Black Earth(14)

Scheubner-Richter’s attempt to assemble an anti-Bolshevik army collapsed in 1922. When he marched arm in arm with Hitler in Munich in 1923, the Nazi putsch was, for him, a final lurch towards the East. When Scheubner-Richter was killed and Hitler was imprisoned, some Nazis saw the failure as a triumph not so much of the young Weimar Republic in Germany as of the Judeobolshevik power they believed they were opposing. As Hitler composed My Struggle in prison in 1924, the Bolsheviks became less a concrete group of political rivals and more a way to connect his ideas about Jews to a piece of territory. For Hitler, who knew little about the Russian Empire, and who thought in grand abstractions, the Judeobolshevik idea was not the end of a Russian struggle but the beginning of a German crusade, not a myth arising from painful events but the glimmering light of eternal truth.

The Judeobolshevik myth seemed to provide the missing piece of Hitler’s entire scheme, uniting the local with the planetary, the promise of victorious colonial war against Slavs with a glorious anti-colonial struggle against Jews. A single attack on a single state, the Soviet Union, could solve all the problems of the Germans at the same time. The destruction of Soviet Jews would mean the removal of Jewish power, which would allow the creation of an eastern empire, which would mean the replay of American frontier history in eastern Europe. The racial German empire would revise the global order and begin the restoration of nature on a planet polluted by Jews. If the war was won, Jews could be eliminated as convenient. If Germans were somehow held back by inferior Slavs, then Jews would bear the consequences. Either way, the pursuit of racial empire would bring the politics of Jewish eradication.

—

In Hitler’s ecology, the planet was despoiled by the presence of Jews, who defied the laws of nature by introducing corrupting ideas. The solution was to expose Jews to a purified nature, a place where bloody struggle rather than abstract thought mattered, where Jews could not manipulate others with their ideas because there would be no others. The exotic deportation sites that Hitler imagined for the Jews, Madagascar and Siberia, would never fall under German power. Much of Europe, however, would. Not so very long after Hitler published his ideas about daily bread and the commandment of self-preservation, Europeans were forcing Jews to recite the Lord’s Prayer and killing them when they could not. Europe itself became the anti-garden, a landscape of trenches.

During a death march, Miklós Radnóti wrote a poem, meant to be discovered in his clothing when his remains were excavated from a death pit: “I the root was once the flower under these dim tons my bower comes the shearing of the thread / deathsaw wailing overhead.”





2


Berlin, Warsaw, Moscow


A worldview is not a plan for taking power. The Judeobolshevik myth supplied an image of the enemy, but not a foreign policy. Lebensraum was a summons to empire, not a military strategy. The problem for Hitler the thinker was that German politics, neighboring states, and the European order could not be abolished by the stroke of a pen. After he left prison in 1924, Hitler learned some practical lessons, without ever changing his mind about the theory. As a young veteran of the First World War, Hitler could imagine that a dramatic gesture, a coup attempt in Munich in 1923, would suffice to transform Germany. In this he was wrong. He was defeated, and his comrade Scheubner-Richter was killed, by the forces of the state. Yet Hitler did come to power, a much cannier politician, ten years after his failed putsch. Then he and his party comrades, with considerable popular support, transformed the German state. Hitler could imagine that the Soviet Union was a cowardly Jewish coven. In this he was mistaken. Yet he did manage, eight years after winning power in Germany, to make war on Moscow and begin a Final Solution.

For Hitler’s worldview to change the world, he had to become a new type of politician, practicing a new type of politics. For anarchy in theory to become extermination in practice, the German state had to be refashioned, and neighboring states had to be destroyed. For the Jews of Europe to be murdered, the states destroyed had to be the ones where Jews were citizens. The vast majority of European Jews lived beyond Germany, the largest number of them in Poland. Poland was not only the major homeland of the Jews, but also the country that separated Germany from the Soviet Union. In one way or another, Poland had to figure in Hitler’s plans to destroy the Jews and the Soviet state.

In the six years after Hitler came to power, he succeeded in altering the German state, but failed to recruit a Polish partner for his wars. Had Poland and Germany fought as allies against the Soviet Union in 1939, the result would no doubt have been disastrous for the Jews of Europe. The Holocaust as we know it, however, followed instead a German-Soviet war against Poland. That the Second World War began as and when it did—as a campaign of state destruction and national extermination against Poland in September 1939—was a result of Hitler’s success at home, his failure to sway Poland to his dream of foreign conquest, and the willingness of the Soviet leadership to join in a war of aggression.