Hitler

mind when, four years later in
Mein Kampf
, he wrote: ‘The nationalization of our masses will succeed only when, aside from all the positive struggle for the soul of our people, their international poisoners are exterminated.’ The notion of poisoning the poisoners ran through another, notorious,passage of
Mein Kampf
, in which Hitler suggested that if 12–15,000 ‘Hebrew corrupters of the people’ had been held under poison gas at the start of the First World War, then ‘the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain’. These terrible passages are not the beginning of a one-way track to the ‘Final Solution’. The road there was ‘twisted’, not straight. But however little he had thought out the practical implications of what he was saying, its inherent genocidal thrust is undeniable. However indistinctly, the connection between destruction of the Jews, war, and national salvation had been forged in Hitler’s mind.
    As we remarked, the initial anti-capitalist colouring of Hitler’s antisemitism had given way by mid-1920 to the connection in his mind of the Jews with the evils of Soviet Bolshevism. It was not that Hitler substituted the image of the Jews behind Marxism for that of the Jews behind capitalism. Both coexisted in his fixated loathing. It was a hatred so profound that it could only have been based on deep fear. This was of a figure in his mind so powerful that it was the force behind both international finance capital and Soviet Communism. It was the image of a ‘Jewish world conspiracy’ that was almost unconquerable – even for National Socialism.
    Once the link with Bolshevism was made, Hitler had established his central and lasting vision of a titanic battle for supremacy, a racial struggle against a foe of ruthless brutality. What he visualized, he had stated in June 1922, was a fight to the death between two competing ideologies, the idealistic and the materialistic. The mission of the German people was to destroy Bolshevism, and with it ‘our mortal enemy: the Jew’. By October the same year he was writing of a life and death struggle of two opposed world-views, incapable of existing alongside one another. Defeat in this great showdown would seal Germany’s destruction. The struggle would leave only victors and the annihilated. It meant a war of extermination. ‘A victory of the Marxist idea signifies the complete extermination of the opponents,’ he remarked. ‘The Bolshevization of Germany … means the complete annihilation of the entire Christian-western culture.’ Correspondingly, the aim of National Socialism could be simply defined: ‘Annihilation and extermination of the Marxist
Weltanschauung
.’
    By now Marxism and the Jew were synonymous in Hitler’s mind. At the end of his trial, on 27 March 1924, he had told the court that what he wanted to be was the breaker of Marxism. The Nazi Movement knewonly
one
enemy, he had emphasized the following month – the mortal enemy of the whole of mankind: Marxism. There was no mention of the Jews. Some newspapers picked up the change of emphasis and claimed Hitler had altered his position on the ‘Jewish Question’. There were Nazi followers who were also puzzled. One, visiting him in Landsberg at the end of July, asked Hitler whether he had changed his views about Jewry. He received a characteristic reply. Indeed his position on the struggle against Jewry had altered, Hitler remarked. He had realized while at work on
Mein Kampf
that he had up to then been too mild. In future, only the toughest measures could be deployed if success were to be attained. The ‘Jewish Question’, he declared, was an existential matter for all peoples, not just the German people, ‘for Juda is the world plague’. The logic of the position was that only the complete eradication of the international power of Jewry would suffice.
    Hitler’s obsession with the ‘Jewish Question’ was inextricably interwoven with his notions of foreign policy. Once his antisemitism had, by the middle of 1920, fused with anti-Bolshevism into the image of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’, it was inevitable that his thinking on foreign policy would be affected. However, not only ideological influences, but questions of pure power politics shaped Hitler’s changing position. In their concentration on France as the arch-enemy, hostility to Britain, recovery of colonies, and the restoration of Germany’s borders of 1914, Hitler’s early views on