In early October 1941, a string of victories brought the Wehrmacht to
the outskirts of Moscow and convinced Hitler that the Soviet Union had
been beaten. He realized his mistake within days. But by then it was
too late. Propaganda Ministry officials in Berlin had already provided
journalists with a brutally frank revelation of what Europe could expect
under Nazi rule. The war was over, they had told them, and the Reich
was going to create a self-sufficient ‘Europe behind barbed wire’ that
could withstand any military threat. Germany would become ‘much
freer and colder’ in the way it treated ‘the nations dominated by us’ and
‘there would be no question of some pathetic little state obstructing
European peace with its special requests or special demands’. As for the
German people, they would face new challenges and they would have
to deal in particular with the sort of constant skirmishing on their
new Eurasian border in the East that the British confronted on India’s
north-western frontier. In short, they would need ‘to be led to the
imperial European ideal’.
Hitler as empire-builder: it may not be how we commonly think of
the Fuhrer, but it was certainly one of the images he had of himself. The
Nazis believed it had fallen to them to establish an empire that would
elevate them to the status of a world power. With scarcely any direct
experience of overseas colonialism to guide them, and knowing little
about the British in India, they were nevertheless greatly impressed
with the idea that a tiny group of administrators could run an entire
sub-continent. For them, empire was an ‘ideal’ – or, to put it more
bluntly, a violent fantasy of racial mastery, a demonstration of the
prowess of a martial elite bred to lord over hundreds of millions of
subjects. The Germans would have to be trained in these virtues, Hitler
believed, in order to compete with the rulers of ‘great spaces’ for the
globe’s resources. They had lagged behind in the Scramble for Africa at
the end of the nineteenth century, and they could not afford to ignore
the competitive rivalries unleashed after the First WorldWar as well. The
British and French had already grabbed the Middle East, the Japanese had
marched into Manchuria in 1931, and the Italians had invaded Ethiopia
four years later. Germany needed to make up for lost time.
How far Nazi imperial ambitions really extended is an issue that still
divides historians. ‘Today Germany is ours, and tomorrow the whole
world,’ sang the Hitler Youth. But what dreams of dominion lay in the
mind of the Fu¨ hrer is hard to say. No one seriously believes that he was
a mere opportunist, without any foreign policy programme at all. But
could he really have envisaged a campaign of world conquest? Believing
the Third Reich’s appetite to have been virtually limitless, some scholars
point to its naval preparations for a transatlantic conflict and argue that
Hitler was guided by a foreign policy programme of confrontation with
the USA that dated back to the 1920s. Others doubt that things worked
so neatly or went so far and stress Hitler’s fixation upon Europe and his
arguments for eastwards expansion.
The two views are not incompatible, but Europe came first in every
sense. The operative difference to bear in mind is surely between domination and conquest. Almost a century before Hitler, Abraham Lincoln’s
secretary of state, William Seward, talked about making the United
States into ‘the successor of the few great states which have alternately
borne commanding sway in the world’. For Seward, establishing ‘control
of this continent is to be in a very few years the controlling influence in
the world’. He saw power projected through commerce whereas Hitler
valued the control of resources, but the two men’s hegemonic ambitions
were otherwise not far apart. ‘Any thought of world policy is laughable,’
Hitler commented in October 1941, ‘until we are masters of the continent
. . . Once we are the masters in Europe, then we will enjoy the
dominant position in the world.’
Controlling Europe was what really mattered for the Nazis precisely
because they believed it held the pivotal position in the world’s geopolitical
system. In 1904 the British geographer Halford Mackinder had
famously argued that he ‘who rules eastern Europe commands the Heartland;
who rules the Heartland commands the World Island; and who
rules the World Island commands the World’. It was not an implausible
idea. By 1942, after all, the Germans were in command of a landmass
larger than the USA, and more densely populated and more economically
productive than anywhere else in the world. Whatever the challenges
that Hitler may have thought would face future generations, there can
be little doubt that the conquest and consolidation of this vast area
represented the culmination of his own foreign policy.
It was for this reason that the Nazis regarded their own imperial
ambitions as compatible with those of other leading powers, and they
could never understand why the British in particular failed to see this. ‘It
seems to us,’ commented Alfred Rosenberg, the regime’s self-proclaimed
philosopher, ‘that the British empire too is based on a racially defined
claim of dominance.’ Did they not share the all-important combination
of a sense of racial superiority and hatred of Bolshevism? The Nazis
planned to dominate Europe, in other words, much as the British ran
Asia or Africa – or so it seemed to them. If the British could be persuaded
to give up their hostility to the idea that no single power should be
allowed to control the destiny of the continent, there was no reason for
the two powers to fight. Africa could be carved up anew along the lines
of the discussions that had started in the late 1930s and the more
ambitious blueprints that followed the fall of France. But for Hitler,
eastwards expansion promised Germany more than overseas colonies
ever could, and it was the lands between the Baltic and the Black Seas
that he singled out for German settlement.