Hitler and his God

Mortal Enemy France

In the First World War the Germans were fighting on two fronts. This made the divided efforts of their armies indecisive, and the unending war caused ever greater suffering in the Fatherland. Because of this problematic situation the German power elite – the Army, the heavy industry and the banks – as one man supporting the military dictatorship of the duo Hindenburg-Ludendorff, did their utmost to bring about the downfall of the Russian empire. When Lenin came to power, it was thanks to the Germans – a fact conveniently forgotten by Hitler in his diatribes against Lenin and his “Judeo-Bolshevism”. The Peace of Brest-Litovsk, concluded on 9 February 1918 with the Ukraine and on 3 March with Russia, looks like the finishing off and robbing the corpse of a defenceless enemy.

The German troops were immediately transported from the eastern to the western front. Operation Michael, the great battle for France, was launched on 21 March. The first German successes were overwhelming and their armies, four years after August 1914, threatened Paris again. But the Americans had entered the war and the Allies, stronger and better armed than ever before, beat “the Hun” back. In August Ludendorff realized that defeat was inevitable and suffered a nervous breakdown. Now he and Hindenburg manoeuvred to let the politicians solve the enormous problem in which the German nation had got itself involved. The Kaiser, according to the armistice conditions laid down by the Allies, had to go. Left to themselves, the politicians of the German Socialist Party, the SPD, almost by accident proclaimed Germany a republic.

Such was the background for a catastrophic sequel to the First World War. After three years of frustration the Germans, because of Brest-Litovsk, had been certain of imminent and triumphant victory (“until the very end military censors had allowed only reports of victories; even the Reichstag was left in the dark” 259); their armies had not been defeated; therefore the signatories of the armistice and afterwards of the “dictated” Treaty of Versailles, in the first place Matthias Erzberger, had betrayed their country. Germany was not guilty of starting the war; it had lost the war because it had been betrayed by the Social-Democrats, communists and Jews within its own house; the nation must become strong and powerful again and take revenge. These were the inexhaustible themes of Adolf Hitler, who had been as shocked as the rest of the German nation by the November debacle. We find them in all his speeches as a beer hall tribune, and they make up a substantial part of Mein Kampf.

But Germany was living a complex lie, which served as the justification for its hurt but not eradicated pride and unabated ambitions, and of which the importance and the consequences cannot be overrated. “The legend of the stab in the back”, the Dolchstosslegende, became widely accepted and was soon considered historical truth, which it remained for a generation and longer. Siegfried, the mythological hero, had slain a dragon and become invulnerable by bathing in its blood, except on one spot of his body. His wife Kriemhild found out that this spot was between his shoulder blades and foolishly told this to Hagen, who one day sneaked up behind Siegfried, plunged his dagger between his shoulders and killed him. Now, once again, “the fighting Siegfried [i.e. Germany] succumbed to the dagger plunged in his back [by the pacifist Social-Democrats and other ‘Jews’]”, wrote Hitler in *Mein Kampf.* 260 This untruth, a lie called legend, launched by Hindenburg before a commission examining the cause of the German collapse, was reinforced and propagated by Ludendorff, and was still believed in after Hitler had done his damage. “It has poisoned, as nothing else, the internal political atmosphere of the Weimar Republic.” 261

The Treaty of Versailles, signed on 28 June 1919 in the Hall of Mirrors at the Versailles palace of Louis XIV, was another cause of German and Hitlerian wrath, and the author of Mein Kampf used his choicest vocabulary for lashing out at it. Versailles was “a scandal and a disgrace, and the dictate signified an act of highway robbery against our people”; it was “an instrument of unrestricted oppression”, “like a whip-lash on the [German] people”, “an instrument of unlimited blackmail and shameful humiliation”, showing “the sadist cruelty” of the dictators. “Each point of that Treaty should have been engraved on the minds and hearts of the German people and burned into them, until sixty million men and women would find their souls aflame with a feeling of rage and shame, and a torrent of fire would burst forth as from a furnace, and one common will would be forged from it, like a sword of steel. Then the people would join in the common cry: ‘To arms again!’” 262

Many authors still assert that the harsh terms of the Versailles Treaty were an immediate cause of Nazism and the Second World War. They might ponder for a while the words of Fest: “The terms in fact could stand comparison with the conditions Germany had imposed on Russia in the treaty of Brest-Litovsk and on Rumania in the Treaty of Bucharest.” 263 Shirer gives some specifics concerning Brest-Litovsk, “a peace treaty which to a British historian, writing two decades after the passions had cooled, was a ‘humiliation without precedent or equal in modern history’. It deprived Russia of a territory nearly as large as Austria-Hungary and Turkey combined, with 56 000 000 inhabitants, or 32 per cent of her whole population; a third of her railway mileage, 73 per cent of her total iron ore, 89 per cent of her total coal production; and more than 5000 factories and industrial plants.” 264 But Brest-Litovsk is “the forgotten treaty”, though it was not forgotten by Hitler who, as an army propagandist, wrote “a circular” and gave several talks on it, as he did later for the DAP. “I compared the two treaties [Versailles and Brest-Litovsk] with one another, point by point, and showed how in truth the one treaty [Brest-Litovsk] was immensely humane, in contradiction to the inhuman barbarity of the other [Versailles].” 265

In truth, the “war aims” (Kriegsziele) of the Germans, formulated by Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg in September 1914, after the war had started, and expanded by the Pan-Germans and the pressure group from the heavy German industry and the banks, were much more comprising and much more merciless than the dictate of Versailles. 1. Germany was to expand into a Mitteleuropa (a central European block) and exert political and commercial domination over France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Austria-Hungary, Poland, and eventually Italy, Sweden and Norway; 2. France would have to part with the coal and iron basins of Longwy-Briey and the Atlantic ports facing southern England; it would have to pay reparations “so high that it would not be able to finance its rearmament in the next fifteen to twenty years”; it would have to become permanently dependent commercially on Germany as a German Exportland; 3. Belgium would have to cede the region around Liege plus the port of Antwerp, at the time the busiest in Europe; commercially it would become a German province; 4. Some of the French colonies and most of the Belgian Congo would fall to Germany; 5. To the above should be added the necessary conquests which would give Germany access to the wheat fields and ore basins of Russia and to the oil fields in the Middle East, a war aim prefigured in the peacetime construction of the Berlin-Baghdad railway. 266

This was the minimum programme the German leadership had in mind, to be carried out if they won the war; the conditions of the Peace of Brest-Litovsk were only part of it. One finds this programme seldom, if ever, mentioned in the history books meant for general consumption, although it illustrates with great clarity the objectives which caused on two occasions death and destruction on such a horrendous scale. Hitler kept these war aims in mind and executed them almost to the letter.

The historical awareness of Germany, and of the rest of the world, had to wait till 1961, the year Fritz Fischer published his Griff nach der Weltmacht (the bid for world power), to be reminded of the German intentions at the beginning of the 20th century. And the Germans had to wait to be told by the same Hamburg historian, fifty-seven years and another world war after the fact, that in 1914 Germany “carried the decisive part of the historical responsibility for the outbreak of the general war”, 267 and that article 231 of the Versailles Treaty, the “war guilt article” which stated this responsibility, was not unjustified. Fischer’s bold but unpleasant revelations, sober in their wording and erudite in their justifications, caused an uproar which has not yet died down completely.

Humiliation of an undefeated nation, the stab in the back, victimisation by an inhuman treaty and the wrongful accusation of having started the war: this arsenal of injustices, misrepresentation and offended patriotic feelings provided abundant ammunition for Hitler’s broadsides against “Germany’s enemies”, real or imagined, internal and international. (And exposing the whole lot as Jews always elicited consent from his audiences.) France, however, was his favourite target among the Allies. This country was “a victor which should not have been one”, for it was unjust “that such a highly developed cultural people as the Germans had lost the war”. 268 For Hitler France “was and would remain the implacable enemy of Germany”, “the mortal enemy of the nation”. “The French nation which is slowly dying out”, he wrote, “not so much through depopulation as through the disappearance of the best elements in the race, can continue to play an important role in the world only if Germany be destroyed. French policy may take a thousand detours on the march towards its fixed goal, but the destruction of Germany is the end which it always has in view as the fulfilment of the most profound yearning and ultimate intentions of the French.” 269

The fanatical racist in Hitler had been stung by the French stationing, in 1923, coloured Senegalese troops in the occupied Rhineland. This was to him a direct attack on the blood stock of Aryan Germany aiming at its racial degradation, and he would never forgive the French for the dastardly act. (In 1937 the children of these African soldiers and German woman were among the first to be sterilized in the eugenic scheme of the Third Reich. 270) “As long as the eternal conflict between France and Germany is waged only in the form of a German defence against the French attack, that conflict can never be decided and from century to century Germany will lose one position after another … Only when the Germans have taken all this fully into account will they cease from allowing the national will-to-life to wear itself out in merely passive defence; but they will rally together for a last decisive contest with France. And in this contest the essential objective of the German nation will be fought for. Only then will it be possible to put an end to the eternal Franco-German conflict which has hitherto proved sterile.” 271

In the evaluation of Hitler’s actions, the war in Western Europe is nowadays often looked down upon as of secondary importance in comparison with the attempted conquest of Eastern Europe. Yet the putting down of France and its “civilization” by the Nordic Germans and their Kultur was a prime part of the German aspiration and of Hitler’s personal ambitions. He, who had spent four years of his youth in the dust and mud of trenches dug in French soil, would one day reverse the armistice signed on 11 November 1918 in that train wagon in the forest of Compiègne, and ride one early morning in June 1940 as conqueror through the streets of Paris.