A big, new Hitler? Capitalism, ‘Anglo-America’, and Hitler’s war

ABSTRACT

A new biography of Adolf Hitler contends that historians have overlooked Hitler’s obsessive hatred for capitalism, and challenges the dominant historiography by asserting that both the Führer’s own war aims as well as German military resources were focused overwhelmingly on the democratic regimes to his west rather than on the communist one to his east. This essay reviews the argument, critically interrogating the work’s source utilization as well as the implications of this view for historical conceptualization of the aims of Hitler’s war.

KEYWORDS:

• Hitler
• World War II
• capitalism
• Soviet Union

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ The comment comes from Rommel’s friend Kurt Hesse, cited in David Irving, The Trail of the Fox (New York: EP Dutton 1977), 61, and is consistent with other statements made by Hitler on the North African situation at the time.

² See Hitler’s letter to Mussolini of 23 June 1942 cited in Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt (ed.), Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt 1990), Bd. 6, Der globale Krieg, 634.

³ H. R. Trevor-Roper (ed.), Hitler’s Secret Conversations, 1941–1944 (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Young 1953), 149.

⁴ Hitler speech from Louis L. Snyder, Hitler’s Third Reich: A Documentary History (Chicago: Nelson-Hall 1988), 28; private remarks cited, Trevor-Roper, 57.

⁵ Quoted in David Jablonsky, ‘The Paradox of Duality: Adolf Hitler and the Concept of Military Surprise’, in Michael I. Handel (ed.), Leaders and Intelligence (London: Frank Cass 1989), 68.

⁶ Hitler’s memorandum on the Four-Year Plan was entered as evidence both in the trial before the International Military Tribunal (in defense of Hjalmar Schacht) as well as in Case XI of the Nuremberg ‘successor trials,’ and may be found in Akten zur deutschen Auswärtigen Politik, Serie C (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht 1977) Band V, 793–801 as well as in translation in Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals (Washington DC: Government Printing Office 1946–1949) Vol. XII, 430–39. An English-language translation may be found online at the site ‘German History in Documents and Images’ (ghdi.ghi-dc.org), from which the quotations in this review are taken. The Hossbach Memorandum was entered before the IMT, and a copy may be found in Documents on German Foreign Policy, Series D, Vol. 1 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office 1949), 29–39.

⁷ Heinz Guderian, Erinnerungen eines Soldaten (Heidelberg: Kurt Vowinckel 1951), 75.

⁸ Gerhard Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1994), 193.

⁹ In addition to the work by H. Gackenholz noted below, a still valuable account of the meeting and its possible purposes may be found in English in Walter Goerlitz, History of the German General Staff 1657–1945, tr. Brian Battershaw (New York: Praeger 1953), 309 ff. A.J.P. Taylor famously touched off the historiographical controversy about the meeting with his discussions in A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (London: Penguin 1992 [orig. pub. 1961]), 20–22 and 169–71.

¹⁰ Hermann Gackenholz, ‚Reichskanzlei 5. November 1937. Bermerkungen über “Politik und Kriegsführung“ im Dritten Reich,‘ in Richard Dietrich and Gerhard Oestreich (eds.), Forschungen zu Staat und Verfassung. Festgabe für Fritz Hartung (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot 1958), 470–71.

¹¹ The document’s text may be accessed and examined online at https://avalonllaw.yale.edu/imt/hossbach.asp. No sentence in the document resembles the paraphrase in this work.

¹² A concise overview of the Generalplan is available in Sabine Schleiermacher, ‘Soziobiologische Kriegführung? Der “Generalplan Ost”’, Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 19 (1996): 145–56; Nazi estimates of population requirements for the execution of the plan are in Mechthild Rössler and Sabine Schleiermacher (eds.), Der ‘Generalplan Ost’. Hauptlinien der nationalsozialistischen Planungs- und Vernichtungspolitik (Berlin: Akademie Verlag 1993), 107–108.

¹³ As Nikolaus Wachsmann has noted, the concentration camps were populated for the regime’s first several years overwhelmingly with communists and socialists: See his essay ‘The Dynamics of Destruction: The Development of the Concentration Camps, 1933–1945’, in Wachsmann and Jane Caplan (eds.), Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: The New Histories (London: Routledge 2010), 17–43.

¹⁴ The phrase derives from the title of Götz Aly and Susanne Heim’s book Vordenker der Vernichtung. Auschwitz und die deutschen Pläne für eine neue europäische Ordnung (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe 1991).

¹⁵ Michael Wildt, ‘Eine neue Ordnung der ethnographischen Verhältnisse.’ Hitlers Reichstagsrede vom 6. Oktober 1939’. Zeithistorische Forschungen 3 (2006), 133.

¹⁶ Halder cited in Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Holocaust: A History (London and New York: Norton 2002), 188.

¹⁷ See Andreas Hillgruber, ‘Die “Endlösung“ und das deutsche Ostimperium als Kernstück des rassenideologischen Programms des Nationalsozialismus’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 29 (1972), 133.

¹⁸ Christian Hartmann (eds.), Hitler, Mein Kampf. Eine kritische Edition (Munich and Berlin: Institut für Zeitgeschichte, 2016) Bd. I, 129. Later he extolls the architecture of the Acropolis, of Gothic cathedrals and of Rome. Ibid., 695.

¹⁹ Stephen D. Helmer, Hitler’s Berlin: The Speer Plans for Reshaping the Central City (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press 1985), 81.

²⁰ Leon Krier provides an instructive discussion in Albert Speer: Architecture 1932–1942 (New York: Monacelli Press 2012). See the reproduction of Hitler’s sketch for a triumphal arch from the year 1925 in Helmer, unpaginated, labeled ‘Figure 1.’

²¹ As other historians of the war have noted, ‘Long before Rommel’s troops landed in North Africa, Hitler had decided to give absolute priority to eastern expansion.’ Christopher Chant, Warfare and the Third Reich: The Rise and Fall of Hitler’s Armed Forces (London: Pavilion 2015 [orig. pub. 1996]), 220.

²² Peter Longerich, Hitler: A Biography, tr. Jeremy Noakes and Lesley Sharpe (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2019), 961.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Thomas Murphy

David Thomas Murphy is a historian of 20^th century German culture and politics. A former fellow of the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, he is also the recipient of grants from the DAAD and the Silberman Seminar of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and serves as Professor of History at Anderson University, where he directs the University Honors Program. His books include, among others, The Heroic Earth: Geopolitical Thought in Weimar Germany 1918-1933 (1997), German Exploration of the Polar World: A History (2002) and articles in periodicals including German Studies Review, The Historian, History of European Ideas, The Leo Baeck Yearbook and Metascience. He is currently writing a history of German demopolitical policies and their postwar adjudication at Nuremberg in the case of USA vs. Greifelt et al.