wanted a Greater German Reich, and wanted to rally Germans worldwide to join his quest for conquest and expansion.
This is illustrated by an interesting vignette from the other side of the world in 1942 with which Mazower begins Hitler’s Empire, involving Germans in the Bismarck Archipelago of New Guinea. They had settled in and were content before they were sent by Australian soldiers to internment camps in Australia.
These colonists were a very small part of Germany, being among those who had settled in the string of colonies that were taken at the end of the nineteenth century as Germany as looking to have a place in the colonial Sun alongside the other European powers. Germany’s problem was two-fold: There wasn’t much left to take by the time she and her ebullient Kaiser got to the table, and more importantly, the Germans themselves never cared much about colonization. Most Germans who went abroad went to America, although many others, especially intellectuals and visionaries, had an urge to colonize the east — that is to say, Russia.
Mazower lays out the background of German unity. The 1848 Revolution, with its all-German liberal assembly in Frankfurt, was expansionist, demanding an extension of German lands in the east that would unite the ethnic Germans with their “homeland.” If, as Heinrich Heine said, the British ruled the waves and the French the land, the Germans ruled the clouds. Frankfurt’s hope of becoming a true political power was easily dashed by a revitalized Austria and Prussia, however. In the end, it wasn’t liberal clouds but Bismarck’s blut und eisen that united Germany.
Bismarck was not an imperialist. He was concerned about the increasing number of Poles moving into Prussia, and tried to find ways to discourage them, or to resettle Germans on those contested lands betwixt the Oder and Vistula. Bismarck was frustrated by the reluctance of Germans to become farmers in the old realms of the Teutonic Knights; they preferred cities, factories, and modern life. He therefore accepted German boundaries and keeping a firm, but modest, role in Europe. After his resignation, however, and with Kaiser Wilhelm in charge, it was full steam ahead . . . to where? A place in the Sun, of course.
Mazower notes that in many cases, Germans thought their eastward expansion was a matter of destiny, much like America’s Manifest Destiny. Whereas America could easily dispose of Indian tribes and slice off land from a weakened, corrupt, and overexposed Mexican Empire, however, any kind of German Drang nach Ost would have to deal with a very organized and powerful Russia.
In the European rush to colonize the world, Africa could easily be carved up, but when they tried the same with China, it was too civilized and restive to be treated as such. First there was Sun Yat-Sen and a new Chinese republic, and then an aggressive Japan dampened any European hopes of partitioning China.
Yet for Germans, there was always the call to the east.
You can buy Greg Johnson’s New Right vs. Old Right here
During the First World War, Germany came close to realizing their foggy eastern empire. In the Brest-Litovsk treaty that was signed in March 1918, Russia, which was in the throes of revolution, gave up Poland, the Baltic states, and Ukraine. The eastern German empire was in place. But less than a year later, the war in the west was lost and the Germans were stunned at how quickly it had happened. The obvious military strength of the Allies, given a new transfusion by the United States, was discounted by many who preferred to believe that Germany was “stabbed in the back” by the “November Criminals” at home. Hitler especially believed this bitter explanation. Their new, nebulous eastern empire crumbled away, either being returned to Bolshevik Russia or ending up as independent states under British and French auspices (which was especially favored by Woodrow Wilson; Mazower says little of Wilson’s demand for “self-determination” that defined the Treaty of Versailles) in order to keep Germany in check.
This created problems, for large ethnic German communities were left behind in the new states such as Poland and Czechoslovakia, and too many points of contention remained to be ironed out. For example, the Czechs informed German public servants that they had two years to learn Czech or be dismissed, and Poles attacked German settlements, leading the newly-created paramilitary Freikorps in rumbling, post-Wilhelminian Germany to cross the border to fight back.
All of this is important to understand, because Hitler sought to impose the Greater German Reich upon Eastern Europe. Mazower aptly demonstrates how, after victory in Poland, the Nazis carved out colonies. The Baltic states, after they had been retaken by Stalin, were then seized by Hitler and became the Reich Commissariat Ostland and the Reich Commissariat Ukraine. Northern Poland was given to an expanded East Prussia, and southern Poland was simply called the General Government. All of these regions were to be filled with hundreds of thousands of new German settlers.
Interestingly enough, the Greater German Reich looked like the German Reich envisioned by Prince Felix von Schwarzenberg, one of Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph’s major statesmen. Schwarzenberg envisioned uniting all of Germany under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, creating a great, super-national Central Europe. As Sebastian Haffner noted in The Rise and Fall of Prussia, had Schwarzenberg not died in 1852, German history might have been totally different. His vision was certainly compatible with Hitler’s own cloudy dreams, although Hitler added Russia to his.
The Poles were, after a while, to be exterminated, or those who were left would become helots to German Spartans, which was also to be Russia’s fate west of the Urals. There were likewise plans for at least three million Czechs to be driven out or killed off so that Germans could take their land.
Hitler always saw Germany as being in need of land for agriculture and self-sufficiency in relation to both agriculture and minerals. He believed European colonial empires failed when they went overseas for goods, making them vulnerable. The Greater German Reich wouldn’t make that mistake. As for Russia, Hitler envisioned a perpetual war in the Urals, much like the British having to deal with contentious factions in India. He believed the major war with the Soviet Union would only last six to ten weeks. Hitler saw Soviet Russia as rotten and ready to topple over.
Eerily enough, this echoed American plans in the early 1800s to annex Canada. Americans saw Canada as a ripe prize. Thomas Jefferson said that taking Canada would be “a mere matter of marching.” But Canada and Britain had other ideas — as did Russia, when the Nazi war machine entered it.
How was this new empire governed? Mazower shows that it was brutal and only semi-efficient, with colonial leaders selected from among Hitler’s favored Gauleiters, or regional governors, in Germany. Any attempt at building local allies was discouraged by him. Hitler wanted Germans to be in control of the operation at all times.
Mazower captures the rivalry of Nazi leaders in ruling these areas, which ended up as a tug-of-war between the Gauleiters and the SS almost immediately, with the SS slowly winning, building an administrative system, and culling what profits they could. The Gauleiters, for their part, were less cunning, settling for taking what they could to enrich themselves or simply enforcing the new German Reich’s dictates to create an Aryan-rich region from the Baltic to the Black Sea.
There were problems with this. Aside from the provincialism of most Gauleiters, there was a paucity of Germans willing to settle in the east, just like Bismarck’s own dilemma. Bismarck, for the most part, had let it go, but the Nazis went in for social engineering. Ethnic Germans from Central Europe were ordered east to take over farms recently vacated by evictions or killings. Populations that had resided in Hungary or Romania for centuries were rooted out and forced into Ukraine.
In college, one of my German professors came from a Romanian German family, and they were among those ordered to pack up and go to Russia. After a trying year or two attempting to be farmers, they had to flee west when the Red Army began its surge.
There was a continual battle over who was governing what. The SS slowly outfoxed the party officials, gaining police power and some industrial control.
The Wehrmacht stayed out of this tug of war as much as possible, but Mazower maintains that the military was far more involved in the widespread killings and massacres than they earlier claimed. As it was, simply resisting the Germans resulted in a mini-genocide. Kill one German soldier, and 100 people died.
This became a crisis, as the Germans administering these areas needed people for labor and agriculture, and killing off too many helots would end up destroying the crops needed for the Reich. In many cases, they simply started killing Jews to satisfy the body count, although sticklers for rules — and being Germans, there were quite a few of these — insisted it was the locals who were openly resisting, and not just the Jews, who were going to be killed anyway. Hitler’s Empire makes no attempts to excuse or downplay the Holocaust, but Mazower notes how Jews were enthusiastically attacked and killed by the local Slavic communities, many of them ready to become militiamen or concentration camp guards for the Nazis, especially in Ukraine. Their brutality unsettled even the SS.
As always, the question is why this brutality occurred. The common feeling is that the Jews were simply all Anne Franks, and were needlessly persecuted. Might there have been reasons for this? Mazower is silent on this.
When there was local resistance against SS and Nazi policy, such fierce reprisals helped build the resistance up. Mazower notes, as have many others, that when the Germans first entered Ukraine, they were welcomed as liberators, and Germans like Alfred Rosenberg, one of Hitler’s inner circle, wanted to build on this to create allies among the Slavs in an anti-Bolshevik crusade. Hitler was adamant, however: no allies or local rule, however sympathetic; Germans only. He distrusted anyone who was not German, and Rosenberg and his like were quickly isolated and seen as dreamers.
Mazower does not question any aspect of the Holocaust, but offers evidence that it began randomly during these reprisals and later gaining steam after the Nazis had so many Jews to manage that they didn’t know what to do with them. In fact, the entire eastern empire overwhelmed the German ability to enforce rules and settlement plans.
There wasn’t time to devise some kind of rational method for providing a stable, long-term plan when it was apparent that the German settlers weren’t coming. The SS, however, went on empire-building and did a very good job becoming a state within a state. Himmler was determined to keep adding to its coffers (the Czechs were a highly desired cash cow for the SS), as well as to increase its actual power, which meant military expansion, as in the Third Reich, having the most guns meant getting Hitler’s ear.
You can buy The World in Flames: The Shorter Writings of Francis Parker Yockey here.
Meanwhile, local Nazi officials tried to cope with increasing agricultural production to feed Germany, ignoring the starvation of the locals and, much against their wishes, having to hire locals to administer and run the economy, all while jockeying for more land, redrawing boundaries of control, eliminating rivals’ satrapies, and making sure their districts had more minerals and viable land for exploitation. It became a terrible muddle. As one German official noted, there was always talk of a thousand-year Reich, but the Nazis could barely plan ahead for six months. All the petty empires built by these rival officials, as well as plans for increased colonization, became moot as the Russian counteroffensive closed these lands forever to Nazi administration, and after 1943 it was happening very fast.
The continual brushfire wars Hitler envisioned in reality became one long, grinding advance by Russia upon the now vulnerable Reich.
What about the use of native troops, the sepoys of this new empire? Hitler refused any plans to organize Slavs, such as the Ukrainians, or dissatisfied Russians into a unified anti-Bolshevik army. All of the fighting had to be done by Germans. Eventually, Ukrainians were formed into SS units (there were many more volunteers than positions available), but they were disorganized if enthusiastic fighters, and particularly brutal. Andrei Vlasov, a captured Russian general, became the nucleus of a proposed Russian anti-Bolshevik army, but Hitler dithered; Vlasov’s forces weren’t organized until 1945, when it was far too late for it to be of any practical military use, and Vlasov, a Russian nationalist who was uneasy with much Nazi policy, finally led his men to turn on the Nazis and help liberate the Czechs in the final days of the war. The ungrateful Czechs delivered Vlasov to the approaching Russians, who promptly executed him. Czech reasoning was that Stalin was their liberator; they learned otherwise.
In the west, there were SS formations made up of various European peoples. The Baltic states had enthusiastic volunteers, and 125,000 West Europeans joined the SS. This was a considerable force, but not one of overwhelming numbers. Many later historians claimed this showed that the Nazi forces were a forerunner of NATO. Perhaps, but again, Hitler’s insistence that German soldiers should do the hard fighting and were the most reliable forces stymied efforts to create truly massive European formations of troops loyal to the Nazis. The deteriorating repression, economic situation, and slowly decreasing food distribution in Europe kept dimming any enthusiasm for an empire offering nothing to non-German nationals, in any event.
Mazower points out how ephemeral this empire was. Its high tide was from late 1939 to mid-1943, when the effects of Stalingrad and Kursk put the Germans on the defensive, and all the Reich’s resources were put into fighting the eastern war; a long, grinding, clawing slaughter superseding the Blitzkrieg — and the German economy that wasn’t geared for a long war. Germany, despite Hitler’s economic miracle of the 1930s and quick rearmament, was, like the rest of Europe, still recovering from the atrocity of 1914. The use of the Blitzkrieg to invade Russia for its resources, especially oil, was a quick fix that failed.
Such was Nazi rule in the east, in those lands where polyglot peoples had had their political stability disrupted by the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires. But what of western Europe? It had a somewhat happier fate. The West was spared the open brutality of social engineering and extermination of populations. The Nazis believed it should be treated carefully, and saw its populations, if not equal, at least worthy of being used to work in building the Reich’s war machine — which, as the war widened, was slowly being outproduced by the industrial might of the Soviet Union and the American dynamo.
Denmark, because it offered no resistance to the Nazi invasion, was mostly left alone. Holland was somewhat so, and Belgium less so, but direct control by the Wehrmacht in these countries because of their proximity to Britain, and hence the fact that they were potential war zones, kept the Gauleiters and SS at bay.
France was a special example. Far too large to be bullied or brutalized, the French were brought into the Axis wing half-heartedly. The Vichy government collaborated, while the occupied zone, centered in Paris, proved useful to German forces. Some cultural liberties were allowed. The Nazi sculptor Arno Becker was actually a friend of the French writer Jean Cocteau. He was allowed to produce his plays and publish his books, and while Pablo Picasso could not publicly display his works (at the request of the Franco government), there were no restrictions on visitors to his own gallery. (It was said one German officer came to view these works, and, indicating Guernica, asked if Picasso had painted it. No, Picasso said, pointing his finger, you did this!)
Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité were replaced in Vichy by Travail, Famille, Patrie. It is tempting to think France could have been a very strong and useful ally of Germany, but again, Hitler wanted no allies; he wanted vassals. As it was, the French authorities cooperated fully with the German forces until the war began to turn against Germany. This reluctance led to the creation of the Milice, a combined political and paramilitary organization known for its brutality. Many Milice wound up in the SS, and one of its units, the Charlemagne Division, fought hard and to the bitter end, protecting Hitler in his bunker in April 1945.
Switzerland was left alone. Popular historical conceptions are that the Swiss were unmolested because of their massive citizen army and mountainous terrain, but Mazower shows less strategic reasons. Hitler reasoned that his Reich needed a good, reliable go-between for its finances, being aware France would watch how Switzerland was treated — and he had to bring Vichy fully onto the Axis side. Also, Mussolini would have demanded part of Switzerland if it had been conquered. Thus, Hitler decided it was better to leave the Swiss in peace.
Mazower depicts the states allied with Germany very well, and shows how Italy was a true ally and thus given a lot of room to maneuver; unfortunately, all of Mussolini’s maneuvers were bad ones, particularly his adventures in Africa and Greece, dragging Hitler into both to come to his rescue and hence deny the Allies an entry point on the continent.
The other Axis states in Europe — Horthy’s Hungary, Tiso’s Slovakia, and Antonescu’s Romania — all had their own agendas for expansion, and were each ruthless in their own right. The Iron Guard in Romania was far more brutal than the SS was against minorities and Jews. Mazower likewise buries the claim of Italy being a gentler occupier than Germany. Mussolini was as harsh as Hitler in the territories he occupied. The one fascist state that behaved prudently was Franco’s Spain. Franco shrewdly avoided allying with Hitler and attacking Britain. His wait-and-see attitude kept him in power until 1975.
The high tide of Hitler’s empire was 1940 to 1942, when the Third Reich seemed unstoppable. After its reverses in Russia, the vassals became restive, sensing they’d hitched their wagon to the wrong star and sought a way out as the Red Army rolled closer to their borders.
Nazi harshness wasn’t the only reason there were rumblings in Hitler’s empire. Occupied countries paid the costs for German forces. German troops were provided with occupation marks that were pegged artificially low, about 20% below the currency’s true value. It meant European goods were siphoned into Germany at bargain prices. Perfume counters in Paris were filled with German troops buying all kinds of delicacies for their wives and girlfriends. In small ways like these, and in larger diversions of goods and food sent to sustain the German populace, the occupied countries were being plundered. They were willing to go along with it at first, because more than a few Europeans hoped Hitler was offering a genuine change, and it was assumed Germany would be victorious over Britain and Russia. When it wasn’t, and the war dragged on with more Europeans being forced into factory and other kinds of slave labor to keep the German war machine going, the resentment against Germany deepened.
The armed resistance movements were never seen by the Germans as a serious threat, and in most cases they weren’t, except in Russia, where organized partisan warfare was a sharp bite in the rear. Yugoslavia’s resistance forces were tough, but they fought each other as much as the Germans. Tito and his Communists managed to climb to the top of the heap and free Serbia, reassert their will on the collection of ethnic minorities under its rule, and became the only Communist state not liberated by the Red Army. Tito held it together until the 1980s, after which the ethnic cauldron boiled over.
Another factor that stifled resistance was the reprisals meted out: 100 civilians for every German killed, in many cases. Poles, who were marked for eventual extermination anyway, fought on with varying degrees of success.
In 1944-45 Italian partisans caused Axis forces much discomfort behind the lines, and the SS took brutal, savage reprisals. For all this viciousness, it did curtail the partisans. Mazower recalls incident after incident like to this to show that all of the Nazi methods were a kind of quick fix attempting to solve the embroiling war sucking up all of the Reich’s resources, all for the sake of Lebensraum. Hitler made no compromises, nor allowed any kind of diplomatic maneuvering using the shrinking cards in his deck. It was stand firm, don’t retreat, and obey.
When referring to Italy’s great power aspirations, Bismarck always said Italy had a great appetite but poor teeth. This might as well have been said of Hitler’s aspirations for an eastern empire. Mazower restates at the end that the Third Reich tried to establish a colonial empire much in the same way the other European nations had in the rest of the world. A sore point was Nazi brutality: treating Europeans the same way they had been treating the native peoples they ruled. It was a sobering analysis. Paul Johnson, in his Modern Times, spoke of nationalism going rampant combined with a vulgar interpretation of Darwinism that made Europeans powers begin a contest of survival of the fittest against each other, beating down the path leading to 1914.
Ironically, Hitler had no desire to see the colonial empires dissolved. He favored keeping them intact, especially the British, yet his war roused Britain and Churchill so much that Churchill bankrupted Britain’s empire to fight Hitler, in effect leading the way for American hegemony in the west and Russian hegemony in Eastern Europe. A victorious Stalin found Eastern Europe a physical, spiritual, and political vacuum suffering from the lost stability the Habsburg Empire had provided. The region’s emotional aspirations and ethnic tensions were suppressed during the long Soviet occupation, only to come alive again once the USSR, an empire in its own right, dissolved in 1991.
In The Meaning of Hitler, Sebastian Haffner argued that Hitler had the perfect opportunity to create a united Europe, but only if it had been a cooperative system of continental powers. Hitler would never have done this. It had to be German-controlled empire or nothing, and by 1944, Europeans consented to a division of the continent between America and Russia. As Haffner stated:
“I was Europe’s last chance,” Hitler dictated to Bormann in February, 1945 — and in a certain sense he was right. Except that he should have added: “And I wrecked it.”
I didn’t find any new revelations in Hitler’s Empire, only restatements of previously-known historical facts, but I enjoyed his compendium of Nazi infighting and the extreme lack of planning in the Third Reich.
Mazower also records the terrible plight of German refugees after the war, when, to solve the ethnic problem that so bedeviled the interwar period, Germans were simply expelled from lands they had lived on for centuries, and many times the expulsions were brutal and violent. This was completely ignored in the West. Again, referring to my college days, one German economics professor I knew became furious when describing the expulsions and many horrors he had seen. Some of the faculty thought him a crank, but the man’s memories were certainly genuine, as was his anger at the injustice doled out to these Germans.
In the final weeks of the war, Hitler was less a national leader heroically fighting to defend Germany and his vision of a new empire than a determined artist destroying the canvas of a work of his that hadn’t worked out — in this case, the German people’s colonial destiny. Oddly enough, as Mazower notes, the German defeat, with the awful forced emigration of millions of Germans, did finally unify them as a people, cosseted as they were in the post-war boundaries set up by the Allies.
It was said that much of the German resistance in the last few months of the war stemmed from knowledge of the Allied plans to destroy them, as in the Morgenthau Plan, that would have rendered Germany a deindustrialized pastoral land, but in all honesty this bucolic, ethnically pure ideal was the eventual hope of Nazis like Himmler, which would have seen Germany escape all corruption of the modern world; another cloud dream unrealizable as Germany continued to progress in industry, science, and modern thought. As Mazower noted, the Nazis could have ethnic purity or an imperial state, but they couldn’t have both.
Reading this book today seems remarkably relevant, as Europe is caught in its own contradictions in supporting Ukraine even while slowly destroying itself in self-imposed sanctions and, for want of a better word, fanaticism. It recalls Hitler’s intransigence. He said he would fight “five minutes past midnight, or until one of our damned enemies gets tired.”
The current American leadership and their European . . . allies? vassals? . . . seem to have no strategy except to go full throttle and never back down. This Hitlerian desperation is uncomfortably echoed today, sounding worse when being enacted by the NATO and European Union non-entities who are only concerned about defending these institutions, not Europe while being backed, if not commanded, by a venal cohort in an equally muddled America and a sleazy, senescent first magistrate.
As Scott Ritter has said, a new historical era is beginning, but it has uncomfortable shadows, much of it reflected in the disunity of the Slavic world and the intention of Britain and America to make political gains in fighting, as it is popularly said, to the last Ukrainian.
Hitler’s Empire may document the last colonial empire, but America has become the true and final one. In the end, it might appear that its teeth, too, are weak.
Mark Mazower offers a thoughtful and meditative study of one empire’s brutal failure. Who will write of ours? Any takers?
* * *
Counter-Currents has extended special privileges to those who donate $120 or more per year.
- First, donor comments will appear immediately instead of waiting in a moderation queue. (People who abuse this privilege will lose it.)
- Second, donors will have immediate access to all Counter-Currents posts. Non-donors will find that one post a day, five posts a week will be behind a “Paywall” and will be available to the general public after 30 days.
- Third, Paywall members have the ability to edit their comments.
- Fourth, Paywall members can “commission” a yearly article from Counter-Currents. Just send a question that you’d like to have discussed to [email protected]. (Obviously, the topics must be suitable to Counter-Currents and its broader project, as well as the interests and expertise of our writers.)
To get full access to all content behind the paywall, sign up here:
Paywall Gift Subscriptions
If you are already behind the paywall and want to share the benefits, Counter-Currents also offers paywall gift subscriptions. We need just five things from you:
- your payment
- the recipient’s name
- the recipient’s email address
- your name
- your email address
To register, just fill out this form and we will walk you through the payment and registration process. There are a number of different payment options.
38 comments
I thought it a bit bizarre that a Counter-Currents review of this book wouldn’t even mention the fact that (((Mark Mazower))) is a tribesman whose grandparents were Communist revolutionaries in Russia. He is also the “Ira D. Wallach Professor of History at New York’s Columbia University.” This doesn’t mean that everything he writes in this book is therefore wrong, but it should at least be checked against other sources given that he clearly has a lot of motivation to portray Germany and the Reich in a negative light. And judging from this summary, it seems he reinforces just about every claim about “German barbarism” in the war that’s ever been made. His book certainly shouldn’t simply be taken at face value as “thoughtful and meditative,” as the author of this review does.
Yes. All this Jew has done is switch the narrative from ‘Hitler was an evil genius’ to ‘Hitler was a bumbling idiot’. Neither are legitimate conclusions. Hitler’s situation was very similar to Putin’s situation: He was given no choice but to fight. Peace was denied him.
“Mazower was born in Golders Green and spent most of his early life in north London.[1] His mother was a physiotherapist and his father worked for Unilever.[1] During his youth, Mazower enjoyed playing the French horn and composing classical music.[1]
Mazower’s father was of Russian Jewish descent”
Never ever trust a book about Hitler, ww2, ‘Nazis’, Germany or Eastern Europe written by a Jew. You could not find a more biased angle for information.
Hitler literally was given no choice. Just like Putin.
He gave himself no option, in that he could only avoid a German economic collapse at the end of the Thirties by initiating a war of expansion and plunder. But even then there were choices to be made: he chose to attack his Soviet Union, a non-belligerent trading partner, while Britain was undefeated and drawing the US into the war. Above all he chose to treat conquered peoples in the East with the utmost brutality, surpassing even the recent atrocities of the Bolsheviks in Poland, Belorussia and Ukraine. The war was in effect lost after the failure of Operation Typhoon and the entry of the US in December 41, yet instead of coming to terms Hitler launched his ausrottung of untermenschen, principally Jews and captured Slavs: a vindictive action that took resources away from the Wehrmacht and united his enemies in fierce determination to obliterate his regime.
What you call ‘choice’, Hitler saw as necessity. His hand was forced. Just like Putin’s. The Jews will say Putin ‘chose’ invade Ukraine. However, the claim that NATO chose to encircle Russian territory with armies and weapons and refused to negotiate in good faith equally fits the facts. In the end, there are no ‘historical facts’ in situations where a victor constructs ‘history’ on the basis of the records and artifacts they choose not to destroy.
A bit rich to describe the Soviet Union, a criminal state bent on global domination, as a ‘non-belligerent trading partner’.
It was the only major revisionist power (besides Germany) that contested the post-Versailles order with its ambitions. It was also the only potential ally that mattered against the Anglo-Saxons.
Karl Haushofer knew this and there’s no way the Nazi leadership wasn’t aware of this reality (Ribbentrop-Molotow pact was the last act of sound geopolitics in Third Reich).
Perhaps I should have said that from the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact all the way up to the launching of Barbarossa, the Soviet Union was effectively an ally of the Third Reich’s, suppling her with war materials and assisting with the dismemberment of Poland. Amusingly British communists during this period were instructed to campaign with the slogan “Get Britain out of the Bosses’ War!”. This is something of which the anti-fascist zealots of our own era need reminding.
To add some context for this side of the debate, as one of the commenters above mentioned Germany’s pact with Russia, wasn’t that violated? Suvarov wrote a couple books on this. Both nations agreed to the Blitzkrieg and Russia backed out without notice, thus making Germany the aggressor. Moreover, each respective intelligence agency knew the other had drafted plans to invade their neighbors. I don’t think the war of aggression / martial Keynesian portrayal of Hitler explains why the world order sought his end. The dominant hegemonies were pursuing Germany’s (er Prussian) destruction for 200 years prior. You don’t get the NSDAP without 19th century French occupation, for instance. Either way, Hitler was number one on their hit list… we know who pulled the strings of WWII.
Suvorov/Rezun’s claims about “preventive attack” hasn’t been proven by any documents. All we have are hypotheses that are treated as undeniable facts in some circles.
Russia didn’t “back out”, but invaded at a later date. The secret protocol didn’t oblige them to employ german doctrines of warfare. Both sides had no problems cooperating afterwards with signing the border treaty and setting up the collaboration between Gestapo and NKVD in hunting down any Polish resistance movement.
The only violator of the pact was Hitler who invaded while the last train with Soviet supplies was still in Germany. Stalin wouldn’t have suffered a mental breakdown if he had expected the strike or planned to strike himself mere months later. On the contrary, coming intelligence reports only fueled his paranoia that his enemies are trying to set him up against Hitler early when the Red Army was not ready (as evidenced by the Winter War). He lashed out at any suggestions that Wehrmacht may attack soon. He convinced himself that his diplomacy worked and the Third Reich was too preoccupied with England.
In the end Stalin kept too much faith in the spirit of Rapallo (treaty signed in 1922).
Hitler has invaded in June, 1941, because the British intelligence (i.e. William Stephenson, a.k.a. Intrepid) planted documents on the plans of the USSR to attack Germany at the German Embassy in the United States. The documents were falsified. And the aim of this operation was to push the Germans to attack the USSR, which would open a “second front” for Great Britain, the main culprit of both the First and Second World Wars.
There was plenty of evidence that the Russians were indeed planning an attack on the West.
https://counter-currents.com/2013/04/viktor-suvorovs-icebreaker/
https://counter-currents.com/2011/04/exposing-stalins-plan-to-conquer-europe/
In fact, as empires go, it was more shadow than substance.
How might America fare if the world would decide to arm Mexico and Canada and force it into a 2 front fun war?
Before that we would obviously have to rape it a bit economically.
Both US and Russia/SU were not independent players in the both World Wars, at least on European Theatre of War, but only deliverers of money, materiel (weapons, equipments, etc.) and blood (Russia as canon fodder supplier) for the UK. Both World Wars were Anglo-German wars, or, maybe, two parts of one war (1914-45) with a “peaceful break”.
“Hitler reasoned that his Reich needed a good, reliable go-between for its finances,”
I am reminded of a joke told by an economist of I suppose libertarian bent. So Stalin or someone is addressing the Party Congress, and announces that soon “every nation but Switzerland will be communist!” General applause. Later, a low level party member gently asks Stalin, why not Switzerland? Stalin says, “Idiot! How would we find out what the prices are?”
Interesting. At this point it’s clear that Hitler is overrated by both sides and most of the Nazi staff were unimpressive yes-men. Germany would have come out of it better if it had just annexed the German speaking lands in the surrounding countries and left it at that.
Hitler made some terrible diplomatic mistakes before the war and certainly his grand strategy lacked any pragmatism afterwards, but, in a sense, “uniting the German speakers and leaving it at that” is what he ideally wanted to do.
That’s the trouble. He wanted more than that, and he wanted it from the start. It was always uniting most German speakers (not all) and Lebensraum in the East, which he conceived as a colonial project, drawing models from the American West and British Raj, ignoring the fact that he was proposing to use such techniques on fellow Europeans.
Prof. Hans Günther in Mein Eindruck von Adolf Hitler, 1969, saw it exatly so. He wrote that the annexation of Sudetenland was a right decision, but the annexation of the rest-CZ was wrong.
I was under the impression that most of the lebensraum propaganda, as well as the idea the Germans were set at genociding and/or enslaving the Poles and the Slavs had been debunked. With over 80 years of hindsight, it would appear that Mr Hitler was just trying to regain lost German lands as well as neutralize the communist threat from the Soviet Union. With 100 year old female former bookkeepers being charged with war crimes, I guess the propaganda may never end.
Hitler’s Table Talk has not been debunked and makes it very clear that he intended to reduce the Ukrainians and Russians to helots and to colonize their lands with Germans.
There’s been an attempt at a scholarly appraisal of post-War publications like Table Talks and The Testimony: Hitler Redux by Mikael Nilsson. Like many things related to Adolf Hitler and NSDAP Germany, propaganda materials have been treated as if they are legitimate ‘historical’ documents. If not ‘debunked’, documents like ‘Table Talks’ should be not be granted unqualified veracity. War is hell.
Enough historical evidence exists that proves Nazis saw Eastern Europeans as little more than vermin. They didn’t kill millions of them by accident.
Who didn’t?
Nilsson here:
Hugh Trevor-Roper and the English Editions of Hitler’s Table Talk and Testament (archive.org)
It seems that Table Talks is rather dodgy. There’s been lots of odd stuff with the manuscripts, so one can’t say for sure how accurate it is. In my opinion, Trevor-Roper has an agenda.
I agree. You don’t sell a lot of books saying nice things about Adolf Hitler. Even saying neutral things is considered beyond the pale for some folks.
He was fighting communist expansion from the East, there was no indiscriminate killings of civillians and his strike at the Russians was meant to mirror the German strike from WW1 and force a Russian surrender. He actually only wanted formerly German lands and had the Brits not signed that awful treaty with Poland, Herr Hitler would have gotten his corridor and the Reds wouldn’t have held their boot on the throats of Eastern Europeans for 50 years. Helots? Silly.
Lebensraum in the East was on the menu from the start, and the fact that other peoples already lived there meant nothing to Hitler.
I’ve been trying to get a fair and accurate understanding of Nazi Germany for years, free of both propaganda and wishful thinking. To the best of my knowledge, I agree with Greg Johnson here about Lebensraum. According to my understanding of Nazi thought, Bolshevism coming from the East seems to be about all the excuse that regime needed to do the imperialist expansion it always planned on doing anyway. One way or another, the Germans found themselves conquering Slavic lands, and there was no indication that they were just waiting to mop up the Soviets before politely packing up and going home. Even if you believe invading Eastern Europe was entirely necessary just to secure the survival of Germany, to say nothing of it’s expansion, then that’s still not how conquest works. Once major forces are mobilised, blood is shed, and territory is taken, men generally start taking advantage of it. Regardless of one’s position on Germany in the East, ask yourself: does anyone among us really think Germany ever had any intention of just packing up and going home after defeating the Soviet Union? At optimistic best, from a Slavic perspective, maybe you get a puppet regime, as a buffer state, answering to Berlin. That’s the nature of conquest and expansion.
The Third Reich only continued the imperial projects of the Second. Lebensraum was nothing more than an updated Mitteleuropa plan. Only that time Germany would’ve done away with any autonomy or fake independent countries. Well, that and Kaiser’s Prussia hadn’t planned on physical culling of the native populations, especially Jews that would have acted as balance against the natives (Judeopolonia project).
In a way Hitler’s hubris saved us from slow germanization at a massive cost of blood. Calm, dangerous Prussian was replaced by an increasingly hysterical Austrian.
This comment is in reply to @Bookai’s last comment regarding Lebensraum as an updated Mitteleuropa plan. My apologies, the long thread does not allow me to reply to @Bookai directly.
Thank you for the insightful comments. If I understand you correctly, the Kaiser would have used local Jews in Slavic lands as a balance against the natives. Your hypothesis that this Prussian approach of slow Germanisation, would have been far more dangerous and destructive to Slavs than the Nazis, is fascinating and makes sense.
If the Kaiser had not planned on physically culling the native population, including Jews, as you suggest, then by necessity he intended for them to be an occupied people in service, to one degree or another, to the Second Reich.
Question: In your opinion, would the Kaiser have ruled benignly or cruelly over Slavic natives in his Mitteleuropa plan?
@ Reed Johnson
If I understand you correctly, the Kaiser would have used local Jews in Slavic lands as a balance against the natives. Your hypothesis that this Prussian approach of slow Germanisation, would have been far more dangerous and destructive to Slavs than the Nazis, is fascinating and makes sense.
Of course I’m talking about a hypothetical scenario where Mitteleuropa is realized and a complete success. Then Polish national identity would’ve been in great danger as Prussians knew how to use incentives (social advancement), while keeping punishments within the Rechtstaat and irritating enough, but not too severe (Kulturkampf, lawfare). While the biological substance of the Polish nation would’ve survived, its identity could be relegated to the most provincial elements as too backward for germanization. Nazis provoked a strong reaction and the creation of an entire Underground Polish State.
Realistically however, given the rise of volkism (with such forerunners like Arthur Bonus), there would’ve been an unsteady balance. Polish Kingdom would’ve been restored under Hohenzollern crown, but analogously like in Russia of that time, there would’ve been a growing resentment against non-Germans in the Second Reich. That in turn would animate the Polish nationalism (that established its stronghold in the Prussian part of partitioned Poland). Such movement would likely be supported by Polish autonomists from Austrian Galicia. Germanization would’ve been progressing but with more hurdles on the way. That is my view of the most likely hypothetical scenario.
In your opinion, would the Kaiser have ruled benignly or cruelly over Slavic natives in his Mitteleuropa plan?
Kaiser Wilhelm was a rather sympathetic but very flawed man. He understood his duty as the Emperor, but I think his unstable, passionate character would’ve gotten the best of him. He would’ve started giving more voice to the Prussian nationalists (who would’ve threatened to blow up the empire unless appeased) and consequently increase the repression of non-german identities along with catholicism. There would’ve been some attempts at damage control, but not enough to satisfy everyone. He would’ve tried to rule in a benign way, but suffering from awkward moments like the infamous “hunnic speech” on other occasions, that would tarnish his image. Not to mention the Anglo-Saxons would’ve quickly exploited it to increase the tensions. Overall I think that after an initial liberal phase (supported by postwar fatigue), there would be an internal pressure for reactionary policies to be enacted.
@Bookai
Generally speaking, any people ruled as second-class citizens by a foreign occupier eventually get around to (even if it takes centuries) overthrowing it or cooperating with an alternative foreign invader. While Rechtstaat would have been applied to a broadly Germanised and deracinated Polish population, by virtue of Poles simply being a different ethnicity, Germans (or Russians) couldn’t help but view them differently despite any claims of shared dominion. People are people, and may find ways to get along in daily life, but if any two ethnicities are different enough, sooner or later friction and resentment will accumulate. This is not to say great damage wouldn’t have been done to Polish national identity during protracted Germanisation, but ethnic and genetic differences have a way of preserving any group which finds itself in an unfortunate position. It is the reason why smaller or militarily weaker ethnicities find ways to survive successive waves of invasion and occupation. (Poland, Hungary, and others).
Regarding your comments of Kaiser Wihelm’s speculated ruling style during a hypothetical occupation of Poland, I would agree. His challenge would have been the challenge of basically any emperor in the questionable nature of empire itself; too many moving parts and too many internal competing interests to appease. Ethnic differences are the greatest threat to any empire and usually end up being the final word in their dissolution, to say nothing of their destructive and exhaustive quality to the core dominant group itself (The British Empire, Soviet Empire, and now American Empire).
In-depth critical assessment of Hitler, the German war effort and the political foundations of the Third Reich are all well and good, but not coming from the mouth of a Jew. I’m glad to see others pointing out the long-trunked elephant in the room as well. It’s like letting a Hutu write a dissertation on Tutsis – the obvious tribal bias cannot help but get in the way.
Good review of one of the more interesting books about WW2 in recent decades.
The author may be Jewish but for the most part he just gathers up information from historians (mostly native Europeans) in each country and puts it together in one place. Those of us from neighbouring countries who had the chance to ask our relatives about life under German occupation certainly won’t be surprised to learn that Hitler was not fighting for all Europeans, though I can understand why the MSM, ADL, etc. would want us to believe that.
We who have our eyes fixed on the common good of our race, the White race, have a vision that is incompatible with Hitler’s vision.
This is just a typical rehash of Frankfurt School nonsense. I agree that the Tribal connections of the author are paramount to this kind of scholarship.
First, the Third Reich was incredibly efficient ─ and then once brought to heel, the historical Hitler was hopelessly maladroit except at the Nazis being incredible killing machines ─ nevermind that that is what one does in war, and the Germans did it exceptionally well (especially under Hitler).
There seems to be a pattern here. We are not supposed to know that since 1928, the Soviets had been working on “Socialism In One Country,” i.e., an incredible arms race directed against Germany ─ and with considerable American help after 1933.
The Germans even tried to ease tensions by withdrawing their sphere of interest from the Baltic states, and these efforts were rewarded with a brutal Soviet annexation. It was obvious that the Balkans and the vital German link to oil was next. I for one cannot find any reason to trust the Soviets in 1940, and after Molotov’s visit in the Autumn, neither could Hitler. The clock was ticking.
The Allies would not settle for anything less that the Peace of Versailles. They never wanted any lasting peace with Germany ─ and no peace proposal would have been enough. That was true in 1938. It was true in 1939. It was true in 1940.
From London to Los Angeles there were visions of Soviet hordes raping through Europe.
What Hitler understood was that his enemies could not be accommodated without Germany being hitched back up to the yoke of International Finance Capital or worse, become a Communist satrapy. The Summer of 1941 was probably the last chance to settle that score before it was too late ─ and that chance was slimmer than expected.
In any case, I find it interesting that when the Kriegsherr went on his victory tour of Paris he brought along his sculptor, Arno Brecker (to Hitler’s left on the book cover) and his architect, Albert Speer (to his right).
As far as the Table Talks … Well, they are hearsay at best.
And even if this were not so, a lot of things are said between the spinach and the strudel.
Even when Hitler was having command conferences he eventually found that because all the generals had different opinions about what he said and what the Führer meant, he had to bring in professional stenographers from the Foreign Office so that it was clear what was said. The surprising thing is that this was not done long before.
As far as the claim that Germany was in an economic bind and so had to go to war, this, too, is nonsense.
Germany was the only nation to come out of the Depression without war.
The prewar German economy was robust and the unemployment issue of the Depression was a thing of the past. In fact, now there was a labor shortage, plus minimal inflation, both holding wages down. Reichsbank President Hjalmar Schacht wanted to cool the armaments program, but this was not possible.
Without the rearmaments program, Germany would have had no diplomatic leverage at all short of war, and this was a perishable quantity because the hostile powers were ultimately far stronger. This was an incredible balancing act and Hitler knew it.
Mein Kampf was written circa 1925, almost a generation before World War II. There is no way that Hitler would have precisely known his options.
But far from Hitler needing to go to war to keep the German economic miracle vouchsafed, the prophet of Autarky was actually exporting fine German goods and services and making significant technological gains ─ and it looked like the sky was the limit.
It was the Entente that was in panic mode, and they would do whatever they had to do, including bankrupting their own empires, to bring Germany back to 1919.
The (((Roosevelt Trust))) and the Soviets had their own interests, but sovereign European nation-states, let alone a powerful Germany around to lead them, was not even remotely in their worldview. That is how we got to where we are today. Scores of millions dead, but “it takes two to tango.”
Is Globaloney better? Well, maybe for some tribes.
🙂
Comments are closed.
If you have Paywall access,
simply login first to see your comment auto-approved.
Note on comments privacy & moderation
Your email is never published nor shared.
Comments are moderated. If you don't see your comment, please be patient. If approved, it will appear here soon. Do not post your comment a second time.
Paywall Access
Edit your comment