‘…Extensive shootings were planned in Poland and… especially the nobility and clergy were to be exterminated.’
‘…This matter has already been decided by the Führer.’
‘You are now the master race here. Nothing was yet built up through softness and weakness… That’s why I expect, just as our Führer Adolf Hitler expects from you, that you are disciplined, but stand together hard as Krupp steel. Don’t be soft, be merciless, and clear out everything that is not German and could hinder us in the work of construction.’
‘It was immaterial to him if some time in the future it were established that the methods to win this territory were not pretty or open to legal objection.’
In war Nazism came into its own.1 The Nazi Movement had been born out of a lost war. The experience of that war and erasing the stain of that defeat were at its heart. ‘National renewal’ and preparation for another war to establish the dominance in Europe which the first great war had failed to attain drove it forwards. Mobilizing the people in an attempt at perpetual re-creation of the ‘spirit of 1914’ was essential preparation for the new conflict.2 The keynote of the message was ‘struggle’. National survival — the future of the German people — its Leader had preached for fifteen years or more, could only be assured through acquiring ‘living-space’. And this could only be gained, he had repeatedly stated, ‘through the sword’.
Six years of Nazi rule had brought the ‘world-view’ that Hitler stood for into much sharper focus. Almost imperceptibly at first, restoration of territory taken away from Germany at Versailles had been transformed into a drive for expansion. Hitler had done more than any other individual to bring about this transformation. But it could not have been accomplished without the avid involvement of all ruling groups, but quite especially the armed forces’ leadership, in the push for massive and rapid rearmament. And all sections of the regime’s élites had supported expansion, baulking only at its speed and what were seen as the unnecessary dangers of conflict with the western powers. Meanwhile, with remarkably little direction from Hitler, other than — though this was crucial — to provide the green light for action at key moments, and sanction for what had been done, the aim of ‘racial purification’ had been greatly advanced. Traditional social prejudice and resentment had played its part. Widespread denunciation of fellow-citizens by ordinary Germans had kept the mill of discrimination and persecution turning. Obsession with ‘law and order’ easily slipped into an obsession with the exclusion of ‘troublemakers’ and ‘social outsiders’. Social hygiene fetishism translated readily into pressure for measures to improve ‘racial hygiene’.
