Not as well understood but no less significant, the material gains secured by the seizure of Lebensraum in the east would profit not only the state and heavy industry but everyone in Germany as well. Nazi propaganda had long promoted the notion that the key to increasing the German standard of living was securing resources commensurate with the racial value of the Volk. The war for Lebensraum was, thus, not one for “throne and altar,” as Goebbels put it dismissively, but one
for grain and bread, for a well-rounded breakfast, lunch, and dinner, a war for the achievement of the material prerequisites for the solution of the social question, the question of housing and street construction, the construction of a military, commercial, and cruise fleet, the construction of automobiles and tractors, of theaters and cinemas for the people even in the tiniest village, a war for raw materials, for rubber, for iron, and ores…. We want finally, just once, to cash in…. In the immense fields of the east sways the golden grain, enough and more than enough, to nourish our people and all of Europe…. That is our war aim.
Goebbels expressed well the feeling, as Adam Tooze has put it, of “beleaguered poverty” that afflicted Germans in the interwar period, a fierce resentment at economic inequality and the stranglehold the “Anglo-Saxons” had on the resources of the world. Hitler had long insisted that the German people deserved better, that the principal domestic goal of National Socialism was to raise the individual’s living standard. Ultimately, however, this could be accomplished, Hitler believed, only through conquest of the vast resources of European Russia. That had been the lesson of World War I. Only by securing Lebensraum within the “area of our own weapons” could Germany become economically secure and prosperous.61
At the height of his power, and in order to celebrate the eighth anniversary of his appointment as chancellor, Hitler on 30 January 1941 delivered a rousing speech in the Berlin Sportpalast, one that left him in a radiant mood. And why not? He mocked the hypocrisy of the British, noting gleefully that their empire had, in fact, been acquired and maintained through force, that Britain and not Germany controlled vast areas of the globe, and that Britain had used its power to the detriment of Germany. The latter had been the lesson of 1918, he fumed, when Germany had been deceived and undone by both the British and the internal November criminals. That this centuries-old swindle was changing, that Germany was breaking free of the tyranny of the old order, the Führer boasted, resulted from the liberating energy and dynamism of National Socialism. The capitalist plutocrats, however, motivated by Jewish hatred, were ruthless. Not only had they intervened unnecessarily in the war, but they now also prolonged the conflict in the futile hope that Germany would somehow collapse, as in 1918. This, however, would not happen, Hitler promised, and then reminded the audience of his earlier prophecy:
And I do not want to forget the warning that I gave on 1 September 1939 [sic] in the German Reichstag, that if Jewry were to plunge the world into war, the role of Jewry would be finished in Europe. They may laugh about it today, as they laughed before about my prophecies. The coming months and years will prove that I prophesied rightly in this case too…. [Other nations]… will one day recognize the greater inner enemy, and they too will then enter with us into a great common front… against Jewish-International exploitation and destruction of nations.62
What exactly Hitler meant by this scarcely veiled threat—expulsion from Europe, confinement in ghettos, deportation across the Urals to Asia, or extermination—cannot now be determined. Perhaps he himself had no clear idea what he intended to do. Significantly, however, although unsure how the role of Jewry would be finished, he was certain that his prophesy would prove correct. Characteristically, as well, and highly revealing for a man with a photographic memory, Hitler on this and subsequent occasions recalled his original prophesy being made not on 30 January 1939 but on the day that war in Europe began, as if in his mind international Jewry had, indeed, perpetrated the conflict.
Most likely Hitler intended this as yet another warning to the United States to stay out of the struggle since Roosevelt had just introduced his Lend-Lease bill into Congress. Still, the Jewish question was never far from Hitler’s mind, and it would have been reinforced through regular contact with radical anti-Semites in the leadership such as Joseph Goebbels as well as anti-Jewish films such as the “documentary” Der ewige Jude, a scurrilous hate film that had premiered in Berlin just two months earlier. Thus, even as military and civilian planners, on the basis of concerns about the insufficient food supply, began to envisage the impending war in Russia as one of annihilation, a similar radicalizing process was occurring among those responsible for solving the Jewish problem. With the Madagascar Plan a nonstarter, Hitler now authorized Heydrich to come up with a new plan for removing the Jews from German-dominated Europe. Theodore Dannecker of Eichmann’s office noted on 21 January 1941, “According to the will of the Führer, after the war a final solution of the Jewish question within the parts of Europe under German rule or control will be implemented.” To this end, Dannecker wrote, Heydrich had received orders to “submit a proposal for the final solution… the success of which can only be guaranteed through the most careful of preparations. This preparation must include the preliminary work necessary for a general deportation of all Jews, as well as detailed plans for resettlement measures in a territory yet to be determined.” Heydrich evidently envisioned placing the Jews in the General Government area of Poland but, according to Eichmann, met fierce resistance from Hans Frank. Nonetheless, Heydrich instructed top officials in the RSHA in January 1941 to prepare for a large police action in the east. Shortly after his late January 1941 speech, Hitler also discussed the Jewish question with a group of close associates, remarking that he was thinking of new, “not exactly more friendly” schemes to replace the Madagascar project.63
With Hitler pressured both by Nazi leaders in Germany to deport Jews from the Reich and by administrators in Poland who struggled to cope with the horribly overcrowded ghettos, the glimmer of a truly radical solution to the Jewish problem began to emerge. The rapid defeat of the Soviet Union would open myriad new prospects, not least the deportation of the Jews of Europe to the harsh, inhospitable outer extremes of European Russia or even across the Ural Mountains. Such a territorial solution certainly would result in the deaths of millions of people, but Nazi planners already assumed vast numbers of “superfluous eaters” would be eliminated in any case.64 The twin wars of Hitler’s ideological obsessions—for Lebensraum and to solve the Jewish question—began in spring 1941 to converge in German planning. Final victory would make possible the grand demographic projects envisioned by Hitler and to be implemented by Himmler and Heydrich, both eager in any case to expand their empire. Earlier, Hitler had thought only of solving the Jewish problem in Germany; now, once the war had been won, it could be a European-wide solution.