Black Earth(11)

Communism was the proximate example of Hitler’s claim that all universal ideas were Jewish and all Jews were the servants of universal ideas. The proclaimed identity of Jews with communism—the Judeobolshevik myth—was for Hitler the apposite demonstration of both the supernatural strength and the earthly weakness of Jews. It demonstrated that Jews could win destructive power over the masses with their unnatural ideas. “Bolshevism of international Jewry attempts from its control point in Soviet Russia to rot away the very core of the nations of the world,” he wrote. Yet this apparent misfortune was in fact an opportunity. In killing the strongest members of the Slavic races inside the Soviet Union, Jews were doing the work that Germans would have to do in any event. Jewish communism was in this sense, Hitler wrote, “fortunate for the future.” The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, thought Hitler, was therefore “merely a preparation” for the later return of “German domination.”

Hitler’s interpretation of the Bolshevik Revolution as a Jewish project was far from unusual: Winston Churchill and Woodrow Wilson saw it the same way, at least at first. A Times of London correspondent saw Jews as the leading force of the world Bolshevik conspiracy. What was unusual was Hitler’s relentlessly systematic conclusion that Germany could gain global power by eliminating east European Jews and overturning their supposed Soviet citadel. This was nothing more than self-defense, he maintained, since Bolshevism’s victory by whatever insidious means would bring the “destruction, indeed the final extermination, of the German people.” In a direct confrontation, though, the Jewish threat could be eliminated. The destruction of Soviet Jews would cause the Soviet Union to “immediately break up.” It would prove to be a “house of cards” or a “giant with feet of clay.” The Slavs would fight “like Indians,” with the same result. Then, in the East, “a similar process will repeat itself for the second time, as in the conquest of America.” A second America could be created in Europe, after Germans learned to see other Europeans as they saw indigenous Americans or Africans, and learned to regard Europe’s largest state as a fragile Jewish colony.





In this racist collage Europeans were interspersed with Africans and Native Americans. Hitler compressed all of imperial history and a total racism into a very short formulation: “Our Mississippi must be the Volga, and not the Niger.” The Niger River, in Africa, was no longer accessible to German imperialism after 1918, but Africa remained a fount of the images and the colonial longing. The Volga, the eastern border of Europe, was where Hitler imagined the outer limit of German power. The Mississippi was not only the river that runs from north to south through the middle of the United States. It was also the line beyond which Thomas Jefferson wanted all Indians expelled. “Who,” asked Hitler, “remembers the Red Indians?” For Hitler, Africa was the source of the imperial references but not the actual site of empire; eastern Europe was that actual site, and it was to be remade just as North America had been remade.

The destruction of the Soviet Union, thought Hitler, would allow the right master race to starve the right subhumans for the right reasons. Once the Germans replaced the Jews as the colonial masters, food from Ukraine could be directed away from the useless Soviet populations towards grateful German cities and a submissive Europe. Hitler’s axiom that life was a starvation war and his proposal for a hunger campaign against the Slavs were reflected in policy documents formulated after his rise to power in Germany in 1933. A Hunger Plan created under the authority of Hermann G?ring foresaw that “many tens of millions of people in this territory will become superfluous and will die or must emigrate to Siberia.” Then, according to a second round of plans, designed under the authority of Heinrich Himmler, colonization by Germans could begin.

The Judeobolshevik conception allowed Hitler’s portrait of a planetary ecosystem polluted by Jewish ideas to crystallize as planning. The Judeobolshevik myth seemed to define the point where the application of German force could win an empire and restore the planet. It also permitted a politics of war and extermination that would be decisive for Jews and, in a different way, for Germans. The idea that Jewish power was global and ideological seemed to make the Jewish hold on territory weaker rather than stronger. If Jews could be eliminated, then they could no longer purvey their false ideas of human solidarity, and would have to yield their planetary dominion. Thus the Judeobolshevik myth courted the warriors by promising an easy triumph.

If the war did not proceed as planned, if the Soviet Union could not be so easily destroyed, then the idea of Jewish hegemony over the entire planet could return to the forefront of rhetoric and policy. If the Jews were not weakened by a first strike on Soviet territory, then the war against them would have to be escalated. If Germany had to fight a global enemy, there would seem to be no alternative to a total campaign against Jews, since in a long war the Jews could strike from any point at any time. The Jews behind the lines, in places under German control, would have to be exterminated. This latent potential within Hitler’s ideas was realized in practice: Jews were not killed in large numbers first in Berlin, but on the frontiers of German power in the Soviet East. As the tide of war turned, the mass killing moved west from the occupied Soviet Union to occupied Poland and then to the rest of Europe.