Dark Continent, page 19
No one in Berlin, then, doubted that a historic opportunity had been presented to the Third Reich. The question remained, however, how best to exploit it. What the soldiers had won, the politicians must now govern. Yet the land mass controlled by the Germans at the end of 1941 was staggeringly large—stretching from the Arctic Ocean to the fringes of the Sahara desert, from the Atlantic and the Pyrenees to the Ukraine. A quick succession of Blitzkrieg offensives had suddenly brought Hitler into possession of a vast empire much of which he had never planned to conquer.
From Mein Kampf onwards, the proposed site of the future Greater German Empire had been clear; it lay in the East, roughly covering the territory Germany had briefly controlled in 1918 after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. “We are putting an end to the perpetual German march towards the South and West of Europe,” Hitler had written in Mein Kampf, “and turning our eyes towards the land in the East.” The Ukraine was to be turned through German colonization into “one of the loveliest gardens of the world”; it was, according to an SS leaflet, “badly exploited, fertile soil of black earth that could be a Paradise, a California of Europe.”12
Poland would provide a connecting link to the East and a source of labour—an Arbeitsreich for the Herrenvolk, as Hitler put it shortly after the invasion.13 The dismemberment of the country and brutal treatment of its population after September 1939 showed what methods would be used to this end. Yet what about Scandinavia, the Low Countries, the Balkans, even France? These areas figured less prominently in Hitler’s thinking. All the signs are that at the end of 1939 he was reluctant to take on further military commitments. Why bother to invade countries which could be intimidated into alliance and acquiescence? Diplomatic pressure successfully ensured German control of vital resources in Romania, Hungary and Sweden. In early 1940 Hitler resisted as long as he could the idea of invading Norway until he became convinced of the threat British plans posed to Scandinavian ore shipments to Germany.14 France had to be knocked out of the war, of course, but its role in the New Order remained unclear. Greece could probably have remained neutral had not the botched Italian invasion brought in the British and demanded a German response. Plans to invade Yugoslavia had to be made on the run when news came in from Belgrade that the pro-Axis government had been toppled by a military coup.
German policy towards many of the defeated states was at first deliberately provisional: their fate was not to be decided until the war was over. Goebbels insisted in May 1940, on the eve of the attack on France, that there was to be no media discussion of war aims at all; during the war, these were to be formulated simply as “a just and durable peace and Lebensraum for the German people.” Such a policy reflected the wishes of the Nazi leadership. Hitler insisted that declarations of war aims were beside the point: “As far as our might extends we can do what we like, and what lies beyond our power we cannot do in any case.”15
Although in the summer of 1940 the Wehrmacht and the Foreign Office were both sympathetic to the French desire to conclude a peace treaty with the Third Reich, Hitler’s disapproval blocked the way. The German generals in the Netherlands had assumed that the defeated country would remain independent and were taken aback by Hitler’s decision to place it under civilian rule. But the Party and the SS were attracted by the racial affinity of the Dutch and swayed by dreams of annexation in order to reconstitute the Holy Roman Empire, and Hitler had certainly not repudiated such ideas.16
West European statesmen, alarmed by the German annexation of chunks of Poland and Czechoslovakia, sought reassurance that the integrity of their states would be respected, and their sovereignty restored. They naturally did not believe the numerous German declarations to this effect in the absence of solid peace treaties with Berlin. Deluded King Leopold of Belgium had a disappointing interview with Hitler. Vidkun Quisling raised the subject at least three times but got nowhere; indeed, on the last occasion he was told that Hitler wanted no further discussion of the subject. German officials in the Foreign Office and the Wehrmacht who tried to argue for grants of autonomy—for France, for example, and after 1941, for Estonia—were no more successful.17
The question of peace settlements banished to the indefinite future, the Third Reich covered the New Europe with a patchwork of more or less provisional occupation regimes. At one extreme, certain countries were dismembered, their national identity entirely suppressed. Poland, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia endured this approach; their very names were to be erased from the map. “In the future,” said Goebbels in the summer of 1940, “we shall not refer any more to the ‘Government-General for the Occupied Polish Territories’ but—without expressly drawing attention to this—simply to the ‘Government-General’; in this way, just as is gradually happening in the Protectorate (of Bohemia-Moravia), which is now simply called the Protectorate, the situation will clarify itself automatically. The population in those territories merely has the task of making our work easier.” Luxembourg, too, was all but annexed to the Reich and any reference to the “Grand Duchy” or the “country” of Luxembourg was banned. The juridical status of such countries was left unclear, even if their ultimate future was not.18
The customary German procedure was to appoint military or civil commanders, who ruled through the existing native civil service. In that war within a war which was the bureaucratic chaos of the Third Reich, these territories became so many fiefdoms, subject to competing claims from different ministries and ruled with varying degrees of success. The Danish government was most effective in preserving public order, perhaps because it was least disrupted by occupation. The king and parliament were allowed to function and in the beginning enjoyed—in theory at least—a considerable measure of sovereignty: as a result a total German staff of fewer than one hundred kept control of the entire country; in France, Greece, the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia, Serbia and Norway puppet governments interposed a fig-leaf of respectability between the conquerors and the civil service. In the Netherlands, a civilian Reich Commissioner governed through the Secretary-Generals of the civil service, while in Belgium the Secretary-Generals answered to the military authorities. Nominally independent governments in Croatia and Slovakia were, in fact, clearly subordinate to German wishes; Axis partners such as Finland, Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary had slightly more room for manoeuvre.
Hitler’s imagination was captured by the example of the British in India. Their model of imperial rule, such as he conceived it, struck him as admirable. After the invasion of the Soviet Union his mind returned again and again to the problem of how the British ruled the subcontinent with a handful of men; for him the Ukraine was “that new Indian Empire”; the Eastern Front would become Germany’s North-West Frontier where generations of officers would win their spurs and preserve the martial virtues of the Aryan race. But the Führer had little understanding of British imperial techniques of governance; he was critical of the laxness of British racial attitudes and their willingness to permit some degree of local political autonomy.19
The India parallel cropped up on one of the very rare occasions when Nazi war aims were briefly aired in public. This was in a speech made by the prominent radio commentator Hans Fritzsche, almost certainly following Hitler’s instructions, in October 1941 when a Russian defeat seemed assured. Telling the foreign press that the war had been decided, Fritzsche went on to lay out Germany’s political plans: Europe was to become economically self-sufficient under German leadership. The Germans themselves would have to be trained in the “imperial European idea” and prepared for continual minor military operations in the East analogous to the problems the British faced in India. “As for the nations dominated by us,” he said, “our language to them will become very much freer and colder. There will, of course, be no question of some crummy little state obstructing European peace by some special requests or special demands—in such an event it would get a sharp reminder of its task in Europe.”20
Such a harsh vision reflected contemporary Nazi criticisms of liberal international law. Carl Schmitt, for instance, argued that the conquered territories now formed Germany’s own Grossraum. Just as the Monroe Doctrine was supposed to justify the non-intervention of other powers in the Western Hemisphere, he wrote, so Germany had won the right to rule Europe. Above all, it had won the right to govern by new rules: the old system of international law with its universal pretensions and its basis in the relations of sovereign states had to be replaced by a genuinely National Socialist jurisprudence of “Volk Law.” Not all peoples, according to Schmitt, were equally capable of bearing the weight of a modern constitutional state. Departing abruptly from the liberal notion—as enshrined in the League of Nations—that all states were sovereign and juridically equal, Schmitt declared that a “high degree of organization” and “voluntary discipline” were required in the modern world. The Nazi rulers of the Netherlands and the General Government both indicated publicly that the era of “absolute independence” was over.21
Nor indeed was neutrality any more acceptable. As one commentator stated:
What small state is there which is sufficiently independent to be neutral towards the Great Powers? The crisis of neutrality is in reality the crisis of the structure of our continent, of the collapse of old orders and empires, and of the birth of new dynasties. The small states have become the prey of an inexorable course of history, and the only question is whether they will give in without hope or full of hope.22
Luciolli, then, was surely right to characterize the regime’s basic conception of politics as hierarchical. Europe was called to rule the world but only on the condition that it was itself ruled by the Reich. For Hitler no devolution of power to racial inferiors was permissible; it could only be a sign of weakness, not strength. German superiority had to be jealously safeguarded in every sphere, with sometimes ludicrous results. After the Czech national ice-hockey team beat the Germans 5–1 in Prague, Goebbels alluded to “the mistaken practice of matching oneself with colonial peoples in a field in which we are inferior. Herr Gutterer is to arrange … that a repetition of such incidents is made impossible.” Even the Italians, supposedly Germany’s partners in the making of the New Order, got the same treatment; directives issued in connection with the treatment of foreign workers ordered that “relationships with Italians are not welcomed.”23
At the political level, such attitudes were replicated to the detriment of Germany’s would-be collaborators. As Luciolli remarked, given the pervasive sense of disaffection from the Versailles order in Europe by 1939, there was little reason to suppose that collaboration as a political project would not be successful. It is hard now to remember that the very concept had a positive ring to those who coined it in France. Laval and Pétain saw collaboration as a partnership of two imperial powers, and thus a way of salvaging French sovereignty. Hitler stood in the way of such ideas.
He was especially wary of soi-disant National Socialists. If unpopular they were likely to be ineffective administrators; if popular, a threat. Quisling scrambled into power during the invasion of Norway but was kicked out after a week. Degrelle in Belgium and Mussert in Holland were put on ice. They might be allowed to recruit gullible or desperate young men to fight on the Eastern Front, but power resided in the hands of professional civil servants. The disillusioned young French collaborator Robert Brasillach concluded despondently in August 1943: “There is no longer a fascist Europe.”24
What made the Degrelles and Musserts unsuitable partners was precisely, of course, their nationalism. “For Norway to become germanophile it must become national,” declared Quisling. Mussert drew up a scheme for a League of Germanic Peoples in which Hitler would be head but whose members (Germany, the Scandinavian countries, the Greater Netherlands) would have independent National Socialist governments and their own military forces. It is difficult to imagine anything less likely to have appealed to Hitler. On 30 June 1941 young Ukrainian nationalists pre-empted Berlin by their “Proclamation of the Ukrainian State” in Lvov; two weeks later, most of them had been arrested and the movement was broken. Hitler’s imperialism was thus of a very different kind from that of Wilhelm II, who had supported Paul Skoropadsky during the German occupation of the Ukraine in 1918: both favoured authoritarian regimes, but Wilhelm was prepared to allow a local proxy to govern in his name. Hitler refused even that, insisting: “I cannot set any goals which will some day produce independent … autonomous states.”25
The essential feature of the “new European Order” is that it was a German Order. Although numerous Nazi visionaries played with the ideology of Europeanism, for Hitler himself it was only Germany, or more precisely Deutschtum, that mattered. Following the invasion of the Soviet Union, Berlin propaganda publicized the idea that this was a “crusade for Europe”: a new “Song for Europe” was broadcast, stamps with the slogan “European United Front against Bolshevism” were issued and the press even claimed in late November 1941 that “born out of discord, struggle and misery the United States of Europe has at last become a reality.” Nevertheless, such slogans clashed with the reality of occupation rule experienced by ordinary people and there was no sign that this Europeanism was taken any more seriously outside Germany than it was by the Führer.26 After Stalingrad, when the Germans started to seek out friends and allies more seriously, it was too late. No one was convinced by the U-turn in Nazi jurisprudence which led to declarations of “anti-imperialism,” especially as these had no discernible effect upon policy. In eastern Europe, where the Red Army’s advance made anti-communism a potentially fruitful form of political warfare, Nazi racialism had alienated the population beyond Goebbels’s reach. In the West, beyond any plausible Soviet sphere of influence, anti-communism offered little. Only in Greece, and to a lesser extent Serbia and Northern Italy, was it possible to poison the domestic scene to the point of civil war. As the German forces withdrew, they left behind them an inheritance of bitter internecine bloodletting. By 1944, the Cold War was already casting a shadow over Europe, but not sufficiently to save Hitler’s empire.
ORGANIZING EUROPE
In so far as there was a Nazi vision for Europe, it belonged to the sphere of economics, not politics. Associated with the idea of a German Monroe Doctrine was the notion of a Grossraumwirtschaft—a regional economy with Germany at its heart. In certain forms, this bore a more than passing resemblance to the post-war Common Market. The “New Order” beloved of the youthful technocrats at the Reich Ministry of Economics involved the economic integration of western Europe and the creation of a tariff-free zone: Minister Walther Funk went so far as to propose such a scheme in the early summer of 1940. Goering, who carried far more weight in the Nazi establishment, also discussed the need for cross-national investment in Europe under German auspices. Others looked to the Balkans, where German economic penetration had intensified during the 1930s. Trade agreements were negotiated in 1939 and 1940 with Romania and Hungary that brought vital raw materials under the control of the Third Reich.
Late in 1940, Hermann Neubacher—later Hitler’s Balkan supremo—confided to an American journalist the bright future which awaited Europe after the war: “Germany’s economic organization of the Balkans is the first step in a plan to set up the entire European continent as a single Grossraum, which instead of individual countries would form the economic unit of the future. A common plan would regulate production across the European Grossraum.”27 From this continental bloc both the United States and Great Britain were to be excluded; Europe was to become self-sufficient. The gold standard and laissez-faire of the post-Versailles order were to be replaced by barter trade and planning of production on a continental scale in an extension of German trade policy of the 1930s.
The idea of “organizing” Europe into a vast continental economy was discussed before and after 1939 far more openly than was the continent’s political future. Nevertheless, particularly during the first three years of the war, such grand schemes had little practical impact upon policy. The Blitzkrieg strategy for waging war dictated rather different methods of exploiting the economic resources of the conquered territories; only with the turn to “total war” did the idea of some form of economic integration appear attractive in the context of the war effort itself.
But Nazi thinking about international economics provided no analogue to the liberal doctrine of the mutual benefits offered by the market. The regime sometimes claimed that Germany’s partners would benefit from associating with her: this had after all been the case to some extent in the 1930s and was not entirely implausible, especially after the hardships associated with international capitalism in the 1920s. Nevertheless, it was increasingly clear that Europe’s prime economic function was to support Germany. Only in so far as that function was best served by securing the economic prosperity of the rest of the continent did it seem at all likely that the economic benefits would be shared more widely. Countries like Greece and Romania soon suspected they had exchanged the tyranny of the City of London for the stranglehold of Berlin.
Such a narrow vision of the European economy was particularly pronounced during the war itself. To the despair of those like Goering and later Speer, who were responsible for increasing armaments production, Hitler was extremely reluctant to see living standards inside the Reich fall. He wished at all costs to avoid a repetition of the debacle of 1918, when, he believed, the collapse of the home front had led to military defeat. The regime kept food consumption as close as possible to pre-war levels and was unenthusiastic about encouraging women into the factories. Hitler knew that there was little public enthusiasm for an extended conflict and remained sensitive to Party reports of dissatisfaction. He was reluctant to test his popularity by making sharp cuts in consumer goods production. The economic resources of Europe would enable him to avoid this.28
