These theories particularly shaped his thoughts on foreign policy, which he expounded in Mein Kampf and was to pursue right to the end. But no one realized that the seemingly fantastic goals he set forth in his book were meant as a concrete political program. It all revolved around the premise that the plight of Germany was caused by racial factors and that its salvation would come only when it had restored its racial integrity. He argued: “If the German people in its historical development had possessed that herd unity which other peoples have enjoyed, the German Reich today would doubtless be mistress of the globe.” He took the traditional nationalistic phrase Volk ohne Raum (“people without space”) and turned it around into Raum ohne Volk. The pressing domestic mission of the National Socialist Party was, he considered, “to establish a nation in the empty space between the Meuse and the Memel.” For “what we see there today are Marxist human herds, but no longer a German nation.”
The concept of revolution that he had dimly in mind also had a strongly elitist, biological cast. He thought of revolution as aiming nol only at new forms of rule and new institutions but also at a new type of man. In many of his speeches and proclamations he hailed the emergence of that new type as the dawn of a “vertitable golden age.” One of his oft-repeated statements was: “Anyone who understands National Socialism only as a political movement knows virtually nothing about it. It is even more than religion; it is the will to a new creation of man.” Thus one of the most pressing tasks of the new state would be to bring to a halt “further bastardization,” to “lift marriage from the level of continual miscegenation,” and enable it once more “to beget images of the Lord and not abortions midway between man and ape.” The pure Aryan type could be recovered by breeding back in a series of “regression crossings.” By such biological and pedagogical procedures, the German people could once more be restored to its pristine purity. In a secret speech to the 1938 officer class he spoke of a development continuing for a hundred years, at the end of which a majority would possess those select characteristics that would enable it to conquer and rule the world.
The living space that he continually called for was not intended merely to provide food for a surplus population, to insure against “starvation and misery,” and to receive a peasantry threatened by industry and trade. Rather, these territorial demands were a prelude to a program for world conquest. Every ambitious nation needed a certain amount of territory, enough to make it independent of alliances and the political alignments of a given period. Historical greatness was intimately connected with geographic extension. To this idea Hitler clung to the very last. Brooding in the bunker shortly before the end, he complained that fate had forced him into premature conquests because a nation without great space could not even set itself great goals.
He early saw four ways to meet the future threat of overpopulation. Three of these—restriction of births, internal colonization, overseas colonialism—he rejected as timid dreams or “unworthy tasks.” With explicit reference to the United States, he then argued that the only acceptable course was a continental war of conquest. “What is refused to amicable methods must be taken by force,” he wrote in Landsberg and made no secret of what he had in mind: “If land was desired in Europe, it could be obtained by and large only at the expense of Russia, and this meant that the new Reich must again set itself on the march along the road of the Teutonic Knights of old.”19
Underlying such pronunciamentos was, once again, the concept of a great turning point in the history of the world. A new age was beginning; history was once more setting the mighty wheel in motion and apportioning lots anew. An end was coming to the era of sea powers who conquered distant lands with their navies, heaped up riches, established bases, and dominated the world. In the pretechnical age the sea had been the road to expansion. But under modern conditions that had totally changed. Colonial greatness was anachronistic and slated for destruction. Present-day technical capacities, the possibility of pushing roads and railways into vast, still unopened areas and linking these by a network of strongpoints, meant that the old order was being reversed. The empire of the future, Hitler held, would be a land power, a compact, integrally organized military giant. The age was already moving in that direction. Undoubtedly Hitler’s way of conducting foreign policy in later years—as a succession of surprise blows—sprang from his inward restlessness. But he was also waging a desperate battle against time, against what he regarded as the course of history. He was forever seized by fear that Germany might for the second time arrive too late at the distribution of the world’s goods. When he considered the powers who might compete with Germany for future mastery, his thoughts repeatedly returned to Russia. Racial, political, geographic, and historical indications coincided: everything pointed to the East.20
In line with prevailing sentiment, Hitler had begun as a revisionist, demanding annulment of the Versailles Treaty, restoration of the borders of 1914, by force if necessary, and the joining of all Germans in one mighty great power. To this school of thought the main enemy was France, and Germany’s best hopes lay in exploiting the difficulties France was in increasing measure having with Italy and England. But Hitler did not keep to this view. True to his bent for thinking in larger terms, he was soon contemplating the Continent as a whole, and replacing border politics with area politics.
The core of his thesis was that Germany, in her militarily, politically, and geographically threatened middle position, could survive “only by ruthlessly placing power politics in the foreground.” In an earlier discussion of Germany’s foreign policy in the age of Kaiser Wilhelm, Hitler had held that Germany should either have renounced sea trade and colonies in order to join England against Russia or, alternatively, if she sought sea power and world trade, she should have joined Russia against England. In the early twenties Hitler favored the second course. He viewed England as one of the “principal” opponents of the Reich, and on this basis developed a marked pro-Russian bias. Under the influence of the emigré circle around Scheubner-Richter and Rosenberg, he looked toward an alliance with a “nationalistic” Russia, one “restored to health” and freed from the “Jewish-Bolshevik yoke.” Teamed with this new Russia, Germany would confront the West. Neither the concept of Lebensraum nor the inferiority of the Slavic race—which later was to be the basis for his expansionist Eastern policy—seems to have entered his head at this time. It was not until the beginning of 1923, probably in view of the stabilization of the Soviet regime, that he began to think of taking the opposite course and forming a pact with England against Russia. The sources seem to suggest that Hitler weighed this idea for more than a year, considered its ramifications, its consequences, and its chances of being realized. The fruit of this thinking appears in the famous fourth chapter of Mein Kampf, where he speaks of a war for living space fought against Russia.
In presenting this program, Hitler certainly had not abandoned the idea of a war against France. That remained one of the primary points of his foreign policy right down to the last monologues in the bunker. But it now assumed another character. Just as Italy was to be placated by Germany’s renouncing the South Tyrol and England was to be wooed into an alliance by Germany’s dropping all colonial demands, war with France became simply another step that would allow Germany a free hand in the East. By the time he was writing the second volume of Mein Kampf in the course of 1925, Hitler forcefully assailed the revisionist approach; it aimed, he argued, at the restoration of wholly illogical, accidental, far too constricted borders, which, moreover, made no sense in terms of military geography. Worse still, such demands would stir up all of Germany’s former Wartime foes and lead them to revive their crumbling alliance. “The demand for restoration of the frontiers of 1914 is a political absurdity of such proportions and consequences as to make it seem a crime,” Hitler declared in italics. National Socialism, on the contrary, aimed at securing land and soil for the German people. “This action is the only one which, before God and our German posterity, would make any sacrifice of blood seem justified.” Such broad gains would “some day acquit the responsible statesmen of blood-guilt and sacrifice of the people.”21