Autarky, in Hitler’s thinking, was the basis of security. And the conquest of the east, as he had repeatedly stated in the mid-1920s, would now offer Germany that security. ‘The struggle for hegemony in the world will be decided for Europe through the occupation of the Russian space,’ he told his entourage in mid-September. ‘This makes Europe the firmest place in the world against the threat of blockade.’66 He returned to the theme a few days later. ‘As soon as I recognize a raw material as important for the war, I put every effort into making us independent in it. Iron, coal, oil, corn, livestock, wood — we must have them at our disposal… Today I can say: Europe is self-sufficient, as long as we just prevent another mammoth state existing which could utilize European civilization to mobilize Asia against us.’ He compared, as he had frequently done many years earlier, the benefits of autarky with the international market economy and the mistakes, as he saw them, made by Britain and America through their dependence upon exports and overseas markets, bringing cut-throat competition, corresponding high tariffs and production costs, and unemployment. Britain had increased unemployment and impoverished its working class by the error of industrializing India, he continued. Germany was not tied to exports, and this had meant that it was the only country without unemployment. ‘The country that we are now opening up is for us only a raw-material source and marketing area, not a field for industrial production… We won’t need any more to look for an active
Hitler was blunt about his justification for conquering this territory: might was right. A culturally superior people, deprived of ‘living space’, needed no further justification.68 It was for him, as always, a matter of the ‘laws of nature’. ‘If I harm the Russians now, then for the reason that they would otherwise harm me,’ he declared. ‘The dear God, once again, makes it like that. He suddenly casts the masses of humanity on to the earth and each one has to look after himself and how he gets through. One person takes something away from the other. And at the end you can only say that the stronger wins. That is after all the most sensible order of things.’69
There would be no end of the struggle in the east, that was clear, even after a German victory. Hitler spoke of building an ‘Eastern Wall’ along the Urals as a barrier against sudden inroads from the ‘dangerous human reservoir’ in Asia. It would be no conventional fortification, but a live wall built of the soldier-farmers who would form the new eastern settlers. A permanent border struggle in the east will produce a solid stock and prevent us from sinking back into the softness of a state system based purely on Europe.’70 War was for Hitler the essence of human activity. ‘What meeting a man means for a girl,’ he declared, ‘war meant for him.’71 He referred back frequently in these weeks to his own experiences in the First World War, probably the most formative of his life. Looking at the newsreel of the ‘Battle of Kiev’, he was completely gripped by ‘a heroic epic such as there had never previously been’. He immediately then added (in flat contradiction) that it had been like that in what he always called ‘the World War’, but that nobody had been able to record it in the same way for posterity. ‘I’m immensely happy to have experienced the war in this way,’ he added. 72 If he could wish the German people one thing, he remarked on another occasion, it would be to have a war every fifteen to twenty years. If reproached for the loss of 200,000 lives, he would reply that he had enlarged the German nation by
