Chris Hale is a historian and television producer. His first book was Himmler’s Crusade, and has also written the forthcoming Hitler’s Foreign Legions (2008).
DREAMS OF EMPIRE: HITLER’S RAJ
The Nordic race has a right to rule the world and we must take this racial right as the guiding star of our foreign policy.’
-Adolf Hitler, May 1930
One of the sustaining myths of British Second World War propaganda was that Britain ‘stood alone’ against the Nazi menace. This was a childish fantasy. Ashley Jackson points out in his book ‘The British Empire and the Second World War’ that the British 8th Army was ‘the most ethnically varied armed force assembled in modern history’. The 8th Army was one quarter British and three quarters imperial: as well as men from India, Rhodesia, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand it included conscripted soldiers from Ceylon, Cyprus, Nigeria, Palestine, Swaziland and the Seychelles. This book is about the way in which Nazi Germany sought to conquer its own colonies and dominions – and then to recruit from their peoples a ‘Pan European army’ to carry out an imperial master plan. It was no accident that when the German army conquered the Ukraine they called their Ukrainian ‘helpers’ ‘Ashkaris: the same terms was used in German West Africa during the First World War. My father, who leapt onto Sword Beach on D-Day, always told me that ‘Hitler envied the British empire.’ True, he also advised me, at the vulnerable of ten, not to mix with ‘society women’ without satisfactorily identifying these dangerous creatures. About Hitler, though, he was on the whole right. Why else would the Führer insist that his SS Praetorian Guard the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler watch the Gary Cooper movie ‘The Lives of a Bengal Lancer’ so many countless times? But the empire cobbled together by the British was very different from the new Reich imagined by Adolf Hitler.
At the imperial games played so aggressively by the European powers in the 19th Century, Bismarck’s Reich was a peevish brat who arrived late when the best prizes had all been taken. From the moment the second German Reich was born in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles in 1871, German empire builders dashed with frantic haste across Africa and the Pacific grabbing whatever was left over from the party they had missed. During the First World War, the Kaiser fought long and hard to hold on to his new possessions. But to no avail. In 1919, when the victorious Entente Powers gathered together - once again in the Hall of Mirrors - Germany’ new colonies were all snatched away. A tantrum was inevitable.
German dreams of empire would create an imperial slaughter house. For the new empire Nazi builders that would have another go at the imperial sport would be the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS. From the time of Darius, every empire has been an artefact of armed force. The tools of empire builders have always been the spear, the bullet and the bayonet. But for the British, the Dutch or the French from the 17th on, empire was about plunder more than conquest. Greed was more valued than belligerence. Violence, however brutal, was a means to an end. The new German empire that flourished in the minds of Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler was different. This would be an empire founded on blood. Blood would be split and only one racial blood line would come out on top. To be sure, the Nazi imperialists would become the greediest imperialists of all time – but what drove them was this idea of Blut und Boden: blood and soil. Behind the rise and fall of empires was a struggle between races: a struggle to the death. In 1939, the Third Reich launched the second German land grab. But this time, it would be achieved with a war of annihilation. The Nazis would add the mass shooting and the gas wagon to the standard weapons of conquest.
Every schoolchild knows that Hitler wanted ‘Lebensraum’: meaning living space for the German people that would provide economic sovereignty or autarky. This simplistic idea had been developed by Karl Haushofer, a teacher of Hitler’s disciple Rudolf Hess. Hitler’s imperial ideas which allude to Haushofer’s geopolitics were fully developed in ‘Mein Kampf’ – but throughout the 1920’s he waged an ideological war with the left wing of the NSDAP led by Gregor Strasser and, when he first joined the party, Josef Goebbels. These ‘Men of the German Revolution’ as they called themselves, looked forward to the destruction of British power in India by Bolshevik Russia and called on the German government to support the ‘victims of imperialism’: meaning Germany herself as well as India and Africa. This leftist anti imperialist thinking was the main reason why Hitler clashed so violently with Strasser in 1930: in a bitter exchange, Hitler denounced Strasser’s support for Indian nationalists which he called ‘a rebellion of the lower Indian race against the superior English-Nordic race…. The Nordic race has a right to rule the world…co-operation with Russia is out of the question for there on a Slav-Tartar body is set a Jewish head…it is a question of establishing a Nordic-Germanic America, over the world.’ This astonishing diatribe demonstrates that Hitler’s imperial idea was set in stone very early . His ally against the Strasser faction was Alfred Rosenberg, the creepy Balt who had brought the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ to Germany from Russia. Rosenberg admired the Aryan capitalists of Thread needle Street and tended to refer to Indians as ‘poor bastards’. ‘English rule must be supported,’ he wrote in his turgid ‘Der Mythus der 20.Jahrhunderts’, surely the dullest political manifesto ever written. Rosenberg to a much greater degree than Haushofer shaped Hitler’s thinking which, even when he was proposing global conquest, was stiflingly parochial. He travelled very rarely and relied on a bizarre court of foreign advisors like the former wine salesman Joachim von Ribbentrop or the garrulous ‘Putzi’ Hanfstängl. Foreign policy under Hitler was divided between a bewildering number of overlapping offices all staffed by jealous and paranoid powerbrokers who battled each other along shifting front lines for the entire life cycle of the Third Reich. Hitler first used the Dienstelle Ribbentrop to unsettle the elitist German FO in Wilhelmstrasse. When Ribbentrop was finally appointed Foreign Minister, he set up the Information-Dienst to protect his flank from the Wilhelmstrasse mandarins. At the same time, the Abwehr secret service under the ambivalent Admiral Canaris had to compete with Walter Schellenberg’s Sicherheitsdienst (SD) foreign branch which was part of Himmler’s vast SS empire. If this wasn’t confusing enough, Ribbentrop did a deal with the SD to deploy their agents through German diplomatic offices. Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry frequently poked its nose into foreign affairs through its foreign journalist cadre and broadcasting service. And this is to say nothing of the NSDAP ‘Ausland’ agencies and the enormous ‘Todt’ engineering conglomerate that used road building projects in far flung regions of the world like Afghanistan to meddle in foreign policy.
Despite this patchwork of warring factions, the basic ingredients of Hitler’s imperialism were frequently trotted out and are easy to pick out of his various speeches, interviews, pronouncements and, above all, the ‘Table Talk’. Hitler despised every national liberation movement: they were ‘Indian Jugglers’ or ‘a coalition of cripples’. ‘As a Völkisch man,’ he said, ‘I am prevented by mere knowledge of the racial inferiority of these so-called ‘oppressed nations’ from linking the destiny of my own people with theirs.’ His advice to the British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax (twice Viceroy of India) in 1937 was simple: ‘Shoot Gandhi.’ It is an irony that the Third Reich would become a glowing beacon that attracted frustrated nationalists from the Raj and mandated territories like Palestine. Hitler’s Alf Garnett like scorn for lesser races meant that all of them, as well as their supporters, would be badly singed. Hitler – and here is another level of irony - had the same passion for the Raj as the enemies of British rule would develop for the Reich. This time speaking ‘as a man of German blood’, he declared would much rather see India under English rule than any other. In contrast to the left wing in the NSDAP, he feared that Indian would be overwhelmed by Bolshevik Russia or that ambivalent Axis ally, the Japanese. ‘The loss of India by the British Empire,’ he told a journalist in 1939 ‘would be a misfortune for the rest of the world.’ According to Walter Hewel, the Foreign Office representative in the Fuher’s headquarters, Hitler said ‘A very strange thing that with Japan’s help we’re destroying the position of the white race in East Asia and that Britain fights together with the Bolshevik swines against Europe.’ He was ambivalent, if not dismayed, by the fall of Singapore to ‘the yellow men’.
It was thus entirely natural for Hitler to turn to Anglo Saxon models when he contemplated how the new Germanic Reich would be administered. In some of his ‘Table Talk’, Hitler seems hypnotised by the magic of the British Empire. It was the largest the world had ever seen - a boundless source of wealth and power. In 1942, when these apercus were recorded by Martin Bormann, this was barmy. The British Empire had been crumbling in slow motion since the mid 19th Century. The world map familiar to some of us from geography lessons was not so much covered with red bits but spattered with rust. The near instant collapse of Singapore in 1940 shows what could have happened if the Japanese had ever got as far as Calcutta. And, of course, after 1945 the sheer cost of fighting Hitler hammered the last nails into the imperial sarcophagus. The miraculous British India that existed in Hitler’s mind was the one conjured up by (mainly Jewish) Hollywood moguls in ‘The Lives of the Bengal Lancer’: one of the least reliable guides to the subcontinent, but viewed many times at the Berghof, Hitler’s mountain retreat where he claimed he could think more clearly than anywhere else. This British India would be the model for the new empire in the east. ‘What India was for England, the territories of Russia will be for us…’ What particularly impressed Hitler was the way in which a small cadre of English administrators dominated millions of Indians. ‘The Russian space is our India,’ Hitler often said, ‘Like the English, we shall rule this empire with a handful of men.’ Hitler had numbers to impress his guests with. ‘Let’s learn from the English who with 250,000 men in all govern 400 million Indians.’ This cadre of 250,000 would, of course, be the SS. And Hitler also had views about how an elite cadre of Sahibs had achieved dominion in the Raj. A journalist from the Daily Telegraph got the answer in 1936 when he listened to Hitler speak in Berlin: ‘The white race is destined to rule. This is its unconscious urge which arises from a heroic conception of life and which is entirely non-pacifist.’ The lesson that Hitler leant from what was an imaginary version of the Raj was that successful empire builders were not squeamish. Blood was all.
Hitler’s convictions did not stop Goebbels’ using the iniquities of the Raj to make aggressive propaganda . In 1939, after Britain had declared war on Germany, the party rag the Volkischer Beobachter ran a series of red top style attacks on the British record: ‘Britain’s Bloody Responsibility in India’ was one lurid article which sported the sub title ‘Murderers, bankrupt People, and Exploiters established a World Empire’. Another edition featured the ‘Seven Mortal Sins of Warren Hastings’ – and the paper also published vitriolic piece by Habibur Rahman, an Indian Nazi who had lived in Germany since 1923 who became Subhar Chandra Bose’s press agent.
The other and even odder influence on Hitler’s imperial strategy was the adventure writer, Karl May. May was a crook and compulsive liar who found fame and fortune when he began publishing adventure stories set either on the American frontier or in the Orient. May’s heroes were cowboys and Indians with curious names like ‘Old Shatterhand’ and Winnetou. His tales of Indian heroism remain popular in Germany where the Karl May Festival at Bad Segeberg stages his stories with actors and real life sets in front of huge audiences. German ‘Indians’, most of them ‘Ossies’ from the old GDR inspired by May, gather at annual camps attended by thousands of men and women who spend their holidays in tepees, wear feathered head dresses, smoke peace pipes and enjoy energetic late night pow-wows. But what May suggested to Hitler was unintended and a great deal more sinister. His books sowed that the fate of many ‘Indians’ was the reservation. May lamented this – but to Hitler the story had a different lesson. ‘Natives’ were doomed to defeat by his racial superior, the white man. Rounded up and confined in reservations they would become extinct. ‘You should read more Karl May!’ he told his generals.
The men who would become Hitler’s imperial warriors would have little in common with Karl May’s frontier heroes or Gary Cooper’s Bengal Lancer. They would be the SS: the Nordic warrior caste begat by Heinrich Himmler.