Hitler, as has long been known, was obsessed with the alleged Jewish world conspiracy and its threat to Germany. The trauma of the war experience, the revolutionary upheavals and destruction that shook Central and Eastern Europe (especially the triumph of Jewish-Bolshevism in Russia), and the sense of threat and opportunity created by the collapse of empires all left an indelible impression on him. His toxic sense of conspiratorial anti-Semitism reinforced his belief that the Jews had somehow fomented and uniquely profited from the upheavals all around. Further, the threatened German nationalism he had imbibed as a youth in Vienna was further exacerbated by the outcome of the war, when not just the Habsburg Empire but Germany itself seemed on the verge of destruction. Lost territory represented more than just a province or two changing colors on the map; for Hitler and other racial nationalists, it meant not only a truncation of the German racial body but also an opportunity, in the tangle of ethnic groups and lack of clear boundaries in Central Europe, for other nationalities to profit at Germany’s expense. Nor was Hitler in any doubt as to who was responsible for this destruction. In February 1945, in one of his last conversations with Martin Bormann, he remarked, “An unfortunate historical accident fated it that my seizure of power should coincide with the moment at which the chosen one of world Jewry, Roosevelt, should have taken the helm in the [United States]…. Everything is ruined by the Jew, who has settled upon the United States as his most powerful bastion.” At the very end of a lost war, in which his plans for a great continental empire had been foiled in large part by the relentless resistance of the Soviet Union, it was the pivotal role of Roosevelt and the Jews to which Hitler assigned blame for the German defeat.1
Hitler’s obsession with the power and strategic potential of the United States had, we now know, emerged as long ago as the late 1920s in his unpublished Second Book. The perceived threat from the United States to a large extent also determined, from his point of view, the purpose of the war. America, to Hitler, represented more than just an economic or strategic challenge; its liberal, capitalistic, democratic, pluralist vision, behind which lurked the malevolent Jew, posed an existential threat to his own vision of a homogenous racial community unified in a common vision and led by a strong Führer. Germany, after all, had not lost the Great War but been undermined by jealous enemies. Unable to shed his wartime mind-set, Hitler fully subscribed to the Dolchstoss (stab in the back) myth, not least because it neatly encapsulated two key ideas: solidarity and betrayal. In this view, the trench experience had forged a unique “community of the front,” itself a microcosm of a new, unified society, while the huge popular investment in the war domestically had been undermined by the “internal enemy.” The “real Germany,” then, had not lost the war but been betrayed by Jewish war profiteers. Although the myth initially obscured the reality of total war, that Germany had lost a drawn-out war of attrition because it lacked manpower, raw materials, and industrial and financial resources, by the late 1920s Hitler had come to appreciate the importance of these material factors. The only logical response to this situation, as sketched first in Mein Kampf and then in the Second Book, was to create a new unified society within Germany, then carve out a Lebensraum for the German Volk sufficient to allow it to compete with the United States in the struggle for global preeminence. The only such vast spaces available in Europe lay in the east and could be taken only by force. The mission of conquest, for economic and racial reasons, thus formed the central core of Hitler’s ambition. For him, after all, the purpose of a state was nothing less than to secure the existence of the Volk. It also fit well with his fundamentalist social Darwinism: either the German Volk struggled for Lebensraum and assured its existence, or its racial enemies would deny it the means to life and, thus, assure its extinction.2
By the summer of 1939, however, Germany’s ability to conduct that existential struggle seemed in doubt. Rapid rearmament had, indeed, provoked an economic crisis, although this was not in itself the key reason for war. More importantly, Hitler’s actions had prompted accelerated rearmament efforts by Great Britain, France, and the United States as well as a hardening of the global diplomatic constellation against Germany. Not coincidentally, Hitler’s famous threat on 30 January 1939 to annihilate the Jews, to which he returned with such obsessiveness in subsequent years, was intended as a precise warning to Roosevelt to stay out of Germany’s “legitimate” affairs in Europe. As before 1914, Hitler saw the hand of the Jewish conspiracy in the effort once again to isolate and encircle Germany. Ironically, Stalin’s gamble on provoking an intracapitalist war offered Hitler a way out of his dilemma. Faced with an enemy coalition allegedly orchestrated by world Jewry, he needed to strike hard and fast, an opportunity now available because of the pact with Stalin. In the interim, he could fight a war in the west with no threat of a second front and protected against the worst effects of the much-feared British blockade.3
The result, although spectacular, also reinforced the economic and racial logic of Hitler’s ideological vision. Great Britain, influenced and supplied by the United States, chose to continue the war rather than settle with Germany, while Roosevelt launched a truly enormous rearmament effort in America that would, in a few years, produce a military force that would swamp the Wehrmacht. Moreover, although Germany’s conquests in the west contained valuable industrial and human resources, they lacked precisely the things that Germany most needed and the British proceeded to blockade: raw materials, food resources, and, most importantly, coal and oil. Once more, the logic of the situation forced Hitler to turn his eye to the east—only the raw materials, food supplies, and oil of the Soviet Union would allow Germany to organize an integrated continental economy that could compete with America. Nor would further trade agreements with Stalin suffice. Behind Stalin, Hitler believed, lurked another tentacle of the Jewish conspiracy. Economic dependence on the Soviet Union would result in the same fate for Germany as reliance on the Anglo-American global market: extinction. Propelled by a peculiar combination of racial arrogance (the notion of Slavic inferiority), the sense that the borderlands of the former Russian Empire were up for grabs (Germany, after all, had seized them in World War I), and urgency (a belief that time was against Germany), Hitler saw the only solution to the German dilemma in securing the necessary resources by conquest. If Germany acted immediately, a short window of opportunity existed since the American rearmament program would not bear fruit until 1942, while the spectacular victory over France offered the means: a short blitzkrieg campaign. Barbarossa was, thus, planned as a swift operation that would allow Germany access to the vital resources of the Soviet Union even as it continued preparations for the ultimate struggle against America.