Hitler’s Foreign Policy
Hitler’s foreign policy was just that—Hitler’s foreign policy. The emphasis on structural determinants is an intellectual game played by scholars who deny the obvious in a quest for novelty. Discuss.
Was Hitler an ideologue or an opportunist? Did certain well-defined, coherent goals unwaveringly guide his policies, or did he act purely pragmatically to exploit any opportunity to enhance his own hegemony?
On one hand, H.R. Trevor-Roper argues that by 1923 at the latest, Hitler acted and thought “with absolute clarity and logic.” This “program” thesis focuses on Hitler’s insistence that Germany could secure its future neither by economic development nor by overseas colonization, but only by the conquest of living space (Lebensraum) in Eastern Europe. Having originally redacted this view in Mein Kampf, Hitler elaborated two years later in his so-called Zweites Buch, and repeated his explicit aims continuously in private.
On the other hand, A.J.P. Taylor maintains that “Hitler did not make plans—for world conquest or for anything else. He assumed that others would provide opportunities and he would seize them.” This “expansion-without-object” thesis distinguishes between Hitler’s actions and rhetoric, between his fantasies and fanaticism. In this view, as Alan Bullock writes, Hitler was “an astute and cynical politician who took advantage of the mistakes and illusions of others.”
The truth, as with most polarized debates, which assume a false dichotomy, is that Hitler was both an ideologue and an opportunist—“both fanatical and cynical; unyielding in his assertion of willpower and cunning in calculation; convinced of his role as a man of destiny and prepared to use all the actor’s arts in playing it.” He “combined consistency of aim with complete opportunism in method and tactics.”
Moreover, as he repeatedly avowed, politics was a Hobbesian struggle. Guile was a matter of principle. As he declared at the Hossbach conference, “The German question can be solved only way of force.”
In 1925, Hitler published the first volume of his autobiography. In 1929, the Germans Workers’ Party (the predecessor to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party) published its manifesto. Whereas Taylor’s ilk interpret these documents as speculative ranting for propaganda—much like Hitler’s boasts about a “1,000-year Reich” and his denunciations of Bolsheviks with whom he later signed a nonaggression pact—Trevor-Roper’s ilk see them as blueprints for Lebensraum, world war, and the Holocaust. After all, given that Hitler’s success lay largely in his ability to let the world underestimate him, in retrospect we should take him at his word. Of course, deeds speak louder than words, and dictators always exaggerate; Saddam Hussein swore that he would make the First Gulf War the “mother of all battles.”
But the deeds soon came. In 1933, Hitler withdrew Germany from the League of Nations and accelerated rearmament. After all, what good are unilateral policies without autonomy and what good are demands without armed forces to back them up? Fifteen months later, he denounced the Treaty of Versailles and reinstated conscription. A year later, he remilitarized the Rhineland, and six months after that (September 1936), he informed his top officials that the army needed to be operational and the economy ready for war within four years.
In light of what we now know, it is implausible that all this was just opportunism—armed diplomacy to threaten war and reap quick gains without waging war. To be sure, Hitler was an improviser, whose flexibility allowed him to keep his options open; but he was clearly planning for something that would require great force.
Similarly, on November 5, 1937, Hitler met with his top military advisors in the chancellery to lay out, in case of his death, “his fundamental ideas” on Germany’s foreign policy. His adjutant, Colonel Friedrich Hossbach, recorded the minutes in what historians call the Hossbach Memorandum. According to Hossbach, Hitler’s study of history led him to conclude that to be successful, an empire must both control significant territory and culturally assimilate the people outside its original borders.
The Hossbach Memorandum is the smoking gun. The way Hitler describes the various outcomes of the war evinces a scheme. And his resolve to solve Germany’s problem of space by 1943–1945 evinces a timetable. But, again, Hitler remained flexible; he was too shrewd a politician not to.
The exploitation of favorable situations, however, does not make one an opportunist. What makes one an opportunist is annexing Austria and Czechoslovakia in a manner different from what one laid down in the Hossbach conference. Anticipating that his threat of war would back down the British and French, Hitler merely acted on preexisting conditions and twisted them toward his ends. He had no fixed idea how events would unfold, only that they would. His policies were premeditated in principle, but practiced pragmatically. While adhering to an underlying set of ideas, he adjusted his approach as circumstances dictated and his execution as opportunities arose. In short, he had a vision, not a plan.
And yet there is the irrational attack against the Soviets, the counterproductive economic policies in the conquered East, and the unprecedented Holocaust. Here, ideology unequivocally—suicidally—trumps opportunism. William Shirer observes: “No comprehensive blueprint for the New Order was ever drawn up, but it is clear from the captured documents and from what took place that Hitler knew very well what he wanted it to be: a Nazi-ruled Europe whose resources would be exploited for the profit of Germany, whose people would be made the slaves of the German master race and whose ‘undesirable elements’—above all, the Jews, but also many Slavs in the East, especially the intelligentsia among them—would be exterminated.”
Indeed, more than an ideologue, or an opportunist, the New Order evinces Hitler to be a dreamer and a gambler. He dismissed those who disagreed with him, who tried to reason with him about the reality of defeat, of the practicality of surrender, of the necessity to exploit instead of exterminate. Surely, if Germany’s foreign policy were not Hitler’s foreign policy, in the early years, the Nazis would have stopped to smell the roses; in the middle years, they would have refused to take so many risks; and in the later years, they would have cut their losses.
Footnotes
[1] Huge R. Trevor-Roper, Hitler’s Table Talk (London, 1953), pp. xvii, xxxv.
[2] As quoted in <http://stonebooks.com/archives/990615.shtml>. As quoted in A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War. As quoted in Howard J. Langer (ed.), World War II: An Encyclopedia of Quotations (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999).
[3] Alan Bullock, “Hitler and the Origins of the Second World War,” in Henry A. Turner Jr. (ed.), Nazism and the Third Reich (Franklin Watts: New York, 1972), p. 221.
[4] Alan Bullock, “Hitler and the Origins of the Second World War,” in Henry A. Turner Jr. (ed.), Nazism and the Third Reich (Franklin Watts: New York, 1972), p. 222.
[5] As quoted in Benjamin Sax and Dieter Kuntz, Inside Hitler’s Germany: A Documentary History of Life in the Third Reich (Lexington and Toronto: D.C. Heath: 1992), p. 345.
[6] As quoted in Benjamin Sax and Dieter Kuntz, Inside Hitler’s Germany: A Documentary History of Life in the Third Reich (Lexington and Toronto: D.C. Heath: 1992), p. 341.
[7] William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (Simon and Schuster), p. 937.
Notes
* “So little did he take his own professions seriously that he actually concluded a [nonag-gression] pact with the Bolsheviks whom he had denounced.”[8]
* To what extent did fortuitous circumstances facilitate the expansion of the Reich?
* curves situations to his advantage rather then creating them; exploits situations he did not cultivate.
* Once his regime was consolidated, Hitler preferred to focus on foreign policy.
* Inconsistent in his approach, consistent in his aims.
* This evinces not a timetable, but a sense of urgency.
[8] Alan Bullock, “Hitler and the Origins of the Second World War,” in Henry A. Turner Jr. (ed.), Nazism and the Third Reich (Franklin Watts: New York, 1972), p. 222.
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