Today I will be a prophet again: if the international finance Jewry within Europe and abroad should succeed once more in plunging the peoples into a world war, then the consequence will not be the Bolshevization of the world and a victory of Jewry, but on the contrary, the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.27
Again, this statement should be seen not as a blueprint for the Holocaust but as a warning, especially to America: stay out of European affairs, and refrain from interfering in matters important to German existence. To reinforce his threat, Hitler demonstrated his awareness of his options and his willingness to use them: the Jews under German control should be regarded as hostages. If the Jewish conspiracy plunged the world into another global war, he warned, he would not hesitate to deal harshly with the Jews under his control. The time for decisions was approaching. Hitler was going to gain living space for the German people; the choice for the Western powers was acceptance or opposition.
Nazism and war were inseparable. Born of a lost war, energized by the desire to gain redemption for the stain of defeat, determined to achieve Lebensraum in Europe as the key to survival in a world of enemies, preoccupied with solving a self-imposed Jewish problem, the National Socialist regime had, from the time it assumed power, set in motion a process of building a “new man and new society” in order to prepare for war. The key to this much-vaunted Volksgemeinschaft was, as Ian Kershaw has stressed, “an attempt at a perpetual re-creation of the ‘spirit of 1914,’” a “true socialism” that would unite all racially valuable Germans and prepare them for the struggle ahead. Nor had Hitler left any doubt about the inevitability of conflict: the German future could be assured only by gaining living space, and it could be won only through force.28
Hitler’s conception of Lebensraum had been informed and influenced not only by notions of social Darwinism but also by nineteenth-century European colonial and imperialistic practices. The European scramble for colonies in Africa and Asia had been justified not only by economic necessity but also by reference to the alleged racial inferiority of the “backward” and “uncivilized” peoples of those continents. European domination thus seemed a natural and logical consequence, as did the brutalities inflicted on the native peoples. Since Hitler looked to Eastern Europe as the natural sphere of German expansion, and since he viewed the Slavic and Jewish inhabitants of the region as either inferior or threatening, his notion of Lebensraum harbored from the beginning murderous impulses. What had hitherto been done only to conquered populations overseas Hitler now stood ready to inflict on a European population.29 In some respects, then, Lebensraum could be seen as merely a belated continuation of the nineteenth-century Western policy of imperialism, with Eastern Europeans substituting for Africans or Native Americans. At its heart, however, Hitler’s program would prove far more radical and far-reaching, a racialist and exterminationist scheme of limitless aims and brutality.
Poland would be the first country to experience the full harshness of this policy, a sort of dress rehearsal for what would come later in the Soviet Union. From the beginning, Hitler had done little to hide his radical notions regarding the treatment of Poland from his top generals. A 31 July agreement between the army and the SS gave its killing units, the Einsatzgruppen, special tasks for combating anti-German activities behind the front lines, which in practice meant a license to murder. Meeting with his top commanders at the Berghof on 22 August, Hitler stressed, according to the notes of one present, the “destruction of Poland in the foreground. The aim is elimination of living forces, not the arrival at a certain line…. Have no pity. Brutal attitude. Eighty million people shall get what is their right. Their existence has to be secured. The strongest has the right. Greatest severity.”30 In part, army leaders raised no objections because they too longed for the destruction of Poland, that hated product of Versailles, and regarded Poles as racially and culturally inferior. Then, too, many likely regarded Hitler’s rhetoric as mere hyperbole.
The terror unleashed on the Polish population from the first days of the invasion left no doubt, however, that Hitler’s intentions matched his venomous words. Even as local militias composed of ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) began vigilante actions against Poles who had committed outrages against the German minority, Heydrich’s units swept into action, armed with lists of perhaps thirty thousand people to be arrested or executed. On 9 September, Franz Halder confided to Major Helmuth Groscurth the chilling news that “it was the intention of the Führer and Goering to destroy and exterminate the Polish people.” Apart from a few mild and scattered protests, however, the army leadership accommodated itself to the new reality. Rather than object in principle to this planned, wholesale murder, Brauchitsch, the army commander in chief, blandly informed his subordinates that the Einsatzgruppen had received orders from Hitler to carry out “certain ethnic tasks” that “lay outside the responsibility” of the army. Indeed, despite occasional mild protests about “excesses” committed by the Einsatzgruppen, most army commanders welcomed them as protection against presumed security threats. Although this campaign of ethnic cleansing had clearly been authorized by Hitler, it was Himmler and Heydrich, the ambitious leaders of the SS, as well as party radicals such as Hans Frank, Arthur Greiser, and Albert Forster, who grabbed the opportunity to expand their power. Hitler now made it clear that a “harsh racial struggle” would be carried out in Poland, the essence of which, as Groscurth succinctly noted, was to “exterminate.” Within days of the outbreak of war, the initiative had passed to Nazi radicals who now sought, in the words of Hans Mommsen, the “realization of Utopia.”31
Although Hitler’s fixation on Lebensraum and intention to promote a “harsh racial struggle” in Poland had set the general direction of Nazi policy, surprisingly little practical consideration had been given to how to implement a comprehensive racial policy or to how best to “Germanize” this new Lebensraum. Such discussions began only in early September, with the resulting plans largely a consequence of two factors. The first was Hitler’s characteristic method of ruling, in which he would set broad goals or the direction of policy and then allow his subordinates to compete among each other by submitting proposals for turning policy into reality, a process that quickly produced a manic dynamism as eager Nazis sought to prove themselves and gain a step up the career ladder. Moreover, these schemes tended to be highly ambitious, radical projects since no one was going to be punished for being too ruthless. The second key factor involved ongoing discussions with Soviet officials on a final delimitation of the spheres of interest in the Baltic region agreed on in the Nazi-Soviet Pact.32
As a result of the interplay of these two factors, by the end of September 1939 the Nazis had formulated a stunningly ambitious demographic scheme of racial reordering that involved millions of people. Though improvised at the time, these policies were fully consistent with Hitler’s underlying ideological assumptions of the need to secure living space, life as a Darwinian struggle, the unequal racial value of ethnic populations, and a determination to solve the rapidly expanding Jewish problem. While, ultimately, the last of these obsessions came to dominate Nazi policy, in the autumn of 1939 securing and Germanizing the newly won living space clearly took precedence. Moreover, an agreement on 28 September between German and Soviet officials on a revision of their respective spheres of influence in the Baltic meant that Lithuania would now fall into the Soviet orbit. In exchange, however, the Germans secured the right to repatriate Volksdeutsche from the Soviet sphere. Nazi leaders now envisioned a comprehensive racial restructuring of Eastern Europe in which Germans would be consolidated in the newly annexed territories of formerly western Poland, Poles would be concentrated in a vassal state to the east, and Jews would be shoved to the outer reaches of the German domain. In order to make room for the resettlement of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans in West Prussia and the Wartheland, both former Polish provinces, the Nazis needed to clear the areas of their Polish and Jewish inhabitants. What had begun at the beginning of September as the intended liquidation of the Polish intelligentsia had now grown into a plan for the dispossession of millions of Poles. As Goebbels noted in his diary on 10 October, “The Führer’s verdict on the Poles is devastating. More like animals than human beings.”33