By the mid-1920s, then, Hitler had established in his own mind the key link between the destruction of Jewish-Bolshevism and the acquisition of Lebensraum in the east, both of which were necessary in order to secure Germany’s existence. In the desperate period following World War I, this potent combination of nineteenth-century notions of social Darwinism, imperialism, racism, and anti-Semitism provided a seemingly plausible explanation for Germany’s current quandary and a prescription for action to save and renew the nation. Once established, the quest for Lebensraum and the final reckoning with Jewish-Bolshevism remained the cornerstone of Hitler’s life’s work: only the conquest of living space could make good the mistakes of the past, preserve the racial value of the German Volk, and provide the resources to lift Germany out of its economic misery. Just a few days after becoming chancellor, Hitler announced unequivocally to his startled generals that his aim was “to conquer and ruthlessly Germanize new living space in the east.” Everything, he stressed, had to be geared toward securing German predominance in Europe. From his first days in office, then, Hitler began preparing for war, for the struggle, as he saw it, for Germany’s existence.13
Adolf Hitler was not one to appreciate paradox—he was far too humorless and self-absorbed for that. If he had been more detached, however, he might well have appreciated the great historical irony that confronted him in September 1939. Instead, his chief interpreter, Paul Schmidt, perfectly captured the Führer’s mood on the early evening of 3 September 1939. Having been summoned to the Reich Chancellery to translate the British declaration of war, Schmidt described the funereal scene:
After I finished there was total silence…. Hitler sat there as if petrified and stared straight ahead. He… did not rant and rave…. He sat in his seat completely quiet and motionless. After a while, which seemed like an eternity…, he turned to Ribbentrop who kept standing at the window as if frozen. “What now?” Hitler asked his Foreign Minister with a furious gaze in his eyes as if he wanted to indicate that Ribbentrop had misinformed him about the reaction of the British…. Goering turned to me and said: “If we lose this war, may Heaven have mercy on us!”
Far from the arrogant, infallible, rigidly self-assured Führer of myth, Hitler had at that moment allowed Schmidt to glimpse the nearer reality: an uncertain figure whose guiding illusion had been crushed and who did not know how to proceed. His great gamble had failed, and what followed his invasion of Poland he neither wanted nor expected. His original intention had been to attack the Soviet Union with Polish help, but, when the Poles balked at playing their assigned role, he had hoped to neutralize Great Britain through the conclusion of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. This, he expected, would free his back in the west for a quick destruction of Poland followed by the showdown with Stalin’s Russia. Rather than fight the British, Hitler desired an alliance with England based on a common anti-Bolshevik attitude and a complementary relationship between a maritime and a continental power. What he got instead was a war with an Anglo-French alliance supported by the latent power of the United States.14
The irony, then, was that the nation he had wooed for years had now become his implacable enemy while the country that he envisioned as his greatest adversary had emerged as his indispensable ally. Moreover, he had embroiled Germany in what looked to be, at minimum, a protracted war in the west against the two nations that had undone it in the Great War and with a woefully unprepared Wehrmacht in no way comparable to the powerful military force of 1914. Given Germany’s position in the middle of Europe, the nightmare of its military planners had always been a two-front war, but Hitler had now conjured precisely this specter. Nor did his generals put faith in a supposed war-winning blitzkrieg strategy, for such a plan did not exist. In fact, they had absorbed all too well the lesson of World War I: they no longer believed that wars could be won quickly against opponents of superior strength. “The fixation upon a short war has been ruinous for us,” asserted Colonel (later General) Georg Thomas, chief of the Wehrmacht Economic Staff in 1937. “We should therefore not be guided by the illusion of a short war in the age of air and Panzer squadrons.” A 1938 study confirmed this opinion, stating categorically, “The possibilities of defeating an equivalent opponent by means of a Blitzkrieg are zero…. It is not military force that is strongest; instead, it is economic power that has become the most important.” By plunging recklessly into war, Hitler had created a nearly insurmountable strategic dilemma for Germany: although his generals had worked out a plan of operations against Poland, no overall war-winning concept existed.15
This was certainly not what Hitler intended. Since the mid-1920s, he had consistently expressed his desire to have Great Britain as an ally in the struggle against Jewish-Bolshevism. Although there were tantalizing hints of an alignment, such as the Naval Agreement of 1935 or Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement, by 1938 the hope of an alliance with Britain was illusory. If, in his ideologically blinkered world, the British did not act as Hitler wished, it meant that “world Jewry” had come to dominate in London and that “the Jew” had won over “the Briton.”16 This sense of a gathering worldwide Jewish conspiracy directed against Germany imparted a sense of urgency to Hitler’s actions in 1938–1939, as did his recognition that Britain was beginning a rapid, if belated, rearmament. Beyond this lay the vast latent power of the United States, which was also beginning to rearm and which Hitler had already identified in the late 1920s as the long-term opponent with which a German-dominated Europe would have to fight a war for world supremacy. The problem was many-sided. In order to protect Germany in its existential struggle with the Jewish conspiracy, German military power had to be restored in order to wage a successful war for Lebensraum. This meant a policy of rearmament that violated the Treaty of Versailles and threatened to alarm Germany’s neighbors. In addition, the provisions of the hated peace treaty had reduced German military strength so considerably that a crash program of rearmament would be necessary just to bring the military to adequate levels of self-defense. Moreover, all this was to be undertaken in a country only beginning to recover from the enormous economic and psychological trauma of the Great Depression. Just as the Nazis were beginning to reap the benefits of economic recovery, any overly ambitious rearmament program would imperil German economic recovery and Nazi popularity.
Hitler proved remarkably successful in striking a balance between these domestic and foreign policy demands between 1933 and 1936, but in August of that latter year, as he pondered Germany’s economic and political situation at the Eagle’s Nest on the Obersalzburg, he became more convinced than ever that Germany had to accelerate its preparations for war. His ideological fixation on struggle, along with his consciousness of Germany’s shrinking lead in rearmament, made the time factor increasingly important. In turn, this self-imposed time pressure inhibited the rational strategic calculations that had largely governed the first phase of his foreign policy. The result of his deliberations was a memorandum that he showed to a small circle of advisers: the defense minister, Werner von Blomberg, the builder of the autobahns and the West Wall, Fritz Todt, and the head of the German air force and de facto second in command to the Führer, Hermann Goering. Characteristically, Hitler felt compelled to justify his actions and, as usual, returned to his central argument of the necessity of war against Jewish-Bolshevism. “The historical struggle of nations for life,” he asserted, constituted the essence of politics; because of the growing military strength of the Soviet Union the world was moving “with ever-increasing speed towards a new conflict”; the present crisis rivaled that of the ancient world faced with the barbarian invasions or the long, violent struggle between Christianity and Islam; Germany could not “avoid or abstain from this historic conflict”; “the goal of Bolshevism [was] the elimination of those strata of mankind which have hitherto provided the leadership and their replacement by worldwide Jewry”; “a victory of Bolshevism over Germany would lead to the annihilation of the German people.” Given this existential threat, against which “all other considerations must recede into the background,” Hitler concluded that rearmament could not be “too large, nor its pace too swift.”17