Crucially, Hitler also viewed Jewry as an actual political entity, a hidden force that had started World War I, engineered the German defeat and humiliation, and ruined Russia and was now intent on exterminating Germany and the Germans. Unless the Jewish question was solved by a “bloody clash,” he asserted in 1924, “the German people will end up just like the Armenians.” As Saul Friedländer has stressed, Hitler’s was a “redemptive anti-Semitism” that combined anxious, conspiratorial notions of an all-powerful, destructive Jewry with promises of redeeming Germany. For Hitler, the Jewish conspiracy constituted the primary obstacle to German renewal. “The Jew today is the great agitator for the complete destruction of Germany,” Hitler insisted, while the ultimate goal of the Jewish conspiracy remained the “annihilation of Germany…, the next great war aim of Bolshevism.” Once he made the link with Bolshevism, Hitler cemented in his own mind his mission of waging a racial struggle against a ruthless, implacable, and brutal foe for the very existence of German and Western culture. The mission of National Socialism became the destruction of Bolshevism and, with it, “our mortal enemy: the Jew.” In this struggle, “A victory of the Marxist idea signifies the complete extermination of the opponents.” To Hitler, there could be no middle ground: “There is no making pacts with Jews. There can only be the hard either-or.” The outcome of the struggle, he stressed in a 1922 speech, would be “either victory for the Aryan side or else its annihilation and victory for the Jews.”8 Implicit in this was the notion of absolute destruction: either they would win and kill us, or we would win and eliminate them.
If this radical anti-Semitism gave Hitler’s ideology its manic dynamism, it was Lebensraum that provided the vital link between dogma and a pragmatic program of territorial expansion. Notions of living space and expansion in the east were common currency in Germany both before and especially after World War I. Based on work by geopolitical theorists such as Friedrich Ratzel and Karl Haushofer, and popularized in the 1920s by Hans Grimm’s best-selling novel Volk ohne Raum (People without space), Lebensraum stressed the necessity of a policy of expansion in order to achieve a positive ratio between population and resources. Ratzel emphasized that healthy states needed to expand and grow in order to survive, an idea hardly unique to Germany at the turn of the century. The British “hunger” blockade between 1914 and 1919, a plebeian form of killing that nonetheless had a profound impact on shaping Hitler’s ideas, seemed to confirm the truth of these notions. Responsible for the death by starvation of perhaps 750,000 civilians, and regarded by many Germans as the main culprit in the collapse of the war effort, the blockade reinforced and gave legitimacy in the minds of millions of Germans to the urgency of securing living space. For Hitler, it provided proof of his contentions and justification for his actions: the decisive factor in the struggle for survival was obtaining the means by which the German nation could sustain itself. The Great War had clearly demonstrated that Germany, a resource-poor nation surrounded by hostile powers, possessed insufficient resources and was, thus, vulnerable to the murderous actions of its enemies. If Germany was to survive, it had to gain living space.9
Viewed from the perspective of the 1920s, Germany faced a series of stark choices: attempt to resurrect the liberal economic policy of free trade and export orientation that had characterized imperial Germany; promote a policy of colonial expansion to secure vital resources; or promote a policy of contiguous expansion to secure Lebensraum in Eastern Europe. As Hitler assessed the situation, the first two choices offered no realistic alternative, the first because Great Britain and the United States dominated the global trading system, German exports faced increasing trade barriers, and reliance on foreign trade did not solve Germany’s ultimate problem. As World War I had demonstrated, its enemies, organized by the international Jewish conspiracy, could easily cut off imports and force Germany into defeat. The second option not only dispersed the German racial core but was also completely untenable in any case: no suitable land for colonization outside Europe existed, and Britain had in 1914 already shown its willingness to organize a coalition to quash German economic, naval, and colonial competition.10
As Adam Tooze has argued, from the vantage point of the early 1930s Germans looked back on a twenty-year period in which economic decline and insecurity dominated their experience. Despite their hard work, diligence, and technology, their country was poor, especially in comparison with the United States. Playing within the rules of the economic game as devised by the British and now dominated by the Americans clearly had not worked. Moreover, the Great Depression seemingly had made a mockery of the liberal doctrine of economic progress and only reinforced Hitler’s notion that, in economics, as in race, life was an unceasing process of struggle for survival. As he stressed in 1928, the huge difference in living standards between the United States and Germany could be understood only in terms of the American advantages in resources and space. Now, in the midst of the Depression, his basic Darwinian outlook and economic understanding combined to point in one direction: the solution to the existential threats facing Germany, both economic and racial, lay in the conquest of Lebensraum in the east. “And so we National Socialists consciously draw a line beneath the foreign policy tendency of our pre-war period,” Hitler emphasized in Mein Kampf. “We take up where we broke off six hundred years ago. We stop the endless German movement to the south and west, and turn our gaze toward the land in the east. At long last we break off the colonial and commercial policy of the pre-war period and shift to the soil policy of the future. If we speak of soil in Europe today, we can primarily have in mind only Russia and her vassal border states.”11
Not only did expansion in the east accord with Hitler’s ideology, but it also seemed to offer the fewest risks. Germany would conquer the necessary living space at the expense of the allegedly racially inferior Slavs, secure for Germany the resources needed to make it self-sufficient and powerful, and put it in position to wage a successful struggle against the Jewish-Bolshevik enemy. Moreover, expansion in the east seemed promising because Jewish-Bolshevik rule had, in Hitler’s opinion, already ruined the Russian state and left it ripe for collapse. “The struggle for world hegemony,” he claimed, betraying his constant obsession with World War I, “will be decided for Europe by the possession of Russia’s space: this will make Europe the most blockade-proof spot in the world.” Finally, Hitler believed that such eastward expansion posed no fundamental threat to the British Empire. Thus, if Germany pursued a purely continental policy and avoided any challenge to Britain’s colonial or commercial interests, which Hitler believed had been the key mistake of German governments before 1914, Britain might even aid in the destruction of Russia. Indeed, throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and even in the first years of World War II, he persisted in the belief that Britain would, ultimately, be an ally of German-dominated Europe in the eventual struggle with the United States for world domination.12