In his so-called second book, the sequel to Mein Kampf, written in 1928, Hitler had already developed the idea that this Europe was not to arise as the result of federation, but by the racially strongest nation’s subjugating the others. This early view of his determined his style of ruling over both conquered and allied countries. Occasionally he received offers of collaboration within the framework of a Fascist federated Europe; one such offer, for example, came from certain elements in France. But Hitler regarded such offers merely as arrogance and did not even deign to reply. Sometimes, it is true, he was apt to reject the idea of the nation in the name of the “higher concept of race”: “It [race] breaks up the old and affords the possibility of new combinations,” he declared. “Employing the concept of the nation, France carried her great revolution beyond her borders. Employing the concept of race, National Socialism will extend its revolution until the New Order has been achieved all through the world.”
Immediately after the campaign in France, a draft defining the border in the West was worked out under his personal supervision. It provided for the territory of the Reich to include Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg, thus extending to the coast of Flanders. “Nothing in the world can prompt us to… give up again the Channel position won by the Western campaign,” he is quoted as saying. From the Channel the new boundary would run “about from the mouth of the Somme eastward to the northern rim of the Paris basin and along Champagne to the Argonnes, there turning southward and passing farther across Burgundy and west of the Franche-Comte to the Lake of Geneva.”88 Historical treatises, and measures for Germanization, were to provide a historical base for these annexations. Nancy was henceforth to be known as Nanzig; Besançon would be called Bisanz.
Hitler also declared that he would “never again leave Norway.” He intended to make Trondheim a German city of 250,000 inhabitants and build it up into a great naval base. Early in 1941 he issued orders to this effect to Albert Speer and the heads of the navy. Similar bases to guard the sea routes were to be established along the French Atlantic coast as well as in northwestern Africa. Rotterdam was to become the “largest port in the Germanic area.” There were also plans for organizing the economy in the conquered countries on the pattern and in harmony with the interests of German industry, to accommodate wages and cost of living to the conditions in Germany, to regulate problems of employment and production on a continental scale, and to redistribute markets. The internal frontiers of Europe would soon lose their importance, one of the ideologues of the new order wrote, “except for the Alpine frontier where the Germanic Empire of the North and the Roman Empire of the South” meet.
The wider panorama was of such grandeur that the regime itself was awestricken. At the center of the stage there would be the world capital of Germania, which Hitler meant to transform into a metropolis that would stand comparison with the capitals of ancient empires, “with ancient Egypt, Babylon or Rome… what is London, what is Paris by comparison?” And radiating from it would extend, from the North Cape to the Black Sea, a dense network of garrisons, party citadels, temples of art, camps, and watchtowers, in whose shadôw a generation of master personalities would pursue the Aryan blood cult and the breeding of the new god-man. SS formations would be stationed in the regions with inferior blood, such as the Bavarian Forest or Alsace-Lorraine. “Through them a refreshening of the blood of the population would be provided.” Following old, deeply incised psychic tracks, Hitler combined his vision of the new Europe with the mythology of death. After the end of the war, when the great reckonings with the churches had begun and the pope in tiara and full pontificals had been hanged in St. Peter’s Square, Strassburg Cathedral would be converted into a monument to the Unknown Soldier, while on the borders of the empire, from the rocky capes of the Atlantic to the steppes of Russia, a chain of monumental towers would be built as memorials to the dead.89
Projects such as these reveal an unbridled mania for planning, an elemental drive, blind to all obstacles as well as to the rights and claims of others, dictating destinies, trampling down “bastard races,” resettling peoples, or, as the above-mentioned memorandum of the East Ministry curtly put it, “scrapping” them. Yet to Hitler himself the building of the new order was “something wonderfully beautiful.” Here we see once again the strange incongruities of National Socialist philosophy, the combination of stoic objectivity and irrationality, of “ice-coldness” and belief in magic, of modernity and medievalism. Through the supercities of the future would march an ideological vanguard. They would revive the “Cimbrian art of knitting” and plant exotic root. They would propagate themselves, breeding for blond and blue-eyed issue, and begetting largely male children through the practice of abstinence, long hikes and proper nutrition. For along with the sweeping, ruthless dictates of National Socialism there was an element of trivial fantasy play. With “holy earnestness” Nazi philosophers considered the question of oatmeal porridge and organic manure, the possibility of developing a perennial rye, of, steatopygia in the women of primitive tribes, and ravings about the flylike witch of epidemics, Nasav.90 They were great at the institutionalization of nonsense; there was a “Special Commissioner of the Reichsführer-SS for the Care of Dogs” and an “Assistant Secretary for Defense against Gnats and Insects.” Even as Hitler made fun of all superstition, he was always extremely subject to it. He inclined toward all sorts of crude theories about falling heavens and moons, saw the Mongoloid origin of the Czechs in their drooping mustaches, and planned—in the empire of the future—to forbid smoking and introduce vegetarianism.91
The same incongruities pervade his great dream of 200 million racially conscious persons established as masters of the Continent, secure in their rule because monopolizing the military and technological power, planning on a vast scale but personally abstinent, eager soldiers, and bearers of many children while all the other peoples of Europe would have been reduced to slavery, leading “their modest and contented existences beyond good and evil.” The masters themselves fulfilled their historic mission and danced around fires on Midsummer’s Night, honoring the laws of nature, art, and the idea of greatness, and seeking relaxation from the burdens of history in the Strength-Through-Joy mass hotels on the Channel Islands, on the fjords of Norway, or in the Crimea, to the accompaniment of jolly folklore and operetta music. In moments of depression, Hitler would speak of how far off the realization of his visions was, 100 or 200 years; “like Moses” he would see “the Promised Land only in the distance.”
The series of setbacks from the summer of 1943 on pushed the dream even further off. After the failure of the great offensive against the Russian lines near Kursk, the Russians surprisingly went over to the attack in the middle of July, and with apparently inexhaustible reserves threw back the desperately fighting German troops. In the southern sector the ratio of the forces was one to seven, in the north and center army groups about one to four. In addition an army of partisans supported the Soviet offensive by carefully co-ordinated actions. In the course of August alone, for example, they destroyed the railroad tracks in the German rear area in 12,000 places. Early in August the Red Army retook Orel, some three weeks later Kharkov, on September 25 Smolensk, and then the Donets Basin. By mid-October they were at the gates of Kiev.