The Hitler–Hess Deception. Martin Allen
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Название: The Hitler–Hess Deception
Автор: Martin Allen
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Историческая литература
isbn: 9780007438211
isbn:
While they were incarcerated at Landsberg, Hitler and Hess were extensively tutored by Professor Karl Haushofer. Indeed, many of Haushofer’s geopolitical theories on Lebensraum, German ethnicity and nationhood, became adopted as Hitlerisms in Mein Kampf. In effect, Hitler was quite literally a captive audience to Hess and his political guru Karl Haushofer, receiving tutorials on the European balance of power, the distribution of peoples, ethnicity, colonies and nationalism.
Hess’s importance to Hitler at this time should not be underestimated. Their long conversations were not between Führer and obedient disciple, but rather between two close friends and political colleagues, and set the tone for Hitler’s future reliance on his loyal friend. In private they were not ‘Mein Führer’ and ‘Hess’, but ‘Wolf’ (Hitler) and ‘Rudi’ (Hess); often seated with them in their enforced seclusion – a tight-knit political commune in a sea of criminality – was Karl Haushofer.
At the end of the Second World War Haushofer would resolutely deny that he had made any contributions to Mein Kampf. However, during the 1930s he was not nearly so reticent. Deep within the microfilmed records of America’s National Archive in Washington DC are numerous Haushofer letters from the 1920s and thirties, in which the extent to which his theories influenced Mein Kampf is not concealed. Indeed, even in 1939, between a letter to the head of the Volksdeutsche Mitelstelle (German Racial Assistance Office), or VOMI, and a report on the exploitable resources of Poland, reposes a nine-point statement by Haushofer enumerating his credentials and his importance to the Volksbund für das Deutschtum im Ausland (the Committee for Germanism Abroad), known as the VDA, and listing amongst the accomplishments he was proud of his contributions to Hitler’s thinking, which appeared in Mein Kampf.17
Rudolf Hess’s input into Mein Kampf was not insubstantial either. During Professor Haushofer’s interrogation by American Intelligence in 1945, he was asked: ‘Isn’t it true that Hess collaborated with Hitler in writing Mein Kampf?’ The by now very elderly Haushofer replied unhesitatingly: ‘As far as I know Hess actually dictated many chapters in that book.’18
Hess was very much Professor Haushofer’s protégé, and as such had a keen understanding of the theories behind Lebensraum, the distribution of ethnic Germanic peoples across central Europe, and how this ethnicity could be mobilised in the future to create a Greater Germany and Reich.
Haushofer’s original position had been that Germany’s living space should stretch from the Baltic to the Pacific. Hitler, however, was more circumspect, and advanced the view that if Germany were to conquer the east, it should initially aim to occupy only western Russia, using the Ural Mountains as a natural buffer between the Reich and Asia. This territory, Hitler proposed, would take Germany a century to exploit. In the summer of 1941, while Germany’s armies rolled ever eastward enjoying early successes under Operation Barbarossa, a relaxed Hitler became extraordinarily open about his aims in the east, and over dinner one evening confided to his guests:
We’ll take the southern part of the Ukraine, especially the Crimea, and make it into a German colony … [Russia] will be a source of raw materials for us, and a market for our products, but we shall take care not to industrialise it …
If I offer [people] land in Russia, a river of human beings will rush there headlong … In twenty years’ time, European emigration will no longer be directed towards America, but eastward.
Finally, he added whimsically:
The beauties of the Crimea, which we shall make accessible by means of autobahns – for us Germans, that will be our Riviera … [for] we can reach the Crimea by road. Along that road lies Kiev! And Croatia, too, a tourists’ paradise for us … What progress in the direction of the New Europe. Just as the autobahn has caused the inner frontiers of Germany to disappear, so it will abolish the frontiers of the countries of Europe.19
This is a revealing insight into the world Hitler was attempting to create, a Reich that had been designed for him by Karl Haushofer.
The impression has always been given that the Second World War was Hitler’s attempt at total European and then world domination, but this is not necessarily completely accurate. The above statement, allied to Map 2, is a much closer approximation of what Hitler’s war objectives really were.
The Nazis’ rise to power took ten years of hard political struggle, during which the party grew into a membership that numbered well over a million souls disaffected with the Weimar Republic. From a handful of members of parliament, by 1933 the Nazis held the balance of power with over 70 per cent of the vote. Many of Hitler and Hess’s aspirations for the party had been accomplished, and their theories, as laid down in Mein Kampf, were about to be applied to the German nation. In the Germany of the 1930s, the majority accepted the concept of authoritarianism, of a ruling party which promised to take your children and turn out model citizens who would in turn have safe, if controlled, existences, free from the horrors of economic decline and the threat of the Communism. Through all this, at Adolf Hitler’s right hand stood Deputy-Führer Rudolf Hess, the upstanding, well-spoken, educated family man, who yearly took part in competition flying, and had no stigma of seediness – unlike other leading Nazis such as the drunkard Dr Robert Ley, or the appallingly anti-Semitic Julius Streicher.
Rudolf Hess’s character was one that naturally instilled confidence. He was an unassuming man, frequently called ‘the conscience of the Party’, who annoyed his fellow top Nazis – ever attired in uniforms glittering with medals and bedecked with swastika armbands – by calmly going about his work in earnest fashion, often arriving at the Reich Chancellery dressed in a sports jacket, or neatly tailored suit. The image of the brown-shirt-wearing Hess standing at his Führer’s shoulder and screaming ‘Sieg Heil!’ was for public consumption. In private he was a very different man indeed. After the war, a close acquaintance of Hess’s, Ernst Bohle, the former head of the Auslandsorganisation,* was asked whether Hess was a sincere Nazi. After mulling the question over for a few moments, Bohle replied: ‘He was sincere as an idealist, in my opinion the biggest idealist we have had in Germany, a man of very soft nature, no uniforms with him or that sort of stuff, [and] he very seldom went into the public field.’20
Hess was therefore an earnest politician, content to toil behind the scenes for the advancement of National Socialism, and in many ways he quickly became the all-round acceptable face of Nazi government.
Importantly, the high regard in which Hess was held in the 1930s was not limited to Germany. Politicians and Foreign Office officials in many other European countries, including Britain, saw him as a moderating influence within National Socialism. Hess was viewed as a reliable, solid politician, a man who did not drink, lived modestly, had a model family life, and, most important of all, was a safe pair of hands. This last sentiment, particularly in light of the surprising level of disorganisation in the Nazi administration, placed Hess in a particularly strong position not only within government, but also with Adolf Hitler.
When Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, he quickly found that his long-sought position was an all-consuming task that affected his ability to interact with the party. He therefore appointed his trusted friend Rudolf Hess as Deputy-Führer of the Nazi Party, with the responsibility of leading the party as his direct representative. Hess proved so successful an administrator that within eight months, on Hitler’s proposal, the elderly German head of state President Hindenburg appointed Hess to the position of Reich Minister without Portfolio in 1934.
Despite the ambiguity of this title, defined as ‘a Minister without an office or papers of state’, СКАЧАТЬ