Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

Göring soon had a team of technical experts assembled under Lieutenant-Colonel Fritz Löb of the Luftwaffe. In the research department of Löb’s planning team, run by the chemical firm IG Farben’s director Karl Krauch, solutions were rapidly advanced for maximizing production of synthetic fuels and rapidly attaining self-sufficiency in mineral-oil extraction.⁴⁰ By midsummer, Löb’s planners had come up with a detailed programme for overcoming the unabated crisis. It envisaged a sharp tilt to a more directed economy with distinct priorities built on an all-out drive both to secure the armaments programme and to improve food provisioning through maximum attainable autarky in specific fields and production of substitute raw materials such as synthetic fuels, rubber, and industrial fats.

⁴¹ It was not a war economy; but it was on the road to becoming the nearest thing to a war economy in peacetime.

At the end of July, while Hitler was in Bayreuth and Berchtesgaden, Göring had a number of opportunities to discuss with him his plans for the economy. On 30 July he obtained Hitler’s agreement to present them with a splash at the coming Reich Party Rally in September. ‘A big speech of the Colonel-General at the Party Congress’ was envisaged, according to a note in Göring’s desk-diary.⁴²

Göring intended to reap the glory. The new economic programme would dominate the Rally. That was what the Luftwaffe chief had in mind. But when it came to propaganda, Hitler, sniffing another chance to enhance his image through the major announcement of a ‘Four-Year Plan’, was unwilling as ever to concede the star-role. He decided to deliver the key speech himself.⁴³

Hitler had meanwhile become increasingly preoccupied with the looming threat, as he saw it, from Bolshevism, and with the prospect that the mounting international turmoil could lead to war in the nearer rather than more distant future.⁴⁴ Whatever tactical opportunism he deployed, and however much he played on the theme for propaganda purposes, there is no doubt that the coming showdown with Bolshevism remained — as it had been since the mid-1920s at the latest — the lodestar of Hitler’s thinking on foreign policy. In 1936, this future titanic struggle started to come into sharper focus.

At his private meeting with the former British Air Minister Lord Londonderry in February 1936, Hitler had concentrated on what he described as ‘the growing menace to the world of Bolshevism’. He was, he said, destined to play the part of the prophet internationally, as he had done within Germany some fifteen years earlier. He understood the dangers of Bolshevism better than other European statesmen, he went on, since ‘his political career had grown out of a struggle against Bolshevist tendencies’. Continental Europe was unbalanced and unstable, he claimed. Most governments were weak and short-lived. The continent was living ‘from hand to mouth’. The ‘extraordinary development of Soviet power’ had to be seen against this background of ‘decay’. Moreover, he added, playing up the bogey of Bolshevism to his British guest, the Soviet Union was not merely the greatest military power on the continent, but also ‘the embodiment of an idea’. He went on to provide Lord Londonderry with facts and figures on Soviet military and economic might. The admission of Russia to the League of Nations reminded him of the fable of Reynard the Fox — overcoming the suspicion of the other animals, then devouring them one after another. ‘Just in the same way as one does not allow germ-carriers in ordinary life to frequent the society of healthy people, so we must keep Russia at a distance,’ he maintained. But if the decomposition of Europe and the strengthening of the Soviet Union continued, he asked, ‘what will the position be in ten, twenty, or thirty years?’⁴⁵

Hitler had visualized for Lord Londonderry the prospect of war between the Soviet Union and Japan, with defeat for the Japanese opening the path for Soviet domination also of the Far East. After meeting the Japanese ambassador in Berlin early in June, Hitler repeated his view that deepening conflict was on the way in the Far East, though he now thought that Japan would ‘thrash’ Russia. At that point, ‘this colossus will start to totter (ins Wanken kommen). And then our great hour will have arrived. Then we must supply ourselves with land for 100 years,’ he told Goebbels. ‘Let’s hope we’re ready then,’ the Propaganda Minister added in his diary notes, ‘and that the Führer is still alive. So that action will be taken.’⁴⁶