Hitler

now stated to be the attaining of ‘living space’ at the expense of Russia.
    We National Socialists consciously draw a line beneath the foreign policy tendency of our pre-War period. We take up where we broke off six hundred years ago. We stop the endless German movement to the south and west, and turn our gaze towards the land in the east. At long last we break off the colonial and commercial policy of the pre-War period and shift to the soil policy of the future.
    If we speak of soil in Europe today, we can primarily have in mind only Russia and her vassal border states … For centuries Russia drew nourishment from [the] Germanic nucleus of its upper leading strata. Today it can be regarded as almost totally exterminated and extinguished. It has been replaced by the Jew … He himself is no element of organization, but a ferment of decomposition. The giant empire in the east is ripe for collapse. And the end of Jewish rule in Russia will also be the end of Russia as a state …
    The mission of the National Socialist Movement was to prepare the German people for this task. ‘We have been chosen by Fate,’ wrote Hitler, ‘as witnesses of a catastrophe which will be the mightiest confirmation of the soundness of the
völkisch
theory.’
    With this passage, the two key components of Hitler’s personalized ‘world-view’ – destruction of the Jews and acquisition of ‘living space’ – came together. War against Russia would, through its annihilation of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’, at the same time deliver Germany its salvation by providing new ‘living space’. Crude, simplistic, barbaric: but this invocation of the most brutal tenets of late nineteenth-century imperialism, racism, and antisemitism, transposed into eastern Europe in the twentieth century, was a heady brew for those ready to consume it.
    Hitler himself repeatedly returned to the ‘living space’ notion, which became a dominant theme of his writings and speeches in the following years. His foreign-policy ideas were to be more clearly laid out, but in no significant way altered, in his ‘Second Book’, written in 1928 (though left unpublished in Hitler’s own lifetime). Once established, the quest for
Lebensraum
– and with it the destruction of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ – would remain a keystone of Hitler’s ideology. One element remained to complete the ‘world-view’: the leader of genius who would accomplish this quest. In Landsberg, Hitler found the answer.
    III
    Many years later, Hitler regarded ‘the self-confidence, optimism, and belief that simply could not be shaken by anything more’ as deriving from his time in Landsberg. His self-perception did indeed alter while he was in prison. Even at his trial, as we have seen, he had been proud to be the ‘drummer’ of the national cause. Anything else was a triviality, he had declared. In Landsberg this changed – though, as noted, the change had already been under way during the year preceding the putsch.
    Hitler was preoccupied from the beginning of his sentence with the question of his own future and that of his party after his release. Since he expected his release within six months, the question was an urgent one. For Hitler, there was no turning back. His political ‘career’, which had developed into his political ‘mission’, left him nowhere to go but forwards. He could not return to anonymity, even had he wanted to do so. A conventional ‘bourgeois’ lifestyle was out of the question. Any retreat, after the acclaim he had won on the nationalist Right at his trial, would have confirmed the impression of his opponents that he was a figure of farce, and would have exposed him to ridicule. And as he pondered over the failed putsch, transforming it in his mind into the martyrs’ triumph that would come to have its central place in Nazi mythology, he had no trouble in assigning the blame to the mistakes, weakness, and lack of resolve of all the leading figures to whom he was at the time bound. They had betrayed him, and the national cause: this was his conclusion. More than that: the triumph at his trial; the torrents of adulation ever-present in the
völkisch
press or pouring unabated from letters sent to Landsberg; and not least the collapse of the
völkisch
movement in his absence into derisory sectarian squabbling, and the growing conflict with Ludendorff and the other
völkisch
leaders; all these contributed towards giving him an elevated sense of his own