Wunderlich, Sophie 2018 History Thesis

Title: "We See Into the Distant Future, Because We Know What It Will Be" Destiny, Utopia, and Apocalypse in National Socialism: Destiny, Utopia, and Apocalypse in National Socialism Advisor: Professor Thomas Kohut Advisor is Co-author: None of the above Second Advisor: Released: release now Contains Copyrighted Material: No

“We See into the Distant Future, Because We Know What it Will Be” Destiny, Utopia, and Apocalypse in National Socialism

by

Sophie Wunderlich

Thomas Kohut, Advisor

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors in History

WILLIAMS COLLEGE

Williamstown, Massachusetts

April 16, 2018

It would be an evil day if the Germanic people did not survive…it would be the end of beauty and of Kultur, of the creative power of this earth. That is the distant future. It is for that we are fighting, pledged to hand down the heritage of our ancestors. We see into the distant future, because we know what it will be. Heinrich Himmler Speech to the SS leaders in Posen October 4, 1943

Gentlemen, in a hundred years’ time, they will be showing another fine color film describing the terrible days we are living through. Don’t you want to play a part in this film, to be brought back to life in a hundred years’ time? Everybody now has the chance to choose the part that he will play in the film a hundred years hence. I can assure you that it will be a tremendous film, exciting and beautiful, and worth holding steady for. Hold out now, so that a hundred years hence, the audience does not hoot and whistle when you appear on the screen. Joseph Goebbels Speech to the Propaganda Ministry in Berlin April 17, 1945

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements i

Glossary iii

Introduction 1

I. Destiny 17 “Another Fine Color Film” 17 Theories of History 22

II. Inheritance 39 Imagining History (1925-1939) 44 Mythologizing the War (1939-1945) 55

III. Utopia 61 A Racial Utopia 70 Modern Metropolises 82 “A Happy People in a Beautiful Land” 90 A New World 93

IV. Apocalypse 95 Extermination 100 Heldentod 107 Cosmic Disaster 117

Epilogue 125

Bibliography 129

Images 135

i

Acknowledgements

My interest in this topic was sparked by a paper written for my advisor, Tom Kohut, in his class on National Socialism two years ago. It was the proudest I had ever been of a paper until the completion of this thesis. I still remember my shock upon coming to the end of his comments, which read, “Have you considered grad school?” This was a decisive moment in my time at Williams. This seemingly innocuous question gave me the confidence to admit to myself how much I loved studying history and that I wanted to pursue it more seriously.

At the end of my sophomore year I decided to expand that paper into a thesis, assuming I would begin my research while studying abroad at Exeter College, Oxford. At Oxford, I became very ill and made the difficult decision to leave. When I returned from Oxford last spring, I did not know if I would be able graduate from Williams. I spent my breaks getting medical tests and could hardly complete my schoolwork. Even as I began my thesis research over the summer, my ability to return to college was unclear. I feel incredibly lucky for my newfound health and for what has turned into my happiest, healthiest year at Williams. The completion of this thesis and my impending graduation are absolutely astonishing to me still. I have many people to thank for their support throughout my wonderful and difficult four years here.

I am forever grateful to my parents, who have suffered through three years of asking me how my day was and receiving an answer about the Nazis, and who have given me the opportunity to study at this amazing college. I love them and I cannot ever thank them enough. I also want to thank my grandfather, whose love of history has inspired me for as long as I can remember. I wish he could have read this.

I also want to thank my friends, in particular Anna Rose Chi, Morry Kolman, Caroline McArdle, Ben Metrikin, Sarah Loewenstein, and Gabe Wexler, for their support and willingness to listen patiently while I incessantly discussed Nazis. I feel very lucky to have friends who have stuck with me throughout my time here.

I am grateful to the history thesis program and to Professors Eiko Siniawer and Alex Bevilacqua, whose advice and reassurance has helped this project come to fruition, and to my fellow thesis writers, who provided feedback and companionship through this long, often grueling process.

My research has undoubtedly been improved by the help of the staff of the Williams College Special Collections, who allowed me to comb through the college’s daunting Third Reich collection. I also want to thank the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Library for giving me the opportunity for a vital summer of research and work.

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I want to thank Chris Waters, who has been a source of unceasing encouragement and inspiration since my very first year at Williams. It is because of him that I became a history major. Thank you to Chris Koné for teaching me German. I feel very lucky to have had such a patient, supportive instructor. I want to thank Professor Ali Garbarini for her thoughtful teaching and for changing the way that I approach history. I also want to thank Professors Aparna Kapadia, Gail Newman, and Brian Martin for their guidance, moral support, and kindness.

I want to thank Zach Wadsworth, who has been a wonderful professor, mentor, and friend. Although he once challenged me to “write just one paper that’s not about Nazis,” I clearly haven’t followed his advice very closely. I am confident that this is a more interesting project because of his input. Although I have played music for most of my life, it was not until these last two years that I have become confident enough to talk, let alone write academically, about music. I am incredibly fortunate to have gotten to know him over my time here. His support, both intellectually and personally, has been vital to this project.

Finally, of course, I want to thank Tom Kohut, who is the most incredible thesis advisor I could have ever asked for—which is still an understatement. Clearly, he motivated me to study the Nazis, but it has been the remarkable thoughtfulness and kindness with which he approaches history that has been most inspirational for me. His expertise and feedback have been invaluable throughout my thesis and in his classes. Over the time I have known Tom, I have become a better writer, historian, and version of myself. Even in my lowest moments, he has always been patient, kind, and willing to listen. I cannot imagine getting through Williams, let alone this thesis, without his support and encouragement. I feel so lucky to have him in my life and there is no way I could ever express my appreciation in full.

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Glossary

I. German Terms

Götterdämmerung Literally: Twilight of the Gods; the German translation of Ragnarök, the Norse myth in which the world is burned, flooded and renewed; the title of the final opera in Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung).

Heimat Literally: homeland; a positive emotional attachment to one’s ancestral lands, associated with German nationalism.

Heldentod Literally: hero’s death; connoting Romantic, noble death in battle.

Kultur Literally: culture; associated with German cultural superiority, used in contrast to Zivilisation (civilization) associated with Jews and cultural decline.

Schicksal Literally: Fate; according to my research: in National Socialism, a force working beneath history’s surface to enact humankind’s fate. Also used in the term Schicksalslinie (fate line) to suggest a predetermined course of history.

Schicksalsgemeinschaft Literally: community of fate; in National Socialism, a racial community (see Volksgemeinschaft) that shares a common destiny.

Volk Literally: people; in National Socialism, the German nation, highlighting the superiority of their race, history, and culture.

Volksgemeinschaft Literally: people’s community; the egalitarian national community founded on ethnic solidarity rather than class; represented by the Führer.

Vorsehung Literally: Providence; according to my research: in National Socialism, a secular, personified concept of history.

Wissenschaft Literally: science; in National Socialism, associated with German technological superiority.

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II. The Nazi Leaders

Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) Führer of Germany; trained in watercolor painting; committed suicide on April 30, 1945.

Albert Speer (1905-1981) Nazi Party architect and Reich Minister for Armaments and Munitions (1942-1945); sentenced to 20 years in prison at Nuremberg before the International Military Tribunal.

Alfred Rosenberg (1893-1946) Nazi Party ideologue and Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories (1941-1944); trained in architecture; sentenced to death at Nuremberg and executed.

Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945) Head of the SS (1929-1945) and overseer of the Final Solution; trained in agronomics; captured by British forces and committed suicide on May 23, 1945.

Hermann Göring (1893-1946) Commander in Chief of the Luftwaffe (Air Force) and Hitler’s deputy for all governmental affairs; Hitler’s designated successor after 1939; Sentenced to death at Nuremberg and committed suicide prior to his execution.

Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945) Reich Minister of Propaganda and General Plenipotentiary for Total War (1944); a novelist and playwright; committed suicide along with his wife and children on May 1, 1945.

Martin Bormann (1900-1945) Hitler’s personal secretary; tried in absentia at Nuremberg and sentenced to death; it was believed that he had escaped to South America, but in 1972 his remains were identified, confirming he died escaping from Berlin on May 2, 1945.

Reinhard Heydrich (1904-1942) Head of the Reich Main Security Office (RHSA) and Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia (1941-1942); assassinated by the Czech resistance in May 1945, becoming a martyr for the Nazi Party. 1

Introduction

National Socialism seems to exert an inescapable attraction for historians. Even beyond the desire to understand how a single regime could create such large-scale horror, National

Socialism naturally lends itself to scholarly preoccupation. The Nazi leaders carefully documented their words and choreographed their actions to shape how they would be seen by future generations. They exhibited a historical self-consciousness, as if they were posing for posterity. In a 1944 book entitled, Der Krieg als Weltanschauungkampf (War as Ideological

Struggle), Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels wrote,

Fifty or a hundred years from now, National Socialism, too, will have become a philosophic system that can be studied at the universities for four or five semesters, just as today, theology or classical economics are academic subjects.1

Mere weeks before his suicide in spring 1945, Goebbels pondered how the Nazi leadership would be remembered, writing in his diary, “Subsequent historical research will establish where blame lies and where merit.”2 Goebbels seems to have been eerily prophetic in these moments, anticipating the outpouring of historical scholarship on National Socialism. Even my own work has helped realize his prediction. This thesis represents the culmination of five semesters of studying National Socialism in one form or another. Although, today, we do not remember the

Nazis as they would have hoped, they remain inextricable from twentieth century history. The leaders of the Third Reich were constantly aware of the radical nature of their racialized worldview and of the violent actions that stemmed from it. In a sense, they succeeded in securing their importance to posterity. Today’s world is far from the one that the Nazis hoped to create; yet, their legacy lives on. Even as villains, they are remembered.

1 Joachim Remak, The Nazi Years: A Documentary History (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969), 40. 2 Joseph Goebbels, Final Entries, 1945: The Diaries of Joseph Goebbels, trans. Richard Barry (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1978). 2

Why did the Nazi leaders operate with such heightened historical self-consciousness? How did they imagine history and their role within it? My work seeks to identify the National Socialist vision of history and what this vision meant to the movement’s leadership. Their theory of history was profoundly grandiose, stretching centuries into the past and centuries into the future.

The Nazis fervently believed that Germany had a destiny, and that their regime would lead the nation either to its ultimate triumph or to its ultimate destruction. I examine their dreams of the distant past, both historical and mythical, as well as their fantasies of the distant future, both utopian and apocalyptic. These fantasies informed their self-image and allowed them to orient themselves and their project in the course of history. Rather than present concepts such as the

Thousand Year Reich as the peculiar ephemera of an eccentric regime, I ask why the Nazi leaders felt the need to dwell so obsessively on their fantasies of the past and future over the course of the Third Reich. How could a regime that lasted only twelve years have believed that it had established a Reich that would endure for a thousand?

I. Background

The previously unimaginable horrors of mechanized warfare in the First World War, combined with the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles, represented a traumatic break in the narrative of German history for many in the Weimar Republic. History had not progressed to produce a better world, but instead seemed to signal the impending collapse of the European order. The immediate future became frightening to contemplate in the Weimar Republic, a chaotic period characterized by political turmoil, social tension, and economic instability. In order to cope with the confusing present and a traumatic past, Germans developed visions of a distant future when meaning and order would be restored. This preoccupation with new and better worlds did not require radical or novel agendas. Conservatives dreamt of a return to the 3 traditional order of the lost Kaiserreich (Imperial Germany), but, according to Richard Bessel, exhibited an “hysterical urge to construct a world they never had,” a mythical past defined by national standards of morality, cleanliness, and stability never present at the time.3 The far Left envisioned coming communist utopias in keeping with their Marxist paradigm of historical development. The 1918 Spartacus Manifesto declared that the horrors of war would inevitably spur the masses to “replace hatred and dissension with fraternal solidarity,” creating a world of

“permanent peace” that would “transform the plains of Europe…into blossoming gardens.”4 The more distant future was also a common theme among the literature of the Weimar period.5

Preoccupation with the future also manifested in widespread cultural pessimism, most notably Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West) published between 1918 and 1922, which predicted an inevitable collapse of Western civilization. Spengler claimed that Europe was fated to devolve into violence, a “primitive, cosmic-historyless” anarchy ruled by “retinues of adventurers, self-styled Caesars, seceding generals, barbarian kings.”6 Fear of Europe’s collapse foretold in conservative writing such as

Spengler’s, coupled with contemporary instability, spurred a desire to imagine futures that would reverse Germany’s apparent decline. Conservative Arthur Moeller van den Bruck wrote in 1923 of his dream for Das Dritte Reich (The Third Reich), “A future which should be not the end of all things but the dawn of a German Age, in which the German People would for the first time fulfill their destiny on earth.”7 Although Moeller van den Bruck committed suicide in 1925, his

3 Richard Bessel, Germany after the First World War (Oxford; New York: Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press, 1993), 251-53. 4 Spartacus Manifesto (1918) in Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 38. 5 See the study of Weimar Zukunftsromane in Peter S. Fisher, Fantasy and Politics: Visions of the Future in the Weimar Republic (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991). 6 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, ed. Charles Francis Atkinson (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1937), 378-80. 7 Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Germany’s Third Empire (New York: H. Fertig, 1971), 13. 4 dream was adopted by the nascent NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or

Nazi Party), which promised a Führer to lead Germany out of the “Decline of the West” and into a new golden age. Hope could be found in Alfred Rosenberg’s 1930 The Myth of the Twentieth

Century, in which the Nazi ideologue claimed that Spengler’s predictions did not take into account the “racial-spiritual forces” that shaped history. The Decline of the West, to Rosenberg, ignored “race, personality, and personal value…of Germanic men.”8 The Nazis believed that they had rediscovered Germany’s destiny: one that guided and protected the Volk (German nation) through history and that promised a utopian future.

II. Topic

I set out to understand the inner workings of history, destiny, and the future as the Nazi leaders understood them. Each man felt he had been called upon to help Germany realize its destiny: a higher purpose that permeated all of German history and that would, one day, bring the

Volk either to utopia or to extinction. I have sought neither to monumentalize the Nazi leaders nor to present them as spectacles of eccentricity or absurdity. Instead, I have attempted to examine and thereby demystify the worldview of the living, breathing humans who constructed these elaborate façades for themselves: why did they need these grandiose conceptions of history and of their role in it? Keenly aware of their unique historical mission and responsibility, they sought to orient themselves in time. By positioning themselves in history, the Nazi leaders imbued their potentially overwhelming reality with structure and meaning. Believing themselves to be an unprecedented breed of artist-politicians, the Nazi leaders felt uniquely qualified to create a new world in their desired image. Even as reality became chaotic in the final years of the

8 Alfred Rosenberg, The Myth of the Twentieth Century: An Evaluation of the Spiritual-Intellectual Confrontations of Our Age (Newport Beach: Noontide Press, 1993), 257. 5

Second World War, the Nazi leaders found supreme meaning in the spectacle created by the destruction of this world they had created.

At the crux of these imaginings was the sense that they, as individuals, their ideology, and their plans were historically unprecedented. The Nazis were young radicals with no previous experience in government, not traditional politicians. Moreover, many key Nazi leaders held background in the arts. Hitler, a painter, Goebbels, a playwright, and Speer, an architect, represented a new kind of leader: the artist-politician. As James Young writes, the Nazi leaders and National Socialism itself had “an essentially aesthetic logic.”9 Their aesthetics were both an expression of and an essential part of their ideology, as identified by George Mosse, Friedrich

Spotts, and Saul Friedländer among others.10 They were not legislators seeking reform, but artist- politicians seeking to create a new world in keeping with a specific artistic vision.

In a speech to Bayreuth festival in 1933, Goebbels reflected upon Richard Wagner’s 1867 opera, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, declaring, “There is certainly no work in all the music literature of the German Volk that so closely relates to our times and our spiritual conditions.”11

In autumn of the same year, the Party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, reported on the opening celebration of Reichskulturkammer (Reich Chamber of Culture): amidst roaring applause, Goebbels played the “Wach auf” chorus from Die Meistersinger, “Music for—as Dr.

Goebbels so perfectly put it—marching into the shining future of German culture.”12 How did

Goebbels imagine that a nineteenth century nationalistic opera about a sixteenth century

9 James E. Young, "The Terrible Beauty of Nazi Aesthetics," in The Stages of Memory: Reflections on Memorial Art, Loss, and the Spaces Between (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), 127. 10 See George L. Mosse, The Fascist Revolution: Toward a General Theory of Fascism (New York: H. Fertig, 1999).; Frederic Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics (Woodstock: Overlook Press, 2003).; Saul Friedländer, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). 11 David B. Dennis, "The Most German of All German Operas: Die Meistersinger through the Lens of the Third Reich," in Wagner's Meistersinger: Performance, History, Representation (Boydell and Brewer, 2002), 109. 12 Ibid., 110. 6 musicians’ guild could inform Germany’s future? The answer may lie in the political power of the titular “Mastersingers,” a group of artists who lead Wagner’s fictionalized Nuremberg. In the opera’s finale, the most talented Mastersinger is crowned their chief (Haupt), chosen to lead the

Volk into an age of “holy German art.” Art, race, and politics were intertwined in the Third

Reich, just as art, race, and politics were united in Wagner’s imagined Nuremberg. Seeing their ideology reflected in this mythical past, the Nazi leadership may have envisioned themselves as a modern group of Mastersingers.

They perceived and created reality through the lenses of history, myth, and art, a part of what Walter Benjamin refers to as “an aestheticizing of political life” under fascism.13 The Nazi leadership felt it had been predestined to create a new Germany and, in the process, sought to transform the consciousness of the Volk using the symbols, sounds, and structures of Romantic art. I will refer to Romanticism in this context using Rüdiger Safranski’s identification of the

Romantic impulse in Germany, which, after the Romantic era ended in the 1820s, retained its desire for the intense, unknowable nature of mystical, albeit secular, experiences, culminating in a desire for national rebirth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While Safranski does not specifically identify the Nazi leaders as Romantics, their mystical conceptions of the

Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community) and of the transcendence of race, history, and myth clearly situate their ideologies within the tradition he outlines.14

Wagner himself conceived of his work as both political and artistic. In an 1892 treatise,

“The Artwork of the Future,” he set out a framework for opera that would fuse together all art forms—the Gesamtkunstwerk (“total work of art”). At the end of the work, Wagner prophesized that this Gesamtkunstwerk would unite Germany in an “assault upon the oppressor” from an

13 Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 41. 14 See Rüdiger Safranski, Romanticism: A German Affair (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014). 7

“unnatural culture,” likely implying a revolution against Jewry.15 The Gesamtkunstwerk was both a formal theory and the foundation of what Kriztina Lajosi calls the “social-aesthetic utopia” sought by Wagner.16 Die Meistersinger can be considered an expression of the

Deutschtum (German ideal) that Wagner hoped would arise as his radical art connected his listeners with the Germanic spirit.17 Wagner’s Bayreuth Festspielhaus (Festival Theatre) also seemed to manifest the Deutschtum in reality. During the annual Bayreuth Festival, the

Festspielhaus became synthesis of art, politics, and spirit in a physical space.18 In the Myth of the

Twentieth Century, Rosenberg wrote, “The inner value of Bayreuth still rises as a guide to our times…reaching beyond into the future of the coming German Reich.”19 The Nazi leadership felt uniquely qualified to remake Germany in their artistic vision, just as Wagner had created his own at Bayreuth, crafting the new Reich as if it were a National Socialist Gesamtkunstwerk.

Still, opera did not provide the institutions from which political movements typically draw strength and authenticity. Wagner’s theories did not form a coherent intellectual legacy for leading a nation, nor was a fictionalized medieval Nuremberg or an opera festival a guide to a modern empire. Certainly, the legacies of German nationalism and völkisch movements informed

National Socialist ideology, but the Party itself lacked the well-defined and well-established tradition that supported and guided other political movements in the past.20 The Nazi leaders

15 Richard Wagner, "The Artwork of the Future," in Art in Theory, 1815-1900, ed. Wood Harrison, and Gaiger (1993). 16 Krisztina Lajosi, "Wagner and the (Re)Mediation of Art: Gesamtkunstwerk and Nineteenth-Century Theories of Media " Frame 23, no. 2 (2010): 44, 52-53. 17 See Hannu Salmi, Imagined Germany: Richard Wagner’s National Utopia, vol. 29, German Life and Civilization (New York: P. Lang, 1999). 18 The Bayreuth Festival is an annual music festival in Bayreuth, Germany celebrating the life and works of Richard Wagner. After its 1876 opening, the Bayreuth Festival became a site of pilgrimage for devoted fans of Wagner. Until the fall of the Third Reich, Bayreuth was also a meeting place of Wagner’s nationalist followers, who were proponents of scientific racism and, eventually, Adolf Hitler. 19 Rosenberg. 20 See George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964). 8 were acutely aware of their status as revolutionary men, living in an exceptional time, attempting the historically unprecedented. Without historical antecedents to guide them and established political structures to support them, and with a radical political project that sought to transform

Germany, rewrite the map of Europe, and, through their racial policies, change the course of natural history itself, the Nazi leaders felt exposed and their position precarious.

At some moments, they reveled in their unique historical status: they were the visionary architects of a previously unimaginable future, one that would be monumental and glorious. Yet, the singular radicalism of their project meant that they were alone in history, without anything or anyone to guide them beyond themselves. Adding further pressure was their racialized worldview. Social Darwinism dictated that the Aryan race was under constant the threat of extinction by other races. The outbreak of the Second World War engendered particular existential dread. They came to see the war as the Endkampf (final battle) that would determine the race’s survival. The creation of a new world and the survival of the race was an enormous responsibility for an individual to shoulder alone. Therefore, each Nazi leader adopted a view of history that provided guidance and structure, lending authenticity and confidence to their unprecedented project.

The Nazi leaders came to believe in the existence of higher powers and a higher purpose for the Volk. A shifting amalgam of Christian, Hegelian, Romantic, and Social Darwinist theories, the Nazi views of history afforded a sense of purpose in a vast universe and a sense of direction in a chaotic historical moment. The Nazi leaders looked far into the past to understand themselves, constructing an artificial legacy of racial ancestors and cultural forebearers from whom to draw inspiration and to alleviate their sense of isolation in history. They envisioned future worlds of aesthetic grandeur, taking pleasure in both the beauty of idyllic utopias and the 9 thrill of catastrophic defeat. In these distant futures, they would live on through the

Volksgemeinschaft (German community), their present-day activities laying the foundation upon which future leaders would build. In the attempt to orient themselves and their regime, these artist-politicians created a sustaining past, present, and future for themselves. In this vision of history, they could simultaneously be historically significant visionaries and relatively insignificant vehicles of historical processes. It is all too human to fear being forgotten or being alone in the world. Yet, it was their radicalism, the scale of their acts, and the universal importance they ascribed to themselves that elevated these fears to obsessions. The resulting fantasies were a means of managing their vulnerability, substituting an ordered world of fantasy for an overwhelming reality. As they sought to rewrite the past and create the future, these dreams anchored the Nazi leaders in time and gave them the confidence to attempt the historically unprecedented.

I have confined my analysis only to the highest ranking and most ideologically devoted

Nazi leaders: Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Alfred Rosenberg, Heinrich Himmler, Albert Speer,

Hermann Göring, Reinhard Heydrich, and Martin Bormann. This is a choice based on both the already sizeable nature of this work and the existence of well-translated, accessible documentation of their words. Further, I have limited my topic to the period between the Nazi

Party’s rise to power in the late 1920s and early 1930s to the regime’s collapse in 1945. The visions of destiny and of the future held by Nazism’s ideological forebearers, or how these notions were internalized, if at all, by the citizenry at large present opportunities for further study, but fall outside of the scope of this present work.

For my thesis, I have examined a wide range of primary sources, including diaries and private conversations, speeches and memoranda, and books, film, and art created during the 10

Third Reich. I chose to consider private and public communications, as well as artistic output within the same space for a number of reasons. Firstly, diaries and other “private” documents were, in general, self-consciously created for future consumption. Goebbels, for example, meticulously wrote diaries for more than two decades, kept multiple copies that he stored carefully, and considered them his most valuable possession.21 He likely envisioned his diary as a historical source for the future. Similarly, Hitler’s Tischgespräche (Table Talk) were a series of monologues given to his inner circle and special guests, recorded between 1941 and 1944 by his secretaries, most often Martin Bormann.22 Hitler’s “Testament,” not to be confused with his final will and testament, was also generated under similar conditions, transcribed by Bormann between February and April 1945; thus, I refer to this as a “table talk” as well.23 Given their contemporary transcription, one can assume that Hitler expected that these musings would eventually be read by posterity, although they were not immediately made available to the

German public. I included art, film, and architecture in my analysis due to the Nazi leaders’ aforementioned self-conception as artist-politicians. In addition to asserting direct control over the regime’s cultural policies, the Nazi leadership saw art as expressing and transmitting their ideology.24 The Nazi leaders regarded themselves and their actions in aesthetic terms, believing that art could transform consciousness. Their monumental building and idealized propaganda were expressions of their ideology, just as the spoken or written word were.25

21 Goebbels, xxxviii. 22 See Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941-1944: His Private Conversations, trans. Norman Cameron, Stevens, R.H., 3rd ed. (New York: Enigma Books, 2000). 23 See The Testament of Adolf Hitler: The Hitler-Bormann Documents, February-April 1945, ed. Martin Bormann and François Genoud (London: Cassell, 1961). 24 See Jonathan Petropoulos, Art as Politics in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). 25 See Deborah Menaker Rothschild, Prelude to a Nightmare: Art, Politics, and Hitler’s Early Years in Vienna 1906-1913 (Williamstown, MA: Williams College Museum of Art, 2002).; Brigitte Hamann, Hitler's Vienna: A Dictator's Apprenticeship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 11

My primary source material was, of course, originally spoken or written in German. I believe that the translations that I have used are accurate and convey the Nazi leaders’ words more closely than I, as a non-native German speaker, could possibly communicate. Still, when I have analyzed certain key phrases that come up consistently in my primary sources, I have consulted the original German and have noted doing so throughout the thesis. For example, the

English translation of Hitler’s table talk is notoriously imperfect. As Ian Kershaw points out, the table talk sporadically leaves out words or entire phrases.26 Therefore, I have referred to the original German for short passages to ensure accuracy. Another vital but problematic source is

Nazi Party architect Albert Speer’s memoir written between 1945 and 1966.27 His assertions should be taken with some caution given his postwar efforts to burnish his reputation.

The visions of history identified in my thesis do not form a coherent system of beliefs. These men did not think about history in a systematized way, nor would they ever explicitly admit a sense of their own vulnerability. Instead, their visions of history were assumed, often left unspoken or unexplained, and I have imposed systems and definitions upon their ambiguous statements. Because the Nazi leaders themselves did not have a stable conception of history or destiny, my interpretation is necessarily speculative.

III. Historiography

My interest in Nazi visions of the future and destiny topic grows out of a shorter paper I wrote in a class on National Socialism two years ago. Fascinated by the subject, I continued my research and ultimately discovered that, despite the immense literature on the Third Reich, there was no scholarly debate on which to weigh in, nor did the future or destiny merit more than a

26 See Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris, 1st American ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999). 27 See Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs (New York: Macmillan, 1970). 12 couple of sentences in a few of the relevant works I found. To the best of my knowledge, this topic is largely unexplored in the scholarship, often written around rather than about. For example, in Eberhard Jäckel’s renowned study, Hitler’s Weltanschauung, he writes that, in order to ascertain someone’s Weltanschauung (worldview), one must ask, “How did he judge life and society in the past and present, and in the future? What kind of goals, desires, utopias did he harbor?”28 Yet, Jäckel does not answer the questions he posed about utopian futures in the

Nazi imagination, focusing instead on antisemitism and accepting the Nazi view of history as wholly Darwinian.29 My thesis is, in part, an attempt to understand this nuance within the Nazi worldview and perhaps to more directly answer Jäckel’s questions. Even so, within this vast scholarship, it is possible that there exists a direct discussion of my topic. Despite extensive reading of the secondary literature, I have not found one.

Therefore, the majority of the secondary research cited in my thesis has provided contextual, rather than historiographical input. I have consulted a great number of books, from biographies of Nazi leaders to studies of Nazi culture. The information and perspectives provided by these historians are cited throughout my thesis, but, for the most part, can only be considered relevant to certain sections of my work. Still, my thesis is in more direct conversation with a small selection of works. Firstly, Jost Hermand’s work on utopias in völkisch movements generally and in National Socialism specifically has clarified the simultaneous backwards-looking and modernizing impulses of Nazi utopian thought.30 My thesis also bears a similar focus on the future as Hermand’s, although his analysis primarily relies on science fiction written between

1889-1945. Analogously, Hannu Salmi’s study of Richard Wagner’s fantasies of an ideal

28 Eberhard Jäckel, Hitler’s Weltanschauung: A Blueprint for Power (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1972), 22-23. 29 Ibid., 60-64, 90-106. 30 Jost Hermand, Old Dreams of a New Reich: Völkisch Utopias and National Socialism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). 13

Germany, as well as Peter Fisher’s analysis of futuristic literature during the Weimar Republic, although outside the scope of my research, have provided models for analyzing dreams of the future.31 Tangentially related as well is George’s Mosse essay entitled, “Death, Time, and

History: Völkisch Utopia and Its Transcendence,” which uses fiction to examine German conceptions of utopia, as well as his work on völkisch utopian movements in Weimar Germany.32

Eric Kurlander’s work on Nazism and the supernatural has sharpened my understanding of the regime’s mystical views of the past and of the distant future.33 Relevent to my discussion of future eastward expansion is Peter Fritzsche’s history of the Third Reich, which details the regime’s hopes for the Germanization, describing the war as a means of establishing “racial utopia” that would “affirm their superior status as a people able to make history and determine its destiny.”34 Fritzsche’s characterization of more immediate plans for the East as imbued with a higher meaning has framed my analysis of the Nazi leaders’ fantasies of the region’s distant future. My thesis also seeks to assign more precise definitions to history and destiny in this context. Jeffery Herf’s Reactionary Modernism, which identifies the unified impulses of technologically-driven modernism and Romantic, anti-modernism within National Socialism has added nuance to my analyses of the Nazi leaders’ pastoral and futuristic utopias.35

Norman Cohn’s study of millenarian sects in medieval Europe was, initially, a tempting analytical framework to use in my thesis. At the end of his book, Cohn asserts the relevance of his model of “Salvationism,” which heralds a new world born through a final, cleansing

31 Fisher.; Salmi, 29. 32 George L. Mosse, Masses and Man: Nationalist and Fascist Perceptions of Reality (New York: H. Fertig, 1980), 69-86.; The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich, 108-25. 33 Eric Kurlander, Hitler's Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017). 34 Peter Fritzsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 154-86, 56. 35 Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 14 apocalypse, to Nazi antisemitism.36 While Nazism does, superficially, seem to be a millenarian cult, given its fascination with a Thousand-Year Reich, I do not believe that Cohn’s model entirely predicts Nazi apocalyptic beliefs. James Rhodes attempts to map Cohn’s work onto

National Socialism, calling it a “mutant form of early Christian and medieval apocalypticism” in a secular form.37 In addition to Rhodes’ oversimplification of National Socialism’s relationship with Christianity, I argue that, for the Nazi leadership, utopia was not the result of apocalypse, but an alternative to it.38 Antisemitic policies and genocide did not feel apocalyptic for the Nazis, but were understood as essential to establishing their utopia—an act of creation rather than of destruction.

Most influential on my thesis have been the works of Saul Friedländer and Alon Confino.

Friedländer identifies the “Nazi apocalyptic imagination,” which exhibited a “desire for destruction” and found beauty in death, an aesthetic framing that I use throughout my thesis.39

He writes that this desire was informed by their Romantic and mythical conceptions of death, which conspired to form an aesthetic he dubs a “kitsch of death.”40 As Friedländer writes, the kitsch of death lends coherence to the contradictory Nazi ideals of “young girls crowned with flowers and the snow-capped peaks of the Bavarian Alps” and “the ecstasy of Götterdämmerung, the visions of the end of the world.”41 His claim that the coexistence of these ideas stimulated detailed visions and high emotions for the Nazi leaders has been essential in connecting my

36 Norman Rufus Colin Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 14-16, 285. 37 James M. Rhodes, The Hitler Movement: A Modern Millenarian Revolution (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1980), 18. 38 Saul Friedländer also writes that Rhodes is not convincing because he ignores the image of Hitler as a messianic savior and the notion of revelation through a gospel-like text—Mein Kampf. (Saul Friedländer, Visions of Apocalypse: End or Rebirth? (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985), 7.) 39 "Preface to a Symposium: Kitsch and the Apocalyptic Imagination," Salmagundi, no. 85/86 (1990): 205.; Visions of Apocalypse: End or Rebirth?, 11. 40 Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death, 26-27. 41 Ibid., 131. 15 analyses of utopia and apocalypse in the Nazi imagination. That they simultaneously dreamed of ultimate perfection and ultimate destruction reflects their understanding of themselves and their world in aesthetic terms. Furthermore, Friedländer’s identification of “redemptive antisemitism” in National Socialism, which saw the expulsion and annihilation of the Jews as a means of achieving Germany’s salvation, illuminates the Jewish genocide as a creative act in service of a racial utopia as well as a destructive one.42

Confino’s book, A World Without Jews, uses the burning of the Hebrew Bible to illuminate the ways in which National Socialism sought to rewrite German history by eradicating the Judeo-

Christian tradition from it.43 He writes that it was an attempt to create a new origin story, which would imbue National Socialism with “legitimacy, roots, and authenticity.”44 My thesis, in attempting to understand the Nazi vision of history, takes a similar approach to Confino’s, seeing their creation of a mythical past and fantastical future as a means of self-creation. Confino writes that the Nazis desired the conquest of “historical time”—a “past, present, and future”—that would imbue their mission with meaning.45 My work is an extension of Confino’s notion of rewriting Germany’s history, attempting to answer how the Nazi leaders sought to conquer the future as well as the past.

IV. Structure

My thesis examines the Nazi leaders’ visions of destiny, the past, and the distant future throughout the Third Reich’s existence. In my first chapter, I examine their theories of history, which were united in the belief that higher forces guided Germany toward its racial destiny. The

42 See Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews (New York: HarperCollins, 1997). 43 Alon Confino, A World without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). 44 Ibid., 14. 45 Ibid., 16. 16 thought of a caring and ordered universe, coupled with the promise of a glorious destiny, allowed them to feel as if they were simultaneously important actors in and instruments of history. My second chapter identifies the people whom and moments in history that the Nazi leaders used to create a heritage upon which they could build their new world. This legacy imbued the National

Socialist movement with authenticity and confirmed their view of history’s course and their place in it.

My third and fourth chapters explore the Nazi leaders’ fantasies of the distant future—the beautiful worlds that would ensure their immortality. Even facing the grimness of a wartime reality, they could imagine the beautiful worlds that lay at the end of their struggle. I first examine their visions of utopia, articulated between the Party’s inception in the 1920s and 1943.

What began as utopian dreams, after their catastrophic defeat at Stalingrad in 1943, transformed into awe-inspiring nightmares of dystopia, extinction, and apocalypse. As the war came to a close, these fantasies reminded them that their struggle had not been futile. Often, they believed the Volk would survive: the Third Reich could collapse, but Germany would endure. The surviving Germans would be prepared for the next great war, inspired by the heroic examples of the fallen Nazi leaders. The Nazi leaders found Romantic meaning in envisioning these future spectacles. As Benjamin posits, fascism experiences “its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure."46 The Nazi leaders believed they would be immortalized in these grand finales. Going out in a blaze of glory, they would become one with their art.

46 Benjamin, 42. 17

Chapter 1 Destiny

I. “Another Fine Color Film”

Even as the Soviets marched on Berlin in 1945, Joseph Goebbels remained fixated on what he believed would bolster the deteriorating war effort: a propaganda film called Kolberg

(dir. Veit Harlan). Goebbels exercised near-complete creative control over the film, spending almost 9 million Reichsmarks (RM) on its creation.1 Kolberg depicted the defense of its titular town during the Napoleonic Wars. Even as the French army closed in and all hope seemed lost,

Kolberg’s citizens remained steadfast, defending their Heimat (homeland) at all costs. The female lead, Maria (Kristina Söderbaum), at one point in the film declared, “The citizens of

Kolberg would rather be buried under the rubble than be unfaithful to king and country.” They sacrificed life and limb for Germany, flooding the town and throwing themselves in the line of fire. The town leader, Joachim Nettlebeck (Heinrich George), articulated the film’s message in his declaration, “They can burn our houses, but not our soil.” Goebbels, using Kolberg, communicated that an act of sacrifice for the Volk was a heroic gesture. German soil and spirit would survive far beyond one’s lifetime. Therefore, one must always act to ensure the race’s survival: in this case, fighting until the bitter end. In the film’s finale, Kolberg’s citizens were rewarded for their perseverance through an astonishing twist of fate. Ahistorically and miraculously, the French army, intimidated by the Germans’ commitment to their Heimat, abandoned the siege and retreated.2 Although the French seemed poised for victory, the citizens’ faith, and perhaps some higher force, allowed Kolberg to prevail.

1 Frank Noack, "Perseverance," in Veit Harlan: The Life and Work of a Nazi Filmmaker (University Press of Kentucky, 2016), 239. 2 In reality, the Siege of Kolberg ended after the signing of the Treaty of Tilsit. This conclusion amounted to Prussian surrender, forcing the country to give up large swaths of territory. 18

Kolberg’s narrative alluded to fears following the catastrophic defeat at Stalingrad, which transpired during its conception and production.3 At the time of its release, however, the film offered an eerie reflection of Berlin in spring 1945, conditions that could not have been foreseen when the film went into production in 1943. Berlin, too, was under attack by a seemingly unstoppable enemy, one that posed a threat to Germany’s very existence. Amidst this terrifying, collapsing world, the Nazis turned to a mythical version of the Battle of Kolberg for hope.

Kolberg offered a framework for understanding the chaotic current conditions as temporary, merely a moment in the larger arc of German history. This history seemed to prove the existence of an omnipresent national destiny, one that gave Germany a higher purpose and assured its survival against all odds. Goebbels, by turning to this mythical past, created a comforting vision of Germany’s future. Over the centuries, the Volk had proved capable of overcoming adversity no matter how hopeless the situation, a capacity linked to its supposedly inherent racial qualities.

Although the war had realistically been lost far before its April 1945 release, Kolberg provided

Germans with a fantasy world of sudden shifts in fortune and astonishing victories. The film suggested that, even in 1945, if Germany could hold out, something—either their own heroism or some higher power—would change their fate.

This fantastical moment never came. Fate did not intervene on behalf of the Volk, and dreams of a Thousand-Year Reich vanished at the moment when Hitler pulled the trigger to take his own life. Kolberg never reached the audience it was intended to inspire. The film was never widely released: the end of the war had come too quickly.4 Because raw materials for prints became scarce and most cinemas capable of showing Technicolor were demolished in air raids

3 The film’s connection to the present was also evident in its visuals. For example, the images of cannon fire in Kolberg were far more destructive and incessant than would have been historically accurate, intended instead to provoke associations with the terror engendered by Allied air raids or Soviet artillery fire. Small details such as these were likely intentional, given Goebbels’ direct control over the film (Noack, 239). 4 Noack. 19 by early 1945, Kolberg was probably only shown in about two dozen theatres. Despite its limited release, Kolberg was considered so vital to the war effort that Goebbels ordered it be parachuted into a German submarine base off the coast of France.5

Mere weeks before Hitler’s suicide and the end of the war, the Propaganda Ministry held an initial screening of Kolberg for its officials. The epic film offered two hours of escape from the apocalyptic conditions in Berlin. It was an uplifting reminder of the nation’s place in history: an underdog condemned to struggle, but ultimately emerging victorious. At the screening,

Goebbels described a new film, entitled “Götterdämmerung” (Twilight of the Gods) in reference to the finale of Wagner’s epic, Der Ring des Nibelungen, to the Propaganda ministry officials6:

Gentlemen, in a hundred years’ time, they will be showing another fine color film describing the terrible days we are living through. Don’t you want to play a part in this film, to be brought back to life in a hundred years’ time? Everybody now has the chance to choose the part that he will play in the film a hundred years hence. I can assure you that it will be a tremendous film, exciting and beautiful, and worth holding steady for. Hold out now, so that a hundred years hence, the audience does not hoot and whistle when you appear on the screen.7

Goebbels created a direct link between Kolberg and the current invasion of Berlin, intensifying the film’s already visceral connection to its audience’s immediate surroundings. He conjured up a reassuring vision of a future in which there would still be a Volk to appreciate their heroic deeds. Alternatively, if the audience members failed to hold out, this future Volk would scorn them as cowards and traitors, just as the town officials in Kolberg appeared as self-centered saboteurs. With these imaginary future eyes watching and judging their every action, the propaganda officials were forced to contemplate their own legacies and to appreciate the

5 David Culbert, "Kolberg: Goebbels' Wunderwaffe as Counterfactual History," Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques 35, no. 2 (2009): 136. 6 David Welch, The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2002), 122. 7 Portions of this quotation appear in the preface to Saul Friedländer, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). and Ernest Kohn Bramsted, Goebbels and National Socialist Propaganda 1925-1945 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1965), 229. 20 historical significance of their actions. Each Propaganda Ministry official was both a potentially important historical actor and a literal character in the future cinematic rendering of Germany’s last stand. Goebbels saw the war’s end through the lens of fictional epics like Kolberg and

Götterdämmerung, consciously shaping his own narrative into a heroic one.

Nazi leaders were preoccupied with their place in German history and with how they would be seen by future generations. In the early days of the regime, on March 9, 1933, Goebbels wrote in his diary, “We are living in a great and stupendous epoch.”8 He and the other Nazi leaders believed they would be remembered as heroes for their participation in this historic moment.

Within this rather clear-cut narrative of German heroism was a conflict: the Germans were both the victims of a tragic historical fate and the master race destined for greatness. Yet, this conception of destiny was not necessarily a conflict for the Nazi leaders. German history was a dramatic story, populated by heroes and villains, all of whom had a role in Germany’s quest to fulfill its destiny; one must merely play his part. Thinking in Romantic terms, they envisioned

Germany as tragic hero, chosen by unseen forces to undergo trials and tribulations on the path to world conquest, or to perish valiantly in the attempt. Perhaps the most resonant model was that of the Wagnerian protagonist, considering the widespread reverence for the composer among the

Nazi leadership. Siegfried, the hero of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, for example, is divinely chosen and overcomes a number of great obstacles, only to face his predestined demise.

If the Volk was a Wagnerian protagonist, the Third Reich was as a defining moment in the hero’s journey and the Second World War a trial to determine his destiny.

The exact nature of this destiny and the degree of agency the Nazi leaders had over it varied according to their optimism about the nation’s survival, most often according to the projected outcome of the Second World War. Whether they were convinced their destiny would

8 Joseph Goebbels, My Part in Germany’s Fight, trans. Kurt Fiedler (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1940), 229. 21 result in a utopian future, a glorious Heldentod, or something else entirely, Nazi leaders took solace in the existence of this larger plan. Conceiving of themselves and their time within a grand historical context, each moment was a step closer either to the establishment of the

Thousand-Year Reich or to the end of the Aryan race. In their racialized worldview, the stakes were inevitably high: all races constantly faced the threat of extinction. As Saul Friedländer describes, they felt that each moment held the potential for both “triumph” and “irredeemable catastrophe.”9 In an atmosphere colored by existential dread, they needed large-scale thinking to situate themselves in history, in relationship to a legacy and to the new world they would create.

A long view of history afforded the Nazi leaders the sense that they were a part of a journey toward a national destiny, one that had existed before them and would continue long after their deaths. Thus, their vision of history encompassed Germany’s past, present, and future, placing the Aryan race, and themselves, at the center of history from antiquity to the unfathomable future. Still, the Nazi concept of history presented in this chapter is not entirely clear because it was not clear to those who employed it. The analytical framework presented here does not come from a consensus-backed, fully fleshed out theory of history, but is instead borne out of unspoken assumptions and implications. Their theories of history combined elements of

Christianity, Hegelian ideas of historical progress, Romanticism, and Social Darwinism, all of which provided a clear path and destiny to their stories. Seeking to orient themselves in time, they envisioned a universe in which they received mystical guidance and held a higher purpose.

It was far too frightening to acknowledge wholly their responsibility over Germany’s fate. If the forces of history were working with and through them, they could shape the future without being alone in the universe.

9 Friedländer, 134. 22

II. Theories of History

The forces that influenced history held various names over the course of the Third Reich, most often Schicksal (Fate), Vorsehung (Providence), but also Nature, God, and the universe.

Any attempt to assign a precise definition to the words referring to the universal forces that moved history for the Nazis would be futile. Each word, in its usage from person to person and across the twelve years of the Third Reich, was used and reused with varying intentions and in a myriad of contexts. Hitler, in a table talk from September 1941, referred to “Vorsehung (or the unknown, or Nature, or whatever name one chooses),” suggesting their flexible and perhaps interchangeable meanings.10 Still, a general outline of their usage is pertinent. I have found that

Nazis used Vorsehung (direct translation, Providence) as shorthand for the coherent movement of history, emphasizing predetermination.11 Schicksal (direct translation, Fate) connoted the enactor of this plan, similar to a deity, but in an entirely secular context.12 Both terms were commonly imagined as active or sentient beings working beneath history’s surface. Destiny’s meaning was more consistent, connoting the end state of German history—the utopia or apocalypse that inevitably lay in the future. The mysteriousness of this portended undertaking imbued destiny with fluidity, allowing it to be modified by the Nazi leaders across the Third

Reich’s history. Despite these slight differences, each term referred to a coherent, purposeful movement of history.

10 Original translation, "Respect toward Providence..."; Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941-1944: His Private Conversations, trans. Norman Cameron, Stevens, R.H., 3rd ed. (New York: Enigma Books, 2000), 44. 11 The precise definition of Vorsehung is “von einer höheren Macht über jemanden Verhängtes, ohne sichtliches menschliches Zutun sich Ereignendes, was jemandes Leben entscheidend bestimmt höhere Macht, die in einer nicht zu beeinflussenden Weise das Leben bestimmt und lenkt—die göttliche Vorsehung” (“die Vorsehung”, Duden, 2017, www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/Vorsehung) 12 The precise definition of Schicksal is “höhere Macht, die in einer nicht zu beeinflussenden Weise das Leben bestimmt und lenkt” (“das Schicksal”, Duden, 2017, https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/Schicksal) 23

Irrespective of how each Nazi leader imagined the forces at work in history, it was their consistent belief in the existence of a higher power that is of interest in this context. I identify four systems of thought that influenced this amalgam of beliefs: Christianity, Hegelianism,

Social Darwinism, and Romanticism. Although the Third Reich was not a Christian regime,

Christianity’s omnipresence in German culture inevitably informed the aesthetics and structure of their historical vision, if not its genuine meaning. Furthermore, Hegel’s conception of a world driven by the progress of the World Spirit also shaped their conceptions. Each moment in history was a part of its trajectory toward a higher state of being, albeit one of racial consciousness rather than the full consciousness of Reason. Even more racialized were their Social Darwinist theories of history, which imagined that Nature controlled history, ensuring survival to races that adhered to its laws. What went from an encouraging notion that the superior Aryan race would inevitably prevail if it protected itself became, later in the war, a frightening vision of a cold, brutal universe in which Germany was fated for extinction. Romanticism smoothed over the contradictions among these visions, as history became a beautiful story without the need for precise theory. They maintained these separate, often conflicting views of history, but always imagined a universe governed by forces with a specific plan for Germany. Each member of the

Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community) was also a part of the Schicksalsgemeinschaft

(community of fate), sharing a common destiny that had existed for centuries and that would exist beyond any individual’s lifetime.13 Even as Nazi leaders created a new world, they were never alone in their endeavor: they were always a part of the Schicksalsgemeinschaft.

1. Christianity and Vorsehung:

13 The term Schicksalsgemeinschaft appears in Nazi sources as early as 1925, in Goebbels’s Das Kleine abc des Nationalsozialisten in Joachim Remak, The Nazi Years: A Documentary History (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969), 40. 24

Upon first glance, there seems to be an overtly Christian dimension to the Nazi theory of history, most conspicuously in their use of Vorsehung. The term Vorsehung translates most directly to Providence, which suggests a Christian view of history as determined by the will of

God, working in mysterious, unknowable ways. However, similar to Hegel’s use of the term to connote the secular concept of a hidden rational force determining history’s progress, for the

Nazis, Vorsehung came to connote a non-Christian higher power working to realize their racial destiny. The Nazis’ usage transformed Vorsehung from a Christian image of God into an image of personified history. History was an object of respect, even verging on worship. While Hitler did explicitly reference Christian themes in the Party’s early years, the Party’s ideology shifted away from the religion. Still, Nazi leaders used Vorsehung when referring to history rather than the already secular Schicksal, translating most directly to Fate, because Vorsehung’s original religious context translated traditional Christian concepts of history into secularized Nazi notions of racial destiny. This translation was necessary for the Nazi leaders to establish a link to

German history and to conceptualize an entirely new belief system.

In the Party’s early years, the Nazi use of Vorsehung was an explicit reference to God.

Throughout Hitler’s speeches in the Weimar era, he referred to his Christian faith often, references that became infrequent later in the regime. In a speech from 1922, for example, just months after his release from Landsberg prison and at the first public meeting of the Nazi Party,

Hitler began an antisemitic diatribe with reference to God and “His fight for the world against the Jewish poison.” He then declared, “As a Christian,” he had a “duty” to prevent the

“catastrophic collapse” of societies controlled by Jewish influences.14 Hitler thus tied Nazi racial antisemitism with Christian antisemitism. The insinuation that God was on their side in an

14 Adolf Hitler, My New Order, ed. Raoul Jean Jacques François De Roussy de Sales (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1941), 26. 25 eternal conflict with Judaism presented National Socialism’s mission as divinely inspired.

Attempts to link the Party’s ideology with religious antisemitism continued throughout the early

1930s. In a September 1933 speech, Hitler justified his new regime with the phrase, “We are but carrying out the will of the Creator.”15 Hitler implied that God had preordained that the Nazis— and he specifically—would come to power. God ruled over history, and had specially chosen

Hitler to lead the nation into greatness. Germany’s cultural context and Hitler’s own Catholic upbringing made Christianity an easily accessed framework for understanding history as

National Socialist ideology developed. Moreover, the Nazi leaders positioned their movement as an extension of the Germany’s religious antisemitic tradition, imbuing the radical Party with legitimacy and authenticity.

Rhetoric of this sort presented Hitler as the fulfillment of God’s will, even as a messiah who would bring about Germany’s salvation. This image is particularly evident in Leni

Riefenstahl’s 1935 propaganda film, The Triumph of the Will, in which Christian symbolism was explicitly appropriated to position Hitler as a Christ figure. The opening intertitles convey a short, recent history, stating that Hitler’s regime brought about “deutschen Wiedergeburt

(Germany’s rebirth)” after the “Leiden (suffering or Passion)” of the Weimar era, directly channeling ideas of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. In a lengthy shot of Hitler’s arrival in

Nuremberg, his plane appears out of the clouds, as if descending from heaven. As Hitler nears the ground, the plane creates the shadow of a cross over the city. Later in the film, church bells ring in the second day of the rally, played over the “Wach auf!” theme from Wagner’s aforementioned Die Meistersinger von Nürnburg. The addition of these bells to the original music conveys a sense of religious ceremony to the events, as if to invite rally attendees and film audiences to a space of worship. Their use of Christian imagery did not necessarily imply

15 Ibid., 197. 26

Christian beliefs, but instead laid the foundation for a secular spirituality, at the center of which lay the holy figure of Führer. Hitler was positioned as Germany’s savior, giving him power over

Germany’s fate, but still in the service of higher forces. Other Party leaders portrayed Hitler as a messiah as well. In his 1934 history of National-Socialism, Germany Reborn, Hermann Göring described Hitler as “mystical,” writing, “God has sent him to us to save Germany.”16

Hitler portrayed himself as the fulfillment of God’s plan to revive Germany, just as Christ had been chosen by God to save humanity. Upon arriving in his childhood home of Linz after the invasion of Austria in March 1938, Hitler declared, “Vorsehung once called me forth from this town to be the Leader of the Reich.”17 A month later, at a speech in Vienna, he reiterated that it was “God’s will to send a boy from here into the Reich…so as to enable him to lead back his homeland into the Reich,” characterizing the Anschluss as a predestined “miracle.”18 Hitler mythologized himself and the Anschluss as signs from God that Germany was on the proper path toward the fulfillment of its destiny. Similarly, in a February 1940 speech, Hitler attributed the successful invasion of Poland to “divine justice.” He then referred to “Vorsehung, our God” who

“will not abandon us” and “will guide us,” proclaiming, “Victory will be ours, because it is so ordained.”19 God’s will determined the course of the war, each battle a part of a divine plan for the nation.

These seem odd rhetorical choices for an atheist at the helm of a regime that was, at this point, actively seeking to remove Christian influences from Germany. Perhaps Hitler projected himself as a Christian to make Nazism seem accessible and in line with German tradition.

Citizens were encouraged to develop a personal relationship with the Führer in a manner with

16 Hermann Göring, Germany Reborn (London: E. Mathews & Marrot, ltd., 1934), 80. 17 Original translation, "Providence called me forth..."; Hitler, My New Order, 467. 18 Ibid., 483. 19 Original translation, "Providence, our god..."; ibid., 788. 27 which they were already acquainted, transforming religious belief into ideological commitment.20 Still, Hitler seems to have found meaning in the Christian view of history, seeing the course of history as a mysterious plan and himself as a messiah, despite his lack of religious conviction. These overt religious references dwindled over the course of the Third Reich and were usually limited to public events. Vorsehung became more of a catch-all term for the forces that propelled history than a reference to Christianity in particular. Even in Nazism’s secular ideology, the association of Hitler with Christ imbued him with godlike importance, centering

German spiritual life on the Führer. Hitler and his inner circle developed the sense that they had begun a mystical undertaking, one that some force beyond their full comprehension had dictated.

Even in the absence of Christian theology, National Socialism inherited and adopted some of its features into its concepts of destiny. In a 1938 proclamation, Hitler meditated on the importance of “belief” in their ideology.21 The term “belief” suggested that faith, albeit racial rather than religious in connotation, played a role in history. In a Christian view of history, man had to trust God’s mysterious plan. For the Nazi leaders, the Volk had to trust the Nazi regime and the racial-spiritual forces that guided it. The theme of faith was most common in Hitler’s speeches during the Second World War, many of which took the form of prayer. In a January

1940 speech in the Berlin Sportpalast, Hitler described the intervention of Vorsehung in the First

World War. At the war’s outbreak, Germany had “the blessing of Vorsehung,” but,

In the end they even began to rise up against their own Reich and their own leaders, and it was at that moment that Vorsehung turned away from the German people…I was of the opinion that we only got from Vorsehung what we deserved. The German nation had

20 The connection that ordinary Germans had to Hitler seems to have taken religious form, as demonstrated in a letter written by an ordinary citizen to the press in 1939: “Just as in my youth the dear Lord used to appear in my dreams, so now the Führer appears. We have had hundreds of dream conversations—funnily enough never about politics, but always about day-to-day, human, family matters. These nights are times of celebration.” (Jeremy. Pridham Noakes, Geoffery, Nazism, 1919-1945, V.2. State, Economy, and Society, 4 vols., vol. 2 (Exeter: Univeristy of Exeter Press, 1994-1998), 572.) 21 Hitler, My New Order, 493. 28

been ungrateful, and victory was denied to it. This mistake will not be repeated a second time.22

Vorsehung could be a holy judge, carrying out punishments on wavering devotees and rewarding the faithful. In 1941, Hitler expressed his gratitude “to Vorsehung that this struggle, having become inevitable, broke out in my lifetime,” and asked that the Third Reich “in the future be blessed by Vorsehung, as it has been blessed up to now.”23 He spoke about Vorsehung as one would God, positioning himself as a “humble” seeker of guidance before an all-powerful creator who determined the war’s outcome.24 Even without Christian beliefs, the Nazi view of history and destiny remained intertwined with Christian ideas of predestination and divine intervention, assuring the leadership that a higher power, of some kind, was on their side. The Nazi leaders appropriated the Christian view of history because its theology already provided a universe ruled by a higher power with an interest in humanity’s fate. Christianity’s influence connected

National Socialism to a tradition, imbued Hitler with a mystical aura, and gave the Nazi leaders the security of a universe that cared about them.

2. History as Progress

While Hegel defined history as the progressive unfolding of the World Spirit toward a higher consciousness of human freedom, Nazism saw history as progressing toward racial self- consciousness.25 Nothing was left to chance, imbuing each passing moment and each of their actions with historic meaning. This view of history was illustrated by Alfred Rosenberg who, in a diary entry from August 1934 after President Paul von Hindenburg’s funeral, wrote that the transfer of power from Hindenburg to Hitler revealed that “…the Schicksalslinie (fate line) of the

22Original translation, "The blessing of Providence...that moment that Providence turned away...we only got from Providence what we deserved..."; ibid., 780. 23 Original translation, "grateful to Providence...blessed by Providence"; ibid., 935. 24Ibid., 790. 25 Although it is unlikely that Hitler or most leading Nazis would have actually read and understood Hegel, the Hegelian view of history was deeply ingrained in German culture. 29

Volk is stronger and deeper than the recalcitrance of those who think they can go in another direction.”26 He also recalled that Hitler remarked upon the “mystical coincidence” that

Hindenburg died on August 2nd, the twentieth anniversary of the outbreak of the First World

War.27 The movement of history was never random. Great men like Hindenburg and Hitler led the Volk along Germany’s predestined path. Unseen but omnipresent forces beneath history’s surface guided these men, who came to understand history’s movement through heightened racial consciousness. It was a notion akin to Hegel’s conception of the world-historical figure who, being in tune with the World Spirit, drove history.28 The belief that history moved in a positive trajectory organized an uncertain reality and reassured the Nazi leaders that their mission would ultimately succeed, both when victory seemed imminent and when all seemed hopeless.

The Nazi leaders believed Hitler was destined to play a crucial role in German history.

This fit rather neatly into National Socialist ideology: the Führer represented the

Volksgemeinschaft; thus, his actions determined their collective destiny. Hitler’s powers were imagined to stem from his connection to a sort of racialized World Spirit. He began Mein Kampf, written in 1925, with the following statement, “Today it seems fortunately determined [als glückliche Bestimmung] that Schicksal should have chosen Branau am Inn as my birthplace,” citing its location on the German-Austrian border as a sign of the inevitable unification of the two countries.29 He was born to make history. He was a messiah-figure, but one with special powers to lead based on his unique knowledge of history’s movement rather than his ability to

26 Jürgen Matthäus, The Political Diary of Alfred Rosenberg and the Onset of the Holocaust, ed. Frank Bajohr (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 49. 27 Ibid., 47. 28 See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, trans. Hugh Barr Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). 29 Original translation, "It seems providentially determined that Fate should have chosen Branau am Inn as my birthplace."; Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Mannheim (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 3. 30 bring about salvation. Narrating his experience of poverty in Vienna, he wrote, “In this respect

Schicksal was kind to me…it removed the blinders of a narrow petty bourgeois upbringing from my eyes.”30 Hitler had been driven toward Nazism, as if by preternatural instinct. His insistence that Schicksal was “kind” implied that the force had nurtured him and intervened periodically to keep him on the proper path. Later, Hitler described his experience of learning about the outbreak of the First World War with, “A light shudder began to run through me at this vengeance of inscrutable destiny.”31 Hitler described his ability to sense shifts in world history as if it were a bodily sensation, organically connecting him with history’s movement. He wrote that he possessed a “thoroughness and deep insight which are disclosed to the man who has himself mastered Schicksal only after years of struggle.”32 Hitler’s historical consciousness, his ability to sense its course and to act accordingly, was likely an unconscious reworking of the Hegelian world-historical individual. Having identified the core undercurrents of his age, Hitler felt he aligned himself with them to make history.

A clear articulation of this special status, influenced by both Hegelianism and

Christianity, was Hitler’s consistent self-identification as a “prophet.” In a 1936 speech in

Nuremberg, Hitler stated, “For many a year in Germany I have been laughed to scorn as a prophet…my prophecies were regarded as the illusions of a mind diseased.”33 Hitler used the term to express the connection he felt with a higher realm. He did not mean to suggest that he communicated with the Christian god, or any deity for that matter, but that he possessed a special understanding of history’s inner workings. Some context for this label can be gleaned from one of Rosenberg’s speeches in the same year. He asserted that Nietzsche, Wagner, and Paul de

30 Original translation, "In this respect Fate was kind to me...";ibid., 23. 31 Ibid., 159. 32 Original translation, "...the man who has himself mastered Fate only after years of struggle."; ibid., 125. 33 My New Order, 403. 31

Lagarde “acted officially as prophets.”34 Thus, when Hitler used this language, he was positioning himself as the next German world-historical figure. He was the leader needed at this particular moment in time, who would move Germany farther along its Schicksalslinie. Hitler’s awareness of his historical importance differentiated him from great leaders of the past. Rather than a passive agent of higher forces, Hitler believed he was able to predict the future because he knew his role in history. In a famous speech to the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, Hitler explicitly described the Final Solution, proclaiming,

Today I will once more become a prophet: if the international Jewish financiers...succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevizing of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.35

The grandiosity with which he spoke suggests genuine belief in his higher calling. This belief emboldened Hitler: he was the one chosen to fulfill Germany’s destiny. Hitler continued to cultivate this image in a proclamation from early 1942, writing that his “prophecy will be fulfilled,” and later that year, telling old comrades that he was “ridiculed as a prophet.”36

His explicit identification as a prophet ended abruptly later that year.37 He became more measured in his description of his predictive powers. In a conversation with Bormann in

February 1942, Hitler declared, “I’ve always detested snow…now I know why. It was a

34 Matthäus, 93. 35 Jeremy. Pridham Noakes, Geoffery, Nazism, 1919-1945, V.3. Foreign Policy, War, and Racial Extermination, 4 vols., vol. 3 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1994-1998). 36 Alon Confino, A World without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 196.; Noakes, Nazism, 1919-1945, V.3. Foreign Policy, War, and Racial Extermination, 3, 842. 37Still, after the 1939 Reichstag speech, as argued by Alan Confino, reference to Hitler’s prophecy became a commonly used and understood stand-in for references to the Final Solution. This view of Hitler was not limited to the Party leaders, actually appearing in army newsletters and even soldier’s letters throughout the war. In addition to proving widespread knowledge of the Final Solution, the proliferation of this language shows the extent to which Hitler’s image as a supernatural figure was internalized in Germany. (Confino, 225- 229) 32 presentiment.”38 As the conditions in Russia worsened, Hitler no longer wanted to claim full foresight for the disastrous military operation. History’s trajectory had moved off of the course he had foreseen. Still, he did not stop referencing his special historical status entirely. The July

20th, 1944 assassination plot, attempted by conservatives seeking to make peace with the Allies, reinvigorated his belief that he was Germany’s chosen ruler. Hitler told Mussolini, “After my rescue from certain death today, I am more convinced than ever before that I am destined to bring to a happy conclusion our great common cause!”39 He echoed this sentiment in a radio address from Königsberg that evening, describing his survival as “confirmation of my mission by

Vorsehung.”40 Hitler understood his survival as a sign, proving that he was needed to bring about

German victory. In an April 1945 radio broadcast after Roosevelt’s sudden death, Goebbels proclaimed, “The head of the enemy conspiracy has been smashed by Schicksal. It is the same

Schicksal that allowed the Führer to stand upright and without any injuries among the dead….of

July 20.”41 It would seem that his special connection with Schicksal instilled Hitler and those around him with confidence, viewing his survival as an indication of German history’s positive trajectory. While Hitler’s sole predictive powers imbued him with great importance early in the regime, by 1945, Hitler was willing to reduce himself from a creator of history to an agent of history. The Schicksalslinie, rather than Hitler himself, controlled their fate; it was history itself that would save Germany from defeat.

3. The Hero’s Journey

As self-styled artist-politicians, the Nazi leaders understood destiny and history through the lenses of art, myth, and fiction, Romanticizing the Third Reich and their role in its historic

38 Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941-1944: His Private Conversations, 319. 39 Speeches and Proclamations, 1932-1945, ed. Max Domarus (Wauconda, IL, U.S.A.: Bolchazy-Carducci, 1990), 2920. 40 Original translation, "...confirmation of my mission by Providence"; ibid., 2925. 41 Original translation, "...smashed by Fate. It is the same Fate that allowed the Führer..."; ibid., 3042. 33 story.42 They found beauty and, eventually, escape in these spectacles of high drama, symbolism, and tragedy. Among the most overt indications of this conception was The Myth of the Twentieth

Century, written in 1930, in which Rosenberg meditated on the merits of Richard Wagner’s operas. He called Tristan’s death in Wagner’s 1859 tragic opera, Tristan und Isolde “a conflict of honor,” and continued, “This is Germanic destiny and the Germanic overcoming of life through art.”43 This reference served a dual purpose. Firstly, Rosenberg’s invocation of Wagner imbued the National Socialist vision of German destiny with the prestige and cultural pride associated with the composer’s legacy. In regard to the content of the opera, Rosenberg connected German destiny with Tristan’s choice to die honorably. Tristan was trapped by fate after mistakenly drinking a love potion, but was able to reestablish control over his destiny by dying gloriously for love. Like Tristan, Germany could overcome its hardships and take control of its destiny by pursuing a course of honor and sacrifice—a metaphorical death through national rebirth.

Moreover, in a July 1926 diary entry, Goebbels described a dreamlike experience: after speaking with Hitler, he looked up to see “a white cloud [taking] on the shape of a swastika,” and wondered to himself if it were a “sign of fate.”44 Hitler, as the protagonist of Germany’s story, led the nation on its heroic quest, complete with symbolism and signs from above. Goebbels, after observing Hitler’s interactions with army leaders in 1933, wrote in his diary, “The Führer is unique. His life is like a thrilling novel.”45 Goebbels applied a heroic narrative to Hitler’s life, implying that it had a predetermined beginning, middle, and end. Göring used similarly evocative language in Germany Reborn, writing in 1934 that Hitler had reached “up to the stars

42 For reference, see the discussion of Rüdiger Safranski, Romanticism: A German Affair (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014). in the introduction. 43 Alfred Rosenberg, The Myth of the Twentieth Century: An Evaluation of the Spiritual-Intellectual Confrontations of Our Age (Newport Beach: Noontide Press, 1993), 256. 44 Joseph Goebbels, The Early Goebbels Diaries, 1925-1926, ed. Helmut Heiber (New York: Praeger, 1963), 100. 45 My Part in Germany’s Fight, 241. 34 and fetch down the fire from heaven…to carry the torch among men.”46 These Romantic accounts suggest that they felt as if they were at the beginning of an epic story, a band of heroes who were destined for greatness and who would be immortalized in legend. The Nazi leaders considered themselves part of a larger story, one that was wondrous and meaningful beyond their comprehension.

As with the hardship inherent in the hero’s journey, the Volk would have to weather countless trials before Germany reached its destiny. In a 1937 speech, Hitler proclaimed that

Germany had a “compelling common destiny from which none can escape” because the nation was “treated by Nature…in a more than step-motherly fashion.”47 The Volk was a hero who had been mistreated by a fairytale villain. If history was a Romantic story, it required conflict, suffering, and above all, drama, with the ever-present threat of a tragic ending. As Hitler wrote in

Mein Kampf, “Anyone who demands of Schicksal a guarantee of success automatically renounces all ideas of a heroic deed.”48 Struggle was both inherent to heroism and necessary to make history. In the journey toward its destiny, Germany would make history. With this

Romantic conception, the Nazi leaders were inspired to dream of a happy ending to their story and to take solace in the artistic meaning of their every action.

As the war continued and this happy ending began to elude them, Romanticism became a means of dealing with the uncertainty and disappointment. In September 1942, Hitler called the difficult winter on the Eastern Front “the most fateful test for our Volk,” which they had

“passed”; thus, he continued, “Vorsehung weighed on the German Volk…worse cannot and will not come.”49 They had suffered and struggled; therefore, they deserved an ending that would

46 Göring, 47. 47 Hitler, My New Order, 419-20. 48 Original translation, "Anyone who demands of Fate..."; Mein Kampf, 417. 49 Original translation, "Providence weighed..."; Speeches and Proclamations, 1932-1945, 2674. 35 accord with their heroism. In November 1943, Goebbels wrote in his diary:

“The sky above Berlin is bloody, deep red, and of an awesome beauty. I just can’t stand looking at it…It seems as though all the elements of Schicksal and Nature have conspired against us to create difficulties…What a life we are leading! Who could have prophesied that at our cradle!50

Their visions of glorious battles won by Germanic heroes had not come to pass, yet Goebbels still found aesthetic pleasure and spiritual value in their struggle. The war became cinematic for

Goebbels. Every happening was a potential scene in the color film 100 years into the future. In a radio address from January 1944, following devastating air raids, Hitler asserted that Germany’s

“suffering and pain corresponds to an eternal law of destiny” which would “create that hard state which Vorsehung has destined to fashion.”51 He assured himself and his listeners that their suffering had a purpose and that, ultimately, history would reward them. This was precisely what happened in stories: fate only ever intervened at the hero’s lowest point. In a November 1944 proclamation following the invasion of Normandy, Hitler stated:

In confrontations of world-historical impact, it is not likely that the outcome of the fight should be decided in months and years, but rather over long periods, with perseverance. In these periods, divine Vorsehung has men line up to try them for what they are worth. It thereby decides whether they deserve life or death. That our National Socialist state will today pass this historic trial is already guaranteed.52

This assertion explained away Germany’s deteriorating military situation as a temporary test that, when passed, promised a brighter future. Hitler, thus, transformed their impending defeat into ultimate victory which would come in a moment of surprise—an exciting finale. In his 1945

New Year’s proclamation, Hitler explained that a pattern of losses was not ominous, but rather a positive sign from the universe because, “Whomever Vorsehung subjects to so many trials, it has

50 Original translation, “all the elements of Fate and Nature…”; Joseph Goebbels, The Goebbels Diaries 1942- 1943, trans. Louis P. Lochner (Garden City, New York: Double Day & Company, 1948), 535. 51 Original translation, "...which Providence has destined to fashion."; Hitler, Speeches and Proclamations, 1932-1945, 2876. 52 Original translation, "...divine Providence has men line up..."; ibid., 2967. 36 destined for the greatest things!”53 There was no need to worry; higher forces were looking after

Germany. He and the other Nazi leaders were no longer so important to Germany’s story: the

Volk needed merely to enact a fate that had been written for centuries.

4. Natural History

The Nazi leaders also believed that Nature governed the universe, moving history in accordance with its laws of evolution and natural selection. Hitler drew from Social Darwinism, writing in 1928, “History itself represents the progression of a people’s struggle for survival.”54

This view of history presented only two possible outcomes to their struggle: survival or extinction. Before the downturn in the war, this conception guaranteed that Germany would prevail simply by virtue of its superior genetics. All the Nazi leaders had to do was protect and cultivate the Aryan race in accordance with the laws of Nature. Hitler, in Mein Kampf, explained

Nature’s control over human history:

For events in the lives of peoples are not expressions of chance, but processes related to the self-preservation and propagation of the species and the race and subject to the laws of Nature, even if people are not conscious of the inner reason for their actions.55

Natural history had a clear set of rules applicable to all: follow Nature and survive, or neglect the race and perish. While this vision intertwined with spiritual notions of racial superiority, their view of natural history did not provide the same uplifting quality found in their other historical theories. This biological view of the universe was actually rather grim. They were not on some

Romanticized, mystical journey to greatness, but merely struggling to survive.

The vision of natural history was most common during the regime’s final years, as the

Nazi leaders began to face the possibility of defeat. Hitler described the ultimate power of Nature

53 Ibid., 2993. 54 Hitler’s Second Book: The Unpublished Sequel to Mein Kampf, ed. Gerhard L. Weinberg, Krista Smith, and Adolf Hitler, 1st English language ed. (New York, N.Y.: Enigma, 2003), 7. 55 Mein Kampf, 283. 37 in a September 1941 table talk:

If we did not respect the laws of nature, imposing our will by the right of the stronger, a day would come when the wild animals would once again devour us—then the insects would eat the wild animals, and finally nothing would exist on Earth but the microbes.56

Hitler’s statement calls forth a frightening picture of Nature’s power over the universe, capable of destroying not just nations or races, but all life on Earth. Natural history did not progress, but instead remained eternally static in its cycle of survival and extinction. Individuals could only impact history if they lived in accordance with her laws. In the survival of the fittest, success entailed only survival. History, on the grandest scale, operated autonomously for millennia and was ultimately unsympathetic to the German cause. Nature provided guidance, but was indifferent and unfeeling in her judgments. Yet, even this frightening vision was imbued with vivid, albeit terrifying, imagery, further suggesting their Romanticized view of history. In a table talk from September 1942, Hitler admitted to his growing uncertainty over Germany’s fate:

It is sobering to think on how thin a thread of fate the history of the world sometimes depends! We lost the 1914-1918 war; but we have not the right to say that we did so because the Home Front let us down. Our enemies at the time had some men of the highest quality…57

Here, Hitler conceded that the humiliation of 1918 may not have been punishment by Vorsehung for the stab in the back. Perhaps the Aryan race had not strengthened itself enough for Nature to grant its survival; perhaps years of degeneration without racial consciousness had left them vulnerable to stronger races.

The world they were experiencing did not fit into Nazi beliefs about destiny; they had struggled and given their best, but still could not manage to emerge victorious. In an August

1944 speech to high-ranking government officials, Hitler attempted to explain this dissonance between the war’s outlook and Aryan supremacy:

56 Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941-1944: His Private Conversations, 39. 57 Ibid., 694. 38

Should the German Volk be overpowered in this struggle, then it will have been too weak, it will not have passed its test before history, and it will therefore be doomed.58

The Volk had given their best, but it simply was not enough. No longer did German blood or

Nazi leadership seem to guarantee victory: the war had proven their fallibility. Tellingly, Hitler cited this failure as a racial one. Rather than pinning blame on poor leadership or military blunders, he deflected responsibility for the imminent defeat away from himself and into the natural realm. The race, not the regime, had failed and, thus, faced extinction. A month before the regime’s collapse in spring 1945, even Goebbels’ previously unshakable faith in German destiny wavered. He wrote in his diary, “We are now at a stage of this gigantic struggle in which everything is on a knife-edge and the fate of the Reich sometimes seem to hang by a thread.”59

The world seemed chaotic, Germany was the brink of collapse, and history had not conformed to any of their theories. They had been left to stumble blindly toward defeat, alone in a chaotic universe.

58 Speeches and Proclamations, 1932-1945, 2938. 59 Joseph Goebbels, Final Entries, 1945: The Diaries of Joseph Goebbels, trans. Richard Barry (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1978), 21. 39

Chapter 2 Inheritance

Today, the name, Barbarossa, brings to mind the Nazi code name for the invasion of the

Soviet Union in the summer of 1941: Operation Barbarossa. What connected the regime’s attempt at eastward expansion with a 12th century Holy Roman Emperor? Even before the invasion, Barbarossa had taken on mythical status in Germany. The king was said to have possessed superhuman intellect and strength, becoming, according to John B. Freed, the

“embodiment of German manhood.”1 Hitler personally named the invasion after the emperor.2

As Freed points out, this was a rather peculiar decision: Barbarossa had fought not in the East, but primarily in northern Italy. These lands would eventually form parts of the modern Italian state, the Third Reich’s ally.3 Yet, Hitler’s interest in Barbarossa centered on the mythology surrounding his death and coming resurrection. According to legend, the emperor slept somewhere deep in the Kyffhäuser mountains, awaiting his return to the realm of the living to recreate his empire. Popularized by völkisch movements in the early nineteenth century, the legend was articulated in Friedrich Rückert’s 1817 poem, “Barbarossa”:

He did not die; but ever Waits in the chamber deep, Where hidden under the castle He sat himself to sleep The splendor of the Empire He took with him away And back to earth will bring it When dawns the promised day4

1 John B. Freed, Frederick Barbarossa: The Prince and the Myth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), xvii. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., 532. 4 Friedrich Rückert, “Barbarossa”, trans. Bayard Taylor and Lilian Bayard Taylor-Kiliani, in The German Classics: Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, 5:486-87 in ibid., 523. 40

While Rückert’s poem specified that Barbarossa would return in a century, Hitler would have found a more pertinent timeline in Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s story, “Friedrich Rotbart auf dem Kyffhäuser.” According to the Grimms’ retelling, as Barbarossa slept, his beard continued to grow, twisting around a table at which he sat for centuries. Once his beard had grown around the table’s circumference three times, the king was fated to awaken.5 Hitler may have identified the numerical similarities between the Third Reich and the beard’s third trip around the table, seeing his regime as the fulfillment of this prophecy. He likely imagined his conquest of the East as the twentieth-century fulfillment of Barbarossa’s medieval legacy. It was a useful allegory: the Nazi leadership began what they believed to be a national resurrection under an all-powerful ruler, just as Barbarossa was to be resurrected to bring about Germany’s golden age.6 As German troops invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, perhaps Hitler felt the force of history behind him and the sleeping king awakening within, as if Barbarossa had returned to reclaim his long-lost empire.

Further illumination on this naming choice can be found in the Nazis’ addition to the

Kyffhäuser Monument, the supposed site of Barbarossa’s legendary slumber. Sitting high above the mountains of Thuringia, the monument was erected in the late nineteenth century to celebrate the establishment of the Second Reich and German unification under Kaiser Wilhelm I. In its original form, the site integrated German history from the medieval age with its contemporary time. A towering statue of Wilhelm I stood outside a great hall decorated with paintings of

5 “Der Bart ist ihm groß gewachsen, nach einigen durch den steinernen Tisch, nach andern um den Tisch herum, dergestalt, daß er dreimal um die Rundung reichen muß bis zu seinem Aufwachen, jetzt aber geht er erst zweimal darum.” (Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsche Sagen, Holzinger ed. (North Charleston, USA: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013), 49.) 6 Almost identical myths were associated with Charlemagne and Frederick the Great, contributing to a centuries-long cultural fascination with the motifs of a resurrected, slumbering king followed by the establishment of a holy empire. See Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium and “Kaiser Karl im Untersberg” in Deutsche Sagen, 52. 41

Charlemagne, Martin Luther, and Frederick the Great.7 Beneath all of this stood a slightly smaller statue entitled Barbarossa’s Awakening, depicting a man with a long beard, rising aggressively from his seat. Hitler approved an additional memorial at the Kyffhäuser site to the soldiers of World War I, the Freikorps, and “Nazi martyrs,” complete with a bust of himself and urns containing soil from the territories ceded by Germany in the Treaty of Versailles.8

Figure 1: The hall at the base of the Kyffhäuser monument during the Third Reich. Shown are the urns, the battle flags, and the plaque honoring the dead.

This dark, solemn, crypt-like space was imbued with ceremony and holiness. The urns, filled with hallowed ancestral soil, and the spirits of the German martyrs symbolized the fated reclamation of the East anticipated for centuries. The original monument’s synthesis of the first and second Reich, the Holy Roman Empire and Kaiserreich respectively, was later fused with the Nazis’ ‘Third Reich’. The hall’s design is an illustration of National Socialism’s conscious

7 Freed, 528-32. 8 The Freikorps was right-wing paramilitary group during the Weimar Republic. The new memorial also added busts of Otto von Bismarck and Helmuth von Moltke. (ibid., 532.) 42 myth making, as the Nazi leaders attempted to attach their regime to a heroic legacy. The resulting space suggested that these histories were fused: Kaiser Wilhelm and Frederick

Barbarossa lived on through Hitler. By adhering themselves to this preexisting monument to

German heroism, the Nazis positioned the Third Reich as the next step in the nation’s journey toward its destiny. Lacking an easily discerned political tradition, the Nazis used this monument to project a sense of uninterrupted continuity with Germany’s real past and its mythical past.

The Nazi leaders believed in a racial lineage that stretched back centuries, led by a group of German heroes working toward the same destiny, a Valhalla peopled exclusively by Aryans.9

Hitler, in a November 1940 speech to the senior members of the Wehrmacht (German army) explained, "The spirit of the great men of our history must hearten us all. Schicksal demands from us no more than from the great men of German history.”10 Certain figures, like Hitler or

Barbarossa, were in tune with history’s undercurrents, moving Germany toward its destiny through historic deeds. Each continued and improved upon the work of his predecessors. The

Third Reich was envisioned as a simultaneous attempt to reenact past glory and push the nation to unprecedented heights. Germans would once again rule over Europe, but on a grand scale only possible in an age of modern technology and racial consciousness. Even the numerical designation of the regime—the Third Reich—implied both continuity with and improvement upon the German nations of the past. Although only a small subset of Nazi leaders, principally

Heinrich Himmler, believed in literal reincarnation, there existed the sense that one’s ancestors lived on through the race, providing guidance and inspiration through an inherited spiritual

9 See Jay W. Baird, To Die for Germany: Heroes in the Nazi Pantheon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). 10 Original translation, “Fate demands…”; Jeremy. Pridham Noakes, Geoffery, Nazism, 1919-1945, V.3. Foreign Policy, War, and Racial Extermination, 4 vols., vol. 3 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1994- 1998), 765. 43 knowledge. By the same logic, the Nazi leaders believed that they too would live on through the future Volk.

National Socialism’s absence of a clear political tradition, combined with Germany’s recent unification and an uncertain definition of who belonged to the Aryan race, motivated the

Nazi leaders to establish their regime’s place in history. Their more straightforward connection with the First and Second Reich was extended to other cultures deemed Aryan. This cultivation and appropriation of the past stretched back as far as antiquity and laid claim to peoples and cultures that, in reality, often had little to do with Germany. In my source material, their historical references appear fragmented and scattered, jumping from ancient Greece to medieval

Germany and back again. Yet, it was the spiritual essence of these moments that mattered to the

Nazi leaders, revealing Germany’s destiny across all of human history. The Nazi leaders’ obsession with history was not, as could easily be misconstrued, a reflection of straightforward conservatism. The regime had little interest in winding back the clock and returning to a simpler time. The twentieth century demanded a Führer and National Socialism, just as the nineteenth had required a Kaiser and German nationalism. The nation marched on, following its unfaltering

Schicksalslinie. The Nazi leaders, like conservatives, found stability in harkening back to a mythical past. Yet, it was their persistent mythologization of themselves and of their future that set them apart. They felt adrift in time without a political past, and, in response, fashioned a glorious one that would best suit their ideology. They were both the authors of Germany’s historical narrative and the architects of its grand future—artists creating reality itself.

There were no genuine examples in German history of a fascist state guided by racial beliefs, let alone concepts such as a Führer, SS, or Propaganda Ministry. Thus, the Nazi leaders devised their own lineage, one that allowed them to feel simultaneously as if they acted without 44 precedent and carried on an ancestral legacy. Looking to the past seemed to prove the existence of a national destiny and to guarantee their success, so long as they acted in accordance with their inherited sense of history. Before the war’s downturn, this vision of history gave them the feeling that they were driving German history forward as they created the Volk’s eternal dream.

After Stalingrad, however, this pressure became too great to bear. Instead of dwelling on their responsibility over the nation’s fate, they found the larger arc of German history reassuring because it ensured the race’s survival. Even if Germany fell, the Nazi leaders had not failed. The great men of the future would continue Germany’s journey toward destiny. In his final appearance in front of civilians in July 1944, Hitler found a sense of security in Germany’s difficult but never-ending quest for destiny:

You know, the German Volk has lived for, let us say, hundreds of thousands of years…The German Volk survived the Romans…the Huns, countless wars, the Thirty Years War, the Seven Years War, the War of Spanish Succession, the World War. It will survive this too.11

Their current situation was only a temporary defeat: Germany would find glory in battle in the future. A coming Volk would achieve the victory the Nazi leaders could not. In this conception of history, each found safety in the comfort of the larger Schicksalsgemeinschaft. Still, the Nazi leaders hoped that, one day, they too would be immortalized in legend as Barbarossa had been.

Their dream worlds of the past became a foundation upon which to construct their dream worlds of the future.

I. Imagining History (1925-1939)

11 Adolf Hitler, Speeches and Proclamations, 1932-1945, ed. Max Domarus (Wauconda, IL, U.S.A.: Bolchazy-Carducci, 1990), 2910. 45

Given the economic, political, and social volatility of the Weimar Republic, ensconcing oneself in history felt stabilizing. Even if the present was characterized by defeat and humiliation, one could reminisce about idealized visions of stability in Bismarck’s era or of euphoric national unity at the outbreak of the World War in August 1914. Weimar’s conservatives awaited the reestablishment of the Kaiserreich and of traditional German values, hoping to forget the national trauma of the World War by escaping into an idealized past. The

Nazi Party, while also caught up in these visions, developed an understanding of history that reconciled a radical reimagining of Germany with their interest in glorifying its past. They, too, fully rejected the liberalism and social changes of the Weimar era, but in no way intended to reinstate the First or Second Reich. History was development, never regression. As described by

Peter Fritzsche, most Germans chose the “Nazi future” over the “Weimar past,” seeing the establishment of the Third Reich as a means of healing the nation’s fraught history.12 The rise of

Nazism brought hope for the future to a country that had been living in the past. The Nazi leaders intended to establish an entirely “New Order.” Unlike other political parties on the Right in the

Weimar Republic, Nazism valued German history not as a model, but as a foundation upon which to build a better world in their desired image.

Since the Party’s inception, particular people and groups throughout history served to validate the National Socialist mission and to instill self-importance in the Nazi leaders. The leaders believed they had been chosen to carry out the legacy of all Aryans who had come before them. Certain world-historical figures served as examples of intelligence, charisma, or bravery.

The Führer inherited their strengths and improved upon them because he possessed a new racial consciousness. In Hitler’s Second Book, written in 1928, he outlined his foreign policy goals.

12 Peter Fritzsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 37. 46

Within the book’s short 200 pages, Hitler perseverated on the importance of Frederick the Great,

King of Prussia in the mid-eighteenth century, and Otto von Bismarck, chancellor of the German

Empire at the end of the nineteenth century. In this book alone, he mentioned Bismarck a total of

26 times and Frederick the Great nine times, despite the text ostensibly being about the nation’s future. For Hitler, these men were his guides to the future. Frederick the Great and Bismarck had inhabited the historic role that he now occupied. Even as he exercised unparalleled authority over the country, Hitler did not feel alone if he looked back to history.

In The Myth of the Twentieth Century, Alfred Rosenberg went into extensive detail about the

“types” of leaders the nation required:

It is beyond question that it is the Moltke-type, during the first period of a future Germany, which will form our league of men—let us call it the German Order. This group must step strongly into the foreground in order to save us in the present chaotic confusion.13

Rosenberg envisioned a military order for Germany’s immediate future, imagining that Hitler, in the style of 19th century Prussian military commander Helmuth von Moltke, would end

Weimar’s chaos. He continued,

There is also a need for preachers with Luther-like natures who hypnotize, and for writers who consciously remagnetize hearts. The Luther-like leader in the coming Reich must, however, be clear about the face that he must unconditionally abandon the system of Bismarck after victory. He must transfer the principles of Moltke to politics if he wishes not only to realize himself, but, also, beyond his death, to create a permanent Reich sworn to a highest value.14

The establishment of the Third Reich required a leader who blended together the best qualities of great men like Luther, Moltke, and Bismarck, uniting the realms of religion, war, and politics under a single Führer. Hitler inherited their strengths, which only heightened his own. Rosenberg also went on to list National Socialism’s cultural forebearers, “Don Quixote, Hamlet, Parsifal,

13 Alfred Rosenberg, The Myth of the Twentieth Century: An Evaluation of the Spiritual-Intellectual Confrontations of Our Age (Newport Beach: Noontide Press, 1993), 340. 14 Ibid. 47

Faust, Rembrandt, Beethoven, Goethe, Wagner, and Nietzsche, [who] all lived, spoke and created.”15 Rosenberg’s chosen legacy of great Germanic men not only included artists, but also fictional and mythical men. Rosenberg’s Romantic vision of history included fictional characters who he suggested literally lived, spoke, and created. Hitler apparently embodied the best qualities of all of these men, both real and imaginary, and more. Thus, he instilled confidence in himself and gained that of the Nazi leadership through both his unique greatness and his ability to carry on the Germanic legacy.

The Nazi leaders also felt connected to early European history and myth, most notably the Vikings, the Teutonic Order, and pagan witches. Most closely associated with the esoteric aspects of National Socialism not shared outside of inner Party circles, Hitler often deemed these themes too mystical to share with ordinary Germans.16 Germany’s early history often produced anxiety among the Nazi leadership due to Germany’s lack of a high ancient culture such as a

Greece or Rome. Still, national pride could be found in the image portrayed in Germania, the ancient Roman historian Tacitus’ writings on the Germanic tribes, which became a common conception of ancient Germany during the Third Reich.17 As Christopher Krebs writes, Tacitus’ work was interpreted as proof of ancient Germans being racially pure, noble fighters—an appealing notion for nineteenth century German nationalists and later National Socialists,

Himmler in particular.18 This work seemed to identify Germany as an autonomous ethnic community, establishing a clear lineage for National Socialism to claim as its own. Still, Hitler

15 Ibid. 16 Jost Hermand, Old Dreams of a New Reich: Völkisch Utopias and National Socialism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 243. 17 George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964), 67-68. 18 See Christopher B. Krebs, A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus's Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2011). 48 was concerned that Germany would be seen as primitive. Speer recalled Hitler’s reaction to

Himmler’s excavations of prehistoric sites in the 1930s:

Why do we call the whole world’s attention to the fact that we have no past? It isn’t enough that the Romans were erecting great buildings when our forefathers were still living in mud huts; now Himmler is starting to dig up these villages of mud huts…We should really do our best to keep quiet about this past.19

The reality of early German history could feel shameful or weak, further motivating the Nazi leaders to construct an idealized, mythical legacy for the Third Reich.

Hitler seems to have shown some interest in connecting with Germanic myths. In his Second

Book, unpublished in his lifetime, he wrote that Germany’s leaders were the “carriers of the

Nordic blood, like the Vikings of old,” establishing a direct racial lineage to an idealized vision of the ancient society.20 Each German inherited the supposed strength and vigor of the Vikings, but now possessed the racial consciousness to put it to use. Hitler’s interest in Germany’s mythical past can also be found in his relationship with his Berghof residence at Obersalzburg in the Bavarian Alps. The location had a view of the Untersberg, which was believed to house the body of Emperor Charlemagne. Charlemagne, like Barbarossa, slept in a mountain, awaiting his return to create a new empire.21 In his memoirs, Albert Speer recalled that “Hitler naturally appropriated this legend for himself,” telling Speer in the summer of 1935, “You see the

Untersberg over there. It is no accident that I have my residence opposite it.”22 Hitler crafted his self-image through this choice, positioning himself as a mystical king fated to bring about a golden age, infusing himself with confidence in his historic role as he attempted the unprecedented. Although Hitler did not frequently dwell upon these notions, there was

19 Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 94-95. 20 Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s Second Book: The Unpublished Sequel to Mein Kampf, ed. Gerhard L. Weinberg, Krista Smith, and Adolf Hitler, 1st English language ed. (New York, N.Y.: Enigma, 2003), 109. 21 Norman Rufus Colin Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 72. 22 Speer, 86. 49 considerable research conducted on mythology and early history during his regime. Himmler and

Rosenberg led research efforts into esoteric Aryan history and culture throughout the Third

Reich’s existence, though Hitler did not officially endorse nor publicize their efforts.23

Himmler spearheaded research into witchcraft in early modern Germany, forming the

Hexen-Sonderauftrag (Special Task Force on Witches). 24 Between 1935 and 1944, the H-

Sonderauftrag collected, and often stole, archival materials throughout central Europe about medieval witches, attempting to trace a lineage of Germanic spirituality from these witches to the

Third Reich.25 Himmler believed there had been a genocide of the German people perpetrated by the Catholic Church during the witchcraft trials, which he saw as an attempt to repress

Germany’s true pagan culture.26The SS in particular were understood as a continuation of a lineage with these Germanic pagans and heretics because Himmler “revived” their supposed rituals in the organization’s spiritual practices.27 Rosenberg enthusiastically concurred with

Himmler’s findings, seeing this imagined genocide as further proof that Germany had a historical mission to revitalize the Aryan race.28 Hitler too accepted the historical conclusions drawn by the

H-Sonderauftrag, but did not encourage Himmler’s work.29 The “discovery” of this imagined history made these men feel as if they had uncovered some elemental truth of Aryan nature, imbuing their project with mystical authenticity.

Rosenberg was most interested in the Third Reich’s connection with the Teutonic Order.

Only a year into the regime, on a visit Marienburg Castle, built in the 13th century by Teutonic

23 Hermand, 183-85. 24 Imagining that the Church was secretly run by Jews, Himmler considered his research a vital part of the war effort to end perceived Jewish control over Germany, falling under the SD (Sicherheitsdienst or Security Service, a branch of the SS) rather than the Ahnenerbe. (Eric Kurlander, Hitler's Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 165.) 25 Ibid., 164-65. 26 Ibid., 165-66. 27 Hans Buchheim, "Command and Compliance," in Anatomy of the Ss State (New York: Walker, 1968), 330. 28 Kurlander, 166. 29 Ibid. 50

Knights, Rosenberg delivered an address entitled, “The German State as Knightly Order: A New

Chapter in the Development of the National Socialist State.” In this speech, he linked Germany’s promised colonization of Eastern Europe to the region’s conquest by the Teutonic Order. He also connected the relationship between Führer and Volk to that of a king and his vassals.30 This comparison positioned National Socialism as an extension of traditional German rule, rather than an entirely radical political system. Moreover, he imagined eastward expansion as a German birthright. The Nazi leaders conquered the East, partially, because they felt it was historically preordained. Eventually becoming the Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories,

Rosenberg felt that he had been chosen to reestablish a Teutonic state in the East. Certainly, genocide and colonization were a radical departure from early modern history, but this imagined legacy and destiny gave Rosenberg’s task a sense of historical authority and necessity.

Himmler’s relationship with Germanic myth blended a supposed racial past with his vision for the SS and the nation as a whole. He established the Studiengesellschaft für

Geistesurgeschichte‚ Deutsches Ahnenerbe (Society for the Study of Cultural Prehistory and

German Ancestral Inheritance) in 1935 to study supposedly Aryan societies.31 The Ahnenerbe conducted research on early “Nordic” cultures, funding expeditions from Germany to Tibet that were intended to uncover ancestral knowledge and racial characteristics.32 The Ahnenerbe spearheaded “folklore” research throughout the Third Reich. 33 For example, the society’s research provided purported historical proof to the theory of Lebensraum, identifying evidence

30 Hermand, 240. 31 Ahnenerbe is most commonly translated to “German Ancestral Heritage”, but the term Erbe implies a spiritual inheritance or legacy, beyond a mere familial heritage: Vermögen, das jemand bei seinem Tod hinterlässt und das in den Besitz einer gesetzlich dazu berechtigten Person oder Institution übergeht etwas auf die Gegenwart Überkommenes; nicht materielles (geistiges, kulturelles) Vermächtnis (“das Erbe”, Duden, 2017, https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/Erbe_Nachlass_Ueberlieferung) 32 Peter Longerich, Heinrich Himmler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 275. 33 The Ahnenerbe expanded to include research in the hard sciences by the end of the 1930s. At the outbreak of war in 1939, it became so prominent that it worked with mainstream academic organizations, research institutes, and the army, navy, and airforce. (Kurlander, 155.) 51 of past German rule over Eastern Europe that seemed to legitimize its conquest.34 Himmler latched onto this theory, like Rosenberg, seeing eastward expansion as a fated reassertion of

Germanic control.35 Of all of his “prehistorical” pursuits, Himmler was most invested in studying tenth century German king, Henry I or Henry the Fowler. Himmler was obsessed with Henry.

Believing himself to be the reincarnation of the king, Himmler instituted annual ceremonies in

Henry’s burial place in the crypt of Quedlinburg cathedral to honor his past life.36

Figure 2: Himmler at the grave of King Henry I in Quedlinburg for the annual celebration. July 1, 1938. Himmler instituted an allegedly successful search for Henry’s bones in the crypt at Quedlinburg.

34 Ideas of Lebensraum had been present in Germany since the late 19th century, originating in Friedrich Ratzel’s writings advocating for colonization of Eastern Europe rather than Africa or elsewhere due to a historical-racial necessity to return to lands allegedly ruled by past Aryans. Ibid., 12, 199-201. 35 In July 1939, the editor of the Ahnenerbe’s journal, Germania, wrote that Henry’s own “eastern policy” inspired “the creation and reconquest of living space [Lebensraum].” (Kater, Das Ahnenerbe, 118-119 cited in ibid., 202.) 36 Michael Kater, Das Ahnenerbe der SS 1935-1945: Ein Beitrag zur Kulturpolitik des Dritten Reiches (Berlin, Boston: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2009), 171ff, cited in Hermand, 243. 52

The crypt was then decorated with SS runes for these “King Henry celebrations,” which continued throughout the war and were planned to continue after his death.37 For Himmler,

Henry I was both a symbol of and a motivation for the conquest of Lebensraum; he saw Nazi military action in the East as the fulfillment of Henry’s life’s work and Aryan racial destiny.

Himmler believed in a “cult of ancestors” to which every Aryan’s consciousness was supposedly linked. His conception of the afterlife incorporated ideas of resurrection and immortality, including that all members of the Aryan race lived on in future generations.38 In a

1938 speech to the SS leadership, he described “the eternal cycle of all being” that rendered death “merely a move to another plane; for we have all seen each other somewhere before and by the same token will see each other in another world.”39 Martin Bormann also shared

Himmler’s belief in immortality through one’s racial community, stating there was “no such thing as death” in a private letter.40 For Himmler and Bormann, ancestors literally worked through the present leadership. Their radical ideas had mystical credence if they were spiritual transmissions from great ancestors.

Himmler considered the SS a new order of Teutonic Knights. He believed that he had been called to guide the elite organization, which would lead the new Reich to its destiny.

Without a clear historical example of a vast, militarized secret police, Himmler looked to this glorified past to imbue his own task with mystical, racial meaning. This mythology was instilled in SS men continuously throughout their training and indoctrination. For example, the regime constructed a number of Ordensburgen (Knightly Order Castles), where the sons of elite Party

37 Longerich, 272-73. 38 Ibid., 267-69. 39 Ibid., 267-68. 40 Kurlander, 51-52. 53 members were educated in preparation for leadership positions in the regime.41 Young men were encouraged to believe that they were recreating the training undergone by their ancestors, taking part in the long tradition of Germanic knights. These massive castles, complete with modern furnishings, were far from historically accurate. 42 Still, Himmler intended their austere, medieval aura to instill in the SS a visceral, tangible connection with this glorious past.

Figure 3, Left: A young Hitler Youth member standing in front of Marienburg Castle, from a propaganda book about racial beauty, c. 1933-1935

Figure 4, Below: A view of the NS- Ordensburg Vogelsang.

41 Three of these sprawling castle complexes were built during the regime, with a fourth planned at Marienberg that was never completed after the war’s outbreak. 42 Hermand, 240. 54

As described in Hans Buchheim’s study of the SS, its members were believed to act in accordance with “what the historic moments [demanded],” implying that SS-men possessed knowledge of history and their role within it.43 Similar to Hitler’s identification as a sort of world-historical figure, SS actions were believed to emanate from an inherited connection with history’s undercurrents and with their ancestors. In a speech from June 1931, Himmler explained that the SS was “called upon to establish foundations so that the next generation can make history.”44 The SS was a group of chosen heroes, who would become legends like the Teutonic

Order, admired for centuries to come. An SS-Leitheft periodical from 1939 described the war in the East with the language of early Germanic history:

That which the Goths, the Varangians, and all the individual migrants of German blood failed to achieve, that we now shall—a new Teutonic migration, brought about by our Führer, the leader of all Teutons…Now we shall finally secure Europe’s eastern frontier. Now there will be fulfilled what Germanic fighters once dreamt of in the forests and vastnesses of the East. A 3000-year-old chapter of history today reaches its glorious conclusion.45

The culmination of the Teutonic lineage would be achieved in the coming war, securing the SS and Himmler’s place in history. Eastward expansion was motivated by a desire to continue the grand, Romantic tale of German heroism in the untamed East.

As the war worsened, Himmler found solace in the future mythologization of the SS, telling a meeting of Gauleiters in August 1944,

It is that when history judges this age and pronounces the dogma that is assured even today— that Adolf Hitler was the great Aryan, not just the greatest Teutonic leader—that history will then say about us and the men closest to him: his paladins were loyal, were obedient, were faithful, were steadfast, were worthy of being his comrades.46

43 Buchheim, 317, 61. 44 Longerich, 123. 45 Joachim Remak, The Nazi Years: A Documentary History (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969), 118-19. 46 Ibid., 129-30. 55

His anachronistic use of “Teutonic” to describe Hitler, as well as the use of “paladin” (der

Paladin), a reference to the members of Charlemagne’s court, demonstrate that he understood his own moment as the next chapter in the larger chronicle of Aryan valor in the East.47 Even if they failed, they would be remembered for their heroism. Even in Hitler’s penultimate table talk in

February 1945, he explained that it was “only and always eastward that the veins of our race must expand. It is the direction which Nature herself has decreed.”48 It was of the highest racial and historical necessity that Germany achieved Lebensraum: its destiny lay to the East.

II. Mythologizing the War (1939-1945)

Throughout the Second World War, certain moments in history inspired the Nazi leaders to reimagine the war’s reality as an extension, even a reiteration, of past moments of Germanic glory. To avoid the traumatic memory of the First World War, they looked further into the past to conceptualize the Second World War as a heroic struggle toward Germany’s destiny. Hitler, in an address to the Reichstag after the invasion of Poland in September 1939 stated, “German history will never see a repetition of November 1918.”49 As Fritzsche points out, the defeat in the

First World War was often understood as a lesson, which, if retained, would guarantee German victory in a future war.50 Still, dreams of an idealized past were far more appealing frames of reference than the visceral memories of 1918’s harsh reality. Moreover, the glory of the distant past seemed to confirm their views of history and an omnipresent destiny. What began as an encouraging guarantee of their predestined victory became a means of escape from impending

47 A definition of Paladin is “(in der Karlssage) Ritter des Kreises von zwölf Helden am Hof Karls des Großen” (“der Paladin”, Duden, 2017, www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/Paladin) 48 Adolf Hitler, The Testament of Adolf Hitler: The Hitler-Bormann Documents, February-April 1945, ed. Martin Bormann and François Genoud (London: Cassell, 1961), 46. 49 Noakes, 3, 756. 50 Fritzsche, 156. 56 defeat. Often, legends promised miracles and sudden shifts in fortune. Even examples of heroic defeat confirmed that they would become the stuff of legend. Thinking on this grand scale allowed the Nazi leaders to feel as if they were merely a step along Germany’s journey and as if their mission would continue beyond their lifetimes and beyond this particular war.

Myth was perhaps most visible in the names given to major military operations in the

Second World War, as in the case of Operation Barbarossa and Operation Tannenberg, the code name for the invasion of Poland in 1939. Referring to the Battle of Tannenberg, this choice held a dual connotation: German victory over Russia in August 1914 and the defeat of Teutonic

Knights in the fifteenth century by Lithuanian and Polish armies.51 Robert Gerwarth writes that this naming choice reflects a “romanticized reading of the medieval past.”52 The invasion was conceptualized as revenge for the Teutons’ medieval defeat and the loss of the First World War.

They would reestablish a Teutonic kingdom by crushing these historic enemies and rehabilitate the memory of the First World War. After the successful occupation of Poland and as Germany pushed farther East, Hitler reflected upon the historical significance of their conquests at a table talk in August 1941. He compared the battles of Cannae, Sedan, and Tannenberg to “our battles in Poland and the West, and those which we’re now fighting in the East.”53 By drawing a military lineage from ancient Rome to twentieth century Germany, Hitler believed that he could see the arc of Germanic history and how the Third Reich fit into its narrative. Tellingly, this list

51 The First Battle of Tannenberg, also known as the Battle of Grunwald, took place July 15, 1410 during the Polish-Lithuanian-Teutonic War (1409-1411). In this decisive battle, the Prussian Teutonic Order was defeated by an alliance between the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. This loss precipitated a significant decline in power for the Teutons; their state never again recovered its former status in medieval Europe. 52 Robert Gerwarth, Hitler’s Hangman: The Life of Heydrich (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 135. 53 The Battle of Cannae took place in 216 BCE during the Second Punic War and is famous for being one of the most devastating defeats ever experienced by Rome. The Battle of Sedan, fought in September 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War, resulted in a decisive Prussian victory and the surrender of French troops under Napoleon III; Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941-1944: His Private Conversations, trans. Norman Cameron, Stevens, R.H., 3rd ed. (New York: Enigma Books, 2000), 25. 57 referenced both victories and defeats, implying that historic glory could be found in either outcome and decreasing the pressure on the German victory in this particular time. Each war was merely a battle in their greater struggle for survival that had been raging for centuries.

The legacy of Sparta also became a common leitmotif in the Nazi historical imagination as the war continued.54 For example, facing increased rationing in 1942 in preparation for a major offensive in the East, Goebbels connected present-day Germany to ancient Sparta. Citing the necessity of sacrifice for total war, Goebbels stated that Germany “has developed the Spartan lifestyle into something which appears natural.”55 Evoking the Spartans’ austere, military lifestyle, he made the dismal reality of rationing into a moment of heroism amidst hardship. The worsening conditions on the home front were merely another chapter in the larger narrative of

Aryan sacrifice for the greater racial good. Most famously, following a series of losses in the

East and in North Africa in 1943, Goebbels made a highly publicized speech in the Berlin

Sportpalast intended to improve declining morale.56 He proclaimed, “The German people want a

Spartan way of life for everybody. For high and low, for poor and rich.”57 Despite a lack of genuine genealogical connection, the myths surrounding Sparta were a means of reframing their increasingly hopeless situation both for the citizenry and for himself. In a table talk in February

1945, Hitler spoke of the “shining example” of “Leonidas and his three hundred Spartans.”58

Sparta had remained honorable, even in the face of certain defeat by Persia, just as Germany had

54 Although this time seems to have been when they were most common, references to Sparta date back to the rise to power. For example, in Hitler’s Second Book, he wrote, “…we see in the Spartan state the first racialist state. The abandonment of the sick, frail, deformed children—in other words, their destruction—demonstrated greater human dignity and was in reality a thousand times more humane [than a reduced birthrate which involves “taking the lives of 100,000 healthy children”].” (Hitler’s Second Book: The Unpublished Sequel to Mein Kampf, 21. 55 Jeremy. Pridham Noakes, Geoffery, Nazism, 1919-1945, V.4. The German Home Front in World War Ii, 4 vols., vol. 4 (Exeter: Univeristy of Exeter Press, 1994-1998), 486. 56 David Welch, "Goebbels, Götterdämmerung, and the Deutsche Wochenschauen," in Hitler’s Fall: The Newsreel Witness, ed. K. R. M. Short and Stephan Dolezel (London; New York: Croom Helm, 1988), 85-87. 57 Noakes, Nazism, 1919-1945, V.4. The German Home Front in World War Ii, 4, 492. 58 Hitler, The Testament of Adolf Hitler: The Hitler-Bormann Documents, February-April 1945, 40. 58 to remain so in the face of defeat by the Allies. Even if they were to perish, they would do so gloriously as the Spartans had centuries prior, going down in legend for their valor.

Prussia’s victory against terrible odds in the Seven Years War seems to have been the most common historical reference at the war’s end. The Nazi leaders hoped for a recurrence of 1762’s

“Miracle of the House of Brandenburg”, when Frederick the Great’s dwindling troops defended

Berlin from invading Austrians and Russians. In a stroke of luck, Tsarina Elizabeth died suddenly, leaving her successor, Peter III, to negotiate a separate peace with Frederick, beginning an era of Prussian military prowess. In a November 1942 speech, during the Battle of

Stalingrad, Hitler reassured the people and himself,

Frederick the Great was indeed faced by a coalition of 45 million against his 3.9 million. If I compare our position today with his and see the bastions of our troops far beyond of our borders, then I must say: they are truly quite stupid if they think that they can ever shatter Germany.59

Frederick was evidence that Schicksal or Vorsehung would intervene on the country’s behalf, setting them back on the fated course to victory. By 1945, this example was one of last sources of hope for the failing regime. In March, Goebbels wrote in his diary,

We must be as Frederick the Great was and act as he did. The Führer agrees with me entirely when I say to him that it should be our ambition to ensure that, should a similar great crisis arise in Germany, say in 150 years’ time, our grandchildren may look back on us as a heroic example of steadfastness.60

Imagining himself and Hitler as legends in the making, Goebbels looked to the spirit of Frederick for reassurance about the existence of Germany’s special path. He took to reading biographies of

Frederick in the last months of the war, hoping for a “similar turn of fortune,” perhaps believing that if he understood Frederick fully, he could harness the Prussian king’s spirit.61 Later, when

59 Speeches and Proclamations, 1932-1945, 2698. 60 Joseph Goebbels, Final Entries, 1945: The Diaries of Joseph Goebbels, trans. Richard Barry (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1978), 1. 61 Ibid., 215. 59

Roosevelt, like the Tsarina, died suddenly in April 1945, the Party leaders took it as a sign that the forces of history would provide the nation with a miracle in its darkest hours. Speer recalled

Hitler running up to him upon hearing the news, exclaiming, “Here we have the miracle I always predicted. Who was right? The war isn’t lost.” Goebbels repeated “again and again and again” that, “Vorsehung was watching over them” and “history was repeating itself.”62

Once again, we return to Kolberg, the film, the historical battle, the town itself. The three came together in an amalgam of fantasy and reality in the Third Reich’s final weeks. In early

March 1945, the Red Army invaded Kolberg. Goebbels, in particular, felt there was a mystical dimension to this coincidence, having just recently completed his film. On March 6, Goebbels recorded in his diary his reaction to the proposal a Kolberg be evacuated:

Don’t these rotten generals have any sense of history and feeling of responsibility, and is it possible that a leader of Kolberg has, in this very moment, the ambition of following the footsteps of Loucadou instead of Gneisenau?63

Ludwig Moritz von Loucadou, a Prussian military officer portrayed as a self-interested saboteur in the film and August von Gneisenau, Kolberg’s heroic leader, were both real men. Yet,

Goebbels’ reference, given its proximity to the film’s release, was undoubtedly tied more closely to their fictionalized archetypes of his own creation than any historical reality. He processed the war’s imminent loss through this fusion of history, myth, and fiction, escaping into a world of drama and art. After the Red Army took Kolberg on March 18, Goebbels wrote in his diary,

I will see that the evacuation of Kolberg is not registered in the OKW [Wehrmacht High Command] report. We have no use for that in view of the intense psychological consequences for the Kolberg film.64

62 Original translation, “Providence was watching over us…” (Speer, 463-64.) 63 Frank Noack, "Perseverance," in Veit Harlan: The Life and Work of a Nazi Filmmaker (University Press of Kentucky, 2016), 247. 64 Ibid. 60

Both the past and present battles of Kolberg had not ended in the way that Goebbels had envisioned. However, he could not rewrite the present as he had the past for his film. That the military, let alone the town itself, gave up in Germany’s hour of need was far from heroic.

Kolberg’s surrender mere weeks after its invasion went completely against his belief in German destiny. Unlike in Kolberg, Vorsehung and Schicksal seemed to have abandoned Germany.

There would be no mystical intervention of fate, the Red Army would not suddenly halt its advance, and the utopian future they had been imagining would no longer come to be.

61

Chapter 3 Utopia

In 1933, Albert Speer received a letter from Hitler asking that he move to Berlin. Hitler explained that he needed a young architect because his plans stretched “far into the future.”1 At only 28 years of age, Speer was a rising star in the Nazi Party. He made a splash with his renovation of the Berlin Party headquarters. Shortly after his 1933 election, Hitler personally selected Speer’s proposed design for the new Reichsparteitagsgelände.2 The two became close artistic collaborators. Soon, Speer gained an understanding of Hitler’s architectural philosophy.

Hitler believed a building’s purpose was “to transmit his time and its spirit to posterity.” Inspired by the ruins of Greece and Rome, Hitler suggested a “permanent type of construction” that would display the achievements of National Socialism for centuries to come.3 Speer later refined this philosophy, calling it the “Theory of Ruin Value”:

It was hard to imagine that [modern architecture’s] rusting heaps of rubble could communicate these heroic inspirations which Hitler admired in the monuments of the past. By using special materials and by applying certain principles of statics, we should be able to build structures, which even in a state of decay, after hundreds or (as were our reckonings) thousands of years, would more or less resemble Roman models.4

To help Hitler envision the future appearance of his buildings, Speer sketched the Zeppelin Field at the Reichsparteitagsgelände “after generations of neglect, overgrown with ivy, its columns fallen, the walls crumbling here and there, but the outlines still clearly recognizable.” Hitler responded positively to the Romantic depiction, perhaps imagining the rise and fall of his empire from the perspective of the ages. He proclaimed the drawings “illuminating” and ordered that all future construction be undertaken according to the Theory of Ruin Value.5 For Hitler and Speer,

1 Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 30-31. 2 The Nazi Party Rally Grounds built to the southeast of Nuremberg, Germany. 3 Speer, 55-56. 4 Ibid., 56. 5 Ibid.

62 their work—a fusion of the political and artistic—would be transmitted to posterity through these imagined structures.6 The grounds themselves were massive neo-Classical structures, visual reminders of National Socialism’s supposed continuation of the Greco-Roman tradition.7 In their prime, Speer’s architectural forms were highly appreciated, their cold, sterile beauty documented in Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 Triumph of the Will. The marble edifices were poised to stand as symbols of the monumental, beautiful world that Hitler, Speer, and the other Nazi leaders felt uniquely qualified and chosen to create.

Figure 1: The Reichsparteitagsgelände at Nuremberg designed in 1934.

Yet, reality diverged from these dreams. The Reichsparteitagsgelände were used infrequently after 1939 because the outbreak of war forced the cancellation of the annual Party rally. In the end, Speer outlived most of his work. Wartime bombing of Nuremberg, followed by

6 In practice, architecture that followed the Theory of Ruin Value was characterized by an avoidance of steel girders and iron, instead using marble and other natural stone. (Alexander Scobie, Hitler’s State Architecture the Impact of Classical Antiquity, ed. American Council of Learned Societies (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), 94.) 7 Ibid., 2-5.

63 the Allies’ postwar demolition of Nazi symbols, reduced his buildings to rubble. The resulting scene was not so different from Speer’s original “ruins” drawing. Enshrouded in a thick layer of ash and debris, massive stone swastikas and eagles lay shattered on the ground beside toppled columns. The war had emulated centuries of wear and tear within five short years. Across

Germany, Speer’s Theory of Ruin Value had been put into practice merely a decade later.

Figure 2: Allied soldiers walk among the ruins of the Berlin Olympic Stadium in 1945.

Hitler’s hopes for an eternal monument at Nuremberg were realized, although not in his honor. Instead, the Reichsparteitagsgelände stand today as a memorial to those murdered during his regime and to those whose forced labor supplied the materials to build the grounds.

Overgrown with weeds and discolored from years of exposure, the Reichsparteitagsgelände decay in relative obscurity.

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Figure 3: The Reichsparteitagsgelände in 1945.

Figure 4: The Reichsparteitagsgelände in 2012.

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The notion that National Socialism had inaugurated a “Thousand Year Reich” was not mere propagandistic hyperbole, but a genuine belief held by the upper echelons of the Nazi

Party. The Nazi leaders understood their past, present, and future in relation to this millennial empire, operating as if their regime’s work would long outlast themselves. The response to

Speer’s sketch of the “ruins” of the Zeppelin Field is illuminating:

In Hitler’s entourage this drawing was regarded as blasphemous. That I could even conceive of a period of decline for the newly founded Reich destined to last a thousand years seemed outrageous to many of Hitler’s closest followers.8

Regardless of their opinions on the Theory of Ruin Value, these men, Hitler, and Speer all conceived of time on a grand scale, remaining conscious of the impact their deeds would have long after their deaths. Hitler, in a table talk in October 1941, explained that he acted on behalf of the Volk, not to create “immediate advantages,” but advantages that would “last 300, 500 years or more.”9 There was a sense that each policy, each military maneuver, and each word spoken by Nazi leaders would be not only remembered, but would also set the Reich on a course toward a destiny that lay in the distant future. The Nazi leaders felt that they stood at the dawn of a new golden age, an age that only they could begin to establish.

This chapter will focus on the Nazi leaders’ positive visions of the distant future.

Goebbels, in his diary in December 1940, lamented that the Volk had been “the losers, the oppressed, for 300 years.” However, their struggle would soon pay off because they were guaranteed “a new world empire of Germans.”10 Here, Goebbels articulated what the Nazi leaders believed would be the finale in Germany’s heroic struggle for existence: a utopia. The

Volk deserved this better life after their centuries of oppression—it was Germany’s destiny. In an

8 Speer, 56. 9 Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941-1944: His Private Conversations, trans. Norman Cameron, Stevens, R.H., 3rd ed. (New York: Enigma Books, 2000), 58-59. 10 Joseph Goebbels, The Goebbels Diaries, 1939-1941, ed. Fred Taylor, trans. Fred Taylor, 1st American ed.. ed. (New York: Putnam, 1983), 160.

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October 1943 speech to the SS leadership in Posen, Himmler proclaimed: “We see into the distant future, because we know what it will be.”11 Although there would be trials and tribulations before utopia could be achieved, if Germany acted in accordance with the laws of

Nature and the lessons of its ancestors, this destiny was attainable. This was an optimistic view of history, one that gave the nation a higher purpose and that presented a clear path forward. If

Germany stayed true to National Socialism, Nature guaranteed the survival and improvement of the Aryan race, and history’s mystical, Romantic trajectory promised the flourishing of Kultur

(German culture) in a great empire. The Nazi leaders believed that they had, through their knowledge of history, identified their present moment as the proper time to remake the world, and themselves as its chosen creators.

The most visible attempt to create this utopia was well underway before the fall of the

Third Reich: the extermination of the European Jews. For many Germans, an entirely Aryan nation became conceivable; cities and town across Germany and its territories were declared

Judenrein (cleansed of Jews) by the early 1940s. Here, I draw from Alon Confino’s argument that Nazi atrocities were “built on fantasy”: the “idea of a Germany without Jews.” Confino points to the burning of the Hebrew Bible in 1938 as an attempt to remove the Judeo-Christian tradition from Germany altogether, reshaping the nation’s history into an entirely German one.

This fantasy world required the “overcoming of Jewish memory and history,” effectively wiping

Jews out of European history altogether.12 The removal of Jewry was believed to be a means of achieving Germany’s salvation, as suggested by Saul Friedländer’s theory of “redemptive

11 Jeremy. Pridham Noakes, Geoffery, Nazism, 1919-1945, V.3. Foreign Policy, War, and Racial Extermination, 4 vols., vol. 3 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1994-1998), 921. 12 Alon Confino, A World without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 5-10, 241.

67 antisemitism.”13 As the Nazi leaders attempted to rewrite the past, they also believed they were writing the future, one in which Germany would be liberated from the threats of Jewish conspiracies and racial degeneration. Utopia could only come after Jewry’s eradication from existence.14 A world without Jews was both the precondition for and the essence of the Nazi leaders’ dreams of the distant future. Germany would control its past, present, future.

How did they picture this Germany without Jews? Once again we can look to Triumph of the Will. As the camera pans through the picturesque city, we see streets lined with smiling, handsome families cheering for their adored Führer. The film’s historic location, the medieval city of Nuremberg, established the regime’s connection with Germany’s past. This was also the setting of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, engaging with a Romantic view of history and establishing National Socialism as the bearer of Germany’s cultural legacy. We observe the

Hitler Youth and columns of SS- and SA- men, the future leaders of a united, racially fit

Volksgemeinschaft. In this fictionalized Nuremberg, German life had been perfected according to

Nazi standards. Racial difference no longer merited consideration—everyone was alike. Hitler described a similar future in a 1940 speech, in which Jews warranted no mention:

It is my ambition to make the German people rich and to make the German homeland beautiful. I want the standard of living of the individual raised. I want us to have the most beautiful and the finest civilization.15

Riefenstahl’s idealized Nuremberg and Hitler’s speech sketched the outlines of National

Socialist utopia.16 Hitler’s use of “beautiful” implied a lack of racial inferiors in a world of only beautiful Aryans. In this world they so nearly realized, genocide was the first step toward utopia.

13See Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews (New York: HarperCollins, 1997). 14 Still, Confino speculates that any concealment of the Jewish genocide would have eased after its completion; instead, the extermination of the Jews would become a moral lesson for posterity, offering the Nazis further historical authority over the group. Hitler was rumored to have wanted a museum built to “showcase the Nazi victory over the evil Jews.” (Confino, 240-41) 15 Adolf Hitler, My New Order, ed. Raoul Jean Jacques François De Roussy de Sales (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1941), 890.

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Their distant empire was sometimes referred to as the Thousand-Year Reich, although I came across the term more infrequently than expected in my research. Instead, Germany’s future formed an indefinite dream world upon which the leaders could pin their wildest fantasies. Their utopias would span millennia, but lacked any single timeline for their completion. Furthermore, there was no single Nazi utopia. This chapter will examine commonalities and differences among the Nazi leadership’s visions for the future, broken down into the three distinct strands of their utopian imaginations. Firstly, they imagined racial utopias cleansed of inferior races and populated by spiritually and physically perfected Aryans. This racialized conception of the future reflected their devotion to the laws of Nature and positioned the Nazi leaders as both the lone spiritual progenitors of an entire race and as mere parts of a larger Volksgemeinschaft. Moreover, they envisioned cultural and technological utopias in urban centers designed for both modern efficiency and awe-inspiring beauty. These utopian visions allowed the Nazi leaders to feel simultaneously as if they were unprecedented innovators and were carrying on the tradition of great Kultur and Wissenschaft (German science). Finally, they dreamt of pastoral utopias that would provide a limitless food supply for communities of German soldiers and farmers.

Imagining these serene worlds allowed the Nazi leaders to feel mystically connected with an idealized Germanic past and to believe they had set in motion Germany’s predestined reclamation of Eastern Europe. Each of these visions helped to position the leadership in time, understanding themselves in relation to an imagined future. Their descendants would possess the distinct political, artistic, and racial legacy that the Nazi leaders had not. Future generations of

Germans would live connected with a clear and glorious historical trajectory, anchored in the monuments, both physical and spiritual, left behind by their ancestors.

16 It should be noted that Wagner’s Nuremberg seems to have been a world without Jews as well. At the end of the opera, the Jewish-coded character, Beckmesser, is publically humiliated and runs offstage, perhaps implying he has been exiled from the community.

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Elements of these utopian visions were hyper-specific, reflecting both the Nazi leaders’ belief in their unique power to alter the world and their Romantic impulses. The Nazi leaders believed they could see these futures with absolute clarity. Fantasizing about the future became an all-consuming artistic and sensory experience: they could see the Hitler Youth marching through the wide avenues of great metropolises, taste the fruits grown in the sprawling orchards to the East, hear the classical music playing in shining concert halls, and feel the wind as it whipped through the hair of those traversing the Autobahnen. They could also avert their attention from the unpleasant sights and sounds emanating from the “inferior” peoples they would displace after establishing this utopia.

After a series of victories in the first years of the Second World War, these fantasies seemed the most likely finale to Germany’s story. Therefore, most of the Nazi leadership’s articulations of a utopian future originate prior to 1943. After the defeat at Stalingrad, utopia no longer seemed the most probable result of Germany’s struggle. Still, even as defeat became imminent, the regime continued building, colonizing, and murdering, all in the hopes of making their dreams a reality. The day-to-day struggle of war was made worthwhile with the knowledge that they were laying the foundations for an ideal future. Although the Nazi leaders knew they would not live to see their utopias come to fruition, they could escape into these fantasy worlds and imagine their descendants’ perfected lives. The Nazi leaders believed they were the master artisans of a monumental, Romantic future. Still, they had provided only the blueprint; it was up to the future Volk to carry out their plans and to achieve Germany’s destiny. The creation of these utopias seemed to ensure that they would be remembered and beloved by generations, creating a coherent legacy for the future Party that they themselves had lacked. Knowing today that the Third Reich lasted little more than a decade, the following ideas often read as

70 preposterous daydreams. Yet, the alluring vision of an eternal Reich felt real to those who dreamed it.

I. A Racial Utopia

Undoubtedly, any Nazi leader’s articulation of utopia was racial in nature. Still, the notion that the Volk could evolve toward perfection in a closed racial system represented a specific facet of the larger Nazi utopian imagination. In Mein Kampf, Hitler demanded that Germans care for their bodies and families because, “There is no freedom to sin at the cost of posterity and hence of the race.”17 The body belonged not to the individual, but to the race as a whole. By the same logic, through the careful efforts of the collective, the race could evolve over time to a higher state of consciousness and physical beauty. They took pleasure in imagining their beautiful descendants, whom they imagined in artistic terms. As if they could personally chisel the future

Volk’s features, the Nazi leaders believed they knew the aesthetic of Germany’s future down to the individual, identifying ideal forms and applying these models to all those who appeared in their fantasies. The model Aryan man, woman, and child were works of art that would transmit the essence of their ideology to posterity. The Nazi leaders believed that a perfected physical form required spiritual perfection as well, necessitating attention to Nature and to their ancestral inheritance. In these fantasies, the Nazi leaders became the progenitors of a stronger, more racially conscious Volk and took heart in the knowledge that their descendants would continue and improve upon their historic task.

1. The “New Human Type”

17 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Mannheim (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 254.

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At the opening of the Degenerate Art Exhibition in July 1937, Hitler described the appearance of the future Aryan race18:

The new age of today is at work on a new human type. Men and women are to be healthier and stronger. There is a new feeling of life, a new joy in life. Never was humanity in its external appearance and in its frame of mind nearer to the ancient world than it is today.19

The notion of an “ancient” appearance referred to a belief that the Greco-Roman societies, considered Aryan by the Nazis, had reached a pinnacle of human beauty and athleticism.20

Because the Nazi leaders believed their regime was a continuation of these Classical societies’ legacy, Germany too could achieve their perfect physical forms. In Speer’s memoirs, he recalled

Hitler’s reaction to seeing a “photograph of a beautiful woman swimmer.” Hitler remarked,

“What splendid bodies you can see today. It is only in our century that young people have once again approached Hellenistic ideals through sports.”21 Ancient Greek beauty was a goal toward which to strive, an image determined by sculpture from the period. In his diary in October 1939,

Goebbels wrote, due to “sport, gymnastics, and the fight against sexual cant,” Germany was

“taking huge, swift strides toward a new Classical age.”22 The erection of neo-Classical buildings and the cultivation of neo-Classical bodies formed their vision of a new age in Germany, a fantastical aesthetic refashioning of their professed ancestry.

A book of art criticism from 1935 entitled Menschen Schönheit: Gestalt und Antlitz des

Menschen in Leben und Kunst (Human Beauty: The Human Form and Face in Life and Art) exemplified the Nazi association of Aryan bodies and classical art. Menschen Schönheit paired

18 The Degenerate Art Exhibition, held in Munich in 1937, displayed visual art that had been removed from German museums because it had been deemed “degenerate” and “modern.” The exhibit was mostly composed of works by Expressionist artists working during the Weimar Republic, many of whom were Jewish. 19 Jeremy. Pridham Noakes, Geoffery, Nazism, 1919-1945, V.2. State, Economy, and Society, 4 vols., vol. 2 (Exeter: Univeristy of Exeter Press, 1994-1998), 399. 20 Speer wrote that Hitler “believed that the culture of Greeks had reached the peak of perfection in every field.” (Speer, 97.); Scobie, 2-5. 21 Speer, 97. 22 Goebbels, 29.

72 photos of contemporary, attractive, young Germans with antique and neo-Classical sculpture.23

In the opening of Leni Riefenstahl’s 1938 Olympia, a propaganda film documenting the 1936

Berlin Olympic Games, a shot of the Athenian sculptor Myron’s Discolobos dissolves into a shot of a young German discus thrower. Menschen Schönheit links the two as well, implying that the

Aryan body was a work of high art unto itself. The book and Riefenstahl’s film asserted that the classical past was reborn in the Third Reich, specifically in the German physical form.

Figure 5: Myron's Discolobos and a German discus thrower.

The fetishization of the Aryan body projected a future in which Germans could surpass the

Classical past, a notion confirmed by German art during the Third Reich. Often, these depictions were so exaggerated in their musculature and size that they appeared almost inhuman.

Definitively, the future Aryan man was not merely a copy of a Greek statue—he was more.

23 Hans W. Fischer, Menschen-Schönheit: Gestalt Und Antlitz Des Menschen in Leben Und Kunst (Berlin: Deutsche Buch-Gemeinschaft, 1935).

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Hitler held the firm conviction that humanity had to become entirely vegetarian to reach such heights of physical perfection. Inspired by the mystical dietary beliefs of Richard Wagner and his followers at Bayreuth, Hitler believed “meat-eating [was] harmful to humanity” and that

“animals that live on plants [had] much greater powers of resistance.”24 Goebbels concurred, writing in a 1939 diary entry, “When we reach a higher level of civilization, we shall doubtless overcome [meat-eating.]”25 At a table talk in November 1941, Hitler explained that a dog, which he believed was vegetarian, lived “eight to ten times as long as it takes him to grow up.” Thus,

Hitler reasoned, man “ought normally to live from 140 to 180 years” with a vegetarian lifestyle.26 The Nazi leaders, most of whom did not resemble the ideal Aryan and had health problems, imagined living as the super-humans that their descendants would become. Through the purification and cultivation of the body, the Volk would evolve toward its appearance in art.

Figure 6: Albert Janesch, Water Sports, 1936

24 Joseph Goebbels, The Goebbels Diaries 1942-1943, trans. Louis P. Lochner (Garden City, New York: Double Day & Company, 1948), 188. 25 The Goebbels Diaries, 1939-1941, 6. 26 Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941-1944: His Private Conversations, 114.

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2. Women

Although the role of women in the Nazi leaders’ fantasies appears anachronistic, women occupied a complicated, multi-faceted place of importance in their utopian visions. After the

First World War, Germany’s birthrate plunged from 2 million births in 1900 to only 971,000 in

1933.27 This population decline engendered fear among conservatives. Thus, they adopted the ideal of a domestic, childbearing woman as a symbol of hope for revitalizing the nation.

However, the Nazi image of the ideal woman was not so fixed. She was an amalgam of the conservative image of the mother and the mobilized young activist, with a radical emphasis on racial breeding.28 There was no single model for the woman of the future. Yet, her image was consistent. The ideal female form that appeared in propaganda emphasized her beauty and strength. In the service of destiny and the passing down of Aryan blood, Hitler hoped that women would marry young, which he felt would emphasize breeding and remove the opportunity for prostitution. 29 Complicating this emphasis on motherhood was the importance of women workers to Germany’s economy, especially during wartime. Hitler was fairly specific about the careers that women could pursue in the future, mostly confined to agricultural, service, and factory work. For example, he declared that, eventually, there would be “an end to the use of waiters in all restaurants” because “that sort of work” was “appropriate” only for women.30 He also wrote that women should no longer able to occupy significant political or social positions such as judges or lawyers.31

27 Noakes, Nazism, 1919-1945, V.2. State, Economy, and Society, 2, 256. 28 Thomas August Kohut, A German Generation: An Experiential History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 153-55. 29 Hitler, Mein Kampf, 251.; Steps were taken to secure a more populous future during the 1930s and 1940s, including abortion bans and financial incentives to mothers with large families, including “Mother’s Cross” awards for those with 4, 6, and 8 children. Among the Nazi elite, women were sent to “Bride Schools” that trained them to be dutiful wives to SS, SA, and Wehrmacht leaders. 30 Noakes, Nazism, 1919-1945, V.2. State, Economy, and Society, 2, 245. 31 Ibid.

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These changes were neither understood as a return to an anachronistic role, nor a wholesale liberation, but as the formation of new Nazi women who did her duty for the nation in a racially conscious manner. In a 1934 speech, Hitler proclaimed, “Every child that a woman brings into the world is a battle…waged for the existence of her people.” She had to execute “the task which

Nature and Vorsehung have ordained,” producing “the Germany of the future.”32 Great men shaped German history, but in the grand journey toward Germany’s destiny, women, too, played a role. The transmission of Aryan blood and ancestral consciousness was a great responsibility.33

The improvement of the Aryan race set into motion by the Nazi leaders would be passed down by generations of racially aware, dutiful German women.

Figure 7-8: Propaganda photos of German women. On the left, a female boss briefs a team of saleswomen. On the right, a mother cares for her many children.

32 Original: “…the task which Nature and Providence have ordained…”, Hitler, My New Order, 288-89. 33 This mystical thinking seems to have been disseminated beyond Hitler’s own statements. For example, the introduction to a pregnancy guide from the Third Reich described women as “den Strom des Lebens, Blut und Erbe unzähliger Ahnen (the flow of our innumerable ancestors’ life, blood, and inheritance); Johanna Haarer, Die Deutsche Mutter Und Ihr Erstes Kind (München: Lehmann, 1934).

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3. Children

Children, as the next generation, were the most salient and hopeful manifestation of

Germany’s future—living proof that the Nazi leaders’ legacy would live on and that future leaders would take up their mission. In Mein Kampf, Hitler prophesied, “Some day the German youth will either be the builders of a new völkisch state, or they will be the last witness of total collapse.”34 These children relieved the weight of destiny from the Nazi leaders’ shoulders; it was they, rather than the Nazi leadership, who would define the next era of German history.

Rosenberg, Himmler, and Hitler agreed that the importance of healthy, properly reared babies must, in the future, come before traditional notions of morality. Hitler, in Mein Kampf, expressed his hope that schools would become a space in which “the most beautiful bodies should find one another” and “help to give the nation new beauty.”35 Children born out of wedlock would not be ostracized, but would receive governmental support.36 Himmler also believed that premarital sex, illegitimate births, and sexual relationships without any personal attachment should be encouraged in the future, when the Volk might be more open to rejecting Christian morality.37

Adherence to Nature’s laws required that the Third Reich break social taboos.

They also imagined that schooling would instill heightened racial consciousness in future generations. The Third Reich’s guidelines for secondary school curriculum mandated that history be taught to “awaken in the younger generation that sense of responsibility towards ancestors and grandchildren which will enable it to let its life be subsumed in eternal Germany.”38 Hitler

34 Hitler, Mein Kampf, 406. 35 Ibid., 412. 36 During the Third Reich, SS-run Lebensborn homes were established to support unmarried pregnant mothers and babies born out of wedlock who met racial criteria.; Alfred Rosenberg, The Myth of the Twentieth Century: An Evaluation of the Spiritual-Intellectual Confrontations of Our Age (Newport Beach: Noontide Press, 1993), 368.; Hitler, Mein Kampf, 404. 37 Peter Longerich, Heinrich Himmler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 370.; Kohut, 155. 38 Noakes, Nazism, 1919-1945, V.2. State, Economy, and Society, 2, 438.

77 suggested that Gothic script be replaced by Latin lettering to more resemble “Nordic runes” and

“Greek characters,” cultivating a link with ancestral culture. Hitler also hoped that German would become the common language of Europe, eliminating foreign language instruction.39

The appearance of Germany’s future youth fit neatly into the Aryan ideal, as Speer recalled:

On the whole [Hitler] regarded children as representatives of the next generation and therefore took pleasure in their appearance (blond, blue-eyed), their stature (strong, healthy), or their intelligence (brisk, aggressive) than in their nature as children.40

Hitler articulated similar ideas in a 1935 speech, describing “the German youth of the future” as

“slim and slender, swift as the greyhound, tough as leather, and hard as Krupp steel.”41 Goebbels, too, emphasized the outward appearance of the youth rather than their inward qualities. In a 1932 diary, he recounted a Hitler Youth Rally, characterizing “this fine new generation” as “the same boys with the same faces.”42

Figure 9: An illustration from a 1935 Nazi children’s workbook.

39 Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941-1944: His Private Conversations, 110, 355. 40 Speer, 94-95. 41 Noakes, Nazism, 1919-1945, V.2. State, Economy, and Society, 2, 416. 42 Joseph Goebbels, My Part in Germany’s Fight, trans. Kurt Fiedler (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1940), 145.

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The Nazi utopian imagination saw children as aesthetic beings. They were a symbol of purity and vitality, an indication of a vigorous future Volk, both physically and spiritually. The existence of ideal Aryan children in their reality and in their fantasies was seen as proof that their utopia would come to fruition and that the Nazi leaders would live on in their descendants.

4. The SS

The SS, as the most elite organization in the regime, was considered the zenith of Aryan racial potential. Therefore, the SS was envisioned as the wellspring of future Nazi leadership.

For the Nazi leaders, the organization symbolized the continuation of a Germanic past and the future improvement of the race. In a 1942 table talk, Hitler described the SS as “a nursery of rulers,” anticipating that “in a hundred year’s time from now, we’ll control this whole empire without having to rack our brains to know where to find the proper men.”43 The SS constituted the most racially select individuals, and therefore, the most spiritually capable individuals.44 In a

1937 speech to the SS-Gruppenführer, Himmler described his vision of the SS in the future:

I hope that in ten years we are an order, and not exclusively an order of men, but a community of Sippengemeinschaften [tribal communities]. An order in which women are just as necessarily a part as men.45

Himmler’s use of Sippen (clan or tribe) to describe future SS social structures illustrated his view of the SS as a resurgence and refinement of a romanticized vision of early Germanic culture. He went on to describe the cultivation of these elite clans:

What we want to create for Germany is an upper class that has been selected repeatedly over centuries, a new nobility continually supplemented with the best sons and daughters of our

43 Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941-1944: His Private Conversations, 299. 44 Their racial superiority was determined during the SS recruitment process, which required a “race questionnaire” proving Aryan ancestry dating back to 1750; Michael Wildt, An Uncompromising Generation: The Nazi Leadership of the Reich Security Main Office, trans. Tom Lampert (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 111-12. 45 Heinrich Himmler: Geheimreden 1933-1945 und andere Ansprachen, ed. Bradley F. Smith and Agnes F. Peterson (Frankfurt am Main: Propyläen Verlag, 1974), 61, cited in Wildt, 110-112

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Volk, a new nobility that never grows old, that can be traced back in our traditions and our past, to the extent that these are valuable, into the greatest millennia, and that represents for our Volk eternal youth.46

Unlike the egalitarian spirit of the Volksgemeinschaft, Himmler fantasized that this “new nobility” would be a secretive, insular clan that would rule the Reich. Michael Wildt describes this vision as a “racist utopia” around which Himmler organized his worldview.47 With careful adherence to the laws of Nature in such highly selective breeding, Himmler may have imagined that measures such as the strict marriage laws for SS-men would become obsolete. The elite would grow so large as to allow for intermarriage, a practice that he imagined the Germanic tribes observed. Himmler maintained these visions of the SS throughout his life, remarking in a

1943 speech that his SS were just the “first SS men…in the long history of the Germanic people stretching before us,” the progenitors of nation’s everlasting community of future leaders.48

Himmler and Hitler believed that they had begun a legacy of strong German leaders that would continue beyond their lifetimes. They would not have to take full responsibility for Germany’s future—Nature herself would cultivate better, future men for this great task.

5. A German Religion

The Nazi leaders’ ideas of religion were an attempt to fuse racial improvement and spiritual life in Germany’s future. Although they disagreed about the future of religion in Germany, each leader’s conception involved the rejection of Christianity and the improved consciousness of race. They felt as if they were uniquely chosen to enlighten the nation, allowing Germany to overcome centuries of tradition in order to gain a heightened racial consciousness. Himmler, for example, devoted much of his time and energy to Germany’s spiritual future. Peter Longerich

46 Ibid. 47 Wildt, 110. 48 Noakes, Nazism, 1919-1945, V.3. Foreign Policy, War, and Racial Extermination, 3, 921.

80 suggests that Himmler possessed plans for an entirely German religion that would connect the

Volk with its pagan ancestors.49 Still, Himmler never referenced particular pagan gods, instead centering his spirituality on a “cult of ancestors” who guaranteed eternal life through reincarnation.50 As he dreamed of the distant future, Himmler believed that he, or some version of himself, would be present to witness it. Himmler did not institute his new religion outside of the SS, feeling that Germany was not yet ready to reject its Christian traditions.51 Within the SS, however, Germany’s future religious practices began to take shape. Babies were wrapped in Nazi flags and laid on pagan altars during baptisms. Funerals included readings from Mein Kampf and

Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Historical sites, like Henry the Fowler’s crypt at

Quedlinburg, were decorated with Nordic runes and made into holy places. At SS weddings, vows included, “I wish that your clan may be without beginning or end.”52

Eric Kurlander argues that, like Himmler, other Nazi leaders envisioned alternative spiritualties, even if they were not as invested in them.53 Martin Bormann, for example, publically decried the “naïve” Christian idea of God, pointing instead to the holiness of Nature,

“the force which moves all [the] bodies in the universe.”54 Bormann also shared Himmler’s belief in eternal life through the Volk, as previously discussed.55 Rosenberg’s staunchly anti-

Christian stances abound in The Myth of the Twentieth Century. He hoped that future religious

49 Himmler believed that the Catholic Church had stifled the true Germanic religion and culture by suppressing the heretics and witches of early modern Germany. (Buchheim, 330); Longerich, 265-85. 50 Ibid., 267-69. 51 Ibid., 298. 52 Ibid., 288-89, 98. 53 Eric Kurlander, Hitler's Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 193. 54 George L. Mosse, Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural, and Social Life in the Third Reich (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1966), 245. 55 Kurlander, 51-52.

81 practice would glorify the Nazi martyrs, envisioning, “On Sundays the village [should] assemble, not around pillars of Mary, but around statues of the German field gray soldiers.”56

Goebbels made little mention of a new religion in his diaries, instead reflecting upon his disdain for Christianity. He did, however, in a 1932 diary entry, refer to a performance of

Wagner’s Parsifal as being “just like going to Church,” suggesting that he saw the appreciation of Kultur as a part of Germany’s spiritual future.57 Hitler was against any new religion for

Germany.58 A staunch atheist, Hitler did not feel that there needed to be a replacement for the

Church. In an October 1941 table talk, Hitler described his philosophy on religion:

It seems to me that nothing would be more foolish than to re-establish the worship of Wotan. Our old mythology had ceased to be viable when Christianity implanted itself. Nothing dies unless it is moribund.59

According to his view of history as progress, if pagan German religion had died out, it was no longer suited to the time. Because history was defined by development rather than regression,

Christianity had now become obsolete. Thus, he advocated for “the religions to devour themselves, without persecutions,” also reflecting his Social Darwinist conception of the world.60

He suggested that “lessons in typewriting” replace any kind of religious instruction in German schools.61 In the future, one could have “his private creed,” but education and communal life should be centered on “the maintenance of the state.”62 In a 1938 speech, he proclaimed, “We have no rooms for worship, but only halls for the people—no open spaces for worship, but

56 Rosenberg, 405. 57 Goebbels, My Part in Germany’s Fight, 37. 58 Speer recalled “Hitler had little sympathy with Himmler in his mythologizing of the SS,” once stating, “What nonsense! Here we have at least reached an age that has left all mysticism behind, and now he wants to start that all over again. We might just as well have stayed with the church. At least it has tradition. To think that I may some day be turned into an SS saint! Can you imagine it? I would turn over in my grave.” (Speer, 94.) 59 Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941-1944: His Private Conversations, 61. 60 Ibid., 6-7. 61 Ibid., 75. 62 Ibid., 62.

82 spaces for assemblies and parades.”63 For Hitler, Germany’s spiritual future would not include organized religion, but instead focus on mystical concepts of politics and race.

All of these religious conceptions can be understood in the framework of Confino’s assertion that National Socialism sought to remove the Judeo-Christian tradition and establish an entirely German culture and history.64 The Nazi leaders desired a racial utopia centered on the maintenance and enhancement of the Aryan spirit and physical form—a uniquely German way of life. The thrill of rejecting traditional morality, combined with the notion that the race could become superhuman, made dreaming of a racial future a hopeful, enthralling practice. The Nazi leaders felt vital to Germany as the forebears of a previously unimaginable race of strong, racially conscious Germans, a Volksgemeinschaft capable of carrying on their legacy.

II. Modern Metropolises

From the Nazi leaders’ perspectives, the Third Reich stood at the precipice of a golden age of

German thinking, innovation, and artistic creation. Their Romantic worlds, composed of enormous cities, sprawling highways, and miraculous technology, were thrilling both in novelty and in scale. Whether its image manifested in visions of monumental construction or technological advancement, this futuristic utopia was imagined in aesthetic terms, positioning the

Nazi leaders as the master artisans of a highly advanced new age. They would transcend time through these manifestations of their legacy across the German landscape, ensuring that their dreams would be remembered by posterity. Without a coherent or consistent legacy of their own, they crafted a future in which their imagined descendants’ would be secured in physical form.

63 My New Order, 500. 64 See the prior discussion of A World Without Jews in the introduction.

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1. Art

The Nazi leaders believed that the removal of “degenerate” culture and the establishment of an entirely Aryan one would create a future civilization that only produced and appreciated true

German art. At the opening of the House of German Art in 1937, Hitler announced, “The new

Reich will call into being an astounding blossoming of German art,” envisioning a proliferation of representational art glorifying the German form, landscape, and history.65 In a 1942 table talk,

Hitler predicted that all German towns, regardless of size, would have a museum, not just one

“that students occasionally visit,” but an impressive, world-class site of German culture.66

Goebbels, in a 1942 article, conjured up a picture of bustling German cultural life with

“glittering parties...theatres and music halls…cinemas and community halls” that “fill up every evening with happy people.”67 As artist-politicians, the Nazi leaders envisioned this new era of

Kultur as an extension of their unique artistic influence over Germany.68 They would be remembered not only for being the original creators of this utopia, but also for their artistic production and tastes: they felt they had begun a Renaissance of German art. One can easily imagine the images running through their heads: packed screenings of Technicolor films, elaborate performances of Wagner in opera houses across the nation, and crowded museums bustling with schoolchildren.

2. Führer Cities

Hitler was devoted to a series of plans for rebuilding cities across Germany and Austria, very few of which were ever completed. Dubbed “Führer Cities,” these metropolises combined Hitler

65 Hitler, My New Order, 423. 66 Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941-1944: His Private Conversations, 451. 67 Jeremy. Pridham Noakes, Geoffery, Nazism, 1919-1945, V.4. The German Home Front in World War Ii, 4 vols., vol. 4 (Exeter: Univeristy of Exeter Press, 1994-1998), 486. 68 See Jonathan Petropoulos, Art as Politics in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

84 and Speer’s neo-Classical architectural tastes with ultramodern urban planning—a fusion of their racial legacy and modern Wissenschaft.69 The Führer cities also promised artistic immortality for the Nazi leaders. Linz, Nuremberg, and Berlin (Hitler’s childhood home, the site of the Party rally, and the capital) were the highest priorities. Hitler dreamt of turning Linz into a “German

Budapest” or “a real competitor to Vienna.”70 He envisioned his hometown as a cultural hub with an enormous opera house and a state-of-the-art observatory, writing his own origin story as a great artist.71 Rosenberg was especially eager for The Myth of the Twentieth Century to be

“bricked into the cornerstone…for all time” at the new Nuremberg Congress Hall, seeing this gesture as securing his intellectual legacy in a permanent, physical form.72 Upon hearing the 50 million RM cost estimate for completing the Reichsparteitagsgelände, Hitler told Speer, “That is less than two battleships...how quickly a warship can be destroyed, and if not, it is scrap iron anyhow in ten years.” However, he continued, buildings like Nuremberg’s colossal 400,000-seat stadium would “stand for centuries.”73 Hitler’s architectural fantasies were not stymied by price, often taking precedence over the economy or war effort for their “permanent” value. These buildings would transmit German ideology and Hitler’s spirit for millennia.

Hitler and Speer devoted themselves above all to Berlin’s future. Hitler wanted the city renamed “Germania,” which he explicitly stated would honor the fulfillment of German unification during the Second Reich, but may have also been a reference to Tacitus’

69 Paul B. Jaskot, The Architecture of Oppression: The Ss, Forced Labor and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy, Architext (Routledge, 1999), 5, 37. In a 1941 article in the SS magazine, Himmler linked Aryanism and inherited ideas of architecture, writing, “As the blood speaks, so the people build.” (“Deutsche Bergen im Osten” in Das Schwarze Korps, Jan. 1941, Vol. 4, p.4, cited in ibid., 114.) 70 Goebbels, The Goebbels Diaries 1942-1943. 71 Deborah Menaker Rothschild, Prelude to a Nightmare: Art, Politics, and Hitler’s Early Years in Vienna 1906-1913 (Williamstown, MA: Williams College Museum of Art, 2002), 17.; Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941-1944: His Private Conversations, 322. 72 Jürgen Matthäus, The Political Diary of Alfred Rosenberg and the Onset of the Holocaust, ed. Frank Bajohr (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 83. 73 Speer, 68.

85 aforementioned history of the ancient Germanic tribes.74 Hitler and Speer’s comprehensive redesign featured precisely organized, broad avenues, multiple airports, a 300 ft. tall arch dedicated to the martyrs of World War I, a large man-made lake for recreational swimming, and a large grove of deciduous trees in the Tiergarten, one of the few elements of Speer’s plan that still exist today.75 At the heart of the city would stand the redesigned massive, neo-Classical

Reich Chancellery, characterized by Nazi art historians as the beginning of a revolutionary “new age of building” in Germany.76 These hyper-specific, Romantic visions of these cities, as if the

Nazi leaders were walking its broad avenues and peering up in awe at its monumental buildings, reflected their belief that they were chosen to craft the new German landscape. Its “permanent” architecture would manifest their racial and artistic legacies on a scale only possible in the modern age. The Nazi Party would leave a definitive, visible legacy for their descendants.

Hitler dreamt of a modern, dense city life, demanding that one million apartments be built yearly after the war’s end. Thus, within their imagined neo-historical cityscapes, Speer and Hitler also fit in modern planned communities. Each block of apartments would have a garage for a fleet of Volkswagen and playgrounds with attendants so that children could safely play on their own. These buildings would also feature futuristic amenities, such as an automatic “button” calling for the landlord to “appear immediately” and an “alarm clock…[to] switch on the mechanism that boils the water.”77 The new cities were intended to be eternal symbols of Kultur, simultaneously displaying a link with an idealized past and flaunting Germany’s cutting edge

74 Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941-1944: His Private Conversations, 523. 75 Speer, 74, 77-78, 137-38. 76 The new Reich Chancellery was completed during the Third Reich but demolished postwar.; Rudolf Wolters and Heinrich Wolff, Die Neue Reichskanzlei: Architekt Albert Speer (München: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1940), 52. 77 Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941-1944: His Private Conversations, 347-48.

86 technology. Their dreams reflect the Romanticism the Nazi leaders found in technology and in the past, in the spectacle of striking monuments and of miraculous technological innovation.

Figure 10: The 1939 model for Speer’s proposed redesign of Berlin.

The Nazi leaders’ relationship with innovation fits squarely into Jeffery Herf’s conception of “reactionary modernism,” a conception that saw technology’s function both as modern “means-end rationality” and “anti-modernist, romantic and irrationalist” nationalism.78

78 Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 1-2, 15-17.

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Herf points out that technological marvels developed during the Third Reich, such as radios and cars, the Volksempfänger (“people’s receiver”) and Volkswagen (“people’s car”) respectively, were understood as reflections of the superiority of Wissenschaft (German science) and German

Kultur’s Romantic essence. In a book written by Nazi economist Fritz Nonnenbruch in 1936, he described German technology:

Flying in an airplane, driving in a car, the thunder of the elevated railway, the various landscapes of the battlefield, the growing stream of flowing iron in the ghostly night filled with steel ovens—all of these things are incomparably more romantic than anything previous romantics could imagine.79

Nonnenbruch’s statement exemplifies what the Nazi leaders saw as the specifically German interaction with technology. It was a romantic experience, imbued with meaning and pleasure beyond human comprehension. Among the Nazi leadership, Goebbels seems to have been most interested in these innovations, believing that the “Reich must keep pace with technology.”80 He was particularly fascinated with the radio as “the most modern” propaganda tool, remarking to the directors of the German radio in 1933, “I also believe—one should not say that out loud— that radio will in the end replace the press.”81 Hitler’s table talks reveal vague ideas about renewable fuel sources, climate control, and self-clearing highways, suggesting that he, too, envisioned a future of previously unfathomable technological innovation.82 The Nazi leaders believed that they, as artist-politicians, were exceptionally qualified to initiate an age of great

Wissenschaft and Kultur.

79Fritz Nonnenbruch, Die Dynamische Wirtschaft (München: Eher, 1936), 153. Referenced and translated in Herf, 209. 80 Noakes, Nazism, 1919-1945, V.2. State, Economy, and Society, 2, 381. 81 Ibid., 385. 82 Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941-1944: His Private Conversations, 21-23, 400, 198.

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In the regime’s final years, Hitler asked that Speer continue “at full speed” and that he increase the list of Führer cities, an expansion that would have cost 22-25 billion RM in their failing war economy.83 Speer described Hitler’s tireless obsession with these cities:

Even while Hitler was deep in the plans for the Russian campaign, his mind was already dwelling on the theatrical effects for the victory parades of 1950, once the grand boulevard and the great triumphal arch had been completed.84

At this point, these plans were neither realistic nor feasible, but remained sources of hope and fantastical escape for Hitler. He could live beyond death through the cities’ grandeur, remembered as the master architect of the Third Reich.

3. The Autobahn

The Autobahnen were a point of connection between the Nazi leaders’ futuristic utopian cities and pastoral utopias. The roads would connect Germany’s imagined past in the East with the new empire, representing both the leaders’ historical mission to organize and settle the region and their belief in German technological superiority. Once again applying Herf’s framework of reactionary modernism, the roads held spiritual meaning in addition to their practical purpose of improving the empire’s infrastructure. Goebbels described the Autobahnen in a 1942 article:

We dream of a happy people in a beautiful land, traversed by broad roads like bands of silver which are also open to the modest car of the every man. Beside them lie pretty villages and well laid-out cities with clean and roomy houses inhabited by large families for whom they can provide sufficient space.85

The Autobahnen would create order and beauty in the chaotic, backwards lands they would cross. Hitler, for example, fantasized about transforming Crimea and Croatia to a Nazi “tourist’s paradise” made “accessible by means of an Autobahn.”86 He found romance in the conquest and civilizing of this wild Eastern frontier through rational German Wissenschaft, often referencing

83 Speer, 176. 84 Ibid., 174. 85 Noakes, Nazism, 1919-1945, V.4. The German Home Front in World War Ii, 4, 486. 86 Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941-1944: His Private Conversations, 4-5.

89 the “feeling for great, open spaces” the roads would engender.87 Most explicit was the head engineer of the project, Fritz Todt, who, in a book entitled Deutschlands Autobahnen, Adolf

Hitlers Straßen (Germany’s Highways, Adolf Hitler’s Streets) asserted, “A street is a work of art.”88 The book—seemingly intended for artistic appreciation—features landscape photography of the Autobahn and its construction. For the Nazis, road building was also an aesthetic pursuit.

In the image below, the highways disappear at the horizon, stretching into the distance like great arms of the German Reich. The Autobahn was imbued with a sense of adventure and promise for the Nazi leaders, who saw the East as a vast, open space of limitless potential. Fantasizing about these massive Autobahnen, which would alter the appearance of Europe itself, made the Nazis leaders feel as if they were historic innovators of a new landscape and of a new way of life.

Figure 11: The Autobahn

87 Ibid., 35. 88 “Straßen sind Kulturgüter. Jede Straße, die wir benutzen, hat ihre hundertjährige Geschichte und Bedeutung. Ein Straßenzug ist ein Kunstwerk.” (Otto Reismann, Deutschlands Autobahnen: Adolf Hitlers Straßen (Bayreuth: Gauverlag Bayerische Ostmark, 1937), 2.)

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III. “A Happy People in a Beautiful Land”

The Nazi leaders also believed themselves to have been chosen to fulfill centuries old dreams of Lebensraum. As previously discussed, the conquest of Eastern Europe was understood as historic necessity. In a 1943 speech at the opening of the Reichszentrale für Ostforschung (Reich

Center for Eastern Studies), Rosenberg called the lands Germany’s “region of destiny.”89 History had been leading the nation eastward, and the Nazi leaders felt chosen to resettle the Volk in its ancestral home. Visions of Eastern Europe comprised the Nazis’ more anti-modern ideas of the future, picturing small agricultural communities reenacting an idealized vision of a traditional

German way of life.90 In 1939, Hitler defined the purpose of the occupation of Poland: “To create a German granary, a strong peasantry, to resettle good Germans from all over the world.”91 The typical image of the Eastern settler community was a combination of idealized

German farmers and modern National Socialist men—“soldier-peasants” who would serve their villages as teachers, farmers, and military men.92 Rosenberg was particularly invested in this vision of utopia. As discussed in The Myth of the Twentieth Century, Rosenberg advocated for

“decentralization” through abandonment of cities; he felt that “culture only forms itself in the town” and that the city “promotes decline.”93 Rosenberg was so fervently against the construction of cities that he interpreted the bombing of large cities like Hamburg as a “sign from

Schicksal” to vacate cities and return “to the virtues of rural life.”94 The Nazi leaders imagined

89 Michael Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards: A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 297. 90 I will refer to Eastern Europe as a whole because these long-term dreams were predominantly about a generalized ‘East’, without national or ethnic distinctions, unless otherwise noted. 91 Noakes, Nazism, 1919-1945, V.3. Foreign Policy, War, and Racial Extermination, 3, 927. 92 Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941-1944: His Private Conversations, 15-16. 93 Rosenberg, 359-61. 94 Original translation, “sign of destiny [Wink des Schicksals]”; Memoirs of Alfred Rosenberg, with Commentaries, ed. Serge Lang, Eric Posselt, and Edgar A. Palmer (Chicago: Ziff-Davis Publishing Company, 1949), 318.

91 that they had created the conditions for the Volk to access an essential, mystical part of the

German soul through this reiteration of an idealized traditional lifestyle. They lost themselves in these Romantic visions, quiet towns that were worlds away from their chaotic, war-torn reality.

The colonies’ central purpose would be to provide food for the growing Reich. Hitler imagined a system of “warming greenhouses” in cities that would keep the produce fresh during the winter, once again suggesting his Romantic conception of the future’s astonishing technological feats.95 Goebbels dreamed of an endless food supply, writing in 1942, “In the limitless fields of the east, yellow corn is waving, enough and more than enough to feed our people and the whole of Europe.”96 In 1941, Hitler declared that “in 300 years” Ukraine would be “one of the loveliest gardens in the world” filled with “fields, gardens, [and] orchards.”97

Fears of food shortages—which developed during the First World War and the Weimar

Republic, and intensified during the Second World War—vanished in these fantasies. The East would become a Garden of Eden with a seemingly endless supply of food. The Nazi leaders believed that their political and artistic influence in the region would return the landscape to its natural beauty. In a 1941 table talk, Hitler declared, “We’ll give this country a past,” predicting that the East would be “a country where the work is hard, but the joy pays for the trouble.”98 The notion of giving the region “a past” suggested that Germany would bring meaning and culture to a space previously inhabited by racial inferiors. The Nazi leaders would imbue the land with its original Germanic spirit, thereby securing a legendary future.

95 Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941-1944: His Private Conversations, 23-29. 96 Noakes, Nazism, 1919-1945, V.4. The German Home Front in World War Ii, 4, 486. 97 Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941-1944: His Private Conversations, 68. 98 Ibid.

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The Nazi leaders often envisioned their eastward expansion through the historical framework of American westward expansion in the nineteenth century.99 They drew a historical connection between their racial mission and the American genocide of the continent’s indigenous peoples.

Yet, more resonant with the Nazi leaders’ Romantic sensibilities was the image of the American

West presented in Western films and novels—conquest and settlement as a valiant, masculine adventure in a wild frontier.100 This manifested most in the notion of an Eastern “wall.” This idea appears as early as Mein Kampf, in which Hitler proposed a series of “border colonies.”

Considered a “precious national treasure,” this brave population would live at the edge of civilization, transforming land neglected for centuries by racial inferiors into a beautiful landscape suitable for German settlement.101 The East would thus return to how the Nazi leaders believed it had appeared in medieval Europe. Hitler, at a table talk in August 1941, predicted,

“We shall have a belt of handsome villages connected by the best roads. What exists beyond that will be another world.” He went on, explaining that a “wall of human breasts” was necessary because a physical wall would engender “too great a feeling of security.”102 Nature mandated that the soldier-peasant settlers keep their strength in preparation for inevitable insurrections from other races, conflicts Himmler described to the SS leaders in Posen in 1943 as the “battles of destiny against Asia.”103 In Reinhard Heydrich’s first speech in occupied Prague in October

1942, he described Western Poland as this illusory Eastern Wall, forming a “bulwark of

Germandom” as an eternal “sentry facing east.”104 The Nazi leaders Romantically envisioned

99 Peter Fritzsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 155. 100 Lutz P. Koepnick, "Siegfried Rides Again: Westerns, Technology, and the Third Reich," Cultural Studies 11, no. 3 (1997). 101 Hitler, Mein Kampf, 405. 102 Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941-1944: His Private Conversations, 23-29. 103 Noakes, Nazism, 1919-1945, V.3. Foreign Policy, War, and Racial Extermination, 3, 921. 104 Robert Gerwarth, Hitler’s Hangman: The Life of Heydrich (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 246- 47.

93 this settler population as a group of Germanic heroes, struggling against the ruffians living in the wilds beyond its borders.

These utopian visions stopped abruptly at the Eastern Wall. Beyond the wall, their imagined future world did not engender nearly the same Romantic feelings. Any visions of a future there were fantasies of power and subjugation already being enacted during the Third Reich, and were inevitably bogged down in the bureaucratic chaos of the regime’s Eastern Policy.105 Hitler explained in an August 1941 table talk that, “In the event of a revolution, we shall only have to drop a few bombs on their cities, and the affair will be liquidated.”106 The populations living beyond the Eastern Wall would flounder without culture, merely subsisting in a harsh, confined world, outside of the light of German civilization. The Nazi leaders’ visions of the non-

Germanized East were dystopian counterparts to their Germanic dream worlds. As Fritzsche points out, eastern colonization would “affirm [Germans’] superior status as a people able to make history and determine its destiny.”107 They needed this distorted mirror image to appreciate the beauty of their utopian visions and to grasp their special historical abilities.

IV. A New World

What about Hitler’s purported plans for world domination? His plans for the future seem largely confined to Europe. One does not observe the same obsessive level of fantasizing about

Africa, North America, or Asia that the Nazi leaders exhibited toward Central and Eastern

Europe. Hitler did not seem to find much spiritual significance in reclaiming Imperial Germany’s

105 As Michael Wildt writes, “This conflict among the National-Socialist leadership about the nature of the General Government—whether it should be, in Goebbels’ terminology, “a dumping ground for Jews, diseased people, and loafers”; a reserve labor force; or a model colonial territory as proposed by Hans Frank—did not lead to a stable political conception.” (Wildt, 303) 106 Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941-1944: His Private Conversations, 19, 23-29. 107 Fritzsche, 156-57.

94 far flung colonies, although he did, at one point, express interest in reclaiming Cameroon.108

Still, in a table talk in February 1942 he explained, “On the day when we’ve solidly organized

Europe, we shall be able to look towards Africa. And, who knows? Perhaps one day we shall be able to entertain other ambitions.”109 It is likely that if Germany’s victory streak in the World

War had continued, or if Germany had won the war, Hitler and his comrades would have indulged in larger scale fantasies. Even within their short tenure, the Nazi leaders were quickly able to paint elaborate images of utopia—a testament to their confidence in their historical mission and destiny. Their creation of new and beautiful dream worlds allowed the Nazi leaders to situate themselves in relationship to the distant future for which they were building the foundations.

These utopian visions began to dissipate around 1942 and almost entirely disappear from my source material after 1943. Undoubtedly, this pattern reflects growing fears about the reality of

Germany’s impending defeat. There existed vague mentions of a happy future for the Volk after this period. However, these were infrequent and wrapped up more in discourses of destiny and fate, as previously examined. These distant utopias, which had been growing sharper and clearer in the eyes of Nazi leaders, suddenly disappeared from view. In their place, a new, awe-inspiring world—one of ultimate catastrophe—came into focus.

108 Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941-1944: His Private Conversations, 74. 109 Ibid., 328.

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Chapter 4 Apocalypse

In the final months of the Third Reich, each passing day seemed to intensify the certainty of Germany’s defeat. The enemy approached from the East and West. Major German cities were relentlessly bombed, rendering the country’s landscape unrecognizable. In this frightening, alien world, Nazi leaders struggled to come to terms with the failure of their historical mission. The grim reality that Germany now faced was a far cry from the beautiful empire imagined in the

Reich’s earlier years. Instead, a horrifying echo of 1918 was descending upon Germany, even despite the Volk’s careful adherence to National Socialist ideals. Amidst this atmosphere of chaos and disillusionment, Nazi leaders strove to reconcile their lived experience with the ideology to which they had devoted their hearts and minds for more than a decade. Within the

Nazi worldview, the course of the war simply did not make sense: they had struggled, righteously and with racial consciousness, but had apparently failed nonetheless. If they had acted in accordance with destiny, then where was Vorsehung at the Battle of Stalingrad? If they had remained conscious of their ancestors, then where was the miracle of the House of

Brandenberg as Soviet troops marched on Berlin? If they had maintained the Aryan race, then why had Nature allowed inferior races to overrun their borders? Tellingly, horoscopes surged in popularity among government officials, promising the fateful intervention that would set

Germany back on course to victory. Yet, as Albert Speer recalled, “Only in the astrological sheets did the regime still have a future.”1 Hitler and his inner circle could not stand the thought of being abandoned by the forces of history and of watching their Thousand Year Reich collapse into nothingness only twelve years after its inception.

1 Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 411. 96

Amidst the political chaos of the Reich’s final months was the widespread hope for a miracle that would turn the tide of war. 2 Speer characterized this obsession as a “naïve faith” among the leadership, awaiting the “secret weapons” that “at the last moment would annihilate an enemy.”3

Hitler often alluded to “future new weapons” that would save Germany, a rumor that the

Propaganda Ministry deliberately circulated throughout the government and military in late

1944, which spread to the citizenry by early 1945.4 Hitler and Goebbels likely believed these rumors as well. Hitler was fascinated by super weapons technology, pouring money into research for rockets as early as 1937.5 During the war, he funded research into fantastical weapons that would harness supposed hidden geological energies in the earth and in space.6 In early April

1945, head of the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (German Labor Front) Robert Ley specifically instructed Speer to begin research into “death rays,” claiming there was “nothing more important” for Germany’s survival.7 Confidence in German technological superiority inspired these notions: the Nazi leaders hoped that Wissenschaft (German science) would produce a

“wonder weapon.” Himmler even organized an extensive search for the mythical “Rhine gold” in the Rhine and Inn rivers, inspired by Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, between 1943-1944, looking for any last shred of hope for the economically and military collapsing regime.8 The

Nazi leaders worked tirelessly to reintroduce dramatic shifts in fate to their story. Unable to face defeat, Hitler surrounded himself with men who supplied him with reassuring notions of death rays that would destroy entire cities in an instant or hordes of German refugees from the East

2 Michael H. Kater, Das “Ahnenerbe” Der Ss, 1935-1945: Ein Beitrag Zur Kultur Politik Des Dritten Reiches, Studien Für Zeitgeschichte (München: R. Oldenbourg, 2006), 220. 3 Speer, 446. 4 Ibid., 409-10. 5 Speer claims that, between 1937-1940, the Wehrmacht spent 550 million RM to develop a “large rocket” that never came to fruition. (Speer, 227-228) 6 Eric Kurlander, Hitler's Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 272-73. 7 Speer, 464. 8 Kurlander, 271-72. 97 who would break through enemy lines.9 It was a safer version of reality; one in which victory still felt inevitable and a utopian future remained possible.

Still, these hopes for a miracle were not symptomatic of a regime in utter denial. Instead, the

Nazi leadership developed a vision of Germany’s future characterized by intense, cosmic defeatism. Not only was their utopia moving further from reach, the survival of the race also seemed to be in jeopardy. This chapter will examine ideas of dystopian, even apocalyptic, worlds that would come into existence after the war’s end, visions that provided a dramatic conclusion to Germany’s story. Within their descriptions, which primarily appeared between 1943-1945, dreams of an eternal National Socialist utopia were transformed into centuries-long nightmares of anarchy in the absence of Aryan supremacy. As Confino argues, the murder of European

Jewry was considered a necessary “act of creation” to form a Nazi world that would yield “a cosmic result, either salvation or eternal damnation.”10 Operating at such extremes reflected the

Social Darwinist ideals they held so closely—the Volk had always been under threat of extinction. Now that the war was ending, the race seemed fated for destruction. These apocalyptic fantasies reflected their devotion to self-mythologization. If they could not be the founders of a new world order, the world would end with them in the most horrifyingly beautiful way imaginable. Rather than fizzle out in humiliating defeat as in the First World War, the Nazi leaders imagined themselves as great heroes destined to fall in battle, their final acts ones of valor and sacrifice, enacting a romantic Heldentod (hero’s death).

I will examine the development of these apocalyptic worlds by theme. First, I will discuss ideas of conquest, subjugation, and extermination by the conjoined forces of Bolsheviks and

Jews, visions that were articulated throughout the regime’s existence, but that intensified in its

9 Speer, 464-65. 10 Alon Confino, A World without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 192. 98 final years. These images allowed the Nazi leaders to believe the Aryan race was fighting for survival on the same scale as the Jews the Nazis sought to exterminate, imbuing their struggle with heightened urgency and drama. Then, I will look at notions of sacrifice as an example for future generations, which the Nazi leaders believed would inspire future Germans to fight the next great war. Finally, I will examine the most large-scale apocalyptic spectacles, ranging from mythological and Wagnerian ideas of Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods) to natural disasters.

These notions can be understood through Saul Friedländer’s framing of the “Nazi apocalyptic imagination,” which he writes offered “final crisis and ultimate salvation” through the acceptance of and often desire for destruction.11 This imagination was centered on mythical ideas of death, uniting their yearnings for sacrifice and resurrection into an emotional, romantic, and terrifying image of the regime’s collapse.12 Friedländer characterizes the resulting aesthetic as a

“kitsch of death,” which found beauty in the high emotions and terrifying images that dominated

Nazi thought in the Third Reich’s final days.13 Nazi leaders abandoned reality for these

Romantic scenarios. In these imaginings, they could remain world-historical figures. Rather than the architects of a better world, they would become the choreographers of its dramatic final act.

As Goebbels declared at Nazi martyr Horst Wessel’s funeral in 1930, “Perhaps we Germans don’t know much about living, but as for death—that we do fabulously!”14 Seeing themselves as

11 Saul Friedländer, Visions of Apocalypse: End or Rebirth? (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1985), 7-11. 12 See Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 26-27, 42, 131-34. and "Preface to a Symposium: Kitsch and the Apocalyptic Imagination," Salmagundi, no. 85/86 (1990): 203-05. 13 Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death, 26-27. 14 Horst Wessel was a young SA member who was shot by the German Communist Party in 1930. Wessel’s death became an important symbol of Nazi struggle and sacrifice. The Horst-Wessel-Lied, a march for which Wessel had written lyrics, became the Germany’s national anthem in addition to the Deutschlandlied after Hitler’s election in 1933.; Jay W. Baird, To Die for Germany: Heroes in the Nazi Pantheon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 97. 99 artist-politicians, they reveled in their deaths, embracing the drama and grandeur of a collapsing world of their own creation.

In a reality that seemed to have lost meaning and stability, the Nazis became preoccupied with reasserting their preferred narratives over their collapsing empire. Understanding themselves the last bastions of Aryanism before the onset of a horrifying dark age, Nazi leaders were able to find meaning in their overwhelming failure and in the total defeat of their nation. It was too difficult for them to internalize the mundane explanation that they had been bested militarily without interference from some higher power. It would have been overwhelming to experience themselves as personally responsible for Germany’s defeat. Instead, each Nazi leader adjusted his outlook, embracing the notion that the Volk had actually been destined to lose their final battle all along. It was a means of making peace with and elevating their coming demise and the end of all they had built. Natural selection and the movement of history brought the Volk the Endkampf (final battle) not to achieve victory, but to die valiantly, bringing down as many enemies with them as possible. It was the alternative culmination of Germany’s historical narrative: tragedy. Yet, this ending was neither truly sad nor any less significant than a triumphant one. They took not merely solace, but pleasure in this imagined apocalypse.

As the world around them went up in flames, the Nazi leaders choreographed their last moves, ensuring that posterity would remember them. They ultimately embraced what, in their eyes, were righteous and honorable deaths. As in the finale of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, they fantasized that a horrifyingly beautiful, cleansing fire would destroy the nation. At moments, this felt like the absolute end for Germany. Yet, more comfortingly, they often hoped that this fire would provide fertile ground for a stronger future. A future Volk would once again take up

Germany’s struggle, receiving another chance at achieving destiny. Thus, the nation’s future was 100 left out of the hands of the Nazis leaders, with responsibility falling squarely on Vorsehung,

Schicksal, Nature, and the Germans of the future. The Nazi leaders felt insignificant in comparison to this sprawling vision of time, merely a part of a Volk that had lasted centuries and through whom they could live forever. Their deaths were but the first heroic acts of the next great battle in German history. Before Germany could emerge anew, however, it would need to suffer revenge at the hands of the European Jews. Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, Bormann, and countless government officials and common people killed themselves in fear of this new world order.15 Without the promise of an eternal Reich, these people saw no future for themselves.

I. Extermination a. Early Fears (1925-1942) The vision of Germany, and often the entire world, destroyed by the combined forces of

Bolshevism and Jewry was a consistent source of existential dread among the Nazi leadership.16

Whether they foresaw an invasion by hordes of barbarians from the East or a world corrupted by

Jewry, the major Nazi players all articulated images of dystopia or apocalypse before the end of the Second World War, long before war was a distinct possibility. The Nazi leaders were aware of the existential stakes of their mission prior to any real indication of the regime’s collapse, establishing a precedent to the discourses I will analyze from 1943-1945. Their racial ideologies created what Fritzsche calls “an embattled vision of history,” a frightening worldview in which

15 See Florian Huber, Kind, Versprich Mir, Dass Du Dich Erschießt: Der Untergang Der Kleinen Leute 1945 (Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 2015). 16 The association of Jews with communism dates back to the nineteenth century, but intensified with the anxiety provoked by the Russian Revolution and the subsequent dissemination of the antisemitic pamphlet, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, in Western Europe after 1917. Therefore, any mentions of Bolshevik or Jewish forces should be considered intertwined and interchangeable. 101

Germany lived under constant threat of extinction at the hands of other races.17 Indeed, as in any dramatic story, heroism required villainy.

Mein Kampf, written between 1925-1926, conjured up a vision of Judeo-Bolshevist dystopia by predicting a decline from Jewish authoritarianism to the ultimate destruction of humanity and the natural world. Hitler considered Jewish ideas unnatural and dangerous, seeing the future at two extremes even before the Nazi rise to power: either Aryans would create a good and true world order, or Jews would create “an age without culture…devour the peoples of the earth, [and] become their master.”18 This era without culture reflected common antisemitic tropes associating Jews and commerce:

Future generations would some day admire the department stores of a few Jews as the mightiest works of our era and the hotels of a few corporations as the characteristic expression of the culture of our times.19

In contrast to the utopia discussed in the prior chapter, he envisioned a world without spirit or meaning because Jews, in Hitler’s eyes, lacked all culture. Their monuments could not reflect great Kultur, as Classical temples and medieval castles did, but would instead highlight Jewish soullessness. Hitler predicted that the implementation of Jewish Bolshevism “would bring about the end of any order intellectually conceivable to man,” a “chaos” that would force the planet to

“move through the ether devoid of men.”20 In this age without humans, “darkness will again descend on the earth...and the world will turn into a desert.”21 At another point, he wrote that this apocalypse would be punishment by “Eternal Nature” for “infringement of her commands.”22

Social Darwinism dictated that the German people and eventually all humanity would go extinct

17 Peter Fritzsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 4, 17. 18 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Mannheim (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 383, 452. 19 Ibid., 265. 20 Ibid., 65. 21 Ibid., 290. 22 Ibid., 65. 102 if the Volk neglected the Aryan race. Also influenced by the biblical creation myth, Hitler wrote that Marxism and other anti-Aryan ideology “contributes to the expulsion from paradise.”23 Once again, we observe a combination of the discourses of Social Darwinism and Christianity as lenses through which to understand history’s movement. Hitler’s most extreme statements, such as these in Mein Kampf, reflected his frustration with the Weimar Republic. He believed that any continuation of Weimar’s degeneration would inevitably produce the Untergang des

Abendlandes (Decline of the West), ending either in a new world order or apocalyptic chaos.24

Rosenberg’s early image of a Judeo-Bolshevik world drew from similar images of an age without culture. In a 1928 article entitled, “The Earth-Centered Jew Lacks a Soul,” Rosenberg compared the German “mission” to achieve national destiny with the Jewish desire “to strip the world of its soul and nothing else.”25 He then predicted that prolonged Jewish influence would lead to “the destruction not only of the illusory earthly world, but also of the truly existent, of the spiritual,” a phenomenon “tantamount to the world’s destruction.”26 Rosenberg anticipated that a

Jewish-led world would result in the destruction of both culture and of life itself. He used more specific imagery in The Myth of the Twentieth Century, writing in 1930 that Germany has a

“final decision” either to uphold “the Teutonic-European values of culture” or “sink under the filthy human flood of Cosmopolis; crippled on the hot and sterile asphalt of a bestialized subhumanity.”27 Images of decay and rot highlight the racial degeneration of a Judeo-Bolshevik world order, linking Jews and Eastern Europeans with filth, disease, and the modern city he so

23 Ibid., 383. 24 See the introduction’s discussion of Spengler’s influence on Weimar culture and National Socialist thought. 25 George L. Mosse, Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural, and Social Life in the Third Reich (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1966), 77. 26 Ibid., 77-78. 27 Alfred Rosenberg, The Myth of the Twentieth Century: An Evaluation of the Spiritual-Intellectual Confrontations of Our Age (Newport Beach: Noontide Press, 1993), 43. 103 abhorred.28 The inhabitants of this imagined “Cosmopolis” were not human but a dreaded mass, a deluge come to engulf Germany. Heightening the visceral quality of this description,

Rosenberg used biological imagery, predicting that the mass would “infiltrate like plague bacilli” across the world.29 Because its inhabitants would have no conception of the laws of Nature, this dystopia would lead Germany and eventually the planet to sickness and extinction.

Visions of world-destroying floods and invading hordes dominated the Nazi apocalyptic imagination, prefiguring an historic clash with the East, in which Nature would determine one race to flourish and another to die out.30 In a 1931 speech to the SS leadership, Himmler predicted, “If Bolshevism is victorious then this will mean the extermination of the Nordic race” and “the end of the earth.”31 Himmler was infatuated with this predestined battle with the East, seeing the SS as Germany’s heroic defenders, standing on the front lines of this ever approaching final conflict.32 In 1936, he told the Prussian State Council that Germany was at “the beginning of what may be a centuries long…decisive world struggle with these forces of organized subhumanity.”33 Germany’s destiny was to bring an end to this conflict, providing the decisive finale to its heroic journey. They believed themselves to be struggling valiantly against the forces of evil, a struggle that could only end in ultimate victory or heroic defeat.

These images seemed to diminish in the Nazi leaders’ imaginations in the war’s early years, likely reflecting confidence in Germany’s victory. Still, the knowledge of the existential stakes of their mission remained. In July 1940, Hitler told the Reichstag that the Volk entered the

28 See Chapter 3 for a discussion of Rosenberg’s opinion of the city. 29 Rosenberg, 43. 30 For example, Goebbels recorded in his diary in April 1942: “The human mind cannot possibly imagine what it would mean if this opponent [the “mass” in the East] were to pour into Western Europe like a flood.” (Joseph Goebbels, The Goebbels Diaries 1942-1943, trans. Louis P. Lochner (Garden City, New York: Double Day & Company, 1948), 52. 31 Peter Longerich, Heinrich Himmler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 123. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., 198. 104 war “with the fanatical grimness of a nation aware of the fate that awaits it should it be defeated.”34 Only a month after the successful invasion of France, and only two months after the defeat of Norway, Belgium, and the Netherlands, this statement reads as oddly pessimistic. Yet, even at the height of Germany’s period of victory, Hitler kept the possibility of German extinction at the back of his mind. In March 1941, Hitler privately told the Chief of the

Wehrmacht High Command, Franz Halder, that the conflict with communism was “a war of extermination.”35 The explicit use of the term extermination (die Vernichtung) reflected a growing association between Nazi ideas of their own future with their genocidal policy toward the European Jews. In June of the same year, Goebbels reflected upon the war his diaries:

The Führer says: right or wrong, we must win. It is the only way. And victory is right, moral, and necessary. And once we have won, who is going to question our methods? In any case, we have so viel so auf dem Kerbholz (piled up such a tally), that we must win, because otherwise our entire Volk—with us at its head—and all we hold dear, will be ausradiert (erased). So to work!36

The uses of Vernichtung and ausradiert suggest that Goebbels and Hitler were keenly aware of the potential consequences of their treatment of the Jews. Observing the sheer scale of their violence, they feared that, in the event of defeat, the Jews would enact a similar revenge. The

Nazi leaders felt as if they were Germany’s greatest defenders, locked in a battle for survival with their eternal enemies.

b. “Jewish Liquidation Squads” (1943-1945)

34 Adolf Hitler, My New Order, ed. Raoul Jean Jacques François De Roussy de Sales (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1941), 833. 35 Jeremy. Pridham Noakes, Geoffery, Nazism, 1919-1945, V.3. Foreign Policy, War, and Racial Extermination, 4 vols., vol. 3 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1994-1998), 1086-87. 36 Translation my own: “Der Führer sagt: ob recht oder unrecht, wir müssen siegen. Das ist der einzige Weg. Und er ist recht, moralisch und notwendig. Und haben wir gesiegt, wer fragt uns nach der Methode. Wir haben sowieso soviel auf dem Kerbholz, daß wir siegen müssen, weil sonst unser ganzes Volk, wir an der Spitze mit allem, was uns lieb ist, ausradiert werden. Also ans Werk!” (Joseph Goebbels, Tagebücher 1924- 1945, ed. Ralf Georg Reuth, 2 Aufl. ed. (München: Piper, 2000). Band 4, 1940-1942, 1603. ) 105

In Melita Maschmann’s memoirs of her time in the Bund Deutscher Mädel (The League of

German Girls), published in 1963, she described visiting the Kutno ghetto in occupied Poland:

Everything I saw and heard sickened me. The sight of the Jews did so for two reasons: both because I had learned that they were the most dangerous enemies of Germany, and because their wretchedness offered the spectacle of a human fate which might, for all one knew, be one’s own as well some day.37

Although Maschmann’s account can be taken as a roundabout expression of postwar guilt for

Nazism’s atrocities, the similarity of her description with the Nazi leadership’s prevailing discourses in the last years of the war lends credence to her description. The end of the German race at the hands of the Jewish-controlled Allies became a common means of understanding disappointment in the war’s approaching end.38 In late 1944, rumors spread throughout Germany that Jews in Allied controlled cities were shaving the heads of local Party leaders and marching them through the streets.39 The atrocities they committed against Jews were imagined as threats to Germany in the event of defeat. This conception acknowledged the genocide as a necessary transgression. In the early years of the war, Nazi leaders conceived of this as a critical precondition to create utopia. The stakes in engaging in these acts, and failing, was that the

Aryan race and its leaders would experience equivalent, reciprocal brutality at the hands of a vengeful enemy.

The Volk had no choice other than to finish the project and continue to struggle until the end; their alternative fate was far too devastating. Goebbels’ Total War Speech in February 1943 explicitly described the approach of the Red Army with, “We can see the Jewish liquidation squads—behind which looms terror, the spectre of mass starvation and unbridled anarchy in

37 Melita Maschmann, Account Rendered (London, New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1965), 82-83. 38 See Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). 39 Confino, 377. 106

Europe.”40 In this alarming role reversal, Goebbels predicted racialized violence inflicted upon

Germans by an anti-Aryan Einsatzgruppen.41 Hitler echoed these sentiments later the same year, positing in the decree establishing the Volkssturm, a last-ditch militia made up of men aged 16-

60 who had been previously ineligible for conscription, that the Allies’ “final goal is to exterminate the German people.”42 The Nazi leaders, the army, and the civilians had no choice other than to continue their fight because noble struggle through a hopeless war was still preferable to outright extinction. In a table talk from February 1945, Hitler remarked, “They may well exterminate us.”43 There was simply no alternative—they had gone too far, done too much, to survive the war. Speer recalled Hitler’s common refrain beginning in January of 1943, asserting, “There is no turning back. We can only move forward. We have burned our bridges.”

Hitler’s turn to scorched earth policies in 1944 can be understood within this discourse. After

Speer refused to implement the ‘Destruction Order’ of March 19, 1945, which would have resulted in the demolition of Germany’s infrastructure and industry, Hitler responded:

It is best for us to destroy even these things. For the nation has proved to be the weaker, and the future belongs solely to the stronger Eastern nation. In any case only those who are inferior will remain after this struggle, for the good have already been killed.44

Nature had judged Germany as weak and unworthy of life. Therefore, the stronger hordes to the

East would overrun Germany. Hitler wanted to leave behind only a barren wasteland, ending the civilization of which he felt himself creator.

40 Jeremy. Pridham Noakes, Geoffery, Nazism, 1919-1945, V.4. The German Home Front in World War Ii, 4 vols., vol. 4 (Exeter: Univeristy of Exeter Press, 1994-1998), 490. 41 The Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units) were SS and police squads that followed the Wehrmacht as it invaded the Soviet Union, murdering racial and political enemies, most often by mass shooting or mobile gas chambers in vans. 42 Noakes, Nazism, 1919-1945, V.4. The German Home Front in World War Ii, 4, 643. 43 Adolf Hitler, The Testament of Adolf Hitler: The Hitler-Bormann Documents, February-April 1945, ed. Martin Bormann and François Genoud (London: Cassell, 1961), 40. 44 Speer, 440. 107

Hitler and Goebbels developed more detailed fantasies of victimization in March and

April of the same year as the war drew to a close. Hitler mused that “if we are destined to be beaten in this war,” the Jews and Russians would not rest until “they have destroyed and annihilated National Socialist Germany and reduced it to a heap of rubble.”45 Goebbels’ diaries from these months painted a detailed, disturbing image of Germany’s future. The Allies would starve and eventually “exterminate the Volk biologically,” including the women and children, cut down all of Germany’s forests, turning the country into to a “potato field,” and round up “youth of military age” to be “compulsorily deported abroad as slave labor.”46 Goebbels devoted of his final diary entries to these horrifying scenarios, finding a seeming macabre pleasure in the high drama of these shocking, upside-down worlds. The Nazi leaders took solace in the promise of a more dramatic and conclusive end than in 1918. Perhaps most noteworthy in these statements is the visible similarity between the projected fate of the Volk and the atrocities committed by the

Third Reich, from economic exploitation to forced labor to genocide. German violence against the Jews was likely an easily accessed lens through which to understand the Volk’s coming extinction. Goebbels’ statements engaged in an oppression fantasy taken to the absolute extreme: a spectacle of chaos and death that would continue far into the future. Even in death, they still felt they could create the monumental.

II. Heldentod

Even prior to the outbreak of war, death was understood as a heroic gesture done in service of the Volk.47 The Nazis acknowledged that not all seemingly hopeless struggles could end in

45 Hitler, The Testament of Adolf Hitler: The Hitler-Bormann Documents, February-April 1945, 103-04. 46 Joseph Goebbels, Final Entries, 1945: The Diaries of Joseph Goebbels, trans. Richard Barry (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1978), 210, 94, 97, 305. 47 For example, the Nazi 1938 curriculum guide for the teaching of history in secondary schools stated, “It is not only the successful figures who are important and have an impact on life, but also the tragic figures and 108 miraculous triumph, as they had in Kolberg or the Miracle of the House of Brandenburg. In fact, the Nazi leaders found utmost inspiration in historic acts of selflessness amidst dire conditions.

Monica Black describes the Nazi interest in a “specifically German enthusiasm for death,” understanding Heldentod as an act of sacrifice on behalf of the racial collective.48 Just as

Kolberg’s citizens willingly died for their Heimat without any promise of victory, the Nazi

Volksgemeinschaft was bound together in collective sacrifice for Germany. In Mein Kampf,

Hitler wrote, “In giving one's own life for the existence of the community lies the crown of all sense of sacrifice.”49 A single human life was always subordinate to the continuation of the

Volksgemeinschaft. As Jay Baird argues, heroism, for the Nazis, was “more tied to death than to life,” because a noble death was the ultimate honor.50 It was an act of love for the nation to prioritize the survival of the race above one’s own life.

The discourse on self-sacrifice was inevitably intertwined with the social acceptability of suicide in Germany at this time. Goebbels, in his diary from January 1932, recalled a conversation with an SA leader who inquired if men who committed suicide could be buried under the Nazi flag. Goebbels replied, “Yes, provided his breakdown was attributable to the stress of the times. It is not everyone who can bear the terrible strain.”51 Suicide was a rejection of the unbearable struggle against the Volk’s internal and external oppressors—a final moment of defiance in a world out to destroy Germany. Self-inflicted death was considered heroic if it was

periods, not only the victories, but also the defeats. But it must always show greatness because in greatness, even when it intimidates, the eternal law is visible. (Noakes, Nazism, 1919-1945, V.3. Foreign Policy, War, and Racial Extermination, 3, 438.) 48 Monica Black, Death in Berlin: From Weimar to Divided Germany (Washington, D.C., Cambridge, New York: German Historical Institute, Cambridge University Press, 2010), 72-73. 49 Hitler, Mein Kampf, 298. 50 Baird, xi. 51 Joseph Goebbels, My Part in Germany’s Fight, trans. Kurt Fiedler (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1940), 12. 109 out of protest, while suicide due to depression or personal problems did not reflect bravery.52

Suicide seems to have preoccupied the Nazi leaders, particularly Hitler and Goebbels. In an address to the Wehrmacht in November 1940, Hitler remarked, “I shall stand or fall in this struggle. I shall never survive the defeat of my people,” indicating of a constant awareness of his own mortality.53 The arrival of the Endkampf afforded Germany, and by extension its Führer, only two options: triumph or death. In a February 1942 diary entry, Goebbels remarked,

“Statistics on suicides show a decreasing curve.” He mused, “Nobody wants voluntarily to depart this life. Everybody wants to live to see the end of the war.”54 For Goebbels, life was worth living for the promise of German victory and the Thousand Year Reich. Thus, his statement posits the alternative: if the war were lost, any reason to live would disappear. It would be too easy to read these earlier statements on suicide as a moment of foreshadowing in Hitler and

Goebbels’ lives. Even so, their existence suggests a fixation on death. Not only were the men always conscious of the high stakes endeavor upon which they were embarking, they also held romanticized visions of suicide as an act in and of itself.55 Himmler, in contrast, largely saw suicide as an act of cowardice that endangered the race. For example, he did not allow proper funerals for SS men who took their own lives. Still, even Himmler agreed that suicide could restore honor in the most dire circumstances.56

The Nazi leaders fantasized that they were heroes, sacrificing themselves to become inspirational examples for future generations who would fight in the next war. They were able to reassert their centrality to the historical narrative taking shape around them, reimagining the

52 Christian Goeschel, Suicide in Nazi Germany (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 27-29, 61-63. 53 Noakes, Nazism, 1919-1945, V.3. Foreign Policy, War, and Racial Extermination, 3, 766. 54 Goebbels, The Goebbels Diaries 1942-1943, 91. 55 At the International Military Tribunal, Göring remarked, “We always knew that the Führer would kill himself if things were coming to an end.” (Goeschel, 151) 56 Goeschel, 61. 110 failing regime as a band of brave heroes fighting until their last breaths in a disintegrating world order. In a February 1945 speech to the Party, Bormann explained, “Anyone who never gives up fighting and would rather die among the ruins than retreat a single step is invincible,” but that one who surrendered was “a murderer of our women and children.”57 As discussed in Kolberg, when facing death, Nazis felt it was better to be remembered as a hero than an unfaithful coward.

Bormann continued, “There is only one possibility of staying alive: the willingness to die fighting.”58 Death was not a true end. By enacting a Heldentod, each Nazi leader fantasized that he would live beyond death through the surviving Volk, inscribed in legend forever.

Visions of Heldentod were present throughout the Nazi Party’s existence. Reverence for

World War I soldiers and Party martyrs like Horst Wessel resulted in a preoccupation with what

Christian Goeschel refers to as “a distinctly masculine way of dying.”59 However, the defeat at

Stalingrad invigorated the strongest interest in the image of Heldentod. Against Hitler’s wishes,

Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus had refused to kill himself at Stalingrad, instead surrendering to the Soviets. In 1944, to the regime’s outrage, Paulus joined the communist resistance and urged

Germans to surrender to the advancing Red Army. In a military briefing, Hitler expressed disdain that Paulus had chosen not to “[ascend] into eternity and national immortality,” by becoming a hero and martyr.60 Death in service of the nation could be considered the ultimate fulfillment of

Nazi ideology—an act that would merge the self with the Volksgemeinschaft and provide a heroic example for future leaders. Yet, Paulus had refused this honor, rendering him a traitor.

Examples had to be found elsewhere. By 1944, Speer and Goebbels began encouraging members

57 Noakes, Nazism, 1919-1945, V.4. The German Home Front in World War Ii, 4, 653. 58 Ibid., 654. 59 Goeschel, 142-43. 60 Helmut Heiber, Hitlers Lagebesprechungen: Die Protokollfragmente seiner militärischen Konferenzen 1942–1945, (Munich, 1963), 79; Cited in Goeschel, 142 111 of the Luftwaffe (Air Force) to embark upon sacrificial suicide missions.61 Similar to Japanese kamikaze pilots, these men ended their lives honorably and with the knowledge that they had sacrificed themselves for the future of the nation. The Nazi leaders believed that a noble death was, as Baird argues, “the moral equivalent of victory,” thus ascribing higher meaning to the mass casualties during this period.62 Anyone who died for Germany would be immortalized in legend.

Heldentod also helped shape later conceptions of the Final Solution, redefining the murder of

European Jewry from an act of creation in service of utopia to the last great act of dying heroes.

The elimination of the Jewish threat was considered too important and already too far underway to be left incomplete. Thus, the leaders reconceptualized the genocide, imagining the Volk as a hero taking down as many enemies as possible with it as Germany fell. Rather than consider capitulation, they clung to their own heroism, believing they had done the universe a tremendous service by destroying Europe’s Jews. In March 1943, Goebbels wrote in his diary,

Especially in the Jewish question, we are so fully committed that there is no escape for us anymore. And that is a good thing. Experience shows that a movement and a people who have burned their bridges behind them fight with much greater determination than those who still have a way back.63

Similar to the discussion of Germany’s extermination at the hands of the Jews or Allies, the Nazi leaders felt that their deeds were too radical and too heroic from which to retreat. They had to finish the fight and complete their preordained task. Without the promise of salvation, the Volk would be emboldened to act fearlessly and do what was necessary. In a speech to the SS leaders in Posen in April 1943, Himmler applauded the SS for remaining “hard” in the face of their challenging acts of violence, declaring, “This is a page of glory in our history that has never been

61 Goeschel, 147, 55. 62 Baird, 241. 63 Goebbels, Tagebücher 1924-1945.vol. 7, pt. 2, 454; Cited in Confino, 199 112 written and never will be written.”64 As Wildt describes, the Final Solution was understood as the “responsibility” of German people: the Jewish problem had to be “sorted out” for posterity.65

The SS had an obligation to protect Germany’s future, with the promise of eternal glory for their willingness to carry out this world-altering task. The secrecy and radicalism of their work solidified them as heroic agents of German destiny who valiantly led the nation through trying times. In May 1944, Himmler told the generals that there could be no “generation of avengers” allowed to survive the war because they would prove to be a problem “our children and grandchildren and grandchildren will have to deal with because we, too weak and cowardly, left it to them.”66 The completion of their historical task was of higher importance than human morality, weakness, or individual life—all was done in service of the Volksgemeinschaft that would outlive them and the Reich itself. Therefore, even as the war drew to a definitive close by

February 1945, Hitler asserted in a table talk, “Well, we have lanced the Jewish abscess; and the world of the future will be eternally grateful to us.”67 Even without hope for his own future,

Hitler felt he had completed an act of ultimate heroism by cleansing Europe of its most dangerous enemy.

Goebbels and Hitler’s last statements before their suicides are the most explicit examples of this rhetoric of heroic self-sacrifice. Their last communications reflect a desire to stage the end of their narratives in the style that would most resemble an inspirational Heldentod and avoid humiliation. Goebbels, in a letter to his stepson just three days before his suicide, explained,

“Germany will survive this fearful war but only if examples are set to our people enabling them

64 Rede Himmlers auf der SS-Gruppenfürhertagung in Posen am 4.10.1943, International Military Tribunal, 29:145 (1919-PS); Cited in Wildt, 288. 65 Michael Wildt, An Uncompromising Generation: The Nazi Leadership of the Reich Security Main Office, trans. Tom Lampert (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 288. 66 Noakes, Nazism, 1919-1945, V.3. Foreign Policy, War, and Racial Extermination, 3, 1200. 67 Hitler, The Testament of Adolf Hitler: The Hitler-Bormann Documents, February-April 1945, 57. 113 to stand on their feet again. We wish to set such an example.” Referring to his own anticipated death as a “supreme sacrifice,” Goebbels intended for the end of his life to inspire the surviving

Volk to remain faithful to Germany and fight in its next struggle.68 Goebbels carefully planned his death, believing it would be mythologized. Encountering Speer in the Führerbunker prior to taking his own life and those of his wife and six children, Goebbels explained that he wanted to

“end their lives at this historic site.”69 Hitler also ensured that he would have complete control over the conditions of his death. In his last will and testament, he wrote, “I do not wish to fall into the hands of the enemy, who is looking for a new spectacle organized by the Jews for the

70 amusement of their hysterical masses.” This was an attempt to make his last image for posterity, and for above all himself, a romantic one. Hitler’s decision to be burned immediately after his suicide was perhaps the most overt expression of a desire for drama, a combination of fantasies of Viking funerals and Wagnerian self-immolation.71 Their suicides were meticulously choreographed, infused with the “kitsch of death,” fulfilling their desire for a meaningful, grandiose end.72 In a narrative quickly spinning out of their control, suicide was an attempt to reassert control and to establish a heroic legacy.

In Hitler’s final communication to the Volk, he asked that the Volk “march ahead as shining examples, faithfully fulfilling their duty unto death.”73 Goebbels used the same language in his addendum to Hitler’s will, writing that their deaths were “the best service for the German people for, in the times ahead, good examples are more important than men.”74 By understanding their

68 Letter from Joseph Goebbels to Harald Quandt, 28 April 1945 in Goebbels, Final Entries, 1945: The Diaries of Joseph Goebbels, 330. 69 Speer, 481. 70 Noakes, Nazism, 1919-1945, V.4. The German Home Front in World War Ii, 4, 669. 71 See the discussion of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung in the subsequent section. 72 See Friedländer, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death, 26-27, 42. 73Noakes, Nazism, 1919-1945, V.4. The German Home Front in World War Ii, 4, 669-70. 74 Ibid., 672. 114 suicides as this ultimate, romantic sacrifice, they were able to make peace with their mortality and with Germany’s defeat. They were no longer men, but historic examples of Germanic valor.

They fantasized that they would become German legends, ascending to the higher world of heroic ancestors, a Valhalla inhabited by Charlemagne, Frederick the Great, and Bismarck.

Although these acts were intended specifically to inspire future National-Socialists, the last days in the Führerbunker have become the object of macabre fascination in our culture today—a testament to their theatrical qualities.

a. The Survivors

Goebbels and Hitler remained hopeful that Germany would, through the heroic examples they had set, rise up against its oppressors after years of struggle in a postwar dystopia. Hitler, in a radio address from January 1944, stated that war that would “only result in reinforcing socialist unity…and create that hard state which Vorsehung has destined.”75 Even if Vorsehung seemed to have forsaken him and his comrades, Hitler found comfort in the larger arc of German history.

He could still contribute to Germany’s story, albeit now as the last hero of a dying era. He took the long view of history, clarifying in a table talk from late February 1945 that Germany’s salvation could not be accomplished by “a single man or in a single generation,” and that his regime had only planted the seed of Germany’s future. He continued, “One day the harvest will come, and nothing on Earth will be able to prevent it.”76 Unable to face his role in Germany’s defeat, Hitler took solace in this future Volk, effectively removing himself from responsibility but still maintaining his own prominence as the inspiring forebear of this new movement.

Before this rebirth could occur, what sort of oppression would Germany endure? Goebbels, in a diary entry from March 1945, wrote, “In short the Reich will be dealt with like a Negro

75 Original translation, "...state that Providence has destined." Adolf Hitler, Speeches and Proclamations, 1932-1945, ed. Max Domarus (Wauconda, IL, U.S.A.: Bolchazy-Carducci, 1990), 2876. 76 The Testament of Adolf Hitler: The Hitler-Bormann Documents, February-April 1945, 95. 115 colony in Africa.”77 Calling on associations of Germany’s treatment of its former African colonies in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Goebbels imagined oppression at the hands of foreign powers, with Germany exploited for natural resources and labor. In Hitler’s final table talks from April 1945, he provided the most detailed instructions for Germany’s future inhabitants. He predicted that 1918 would be “nothing in comparison with what we may now expect” after the end of the Third Reich.78 For “those who survive” the catastrophic end to the war, they will face “the grim darkness of the night.” The resulting world he described is, from a

Nazi perspective, dystopian and alien. Without racial laws, North America would face “its own downfall,” and be invaded by “the yellow races….as had the Europeans in the sixteenth century.”79 Inferior races would come to power in a chaotic world devoid of Aryan guidance and organization. Therefore, he demanded constant maintenance of the Volk, warning them not to ignore the laws put into place under Nazism or divide themselves regionally once again amongst

“the German races.”80 Fearing the negative influence of foreign powers on an occupied

Germany, he advised “mistrust and vigilance” toward all European nations. France, in particular, would be controlled utterly by the Jews. Hitler hinted at possible alliances with China, Japan, and

“the people of Islam,” due to their lack of connection with Jewry. He also advised against entangling Germany in the postwar conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union to maintain German independence.81 Hitler’s detailed imaginings of Germany’s future foreign policy may have provided him solace of his waning leadership, offering him posthumous control over his beloved nation. Even in death, Hitler still positioned himself as a key political actor in

Germany’s affairs. While Goebbels feared ultimate downfall for Germany, Hitler found

77 Goebbels, Final Entries, 1945: The Diaries of Joseph Goebbels, 99. 78 Hitler, The Testament of Adolf Hitler: The Hitler-Bormann Documents, February-April 1945, 104. 79 Ibid., 104-05, 08-09. 80 Ibid., 105. 81 Ibid., 106-08. 116 optimism in the “resurrection of eternal Germany,” highlighting that “the more we suffer, the more glorious” this rebirth will be.82 Just as the Volksgemeinschaft of the Third Reich had been forged in the tumult of the two World Wars, so too would a new generation of Germans emerge, stronger than ever before, from their most extreme oppression. Whatever the horrors of this dystopia, it could create an even better future. For Hitler, the dream of utopia had not disappeared entirely, but had merely been pushed forward in time.

In Goebbels’ final hours, he too imagined exerting posthumous political control over

Germany. As previously referenced, he wrote to his stepson, Harald Quandt, three days before his suicide in 1945. In this letter, he urged Harald to “continue our family tradition” and political legacy, so that it not be “essential that we [himself and his wife, Magda] remain alive in order to continue to influence our people.”83 Goebbels sought political immortality through his descendants, which enabled him to avoid the finality of death.

Hitler’s last will and testament also encouraged the Volk to stay alive to fight in “the future battle of the nation”:

Centuries will pass away, but out of the ruins of our towns and monuments the hatred against those finally responsible whom we have to thank for everything, international Jewry and its helpers, will grow.84

Due to the Aryan race’s natural hatred of Jewry, Germany would once again gain racial consciousness and rise up against its oppressors, just as its ancestors had before them. In legend, the Nazi leadership would live forever. Within these fantasies, their direct role in German history was over; however, their deaths would contribute to the nation’s survival and the creation of a better world in the distant future.

82 Ibid., 104. 83 Goebbels, Final Entries, 1945: The Diaries of Joseph Goebbels, 329. 84 Noakes, Nazism, 1919-1945, V.4. The German Home Front in World War Ii, 4, 669. 117

III. Cosmic Disaster

On the evening of April 12, 1945, the Berlin Philharmonic played its final concert under the

Nazi regime. Speer ordered that the orchestra perform the finale of Richard Wagner’s

Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods), the final opera in his mythical tetralogy, Der Ring des

Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung).85 In the final scene of Götterdämmerung, the Valkyrie

Brünnhilde throws herself atop the funeral pyre of her lover, Siegfried, engulfing the hall in flames. As intense, undulating music plays, the fire spreads and rises far above the earthly realm, consuming the gods and their heavenly fortress, Valhalla. The Rhine River floods its banks, creating a deluge that submerges the stage. In the final moments of the opera, the music mellows and an unnamed crowd wordlessly observes this fiery apocalypse, looking up at the bright red flames engulfing the heavens. The feeling and imagery of Götterdämmerung resonated with the apocalyptic mood in the last days of the Third Reich. The Nazi leaders escaped into this fantastical, fiery world of high Romanticism, perhaps imagining that Wagner’s triumphant score would accompany their approaching demise. The war’s end seemed to signal a grand finale for

Germany, and perhaps for the world. Yet, even after this catastrophe, there was still hope for

Germany’s resurrection. This perspective transformed their military defeat into a spiritual victory. Their way of life, already radical in itself, was coming to a definitive end. They faced the end of an era, their era, knowing they would be barred from the new age that would dawn after this global catastrophe. The Nazi leaders felt cosmically important in this moment of high drama, understanding themselves as tragic figures witnessing the end of the world. The fall of the Third Reich became universally significant and even beautiful, imbuing what was actually a

85 Speer, 463. 118 humiliating failure with artistic feeling.86 The leaders themselves seemed small in comparison to these cosmic nightmares. Like actors on stage, they merely needed to enact their part in a larger plan. At the world’s end, they relinquished control over Germany’s fate.

Kurlander characterizes Nazi preoccupation with natural and mythic disasters as “twilight imagery,” a worldview that he writes prepared German citizens for their country’s defeat and fulfilled a national desire for rebirth after the chaos of war.87 He writes that the “grandiose vision of Germany consumed by fire,” a parallel drawn to Wagner’s Götterdämmerung and Norse

Ragnarok, influenced German conceptions of the end of the war.88 I would add that the image of a world on fire specifically in a Wagnerian or Norse mythological context became intertwined with ideas of natural apocalypse, from global disasters to planetary collisions. Nazi ideology’s spiritual, mythic, and Darwinian tendencies coalesced to form visions of the war’s end as a terrifying, cosmological catastrophe: the aesthetic of the Nazi apocalyptic imagination.

A Wagnerian mythos had been a means of understanding death in the Third Reich long before the Berlin Philharmonic’s final concert.89 Wagner was a common point of reference for

Goebbels and Hitler, who saw the radically antisemitic composer as an ideological and artistic forebearer of National Socialism. The Ring, for example, was understood as a reflection of the

Nazis’ own mission: an earth-shaking battle between good and evil was a fitting analogy for their

86 See Friedländer, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death. and "Preface to a Symposium: Kitsch and the Apocalyptic Imagination." 87 Kurlander, 264. 88 Ibid., 289. 89 For example, in June 1942, after Heydrich’s assassination by the Czech resistance, the Party staged an elaborate funeral in the new Reich Chancellery. Goebbels played Siegfried’s funeral march from the Götterdämmerung to draw an association between Heydrich and Wagner’s protagonist. Heydrich, tall, blonde, and blue-eyed, was long considered the best-looking member of the otherwise rather non-ideal Nazi leadership, typifying the model Nazi, just as Siegfried was the ideal Aryan for Wagner. The funeral ceremony thus connected Heydrich’s death to Siegfried’s own romantic Heldentod. (Robert Gerwarth, Hitler’s Hangman: The Life of Heydrich (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 278.) Siegfried’s funeral march was also played at Horst Wessel’s funeral. (Baird, 88) 119

Manichean worldview.90 For example, in Mein Kampf, Hitler compared Germany’s relationship to the Jews with Siegfried and the dragon he slays in The Ring.91 By the war’s outbreak, the Nazi leaders began to focus on Götterdämmerung specifically. In a diary entry from March 1945,

Goebbels wrote that the Allies were “prepared to set fire to the entire world.”92 Bormann, in

April 1945 letter, wrote “If we are destined, like the old Nibelungs, to descend into King Attila’s hall, then we’ll go proudly and with our heads held high.”93 Bormann’s statement refers more specifically to the Nibelungenlied, the medieval German story upon which Wagner based The

Ring. In both Bormann’s and Goebbels’ statements, the outright mapping of Götterdämmerung’s plot onto the end of the Third Reich partially breaks down. Goebbels implied that the Allies, rather than Germany, would inaugurate Götterdammerung, complicating the notion that the Nazi leaders saw themselves wholly as Wagnerian protagonists. Bormann’s identification with the

Nibelungs, who in The Ring are a race of dwarves explicitly coded as Jewish, also contained more complicated implications, perhaps bound up in aforementioned fears of extermination.

“Twilight imagery” should be understood as a flexible part of a larger apocalyptic imagination. I do not wish to paint a picture of a wholly Wagnerian worldview. Even Hitler’s specific wish to be “burnt immediately” cannot entirely be pinpointed to Brünnhilde’s self- immolation, although the comparison is evocative and convenient.94 The connection undoubtedly crossed Hitler’s mind, given his devotion to Wagner, but does not take into account his other mythic influences and his fear of being publicly humiliated, especially after Mussolini’s

90 See Deborah Menaker Rothschild, Prelude to a Nightmare: Art, Politics, and Hitler’s Early Years in Vienna 1906-1913 (Williamstown, MA: Williams College Museum of Art, 2002). and Barry Millington, “Der Ring des Nibelungen: conception and interpretation” in Thomas S. Grey, The Cambridge Companion to Wagner (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 91 Hitler, Mein Kampf, 148. 92 Goebbels, Final Entries, 1945: The Diaries of Joseph Goebbels, 210. 93 Kurlander, 263. 94 Noakes, Nazism, 1919-1945, V.4. The German Home Front in World War Ii, 4, 668. 120 degrading demise one day prior.95 Furthermore, in a January 1942 table talk, Hitler explained that all mythology was a reflection of legitimate history, citing the existence of “a huge cosmic disaster” in “all human traditions.”96 Hitler then immediately moved onto the topic of Wagner, musing, “I imagine to myself that one day science will discover, in the waves set in motion by the Rheingold, secret mutual relations connected with the order of the world.”97 Myth, science, and history were inseparable, with Wagner’s operas just a part of this larger cosmology.98 The

Nazi leaders’ visions of the end of the world were bound up in this fusion of myth and science, with Götterdämmerung only encompassing a portion of the grander scope of the Nazi apocalyptic imagination.

The Nazi leaders meditated on the workings of Nature, which allowed them to understand

Germany’s collapse as a part of universal processes of death and rebirth, rather than as a failure of their regime. As early as Mein Kampf, Hitler had described the possibility of “some tectonic event” that would flood the world and leave “a single great field of corpses covered by water and mud.”99 He wrote that, in the event of such a catastrophe, only the Aryan race could keep culture alive.100 This notion also appeared in Hitler’s second book, in which he wrote that history was a series of “geological occurrences” due to the “clash of natural forces with each other.” He again referred to the image of a flood, perhaps imagining the biblical flood, but in a scientific, secular

95 Mussolini, after being shot by partisans in April 1945, was dumped in Milan. His body hung in a central city square, where it was physically abused, spit at, and mocked. 96 Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941-1944: His Private Conversations, trans. Norman Cameron, Stevens, R.H., 3rd ed. (New York: Enigma Books, 2000), 249. 97 Ibid., 251. 98 Rejecting specialization of disciplines, the Nazis conceptualized geology, biology, mythology, spirituality, the arts, and the social sciences in a singular racial worldview during the Third Reich (Kater, 50. Cited in Kurlander, 151.) 99 Hitler, Mein Kampf, 392. 100 He was likely referring to the origin myth of the Aryan race, a group often said to have survived a great flood by living in the Himalayas—hence the Ahnenerbe’s interest in Tibet as an Aryan cultural site. See Kurlander and Rosenberg. 121 context.101 In a June 1943 table talk, he spoke of that the influence of “natural catastrophe” on the course of history.102 Hitler appears to have been most interested in history at this sprawling scale between 1943 and 1945. The proliferation of mentions of geological history suggest that he found comfort in the ultimate smallness of his own life, the World War, and all of human history itself in relation to these cosmic events.

The Nazi view of natural apocalypse can be conceived of through two adjoined worldviews, that of Social Darwinism and the more esoteric Welteislehre (Cosmic Ice

Theory).103 Created by Austrian engineer Hans Hörbiger at the turn of the century, Welteislehre was a pseudoscientific, mystical belief system based around the eternal conflict between celestial bodies made up of fire and ice.104 This elemental struggle governed all happenings in the universe. Hörbiger theorized that, at some point in prehistory, a moon had fallen from space and collided with the Earth, bringing a second moon into the planet’s orbit and resulting in floods and ice ages in Earth’s early history.105 Many alternative cosmologies and mystical belief systems were explored during the Third Reich, but Welteislehre seems to have been the most widely accepted among the Nazi leadership, especially given its definitively German origins.106

Ernst Schäfer, the SS Zoologist and leader of the Tibet Expedition, claimed that the bulk of the

SS Leadership believed in the theory, stating, “The men read no other books.”107 Himmler and

Hitler were its most enthusiastic supporters, funding Ahnenerbe and SS research to prove the

101 Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s Second Book: The Unpublished Sequel to Mein Kampf, ed. Gerhard L. Weinberg, Krista Smith, and Adolf Hitler, 1st English language ed. (New York, N.Y.: Enigma, 2003), 9. 102 Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941-1944: His Private Conversations, 707-08. 103 This roughly translates to “Global Ice Theory” or “Glacial Cosmogony.” 104 Jost Hermand, Old Dreams of a New Reich: Völkisch Utopias and National Socialism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 64.; Longerich, 279. 105 Hermand, 64. 106 Kurlander, 151.; Hitler was highly interested in border science, going so far as to hint at the possibility of the existence of alien life. In a table talk from October 1941, he remarked, “It is impossible to suppose nowadays that organic life exists only on our planet.” (Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941-1944: His Private Conversations, 86.) 107 Kurlander, 131. 122 theory and banning German scientists from disputing Welteislehre.108 Hitler once claimed that the belief system would replace Christianity in Germany.109 Kurlander also suggests that Göring,

Heydrich, Rosenberg, Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach, and DAF leader Robert Ley supported Welteislehre as well.110 These beliefs were almost entirely contained to the highest echelons of the Party, but must still be considered an integral part of the Nazi worldview and not limited only to Hitler or Himmler.111

Beginning in 1941, Hitler spoke most explicitly about his Welteislehre-influenced fantasies of global destruction. In an October 1941 table talk, while imagining utopian,

“permanent” monuments, he speculated, “In ten thousand years, they'll be still standing, just as they are, unless meanwhile the sea has again covered our plains.” He then immediately went on to discuss a “lunar” catastrophe that destroyed Atlantis.112 Even in more successful points during the war, Hitler accepted this inevitable cycle of destruction and creation as a possible end to

National Socialist utopia. Most unambiguously, in a series of table talks in early 1942, Hitler spoke of the “clash between the earth and the moon” that created “explosions” and “diluvian torrents of rain” ten thousand years prior. He speculated that, because the Earth’s trajectory approached the sun, “Mars may one day be a satellite of the Earth.”113 These nightmare scenarios reflected Hitler’s immense self-importance, believing that he held special knowledge of the hidden workings of the universe. It was thrilling to escape into these chaotic worlds, which were beautiful and grandiose in comparison to the bleakness of war. They also rendered Hitler’s sense

108 Hermand, 64; Longerich, 279 109 Kurlander, 152 110 Kurlander, 153. It should be noted that Goebbels did not, from my research, seem to have expressed an interest in Welteislehre. 111 Additionally, Himmler felt that Germany would, one day, accept Welteislehre along with his other alternative spiritual beliefs, as discussed in the previous chapter. (Longerich, 298) 112 Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941-1944: His Private Conversations, 81. 113 Hitler stated that the reason this belief was not more widespread was because “Men do not wish to know.” Ibid., 249-50, 324. 123 of world-historical importance more manageable, knowing that the cosmos was unconcerned with him or his actions. As Bormann explained in a 1942 article decrying Christianity, mankind and even the Earth itself were “unimportant” when compared with the “countless other bodies in the universe.”114 In the high stakes world of the Nazi imagination, in which each action was potentially legendary, this framework was a relief from their overload of perceived power. The

Nazi leaders, the Third Reich, and all of human history seemed insignificant on this scale.

By the end of the war, these apocalyptic scenarios seemed to manifest across Europe.

Cities burned, countless died, and Germany was becoming a wasteland. Jost Hermand argues that Welteislehre became the framework through which Hitler viewed the war’s end, understanding defeat as merely another catastrophe in the series of natural disasters that shaped the history of the universe.115 Again, no worldview in particular, be it Wagnerian, Welteislehre, or Darwinian, wholly explains the Nazi leadership’s understanding of their collapsing regime.

The notion of a catastrophic end, consumed in some great fire, was wrapped up in numerous discourses: the extinction of races by the process of natural selection, the judgment of

Vorsehung, the immolations of Götterdämmerung and Ragnarok, the sun and earth’s collision in

Hörbiger’s theories, and notions of apocalypse and the lake of fire in the Book of Revelation.

Regardless, the last fantasies of the Nazi leadership can be understood as an attempt to fade into a larger cosmic context. In an address to the Wehrmacht officers in June 1944, Hitler meditated on the influence on “the laws of the cosmos” in “our puny affairs”:

No other law is conceivable in a universe where the stars encircle the planets and force them into fixed orbits, where planets attract moons and where someday in an overwhelming gigantic upheaval suns will be destroyed and other suns will take their place.116

114 Mosse, 245. 115 Hermand, 287. 116 Hans Buchheim, "Command and Compliance," in Anatomy of the Ss State (New York: Walker, 1968), 336. 124

What was the World War when compared with the scope of the universe? Interestingly, he still implored the men to continue their fight because they will be “weighed by Vorsehung,” suggesting that Hitler maintained a belief in Germany’s destiny.117 These two worldviews coexisted, allowing Hitler and Germany to be important to human history, but diminishing his feelings of terror toward and responsibility for the defeat. In the history of the universe, of

Nature itself, human history did not matter in the slightest. In February 1945, he told Goebbels,

There is a limit to what men can do. Who knows when the moon may not crash into the earth and this whole planet go up in flame and ashes. Nevertheless…it must be our mission to do our duty to the last.118

Hitler combined ideas of Heldentod and cosmic apocalypse in this statement, believing he could influence the Volk’s future by example, while, ultimately, only Nature decided humanity’s fate.

Unlike in Götterdämmerung, if the moon crashed into the earth, there would be no survivors, no one to remember the Nazi leaders and their heroic deeds. He and the other leaders simultaneously felt crucial to history and absolutely insignificant in the face of their impending doom. Despite nuance within their apocalyptic imagination, the Nazi leaders believed they had created a Romantic and cataclysmic ending for themselves. They had changed the world. On

April 21, 1945, Goebbels told the Propaganda ministry, “The earth will shake when we leave the scene.”119 In their final hours, they embraced this apocalypse of their own creation.

117 Original translation, “…weighed by Providence.” Ibid. 118 Goebbels, Final Entries, 1945: The Diaries of Joseph Goebbels, 1. 119 Noakes, Nazism, 1919-1945, V.4. The German Home Front in World War Ii, 4, 667. 125

Epilogue

In the last hours of the lives of the Nazi leadership, did each man maintain a whole- hearted belief in his Heldentod, in the inspiring example he would set for a future Volk and in the promise of the ideal world that lay in Germany’s future? Or had history gone so far off of its imagined course that the universe seemed incomprehensibly chaotic? In the prologue to

Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, the three Norns are seen weaving the rope of destiny, a representation of the fates of Gods and men.1 As the Norns reflect on the past, present, and future, the music intensifies. The rope, which has become tattered and fragile, suddenly snaps, initiating Götterdämmerung, the end of the world. Did the Nazi leaders imagine that Germany’s

Schicksalslinie had become irreparably frayed, threatening to snap at any moment? In July 1944, after the attempted assassination of Hitler, the SD (Sicherheitsdienst or SS Security Service) reported that the citizens felt as if “only the Führer is in a position to master the difficult situation and to keep all the threads in his hands.”2 In this conception, Hitler retained agency over German history, even if its outcome was predetermined—the threads had already been woven. Less than a year later, as the Third Reich collapsed, the Führer did not seem to have control over the nation’s destiny. On March 2, 1945, Goebbels wrote in his diary, “The fate of the Reich sometimes seem to hang by a thread.”3 Did Germany’s rope of destiny snap when Berlin fell?

Even as the Nazi leaders came to believe that the forces of history had left them to perish, they remained enthralled in their romanticized worlds. It never seemed to occur to them that these forces did not exist. Instead, their defeat was shaped into a spectacle of mythic proportions.

1 The Norns, similar to the Fates in other European traditions, are the beings who preside over destiny in Norse mythology. 2 Jeremy. Pridham Noakes, Geoffery, Nazism, 1919-1945, V.3. Foreign Policy, War, and Racial Extermination, 4 vols., vol. 3 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1994-1998), 632. 3 Joseph Goebbels, Final Entries, 1945: The Diaries of Joseph Goebbels, trans. Richard Barry (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1978), 21. 126

The Nazi leaders still felt uniquely positioned to interpret and create their reality in Romantic terms—Friedländer’s “kitsch of death,” finding what Benjamin describes as “supreme aesthetic pleasure” in the end of their world.4 Whether they faced extinction in a desolate wasteland or a great battle for future generations, all of their possible worlds promised thrilling experiences beyond human comprehension.

Let us turn now to Goebbels’ dream of a film that would be made a century into the future, also called Götterdämmerung. He assured the Propaganda Ministry officials that they would be “brought back to life” with its creation.”5 Not only would they live on in spirit through the Volksgemeinschaft, but they would also be resurrected in an epic film. Even as Berlin went up in flames, they could take solace in imagining their heroic deeds appearing on screen.

Therefore, death was not final: they would be remembered. It would be a beautiful film—a reward for their tireless struggle. This “fine color film,” of course, was never created. Yet,

Goebbels’ prophecy was not entirely inaccurate. The 2004 German film, Downfall (Der

Untergang, dir. Oliver Hirschbiegel) can be understood as a sort of confirmation of Goebbels’ prediction. All of the Nazi leaders appear on screen in high definition and in color, brought back to life in a detailed recreation of the Third Reich’s final days. They are remembered as spectacle, albeit one of villainy rather than of heroism. There was a certain validity to their historical self- consciousness. People across the world learn about Nazism from the time they are children.

There are entire libraries and museums dedicated to the mere twelve years of the Third Reich.

4 Saul Friedländer, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 26-27.; Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 42. 5 Ernest Kohn Bramsted, Goebbels and National Socialist Propaganda 1925-1945 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1965), 229. 127

Indeed, Nazism can be “studied at the universities for four or five semesters,” just as Goebbels predicted.6 The Nazi leaders secured their place in history.

As this project comes to an end, I hope to take a moment for self-reflection. Throughout my work on this thesis, I have tried to take these fantasies seriously, interpreting them as genuine expressions of the Nazi leaders’ worldviews. In such an ideologically driven regime, it would be a mistake to dismiss these imaginings as the irrational delusions of monstrous men and nothing more. Unquestionably, these men were monstrous. Their fantasies and their attempts to make them a reality led to the suffering and murder of millions. Still, these qualities of both the men and the fantasies themselves do not mean that these statements should be avoided out of discomfort or deemed absurd and ignored. The Nazi leaders may have dreamt of building a world that never was, but they did manage to destroy countless lives in the process.

Moreover, the Nazi leaders often seem to be spectacles, and indeed presented themselves as such. I wonder if our cultural imagination surrounding the Third Reich, which so often sees its leaders as one-note villains, avoids confronting the Nazi leaders’ inherent humanity. To be clear,

I do not mean their humanity in a redemptive sense, but in a realistic one. They were human: an uncomfortable, but crucial realization. The Nazi leadership was nothing more than a group of humans—humans who committed previously unfathomable acts of violence—but humans nonetheless. In writing this thesis, I have come to appreciate their truly unprecedented qualities: the Nazi leaders did possess some of the most extreme, dangerous thoughts that humankind has been capable of having and acting upon. My thesis has been an attempt to highlight the wholly unprecedented, radical nature of the Nazi leaders and the views of history, the past, and the future that they developed to cope with their precarious position.

6 Joachim Remak, The Nazi Years: A Documentary History (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969), 40. 128

In the process, I have tried to inhabit the Nazi worldview over the course of this project, empathizing with people whom I despise and picturing how the new world they believed they were creating looked and felt to them. Of course, there are ethical and emotional stakes to an exercise of this sort. The thought of seeking to adopt their perspective is difficult and fraught; the scars these men left on the world have not faded. Over the course of this year, I have variably found myself feeling angry, exhausted, and unsettled. I often wonder if my choice to study the

Nazi leadership has been, at least partially, an attempt to exert intellectual authority over men who frighten me. I do not believe that the empathy with which I tried to approach my work is infallible. My disgust for the Nazi leaders or disbelief in their extreme theories undoubtedly comes through in my writing. Still, I believe I have done my best as a historian to render these men human and comprehensible.

Let us return, one last time, to Wagner’s Götterdämmerung. As the rope of destiny snaps, its destruction does not entail the end of history itself. The opera continues unabated, indeed for another five hours. Over its course, we come to realize that this particular rope was perhaps not so important to our story, and that perhaps, a new one will never be made. In addition to ending

Germany’s imagined journey toward its destiny, did the fall of the Third Reich fundamentally alter our concept of history’s forward movement? Looking back at the twentieth century, it becomes clear that the view of history as a rope of destiny, as progress, as a Schicksalslinie is an inherently problematic conceit. No single event cascades directly into another; there was no direct lineage from Richard Wagner to Adolf Hitler; humanity has not achieved a higher state.

History often feels chaotic, and it is with this awareness of our own condition that one can begin to understand why the Nazi leaders worked so tirelessly to right its course. 129

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Images

Chapter 2: Destiny

Figure 1 Freed, John B. Frederick Barbarossa: The Prince and the Myth. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016, Figure 20. Original caption: The interior of the hall of the Kyffhäuser Monument during the Third Reich.

Figure 2 Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-H08447 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5433855. Accessed April 2018. Original caption: Am 1. Juli 1938 fand wie auch in den Vorjahren eine nächtliche Feierstunde anlässlich des Todestages König Heinrichs I. zu Quedlinburg statt. Der Reichsführer SS Himmler legt auf die Grabstätte des Königs den Kranz; hinter ihm von links: SS Gruppenführer Wolf, Gauleiter und Reichsstatthalter Jordan, SS Gruppenführer Heydrich und SS Obergruppenführer Heissmeyer.

Figure 3 Hans W. Fischer, Menschen-Schönheit: Gestalt Und Antlitz Des Menschen in Leben Und Kunst (Berlin: Deutsche Buch-Gemeinschaft, 1935), 73. Original caption: vor der Marienburg

Figure 4 Sven Felix Kellerhoff, “Männer-Kommunen für den Führer-Nachwuchs”, Die Welt, April 19, 2011, https://www.welt.de/kultur/history/article12948311/Maenner-Kommunen-fuer-den- Fuehrer-Nachwuchs.html Accessed April 2018. Original caption: Blick auf die Gesamtanlage der NS-Ordensburg Vogelsang in der Eifel.

Chapter 3: Utopia

Figure 1 Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo/Alamy. in Young, James E. "The Terrible Beauty of Nazi Aesthetics." In The Stages of Memory: Reflections on Memorial Art, Loss, and the Spaces Between, 127-39: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016, 133. Orignal caption: A view across the Zeppelin field to the grandstand, designed in 1934 by Albert Speer.

Figure 2 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) Archives, Photograph No.40217. Original caption: Soldiers walk among the rubble of Berlin's Olympic stadium. The Nazi eagle is still standing. Berlin, 1945.

Figure 3 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) Archives, Photograph No.98057. Original caption: Nuremberg stadium, ca. April 20-June 1945 136

Figure 4 Adam Jones, 2012, Wiki Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Albert_Speer- Designed_Complex_at_Nazi_Party_Rally_Grounds_-_Nuremberg-Nurnberg_-_Germany_- _01.jpg Accessed April 2018. Original Caption: Albert Speer-designed complex at Nazi Party Rally Grounds, Nuremberg, Germany.

Figure 5 Hans W. Fischer, Menschen-Schönheit: Gestalt Und Antlitz Des Menschen in Leben Und Kunst (Berlin: Deutsche Buch-Gemeinschaft, 1935), 21 Original caption: Diskuswerfer, Bronzestatutte nach dem Discobolus des Myron

Figure 6 Albert Janesch, Water Sports, 1936 Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin

Figure 7 Retzlaff, Hans. Arbeitsmaiden Am Werk. Leipzig: E.A. Seemann, 1940, 65 Original caption: Liebevoll wird auch das Jüngste betreut

Figure 8 Retzlaff, Hans. Arbeitsmaiden Am Werk. Leipzig: E.A. Seemann, 1940, 47 Original caption: Letze Anweisung der Lagerführerin für den Außendienst

Figure 9 Cover of J. Dieterich, Deutsche Jugend: Eine deutsche Heimatsibel für Stadt und Land, mit Bildern von Lia Doering (Darmstadt: Verlag von Emil, 1935)

Figure 10 Bundesarchiv, Bild 146III-373 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_146III- 373,_Modell_der_Neugestaltung_Berlins_(%22Germania%22).jpg Accessed April 2018. Original Caption: Berlin, Modell zur Neugestaltung nach den Plänen von Speer ("Welthauptstadt Germania"), Blick vom geplanten Südbahnhof über den Triumphbogen bis zur Großen Halle (Nord-Süd-Achse). Foto aus dem Nachlass Albert Speer, 1939.

Figure 11 Deutschlands Autobahnen, Adolf Hitlers Straßen (Bayreuth: Gauverlag Bayerische Ostmark Gmbh., 1937)