Black Earth(17)

After Hitler’s rise in 1933, he pursued domestic policy for more than six years before he began his first war. This is a long time without armed struggle for a man whose theory urgently demanded blood sacrifice for the restoration of nature. Hitler had learned tactics and even a certain kind of tact after the failure of his 1923 coup, but his electoral gambits did not qualify as a program. Disguising one’s own ultimate aims to gain power is not the same thing as making daily decisions once power has been won. Hitler was no believer in institutions and could hardly have been satisfied simply by turning German administrative organs to his own purposes. He was not even a German nationalist. In his view, Germans were presumptively superior to all others, but the hierarchy was to be established in practice, by racial war. He would need special measures to direct Germans towards that war, and unusual techniques to direct their state to the purposes of generating anarchy.

These were mammoth tasks; his tactics were equal to them.

—

An initial inspiration, according to Hitler himself, was the Balkan Model. Like a number of other politicians of his era, he saw in the Balkan nation-states that had emerged from the declining Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century the proper relationship between domestic and foreign policies. Serbia and the other Balkan states had shown how to achieve “a specific foreign policy goal” through “military conflicts.” Balkan-style militarism featured a specific political economy. The leaders of nation-states with limited internal markets and primarily agricultural exports wanted larger economies. The justification for extending the national territory was the liberation of fellow nationals abandoned on the wrong side of the border. At home, voters were told that war was liberation; in fact, expansion broadened the tax base. The only purpose of domestic politics, Hitler claimed, was to mobilize the energy and resources necessary for achieving living space abroad.

Hitler was, to a point, a Balkan-style militarist. The case he made at home and abroad for the need to expand the military was the classic Balkan one of self-determination. Domestic politics thus became the art of accumulating resources and manipulating opinion such that war became possible and seemed inevitable. Although Hitler did not seem to personally care very much about the plight of Germans abroad, he recognized that nationalism of this kind could mobilize German emotion. Hitler built up the German armed forces beyond all previous limits and apparently beyond reason. Compulsory military service was reintroduced in 1935, and military budgets grew extraordinarily from year to year. In creating his war machine, Hitler accumulated debt that could be covered only by war, a condition that itself became an argument for the initiation of one. The old dilemma of budget priorities—guns or butter—could be solved in traditional Balkan style: butter through guns. As Hitler put it, “from the distress of war grows the bread of freedom.”

He respected the Balkan Model but saw it as a first step rather than a final achievement. Although Hitler needed to control the German state, its expansion was not really his goal; although he understood the uses of German nationalism he was not really a nationalist. The national sentiments of his fellow Germans were what he called a “space-conquering force” that could propel them into the racial struggle where they could see and fulfill their higher destiny. Love of country had to be mobilized to get German men out of the country and into alien realms that they could master. As one German woman who understood Hitler would put it, the “inclination towards confined spaces clings like a sticky mass to the German people and must be overcome.” For the far greater ambition of Lebensraum, Hitler introduced seven innovations to the Balkan Model: the party-state, the entrepreneurship of violence, the export of anarchy, the hybridization of institutions, the production of statelessness, the globalization of German Jews, and the redefinition of war.

—

Unlike the Balkan leaders to whom he paid a grudging respect, Hitler was not a king innovating from established notions of legitimacy and sovereignty. He was not the dynastic embodiment of a people with duties or interests, but rather a clear-sighted representative—as he saw matters—of a race doomed to bloody struggle until eternity. The apostle of nature had to accommodate traditional institutions to his own vision of the future, which meant transforming them before he made war. Beginning from the legal position of chancellor within a faltering republic, inheriting a host of institutions, Hitler and the Nazis created something new.

The theoretical reconciliation between the old and the new Germany was the party-state. Such a synthesis had been pioneered by Lenin in the Soviet Union a decade earlier. The Soviet state was present in every way a state might be: with an administration, a parliament, a judiciary, a government, an executive, even a constitution. In fact, the Soviet state was subordinate to the communist party, which was itself supposed to represent the workers and their interests. The communist party, in turn, was run by a central committee, which was run by a politburo of a few men and indeed usually dominated by a single man. Lenin had the advantages and disadvantages of revolution; Hitler’s party did not. Thus the Nazi assimilation of state to party, the Gleichschaltung, took place gradually.