Black Earth(16)

The Nazi recolonial and the Polish decolonial mindsets were each, in their different ways, quite radical. Each was a challenge to the imperial order as it stood, the first envisioning its refoundation on the racial principle, the second its inevitable replacement by postcolonial states. The foreign policies they generated could seem rather similar, especially to a Führer in Berlin who thought that he needed allies. At a crucial level of political theory, however, the opposition could hardly have been more basic: rejection versus endorsement of the traditional state.

This fundamental difference in attitudes about the state arose in large measure from opposing experiences and interpretations of the First World War. It was a basic cause of the Second. For Polish patriots, 1918 was a year of miracles, when an independent Polish state, absent from the maps of Europe for more than a century, arose again. For Germans, 1918 was a year of the unimaginable military defeat, followed in 1919 by the Treaty of Versailles and humiliating territorial concessions—largely to the new Poland.

—

After the failure of his coup, Hitler learned to be politic, using the energy of German resentment to further his own extraordinary ambitions. He exploited the broad German consensus in favor of revising the European political order, even though his own goal was to destroy it. He presented himself as a determined advocate of national self-determination, even though he did not actually believe in national rights. Likewise, he learned to soften his presentation of the Jewish menace. He no longer said in public that Christianity was as Jewish as Bolshevism. German Christians would be allowed to modify their doctrine rather than be forced to abandon it, as they were drawn into the larger struggle that would drain it of all meaning. To Hitler, his fellow Germans were of interest only insofar as they could be rallied to join a mindless war for future racial prosperity. In other words, Germans were disappointingly frivolous as they pursued their petty preoccupations of the Weimar Republic of the 1920s. Hitler could hardly tell them that, and he did not.

After his release from prison, Hitler still sounded radical by comparison with the ruling German social democrats or traditional conservatives, but now his radicalism was in dialogue with political rivals and meant to attract German voters. Success came in the early 1930s, when the world economy was in depression, and capitalism and communism alike seemed to have failed. This left an opening for National Socialists to present capitalism and communism as mad and doomed alternatives and themselves as rescuers rather than as revolutionaries. Hitler did not emphasize at this time, as he had in My Struggle, that only the extermination of Jews could preserve Germans and the world from the two supposedly Jewish systems. In his election campaigns of 1932 and 1933, Hitler instead presented his own National Socialism as a recipe for stability and common sense to be contrasted to the insanity of capitalist and communist ideology.

In reality, National Socialism involved the aspiration to destroy communism in order to build a massive empire that would insulate Germany from the vicissitudes of global capitalism; there was nothing remotely conservative about that aim. Hitler presented his anti-communism not as a military crusade against a great power, but as concern for the bottom line of German businesses and the full bellies of the electorate. In spring 1933, as the Soviet introduction of collective agriculture starved millions of peasants, Hitler used the specter of hunger to discourage Germans from voting for the Left. When he spoke at the Berlin Sportpalast of “millions of people being starved,” he was appealing to the middle classes and their fears. When he continued by saying that Soviet Ukraine “could be a grain silo for the entire world,” he was speaking to his Nazi followers. He veiled one sense of Lebensraum, the bloody conquest of habitat, behind the other, the promise of physical comfort.





In 1933, Hitler emerged triumphant from democratic elections during a long German constitutional crisis that had already centralized power in the office of the chancellor. His National Socialist party, which had won only twelve seats in parliament in 1928, claimed a staggering 230 in July 1932, falling to 196 in November 1932. Hitler was named chancellor of a coalition government in January 1933, supported by conservatives and nationalists who believed that they could control him. This was an error. Hitler used the arson of the parliament building in February to limit the rights of German citizens and create a permanent state of exception that permitted him to rule without parliamentary oversight.

In the weeks and months of Hitler’s consolidation of power in spring 1933, his followers carried out pogroms and organized a boycott of Jewish-owned businesses. The fifty thousand or so Polish Jews in Germany were not subject to these repressions; their Polish citizenship protected them, as it would for the next five years, from Nazi oppression. This was all the more notable in that Polish Jews in Poland organized a counterboycott, refusing to trade with Germany. The boycotts and beatings of German Jews were barbarous in appearance, again by comparison with what had come before. But they were a weak foretaste of the political Armageddon that Hitler had in mind. He would need a war, and a special kind of war. For that he needed not just power in Germany, but also a reconfiguration of German power.