Hitler and his God

Hitler’s Global Ambitions

Several authors have expressed their doubt as to Hitler’s intentions to conquer the globe and make the Germans, literally, masters of the world. They interpret his sayings and writings as a claim to a place among the prominent world powers of that day, more specifically France, Great Britain and the USA. His claim would have been similar to the German demand for “a place in the sun”, the slogan of the great industrial and commercial nation Germany had become around the year 1900. Such opinions fail to perceive Hitler’s real intentions behind some of his sayings. Just as there was a time that he could not yet proclaim his ambition to become the dictator of Germany, so there was a time that he could not yet openly formulate his global ambitions, quite simply because the Germans in general and his most faithful supporters in particular would not have understood them, might have failed to follow him in such a dizzying adventure, and would have put his mission in jeopardy.

“It is certainly true that Hitler improvised in accordance with the measure of his political power”, writes Ralph Giordano. “All the same it is an indisputable fact that his last aim in foreign politics lay not in the East, but that it had global dimensions. The way leading to it was not traced out in every single detail, but the guidelines for the permanent struggle of the ‘movement’, to be waged over centuries, were laid down. Hitler saw himself as the founder of a new world epoch in which the German claims at absolute world mastery would be realized … The will to absolute dominion is inextricably bound up with the phenomenon Hitler. At the high tide of his victories, Hitler laid claim to the hegemony over Europe, and further on to Germany’s position as master of the world, which was to be its future task.” 366

There is no other conclusion from Hitler’s words possible if one admits that they contain any truth at all. The Germans, as Aryans, were the foremost race on earth, being the “highest image of the Lord”, fountainhead of all culture and everything worthwhile in the history of humanity, and they were the Chosen People. If the false pretenders to the title of Chosen People were the Jews, if the ultimate aim of the Jews was world dominion, as documented in The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion, and if Hitler’s Aryans had to exterminate them “to do the work of the Lord” and found the Kingdom of God as the Thousand Year’s Reich, then the stage of this eschatological event could be no other than the whole earth. To put this in doubt is to efface the perspectives of Hitler’s messianic vision, and a diminution of his vision leaves no place for an explanation of the worldwide historical tragedy which was its consequence.

But let us open Mein Kampf once again and see what the author himself had to say. “We all feel that in the distant future man may be faced with problems which can be solved only by a superior race of human beings, a race destined to become master of all the other peoples and which will have at its disposal the means and resources of the whole world … We, National Socialists, must stick firmly to the aim that we have set for our foreign policy, namely that the German people must be assured the territorial territory which is necessary for it to exist on this earth. And only for such action as is undertaken to secure those ends can it be lawful in the eyes of God and our German posterity to allow the blood of our people to be shed once again. Before God, because we are sent into this world with the commission to struggle for our daily bread, as creatures to whom noting is donated and who must be able to win and hold their position as lords of the earth only through their own intelligence and courage.” 367 We recall that it would be “a greater honour to be a citizen of this Reich, even as a street-sweeper, than to be the king of a foreign state”.

Mein Kampf was written in 1924-25, at a time when Hitler had to make a new start in order to give shape to his dreams and world dominion was an envisaged but still vague aim. How, then, did Hitler speak when he held the reins of power? For instance thus, to an assembly of deputies from the Länder, the federal states: “[What I have told you] is not about equality with others but about power over others … In all these conquered countries it will be your task to play the leading role in the name of the German people … As the Jews were able to become the all-encompassing world power from their diaspora, so will we today, as the true people of God, from our dispersion throughout the world become the omnipresent power, the master people of the Earth”. 368

Walter Darré, Hitler’s minister of agriculture and prominent SS-ideologist, said in a speech given in the Führer’s presence: “Instead of a horizontal levelling of the European tribes, a vertical one has to be introduced. What this means is that a German elite is called to become the masters in Europe and ultimately in the world … What has to be done is the conscious reintroduction of an order of classes, or rather of a hierarchical order. This will, however, no longer be possible on such a small territory like Germany, but only on the whole continent, in the whole universe.” 369 Be it noted that in Hitler’s Ordensburgen, the highest Nazi elite schools, young people were trained to become the future governors of the conquered nations. Hardy Krüger, later starring in Hatari! and The Wild Geese, was one of the students. He remembers: “I took it for granted at the time that, after the final victory, I would become the governor of Moscow, at least … The teachers and educators needed nine years to hammer all that nonsense of German world dominion and superiority into my head.” Others were looking forward to similar posts in Siberia and Chicago. 370

What spoke more than words of Hitler’s visions and intentions were the cities and buildings Hitler planned with his architects, one of whom, Albert Speer, was for years his closest confidant in such matters. In his biography of the young architect who would become the Reich’s minister of armaments and who directed a work force of twelve million, mostly non-German slave labourers, Fest writes: “That domed hall”, a prominent feature in Germania, as Berlin was to be renamed, “was ‘worth more than three victorious wars’, Hitler observed on another occasion, returning to his fixation about the psychological power of great works of architecture to overwhelm. He dreamt of addressing the nations of the Greater Germanic Empire from the Führer gallery and of imposing laws on a humiliated world. Similarly, the Triumphal Arch would ‘finally and for ever drive out the pernicious idea from the people’s minds that Germany had lost the [First] World War’, he proclaimed. Upon entering the Führer’s palace everyone was to ‘have the feeling that he was visiting the master of the world’. Psychological reflections of this kind combined with Hitler’s fantasies of omnipotence were similarly at work when, standing in front of the model in the early spring of 1939, he pointed to the top of the dome: ‘The eagle should no longer stand above the swastika here’, he said to Speer: ‘To crown the greatest building in the world the eagle must stand above the globe’.” 371

Speer himself wrote about Hitler’s “strategic concept of achieving domination of the world step by step”. 372 In this, Hitler was very much aware that to himself he could accord no more than the founder’s role of one who launched a new Weltanschauung and to whom the concrete foundations of the Greater German Reich, incorporating this new world vision or religion, were to be the monuments he planned in proportions becoming of the world’s masters. From 1937 onwards Hitler had hypochondriac fears about his health and constantly drove his architects on to speed up the execution of his plans; he wanted “Germania” to be terminated by 1950. It may have been the same fear about his life span which made him commit the decisive blunder of exacting too big an effort from the German people in a series of invasions, most of all the one taking on Russia.

Speer writes in his memoirs: “These monuments were an assertion of his claim to world dominion long before he dared to voice any such intention even to his closest associates … I found Hitler’s excitement rising whenever I could show him that at least in size we had ‘beaten’ the other great buildings of history. To be sure, he never gave vent to these heady feelings. He was sparing in his use of high-sounding words to me. Possibly at such moments he actually felt a certain awe; but it was directed toward himself and toward his own greatness, which he himself had willed and projected into eternity … Hitler one day abruptly stopped me on the stairs to his apartment, let his entourage go on ahead, and said: ‘We will create a great empire. All the Germanic peoples will be included in it. It will begin in Norway and extend to northern Italy. I myself must carry this out. If only I keep my health’. That was still a relatively restrained formulation. In the spring of 1937 Hitler visited me at my Berlin showrooms. We stood alone in front of the nearly seven-foot high model of the stadium for four hundred thousand people … We talked about the Olympic Games, and I pointed out, as I had done several times before, that my athletic field did not have the prescribed Olympic proportions. Without any change of tone, as if it were a matter settled beyond the possibility of discussion, Hitler observed: ‘No matter. In 1940 the Olympic Games will take place in Tokyo. But thereafter they will take place in Germany for all time to come, in this stadium. And then we will determine the measurements of the athletic field’.” 373

And Speer continues: “Hitler wanted a huge meeting hall, a domed structure into which St Peter’s Cathedral in Rome would have fitted several times over. The diameter of the dome was to be eight hundred twenty-five feet. Beneath it, in an area of approximately four hundred and ten thousand feet, there would be room for more than a hundred and fifty thousand persons to assemble standing … The station was to surpass New York’s Grand Central Station in size … The idea was that when visitors, as well as ordinary travellers, stepped out of the station they would be overwhelmed, or rather stunned, by the urban scene and thus by the power of the Reich.” 374 Fest quotes Hitler’s words, spoken in 1937: “Because we believe in the eternity of this Reich, its works must also be eternal ones, that is … not conceived for the year 1940 and not for the year 2000; rather they must tower like the cathedrals of our past into the millennia of the future.” “In 1938 he conceived the plan of converting Berlin into a world capital”, comments Fest, “comparable only to ancient Egypt, Babylon, or Rome”. 375