Hitler’s personal war was against the Jew, Rosenburg had convinced him of the Jew’s complete responsibility for Marxism, a “Jewish concoction”, when the NSDAP was in its infancy at the start of the 1920s. Since Hitler was violently opposed to the influence of the Jew in Germany he was also opposed to what he saw as the Jewish pollution of rightfully German Lebensraum, namely the USSR. As early as 27th July 1920 Hitler had openly asserted, “an alliance between Russia and Germany can only come about if the Jews are overthrown” . Eleven years later on 22nd July in talks with the Japanese military attaché, General Oshima, at Bayreuth he said that he wished to “once more split up the gigantic block of Russia into its original historical components.” This was only three years before the beginning of the largest conflict in human history.
So it appears that Hitler took ideology as an important part of his policy making, this can be seen at home and in foreign policy. Now with the benefit of hindsight we would contradict the uncontested beliefs in ideological policy making which were prevalent in the Nazi administration, this was also true at the time. The democracy of German politics was not completely destroyed by the Nazis when they took power but, like the police and economic systems, was overlaid with an alternative from the party; so that instead of political debate and reasoning, Hitler dictated through ‘erlasse’ and speeches conveyed his current thinking to the Reichstag. Given the fascist dictatorships in Italy and Spain at the outbreak of war, and the Communist/Nationalistic governments in Eastern Europe there were not many real democracies from which the German population could feel separated and so they accepted this method of rule. So by combining populist values in ideological policy and implementing it by dictation Hitler lived up to his description as “a talented demagogue” by Ian Kershaw.
On the 11th August 1939 Hitler declared to the League of Nations commissioner in Danzig – Carl Burckhardt – “Everything I undertake is directed against the Russians.” Within a month Hitler was at war; within two years he would attack Russia, yet less than a fortnight from this dark hint Hitler personally wrote to Stalin to secure the Nazi-soviet pact of non-aggression. These pointed comments and blatantly hostile actions showed Hitler’s determined plan for expansion and general war, yet juxtaposed with the new peace treaty seemed to hark back to his cautious days of selecting an enemy then destroying it at his own pace. After the French campaign the Wehrmacht had high morale and confidence, now was the best time for Hitler to launch his campaign against the Russians. Since 1939 relations between Germany and Russia were starting to fray from the German end. Hitler was unwilling to keep his promises, and behaved towards the USSR in a manner most contradictory to that expected after signing a non-aggression pact. The soviet cause had in fact been strengthened initially by the German alliance; Stalin was worried about the attitudes displayed by the Western allies since the 1st World War and the revolution that had halted Russian participation. Described as “the U-turn of all time” Hitler’s alliance directly contradicted his vehement opposition of Marxism and bolshevism, he took a religious metaphor when talking of the USSR “a war against Soviet Russia would be a holy crusade against Bolshevism”. This Christian versus heathen idea of crusading was quite deftly linked into Hitler’s thinking on the cause of Marxism, the Jew, which he allowed persecuted into oblivion towards the middle of the war. After all, if the Bolsheviks were a Jewish fabrication then the war against them must be a “war of extermination”. No amount of ideological reasoning would hide the obvious political benefits first gained by Russia and Germany from their pact, after being left out by Britain and France over Polish alliance the two countries were pushed together by their mutual enemies.
Hitler’s foreign policy as such was motivated by prejudices based on race, genealogy and the distorted view of an ideological megalomaniac, thus Russia was not only the most convenient but also the most justifiable ‘threat’ for Hitler to attack.
Despite all the ideological causes of the Russian war, the fact still remains that the German premier decided to ally Germany with an, ideologically speaking, inferior country for political expediency, and, to a certain extent, desperation (since Britain refused to join the Germans). Hitler then went on to break the alliance, rather hypocritically given his previous analysis of Russian policy making “The present rulers of Russia have no idea of honourably entering into an alliance, let alone observing one.” So the opening of Nazi-Soviet relations began in the late 1930’s, Hitler having decided that an eastern alliance could benefit Germany by guaranteeing his eastern flank safe whilst the Fatherland’s armies prepared to march into France, gaining half of Poland and the upper hand on mobilisation once Britain and France decided to act.
Underlying the ruse of ideological reasoning was Hitler’s knowledge that Russia was a rich source of raw materials; a good area for the mass colonisation and sprawl of the German people after the war was won. Although Lebensraum in the east was put across as an ideological concept for the Aryan warrior/farmer, (Blut und Boden) the crux of the wish for expansion into soviet lands was the gain in space. Hitler was desperate for a close empire of Germans to be powerful enough to challenge France and Great Britain, yet which was not spread across the globe like the British, or populated by inferiors and non nationals like that of the French in Africa.
As early as 31st July 1940 Hitler was planning that a campaign against Russia would last for around 5 weeks. The motivation for this was mostly diplomatic, Britain was holding resolutely strong and the Russian patience with German misdemeanours in Poland and Finland was wearing thin; Hitler sought to bring Britain to her knees by removing the eastern hope of the empire. The Russians were unperturbed at this time by Japanese proximity and Hitler began to fear soviet plans for expansion especially towards the Rumanian oilfields; hence the economic and political threat posed by the soviets was enough to ensure German plans and possible pre-emptive action. This happened and thus the war with Russia began.
As recounted by Noakes and Pridham, the Hoβbach Conference of 5th November 1937 was an important milestone along the route of Hitler’s thinking on war in the east and shows that it was not even contemplated at that time. However the text quoted is a copy of a copy but, as the editors explain in their introduction to the passage, is widely regarded by historians to be genuine. Surely though an ideological desire as strong as the capture of one of the largest single countries in the world would have surfaced early on in Hitler’s administration, yet the dictator only really addresses it towards the end of the decade when the options for foreign alliance were beginning to exhaust themselves. Another explanation of the absence of Russia in the plans is that at the time it would have worried the generals too much; after all Hitler could not really afford war in 1939 when it broke out, his four year plan was not scheduled to be ready to take Germany into war until 1940 at the earliest.
Germany had been actively investigating the question of autarky on the home front; Ersatz Coffee was an infamous result of experiments to find synthetic alternatives to materials and commodities not naturally found in Germany. So the German pull towards the fertile and ore rich steppes of the Russian west was understandable, and in the instance of general war a certainty. For surely if a large power such as Germany wished to raise its international status it cannot have to rely on other powers for crucial supplies; at this time Britain had oil, coal and steel for the military and food for the home front. Russia was initialising a programme of industrial development; the Magnitogorsk steel factory was a triumph of large-scale production at the time. Germany had only the Ruhr valley to compare, the Krupp steel works the most famous of them, therefore if the opportunity provided itself Hitler would surely seize these leviathans of industrial output.
It was rhetoric such as ‘red peril’ and ‘communist devil’ that gave the ratification for the repudiation of the Nazi-Soviet pact. The time had come for Hitler to swing the German people’s sympathies homewards, to expose the Russian as a Bolshevik and an inferior, be he Slavic or Jewish he was a Bolshevik and therefore a member of the ‘untermenschen’. Thus Hitler provides the cause for war, those who were opposed to the war were branded traitors; the community spirit for protecting the homeland held strong on both sides. The arguments were effective, the pull of patriotism and glory of war won over the people better than the political and economic factors.
Given that the previous generations of German expansionist ideals had rested on the invasion of Russia Hitler was justified in attempting it again. The clear economic and military gains outweighed in his mind the inevitable loss of German lives to accomplish it; besides, general Halder – one of the planers of Barbarossa – claimed on 3rd July 1941 “It is probably no overstatement to say that the Russian campaign has been won in the space of two weeks” with confidence like this from the professional army Hitler must have thought the great cornucopia of Russia lay well within his grasp, and for the modest outlay in troops and equipment the return would be fantastic.
The actual structure of the war was planned over about two months, from a framework speech on 30th March 1941 to the first draft of the ‘Barbarossa plan’ on 13th May. General Halder’s analysis of 11th August 1941 shows the terrible mistake made by the Nazis in attacking Russia – “The whole situation makes it increasingly plain that we have underestimated the Russian colossus”. Therefore proving the lack of full planning and by inference the lack of a clear policy of anti-soviet action. The whole of operation Barbarossa smacked of opportunism, from the lack of winter clothes for the troops to the arguments between the OKH and Hitler on the placement of troops and key areas of attack. If a proper and long-standing policy for the war in Russia had existed these factors would already have been dealt with and the war would have been very different.
Despite the improper plan and execution of the advance into Russia it was bound to happen from the day Hitler gained control of the rest of Europe, his early diplomatic attempts show his preference for pro-British alliances and the unification of Aryan based cultures and societies of Nordic descent. Therefore the ideological reasons given for the war against Russia are valid but do not prove its inevitability.
Economic concerns were limited to the problems of autarky in certain raw materials, the population of Germany was not being starved but a little extra land would have been a luxury Hitler wanted Germany to afford. So the economic reasons for the attack on Russia were valid twofold, to provide the needed materials (and deny those already available in Germany from the allies) and to secure food imports by land which were not at risk from British naval power as in the previous war.
Politically Hitler would have achieved a dream if he had united Europe as an axis of Fascist countries, from Spain to Russia, from Norway to Crete. The implications of this would perhaps have led to world conquest by the forces of European Nazism, yet the lone soviet state had threatened to dog German attempts for empire, and was influencing distrust amongst the axis members. Hitler wrote to Mussolini on 21st June 1941, only a day before Barbarossa that “The partnership with the Soviet Union…was nevertheless often very irksome to me…I am happy now to be relieved of these mental agonies.”. Professor Richard Overy claims in his book “War and Economy in the Third Reich” that Hitler wanted all out war against the Russians, yet his recovering economy was not ready for the strain of warfare; so by buying time with diplomacy Hitler allowed Germany the opportunity of full scale war production. The Führer had originally planned for a war of ten to fifteen years, picking off the major powers from his base of western Europe, Overy suggests that the Reich from France and Scandinavia to the Polish and Czech regions would have constituted Hitler’s new Nazi homeland from where he would take out almost at leisure the powers of Britain, the USA and the USSR. However once general war broke out in 1939 war with Russia became unavoidable because Hitler had not the time to pick his enemies.
Yet despite all the motives for war the one single factor, which must dominate over all the others, was Hitler’s very own views, thoughts and methods of conveying them. Kershaw puts it most clearly in his biography of Hitler:
“Economic, military, strategic and ideological motives were not separable in Hitler’s thinking on the Soviet Union. They blended together, and were used by him with different strength at different times in persuading those in his company of the correctness and inevitability in his course of action.”
Showing that the standard of evidence, depth of analysis and quality of evaluation of any historian’s account of Hitler and the war with Russia must take into account that the man’s strength of mind and character would prevail over virtually any outside factor.
Overall then, it is easy to see German requirements for war with Russia, indeed ideology was an important factor, yet inevitability was ensured by the ambition inherent in Hitler’s dictatorship.
Bibliography
Noakes J & Pridham G (Ed.) Nazism 1919-45 Vol.3 (University of Exeter Press, Exeter, 1997)
Kershaw I The Nazi Dictatorship Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation (Edward Arnold, London, 1989)
Hildebrand K The Third Reich (George Allen & Unwin, London, 1984)
Bullock A Hitler and Stalin Parallel Lives (Harper Collins, London, 1991)
Kershaw I Hitler – 1936–1945 Nemesis (Penguin, London, 2001)
Geary R Hitler and Nazism (Routledge, London, 1997)
Hitler A (Trans. Manheim R) Mein Kampf (Hutchinson & Co, London, 1974)
Overy R War and Economy in the Third Reich (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1994)
Words (Not inc. footnotes or bibliography) 2,966
This idea was introduced mainly by Fritz Fischer in the early 1960’s whose work showed the linkage between the expansionist aims of Germany in both the Bismarckian and Wilhelmine times to the aims for expansion of the Third Reich
Noakes J & Pridham G (Ed.) Nazism 1919-45 Vol.3 (University of Exeter Press, Exeter, 1997) p.615
Kershaw I The Nazi Dictatorship Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation (Edward Arnold, London, 1989) pp.116-118 (Esp. p.117) – Here Kershaw explains the early deterioration of Nazi Soviet relations and puts it down to Hitler’s ideology and a misplaced hope for an alliance with Britain. Although not directly related to this section of the essay it does give insight to the argument concerning Hitler’s method of policy making, in this case showing his plans for future alliance.
Noakes J & Pridham G (Ed.) Nazism 1919-45 Vol.3 (University of Exeter Press, Exeter, 1997) p.612
Hildebrand K The Third Reich (George Allen & Unwin, London, 1984) p.25
Bullock A Hitler and Stalin Parallel Lives (Harper Collins, London, 1991) p.706
Kershaw I Hitler – 1936–1945 Nemesis (Penguin, London, 2001) p.205
Geary R Hitler and Nazism (Routledge, London, 1997) p.6
Hitler A (Trans. Manheim R) Mein Kampf (Second Book) (Hutchinson & Co, London, 1974) p.604
Geary R Hitler and Nazism (Routledge, London, 1997) p.67/68
Noakes J & Pridham G (Ed.) Nazism 1919-45 Vol.3 (University of Exeter Press, Exeter, 1997) pp. 680-688 (Esp. p.686 where the text shows Hitler as having dismissed Russia claiming that they would be distracted from German interests by the Japanese)
Kershaw I Hitler – 1936–1945 Nemesis (Penguin, London, 2001) p.387-8
Overy R War and Economy in the Third Reich (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1994) p.188
Kershaw I Hitler – 1936–1945 Nemesis (Penguin, London, 2001) p.343