In these mythologizing realms of his thought, the lust for conquest, the desire for fame, or revolutionary beliefs were not sufficient reason for unleashing a war. Hitler actually called it “a crime” to wage war for the acquisition of raw materials. Only the issue of living space permitted resort to arms. But in its purest form war was independent even of this factor, and sprang solely from the almighty primal law of death and life, of gain at the expense of others. War was an ineradicable atavism: “War is the most natural, the most ordinary thing. War is a constant; war is everywhere. There is no beginning, there is no conclusion of peace. War is life. All struggle is war. War is the primal condition.”2 Unmoved by friendships, ideologies, and present alliances, he occasionally told his table companions that some distant day, when Mussolini’s reforestation program had taken effect, it might be necessary to wage war against Italy, too.
These ideas also make it clear why National Socialism had no utopian concept, but only a vision. Hitler called the notion of a grand, comprehensive order of peace “ridiculous.” Even his dreams of empire did not culminate in the panorama of a harmonious age; they were filled with the clash of arms, riot, and tumult. No matter how far Germany’s power might one day stretch, somewhere sooner or later it would come upon a bleeding, fought-over frontier where the race would have been hardened and a constant selection of the best would be taking place. This cranky fixation on the idea of war once again showed, far beyond the Social-Darwinist starting point, the degree to which Hitler and National Socialism were a product of the First World War. It had molded their sentiments, their practical handling of power, and their ideology. The World War, Hitler repeated incessantly, had never stopped for him. To him, as to that whole generation, the idea of peace seemed curiously stale and unpleasant. It was certainly not a theme to arouse their imaginations, which were fascinated rather by struggle and hostility. Soon after the end of the struggle for power, shortly after the domestic opponents had been eliminated, Goebbels told a foreign diplomat that “he often thought back full of longing to those earlier times when there were always opportunities for combat.” A member of Hitler’s most intimate entourage spoke of his “pathologically militant nature.” So dominant was this urge that ultimately it crushed and devoured everything else, including Hitler’s long demonstrated political genius.
‘ But if all his thoughts were bent on war, the one that began on September 3, 1939, with the declarations of war by the Western powers, the one marked by absurdly reversed fronts, was not the war he had sought. Shortly before he became Chancellor, he had told his entourage that he would begin the war that had to come free of all romantic emotions, guided only by tactical considerations. He would not play at war and would not be tricked into a trial at arms. “I shall wage the war. I shall determine the suitable time for attack. There is only one most favorable moment. I will wait for it. With iron resolution. And I will not miss it. I will employ all my energy to compelling it to come. That is my task. If I succeed in forcing that, I have the right to send the young to their deaths.”3
Apparently he had failed in this self-imposed task. But had he really failed? The question cannot be why or even whether Hitler began the Second World War of his own free will. It can only be why he, who up to this point had almost alone determined the course of events, stumbled into war at this time contrary to all his plans.
Certainly he misread England’s attitude and once more gambled in defiance to all common sense. He had too frequently emerged triumphant from similar situations not to have been misled; he had come to think of the possibility of the impossible as a kind of law of his life. Hence, too, the many vain hopes he harbored in the following months. First he told himself that England would come around after the rapid subjugation of Poland. Then he expected the intervention of the Soviet Union on the German side. For a while he counted on the effects of reduced military activity against Great Britain, later on the effects of heavy bombing, and then expected the turning point to come from victory over England’s continental vassaclass="underline" “The war will be decided in France,” he told Mussolini in March, 1940. “If France were finished… England would have to make peace.”4 After all, he argued, England had entered the war without any strong motive, chiefly because of Italy’s indecisive attitude. Any of these factors, he thought, might prompt England to withdraw from the conflict. He simply did not see what else might actuate the enemy. So sure was he of his reasoning that in the so-called Z Plan he treated the U-boat building program, which had already been cut back, with noticeable neglect; instead of twenty-nine monthly launchings the plan called for only two.
But illusions about England’s determination to fight cannot sufficiently explain Hitler’s decision to go to war. He was after all conscious of the high degree of risk. When the British government made its intentions clearer by signing the pact of assistance with the Poles on August 25, Hitler rescinded an order to attack already issued. Nor did the following week give him any reason to reassess the situation. When, therefore, he renewed the order to attack on August 31, there must have been some special feeling that overrode his sense of risk.
One of the striking aspects of his behavior is the stubborn, peculiarly blind impatience with which he pressed forward into the conflict. That impatience was curiously at odds with the hesitancy and vacillations that had preceded earlier decisions of his. When, in the last days of August, Göring pleaded with him not to push the gamble too far, he replied heatedly that throughout his life he had always played vabanque. And though this metaphor was accurate for the matter at hand, it hardly described the wary, circumspect style with which he had proceeded in the past. We must go further back, almost to the early, prepolitical phase of his career, to find the link with the abruptness of his conduct during the summer of 1939, with its reminders of old provocations and daredevil risks.
There is, in fact, every indication that during these months Hitler was throwing aside more than tried and tested tactics, that he was giving up a policy in which he had excelled for fifteen years and in which for a while he had outstripped all antagonists. It was as if he were at last tired of having to adapt himself to circumstances, tired of the eternal talking, dissimulation, and diplomatic wirepulling, and were again seeking “a great, universally understandable, liberating action.”