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The Grand Strategy of Racial War the East

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The Grand Strategy of Racial War the East THE \VAGES OF DESTRUCTION Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and fleet of tractors and trucks to bring in the harv:sr. for v..rhich the ye-1 Breaking of the Nazi Economy (New York: Penguin, 2007). could nly come from the Soviet Union itself. Asronishingly, T!t6mas I4 n1ade n comment on the logistical and operational consi0.e'rations involved ·n e~tending Germany's invasion 2,000 kil{)£erres to The Grand Strategy of Racial War the east. 10-' . , /7~··· Surveying 1is ren1arkable collection of rationalizati9ris three things, at least, are cle r. First of all, Hitler's authority was t9" great, following the success in ance, for anyone to mount a seri-6us challenge to his decision to invad the Soviet Union. Halder bac)<~d away fro1n an open clash. General Th 1as did an about-face to /onforn1 to Hitler's point of view. Beneath the veneer of consensus, Jxtvi.rever, it is clear that there The last four chapters have focused on disentangling the complex mili­ \o..rere deep divisions oth about the d~gn of the operation and its tary-economic considerations that motivated Hitler and his regime strategic ratlon;;i.le. As teas the spr· ,g of 1941, the Foreign Ivfinistry between 1939 and r94r. Once \Vt appreciate rhe scale of the inter­ was still opposing the c ing wa preferring to continue the alliance national escalation that Hitler had set in motion in 1938, reaching its \Vith the Soviet Union ag inst e British Empire. 104 But even more climax in the summer of T 940 with the dran1atic rearmament decisions I povverful than ~he Fuehrer th in silencing debate was the common of the United States, it is possible to reconstruct an intelligible and faith in the Wefurmacht. If ed Army could indeed be destroyed in consistent strategic logic behind Hitler's actions. Though by the late the first weeks Of the ca paign, west of the Dnieper-Dvina river line, 1930s Nazi Germany was by far the rnost highly mobilized society in then, as in 194?, the orries tha receded the attack v,rould soon be Western Europe, it \Vas a European economy of modest resources. By forgotten. Ther~ \V uld be no nee for arguments about the relative the summer of 1939 the limits of Germany's peacetime capacity for priorities of ec'6 n1ic as opposed to urely military objectives. The mobilization were fully apparent. The combined economic potential of resources of th '.western Soviet Union wo ld be shackled to the German the European powers arrayed against Germany was daunting enough. war effort Ci ~he Third Reich would fina y be able to i1npose its will Once the United States \i\Tas added to the equation, the disparity \Nas on the e ire c0ntinent of Europe. But this ssumption of imn1ediate completely overwhelming. From I938 onwards the alignment of the milita success' was also the central weakness f all the Wehrmacht's United States with the \Vestern powers \Vas taken for granted in Berlin. plan ing. If the shock of the initial assault di not destroy Stalin's From 1939 onwards it was assumed that America would soon be making regime, it vvas 3.lready evident in February 1941 t r the Third Reich a decisive contribution to the armaments effort arrayed against Ger­ \.~.rould find itself facing a strategic disaster. many. If Hitler vvas to realize his dream of fundamentally overturning the global balance of power, he had to strike fast and hard and he had, at all costs, to retain the initiative. This \Vas the consistent if perhaps i1 'mad' logic that irnpelled first his decision to risk a general war over Poland i.n Septen1ber r939, then his decision to press home the attack Ii on France regardless of risk and shortly thereafter ro prepare for an ii assault on the Soviet Union. In the light of the threat posed by the :1 British and i\merican armaments effort, in the light of the frailties of ii the blockaded European economy and in the light of the apparent :I .1 invincibility of the German arn1y, there vvas eYery reason to press onwards as quickly as possihle. 460 46T THE \\'AGES or DESTRUCTION THE GRAND STRATEGY OF RACIAL \>:'AR Insisting on this strategic logic~ ho\vever, is not in any \Vay meant to ?estroying the Jewish population was the first step tO\Vards rooting out obscure the M~lnichaean racial ideology that provided the animating the Bolshevik state. \Vhat was to follo\:v was a gigantic can1paign of land force of Hitler~s government. For Hitler, 'conventional strategy' \Vas Clearance and colonizarion, which also involved the 'clearance' of the inseparably int~rt\i1lined with racial ideology. Strategy for Hitler \;<,.'as the vast majority of the Slav population and the settlement of millions of grand strategy of race struggle. ff it is true that Hitler's decision to drive hectares of eastern Lebensrau1n with German colonists. Con1plementing: against the Soviet Union as early as 1941 \Vas motivated by a strategic this long-term programme of de1nographic engineering was a short-term calcularion centred on the war in the West, this does not make the attack strategy of exploitation, motivated by the 'practical' need to secure the on the Soviet Union any less "ideological'. 1\s \Ve have seen, for Hitlec food balance of the German Grossraum. The attainment of this entirely and the Nazi l~adership 1938 had marked a funda1nenral shift. As it 'pragn1atic' objective required nothing less than the murder, by organ­ vvas understood in Berlin, the \Var in the w·est had been forced on ized famine, of the entire urban population of the \Vestern Soviet Union. Germany hy the \Vorld Je'-vish conspiracy pulling the strings in London As Hans Frank and Herbert Backe had already den1onstrated in rhe and \~ashington. 1 From the Sudeten crisis onvvards, this perverse hidden General Government in the spring of 1940, Hitler and his regime \.Vere linkage ca1ne to be personified by Roosevelt on the one hand and by determined that in this world \var, it \vould not he the Germans \vho Churchill, the a:rch·-opponent of appeasement, on the other. And as we \Vere starved into defeat. have seen, this c;onspiratorial interpretation was maintained consisrelldy throughout _r174,o and r941. L)ocuments captured in the foreign A-1inis­ tries in Warsaw and Paris only served to confirm the view that Hitler's I decision to start the \Var in 1939 had pre-en1pted a vicious British and American plot to encircle and strangle Gern1any. l'he identification of From the moment that Germany invaded Poland in September .r939, Roosevelt v.rith the 'world Jewish conspiracy' \Vas unrelenting. Seen in the genocidal impulses of Nazi ideology towards borh the Je\vs and the this light) rhe question of whether Hitler was motivated to attack the Slavs had taken on concrete form in an extraordinary programme of Soviet Union primarily by rhe need to knock Britain out of the war, population displacement and colonial settlement._) The architects of this thereby forestalling A.n1erican intervention, or by hi~ pursuit of his programn1e were Heinrich Hin1mler and his technical staffs in the long-held ideol<;gical vision of racial struggle, is based on a false alterna­ Reichssicherheitshaupta1nt (RSH_A.) and the offices of the Reichs­ tive. The conqu~st of Lebensraum in the East had of course ahvays been kommissar fuer die Festigung deurschen Volkstums (RKF). The practical Hitler's central strategic objective. The threat posed by the Anglo­ success of this early programme was lin1ited. But it was crucial in estab­ it American alliar'.lce, rnasterminded by world Je\vry, sin1ply made this lishing rhe close connection in SS thinking bet\veen the removal of r 1! n1ore urgent and more necessary than ever. the Je\vs and the wider project of racial reorganization and Germanic 'I There can be no doubt, however, that in its execution, if not in its settlement. 'i lI rationale, Barh~rossa did mark a funda1nental departure. On 22 June As we have seen, the idea of colonial settlement in the East had 11 1_941 the Third.Reich launched not only the most n1assive campaign ir: long been central to radical German nationalism. In 1939 this v:.ras 1, I! military history, it also unleashed an equally unprecedented campaigr. compounded by two more immediate impulses. The incorporation of a li !f of genocidal violence. The concentrated focus on the destruction of the large part of Polish territory into the Reich faced Germany \Vith the Jevvish population has come to be seen as the truly defining aspect question of \vhat to do with millions of ne\v, non-German inhabitants. of this can1pai~n. l--iowever, in Eastern Europe, the epicentre of the On the other hand, agreements reached with the Soviet Union and Italy ti Holocaust, the .Judaeocide was not an isolated act of 1nnrder. -rhe c;er­ in September and October r939 meant that Germany had to accommo­ ii n1an invasion yf the Soviet ljnion is far better understood as the last date the 'return' to rhe Reich of hundreds of thousands of erhnic Ger­ grent land-grah )n the long Jnd bloody history of European colonialism.2 mans fro1n the Baltic and South Tyrol. To make roon1 for this influx, 462 463 THE \'V-AGES OF DESTRUCTION THE GRAND STRATEGY OF RACIAL IX'AR the SS prepare4 to re1nove both the entire Jewish population and the a nevv round of planning, both for a 'final solution' to the Jevvish vast majority of the Polish inhabitants from the Polish territory nO\V problem, which in 194 I was still predominantly a Polish-Jewish prob­ annexed to the .Reich.-1 One early version of the General plan specified lem, and for a 1nassive displace1nent of native Poles.
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