Hitler's War With Anglo-America

Brendan Simms On Hitler's War With Anglo-America | History Extra Podcast - History Extra

"Some of the most important things that we think we know about him, are actually not true. So for example, that communism and the Soviet Union was his main enemy. I argue that's not the case. It's actually Anglo American capitalism...

‘Often when we talk about Hitler's ideology about the German people, it's put in terms of strength, and, as you say, domination, but… he was actually quite insecure about the state of the German people’...

‘That's right. The key point I'm trying to get across is that although the so called negative eugenics of Hitler were extremely murderous, for example, involving the killing of 6 million Jews, the murder of gypsies and other so called undesirables… that would not be sufficient to ensure the survival of the German people and of the German race in a highly competitive world, which is dominated not only in his view, by the power of so called World Jewry, but also the Anglo Saxon powers, who are in turn, racially, extremely strong.

And he had a profound sense of Germany's demographic and one might say, racial weakness. And he argued this essentially, because he saw Germany as a fragmented polity, a country which was historically divided between Protestants and Catholics ever since the Reformation, divided by class, divided by ideology, and above all, also divided regionally. He's profoundly concerned, for example, by the phenomenon of Bavarian separatism, something which I think hasn't received enough attention in studies of Hitler in the 1920s. For example, the 1923 coup... is as much a move against Bavarian separatism as it is against the central government...

You see Anglo America as the kind of Racial Paragon… the embodiment of everything that's gone, right, from his point of view... a strong existing Anglo Saxon Nordic spine, which has been reinforced by waves of German emigration, on the one hand, and on the other hand, a German race, which has been weakened by this historical fragmentation that I alluded to earlier, undermined by successive waves of immigration, then these two things are, or as it were a mutually reinforcing...

‘So as well as this threat that he felt, America and Britain posed, Hitler also had a lot of admiration for what he saw as the Anglo US world. Can you give us some examples of, of aspects of Britain and America that he aspired to?’

‘Well, probably the most striking area of admiration is his admiration, not only for the British Empire, which is well known as a project of colonization overseas, but particularly also for settler colonialism in the United States, which he sees as the model for the eastern expansion. In fact, Eastern expansion is intended to create not so much a British India style arrangement, but more particularly a kind of a Western colonization of the American West model... admiration of these countries as the repositories of racial value…

[On racial segregation] Hitler's preoccupation is not with with African Americans. In fact, that's a phenomen he took virtually no interest in. The only known reference to my knowledge, to slavery is actually a negative one, where he refers to the slave trade as a barbaric phenomenon. What he’s profoundly concerned with is is what he regarded as the low value migration into the United States of Eastern Europeans, particularly also of Eastern European Jews. So what he's referring to with admiration is the 1924 Immigration Act, which imposes quotas and of course, discriminates against Eastern Europeans. That is what he admires. And what he's really saying is why can't we have the same in Germany? Why is it that, again, I stress from his point of view, we have a process of if you like negative selection, where the best Germans are going overseas as immigrants, from his point of view, lower quality migration is taking their place...

Hitler believed that, in the course of the 18th 19th and early 20th century, the German race had been severely weakened by immigration, which was the result of the lack of space, and that this migration, as I said earlier, had reinforced her rivals, and that in time of war, these migrants, and this was a crucial point would come back as enemy soldiers. And this is how he interpreted these American prisoners that I alluded to earlier on, in the 1920s... Germany is in some ways at war with its own migrants. It's a great irony, of course, that in Dwight Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, you had a German American coming back... [the] commander of the US Air Force, of course, was closely involved in the destruction of German cities, and particularly German industry, again, another German American. So these are profound ironies that Hitler actually brought about the very thing he most feared. But this emigration argument is central. And of course, it is the underpinning... for the project of living space...

Logically speaking, the German people that exists after 1919, or if you like, the dregs there, the Germans who have not emigrated to the United States, or to the British Empire…

In the late 1930s, he briefly experiments with the idea of an exchange. And this is again, if you like an obsessing, really quite grotesque plan, that he has in effect, to exchange German Americans for German Jews, because he has the problem in inverted commas, that he wants both to expel the Jews and to deprive them of their wealth. And the difficulty he has is that while some countries are prepared to accept Jews, virtually none want to take Jews who are, you know, completely indigent. And that's on the one hand, on the other hand, there are German Americans who are writing to the foreign office saying that they wish to leave the United States because, you know, their experiences experiencing discrimination, or they have made it economically. But they're having difficulties and returning across the Atlantic…

‘You suggest that you can't understand Hitler's anti semitism without understanding his anti capitalism. Can you explain the connections that he drew between Britain in the US and what he saw as International Jewry?’

‘Yes, he regards Anglo America, not only and this is somewhat of a paradox, not only as the repository of the high racial Nordic value, but also at the same time as the protagonist of international capitalism. So he sees London and New York as hubs of international capitalism, which is dominated by the Jews in his view... The paradox is that while he argues that Jews are corrupt, and in feeble states, for some reason that doesn't seem to corrupt or enfeeble the British Empire, or the United States, except insofar as it induces what he regards as a form of false consciousness in those states. In other words, that these states don't recognize, as they should do, from his point of view, that their true community of interest is with the German Reich, as opposed to fighting the German Reich’...

The attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, and the quest for Lebensraum is not actually driven primarily by concern about... communism, it's driven by concern about Anglo America. And living space in the east is simply a convenient, closely located area, you can control in a way that overseas expansion doesn't work, because the British and the Americans, but particularly the British, control the seas. And so the attack on the Soviet Union, in that sense is nothing personal, from the point of view of communism. Rather, he sees communism as an opportunity, says, this poor Soviet Union, they're afflicted with the virus of communism, and therefore, they will be more easy to take over. So from all those points of view, there's a clear hierarchy in Hitler’s mind of enemies. And the Soviet Union and communism, while serious threats are by no means as serious as as a threat from the British Empire, and from the United States. And you see this in fact, during the Second World War and the distribution of resources, contrary to many things you might read about the the overall importance of the Eastern Front...

Until the very end, even in his last will and testament, is, you know, he, he talks, you know, even as the Russians are overrunning Berlin, he's talking more about the bombing campaign, he's talking more about international capitalism than he was talking about the Soviet Union, and Bolshevism...

Next to his murderous, inverted commas, negative eugenics, he also had a, an equally problematic in some ways, concept of inverted commas, positive eugenics. In other words, how do I, and this was a phrase he used, raise up, in inverted commas, the German people to the same level as the Anglo Americans. That was a huge part of his project, I think that tends to be overlooked. This project of what he calls racial elevation, was absolutely critical to Hitler's so called positive eugenics. And essentially, Hitler's argument is that the attraction of Anglo America is one of standard of living.

So standard of living and living space are absolutely inextricably intertwined in his mind, because he says that unless we have living space, we will not be able to have a proper standard of living. If we don't have a proper standards of living, then people will emigrate. And by proper standard of living he meant matching the American dream with - this was not a phrase to use, but this is what effectively he meant - the German dream.

In other words, the Germans should have access to travel, they should have access to mod cons, to radios, to autobahns, they should be motorized, they should basically have all the things that people in Britain and particularly in the United States had. Once they had those, and once they had been engaged in the project of expansion in an imperialist project, they would then over decades, and over hundreds of years, elevate themselves to the level of Anglo America. So a point that's really important is timelines with Hitler. Hitler sees himself as part of a really long project, of which he will only see really the beginning. And he sees the British of his time, as the British who have developed over hundreds of years of having run the Empire, of having acquired by doing, in his view, the so called superior characteristics.

So with Hitler, there's always this tension between timelines. On the one hand, he's always in a hurry, because of circumstances, because his life is short, because Germany is in a dire situation. And on the other hand, he realizes that what really needs to be done requires hundreds of years and cannot be done in a shorter period."