It was his firm intention, he declared, in the following year to finish off (erledigen) Soviet Russia at least as far as the Urals. ‘Then it would perhaps be possible to reach a point of stabilization in Europe through a sort of half-peace’, by which he appeared to mean that Europe would exist as a self-sufficient, heavily armed fortress, leaving the remaining belligerent powers to fight it out in other theatres of war. An attack on the European Continent, he claimed, would then be much less possible than at present. And given the progress made in German anti-aircraft weapons, he was ‘extraordinarily sceptical’ about the impact, which, he thought, would become ever more limited, of British air-raids. If this turned out to be the case, he claimed, Britain would be in a quandary.341
He outlined his vision of the future. His National Socialist conviction, he said, had become even stronger during the war. It was essential after the war was over to undertake a huge social programme embracing workers and farmers. The German people had deserved this. And it would provide — always the political reasoning behind the aim of material improvement — the ‘most secure basis of our state system (unseres staatlichen Gefüges)’. The enormous housing programme he had in mind would, he stated openly, be made possible through cheap labour — through depressing wages. The work would be done by the forced labour of the defeated peoples. He pointed out that the prisoners-of-war were now being fully employed in the war economy. This was as it should be, he stated, and had been the case in antiquity, giving rise in the first place to slave labour. German war debts would doubtless be 200–300 billion Marks. These had to be covered through the work ‘in the main of the people who had lost the war’. The cheap labour would allow houses to be built and sold at a substantial profit which would go towards paying off the war-debts within ten to fifteen years.342
Hitler put forward once more his vision of the east as Germany’s ‘future India’, which would become within three or four generations ‘absolutely German’.343 There would, he made clear, be no place in this utopia for the Christian Churches. After the trouble of the summer, he had to take a line which both appeased the Party hotheads but also restrained their instincts. For the time being, he ordered slow progression in the ‘Church Question’. ‘But it is clear,’ noted Goebbels, himself numbering among the most aggressive anti-Church radicals, ‘that after the war it has to find a general solution… There is, namely, an insoluble opposition between the Christian and a Germanic-heroic world-view.’344
Pressing engagements in Berlin — particularly the audience next day with Ambassador Oshima to award him the Great Golden Cross of the Order of the German Eagle — prevented Hitler from returning that evening, as he had intended, to the Wolf’s Lair.345 When he eventually reached his headquarters again, in the morning of 16 December, it was back to a reality starkly different from the rosy picture he had painted to his Gauleiter.346 A potentially catastrophic military crisis was unfolding.
<p>VII</p>
