YOUNG GERMANY AND "MEIN KAMPF "
By R. C. K. ENSOR
NOBODY who wants to understand the policy of Nazi Germany can afford to neglect its Bible— Herr Hitler's Mein Kampf. In England it remains little known, and the only English translation omits many of its most significant passages. Were it otherwise, the extraordinary spectacle of English left-wing organs on March 9th welcoming the recent Hitler coup as a great new starting-point for world-peace would scarcely have been witnessed.
Mein Kampf's conception of German foreign policy is one of the most coherent things in a book not everywhere coherent. The principal expositions of it are in Vol. I, chapter 4, and Vol. II, chapters 13 and 14. The strictures that the Fiihrer there passes on Germany's 'pre-War foreign policy, and the goals that he indicates for the future, are alike determined by a perfectly clear-cut view.
Certain presuppositions need not delay us here—as that the German race is the finest in the world, that its political integration ought to be the object of every German, and that the arch-foe of this race-ideal is Jewry. But the root problem for Nazi foreign policy is the fact (as Herr Hitler regards it) that the Germans, a rapidly expanding race, have not enough land to live upon. Four possible solutions are propounded : (1) to diminish population by birth-control, as in France ; (2) to increase the productivity of the already available land ; (3) to annex new land ; (4) to expand factory production for foreign markets. The first the Fiihrer rejects ; the second he considers incapable of meeting the need ; the fourth he deprecates, because he wants Germany to feed herself and be self-sufficient. There remains the third, and that governs the whole programme. Germany is to increase her area. She is to make it large enough to contain not merely present but future population, and to contain it sufficiently spaced out for industry and agriculture to be interdependent and the need of foreign markets to be reduced to a minimum. A widely spaced population is also recommended for " military-geographical " reasons, because it is less vulnerable to an enemy.
The scale of the new territory which Mein Kampf contemplates annexing is indicated on p. 767, where we are told that, whereas today there are 80 million Germans in Europe, the right policy must look forward a century, and provide land " on this continent "where 250 million Germans can live—" not squeezed together as factory- coolies for the rest of the world, but as peasants and workmen, who through their production assure a livelihood to each other." Where is this vast area to be found ? Herr Hitler does not beat about the bush. It could only be found, he says quite frankly (p. 154, p. 742), at the expense of Russia. And Providence has oppor- tunely brought Russia into a state propitious for the enterprise (p. 742). Such a policy, he adds, cannot be pursued by halves. It would be—and before the War it was—a great mistake to quarrel with other Powers about oversea colonies, which in any case could not afford settlement for a large white population. Germany's future lies not on the water, but on the land. Bodenpolilik is the slogan.
The implications are all quite clearly drawn. How are the Germans to Obtain this Russian land ? By the sword, by fighting for it, as their fathers fought for the soil that is now Germany. And the morality of such aggression " State frontiers are man-made, and men may alter them . . . The right to land and soil may be turned into duty, if without an extension of its soil a great people appears doomed to destruction." Germany " will either exist as a World Power or not exist at all " ; but for the role of a World Power this enlarged area is proclaimed essential to her. Therefore National Socialist policy will concentrate on the one aim. It will discard the colonial policy and the oversea-trade policy of pre- War Germany, and it will make every friend that it can in the West in order to secure Germany's rear when her trek eastward begins. The obvious ally is Great Britain, and Italy is also possible. France, at the- time when he wrote, Herr Hitler dismissed as hopeless. She was for him always " the mortal enemy " (Todfeind); her age- long plans to keep Germany weak and disunited could only be defeated by crushing her. The Fiihrer has lately told a French journalist that he does not feel like that now ; that he considers a Franco-German agreement possible. But this does not imply any change of principle. He never wanted, for its own sake, to fight any Western Power; he would only fight France to guard his rear (luring his attack on Russia.- If instead he could buy her off without bloodshed, so much the better for him.
These doctrines, the statement of which is publicly sold today by the hundred thousand in Germany and incul- cated as a sort of Holy Writ, are in close conformity with what their author's Government has since done and pro- posed. It has violently resented the Franco-Soviet Treaty—why ? Because the treaty was the Soviet's answering precaution against the attack to come. It has hastily re-occupied the demilitarised zone—why ? Be- cause, while the zone remained defenceless, Germany could not parry a French counterstroke at her rear ; even Essen lay exposed. It has offered a 25-year peace pact to all the States bordering it both west and east— why ? Because Russia is not a State bordering Germany, and such a pact would leave her out in the cold, for Germany to pick a quarrel with while the hands of the rest of Europe were tied. No one who had read Mein Kampf could miss the anti-Russian point of Herr Hitler's peace-. ncte on March 7th.
Surely a perfectly plain question may be put to the Fiihrer. Does he stand by Mein Karnes programme of a predatory war against Russia, or does he not ? If he does not, why does he not withdraw Mein Kampf from circulation, or issue a revised edition with the Bodenpolitik left out ? The last course, one must admit, would be scarcely practicable ; you might as well excise Hamlet from Hamlet. For Herr Hitler climbed to power on the economic crisis, and to make good eventually he must provide bread and work for his countrymen. Tem- porarily he has done so by a policy of rearmament. But his permanent policy is the Bodenpolitik, and he has no other. More, he has denounced most of the obvious; alternatives in scathing terms. He is, in truth, tied to his programme, nor is there anything to show that he regrets it. His one weakness is that he cannot wholly choose his own time ; for, if .Iapan attacks Russia, he must follow suit. And it may be that recent signs of precipitance on Japan's side had as much to do with dating the events of February 29th as the Franco-Soviet Pact.
Meanwhile, whether or not Mein Kampf represents Herr Hitler's latest thoughts, the fact remains that the youth of Germany have been brought up on it for half a dozen—in many cases a dozen - years. And they still continue to be. What must be the result ? Can it conceivably be consistent with twenty-live years of European peace ?
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