2

Berlin, Warsaw, Moscow

A worldview is not a plan for taking power. The Judeobolshevik myth supplied an image of the enemy, but not a foreign policy. Lebensraum was a summons to empire, not a military strategy. The problem for Hitler the thinker was that German politics, neighboring states, and the European order could not be abolished by the stroke of a pen. After he left prison in 1924, Hitler learned some practical lessons, without ever changing his mind about the theory. As a young veteran of the First World War, Hitler could imagine that a dramatic gesture, a coup attempt in Munich in 1923, would suffice to transform Germany. In this he was wrong. He was defeated, and his comrade Scheubner-Richter was killed, by the forces of the state. Yet Hitler did come to power, a much cannier politician, ten years after his failed putsch. Then he and his party comrades, with considerable popular support, transformed the German state. Hitler could imagine that the Soviet Union was a cowardly Jewish coven. In this he was mistaken. Yet he did manage, eight years after winning power in Germany, to make war on Moscow and begin a Final Solution.

For Hitler’s worldview to change the world, he had to become a new type of politician, practicing a new type of politics. For anarchy in theory to become extermination in practice, the German state had to be refashioned, and neighboring states had to be destroyed. For the Jews of Europe to be murdered, the states destroyed had to be the ones where Jews were citizens. The vast majority of European Jews lived beyond Germany, the largest number of them in Poland. Poland was not only the major homeland of the Jews, but also the country that separated Germany from the Soviet Union. In one way or another, Poland had to figure in Hitler’s plans to destroy the Jews and the Soviet state.

In the six years after Hitler came to power, he succeeded in altering the German state, but failed to recruit a Polish partner for his wars. Had Poland and Germany fought as allies against the Soviet Union in 1939, the result would no doubt have been disastrous for the Jews of Europe. The Holocaust as we know it, however, followed instead a German-Soviet war against Poland. That the Second World War began as and when it did—as a campaign of state destruction and national extermination against Poland in September 1939—was a result of Hitler’s success at home, his failure to sway Poland to his dream of foreign conquest, and the willingness of the Soviet leadership to join in a war of aggression.

At first glance, a German-Polish alliance would seem more plausible than a German-Soviet alliance. The Nazis and the Soviets spent the second half of the 1930s in a vituperative contest of propaganda, each presenting the other as the ultimate evil. Warsaw and Berlin seemed, by contrast, to have much in common. From 1935 to 1938, both Germany and Poland were central European states pressing territorial claims on their neighbors while boasting a grand rhetoric of global transformation. Leaders in both Berlin and Warsaw faulted the world order for constraining flows of food, raw materials, and human beings. Both placed the Jewish question at the center of their diplomatic rhetoric, suggesting that its resolution in Europe was a matter of international justice. Both emphasized the threat of Soviet communism.

Often the German decision to attack Poland in 1939 is explained in the terms provided by Hitler and his propagandists: by Berlin’s campaign for adjustments to the border, or by Warsaw’s resistance to them. This had almost nothing to do with it. In fact, the war between Germany and Poland resulted from deep differences on the Jewish and Soviet questions that were shrouded for years by Polish diplomacy. Hitler was willing to treat Warsaw as an ally in his grander campaigns against Moscow and against Jews, and also willing to destroy it entirely when such an alliance came to seem implausible, as it did in early 1939. Either way, Hitler saw Poland only as an element in his own master plan: as a helper in his grand eastern war, or as a territory from which that war could be launched. Hitler gave much more thought to the first variant than to the second, which was an improvisation that followed rapidly upon the surprising failure of German-Polish diplomacy in early 1939. All the while, Poland was an actor with its own aims and purposes. Germany and Poland ended up thwarting each other because German and Polish foreign policy were built upon a very different analysis of global politics and the role of the state.

Berlin’s global position after Hitler’s rise to power might be characterized as recolonial. Empires as such were just and good; the best empires were racial; Britain and America were rival exemplars of racial mastery; a German empire would restore balance to the world. The globe was naturally a world of competing empires; what was unnatural was the existence of a Jewish empire—the Soviet Union—and Jewish influence in London, Washington, Paris, and elsewhere. Germany would make a redeemingly racial empire by displacing a decadent Jewish dominion. In Hitler’s mind, Poland’s place in such a recolonial project was to help Germany: during the war as an ally or benign neutral, afterward as a satellite or puppet. In this conception no violent changes in the German-Polish border were needed, since Poland could grant territory to Germany in exchange for some of the booty in their joint conquest of the USSR. In the end this would be meaningless since Poland would fall under the thrall of Germany during the war itself.

Warsaw’s global attitude, by contrast, might be called decolonial. Poland’s history was one of destruction of an ancient Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth by surrounding empires in 1795 and the creation of a nation-state in 1918. As Poles saw matters, empires had no special legitimacy, and as a matter of historical logic and justice were giving way to nation-states. Empires might be destroyed, as the Nazis thought; but if so, they would be replaced by nation-states rather than racial regimes. All nations were more or less equal actors in history, striving towards freedom. Most leading Polish politicians were attached to the nation-state as an intrinsic value and a collective achievement of the recent past. The unglamorous conservative definition of the state, the monopolist of violence and the enforcer of laws, was for many Poles a precious and unlikely achievement. No Polish leader, despite a grandiosity of rhetoric about foreign policy, imagined that Poland would displace one of the world powers. Unlike Hitler and some of the Nazis, the Polish leadership had no theory about the secret leadership of the USSR or all empires by Jews, and no illusions about the hidden fragility of the great powers. The imperial system, of which the USSR was a more or less normal part, would eventually give way to national liberation. In the meantime, maritime empires such as Britain and France had to open themselves to the resettlement of millions of Polish Jews. Warsaw hoped that Polish Jews would rebel against empires and form Polish-Jewish states that would somehow extend Polish influence in any site of settlement—least implausibly Palestine. Israel was as far as Warsaw’s dreaming went.

Both Berlin and Warsaw supported the removal of millions of Jews from Europe. For Hitler, this was part of a vast project of ecological restoration, in which the elimination of Jews after a German victory would repair the planet. The German state was a means to an end; it could and would be mutated and then put at risk. Antisemitism likely had more popular resonance in Poland than in Germany, at least before 1933, but no one with ideas similar to Hitler’s came close to achieving power in Warsaw. Whereas German policy involved the destruction of states where Jews lived, Polish policy sought the creation of a state for the Jews. The covert essence of German foreign policy in the late 1930s was the ambition to build a vast racial empire in eastern Europe; the covert essence of Polish foreign policy was to create a State of Israel in Palestine from the territories granted by a League of Nations mandate to the British Empire.

The Nazi recolonial and the Polish decolonial mindsets were each, in their different ways, quite radical. Each was a challenge to the imperial order as it stood, the first envisioning its refoundation on the racial principle, the second its inevitable replacement by postcolonial states. The foreign policies they generated could seem rather similar, especially to a Führer in Berlin who thought that he needed allies. At a crucial level of political theory, however, the opposition could hardly have been more basic: rejection versus endorsement of the traditional state.

This fundamental difference in attitudes about the state arose in large measure from opposing experiences and interpretations of the First World War. It was a basic cause of the Second. For Polish patriots, 1918 was a year of miracles, when an independent Polish state, absent from the maps of Europe for more than a century, arose again. For Germans, 1918 was a year of the unimaginable military defeat, followed in 1919 by the Treaty of Versailles and humiliating territorial concessions—largely to the new Poland.

After the failure of his coup, Hitler learned to be politic, using the energy of German resentment to further his own extraordinary ambitions. He exploited the broad German consensus in favor of revising the European political order, even though his own goal was to destroy it. He presented himself as a determined advocate of national self-determination, even though he did not actually believe in national rights. Likewise, he learned to soften his presentation of the Jewish menace. He no longer said in public that Christianity was as Jewish as Bolshevism. German Christians would be allowed to modify their doctrine rather than be forced to abandon it, as they were drawn into the larger struggle that would drain it of all meaning. To Hitler, his fellow Germans were of interest only insofar as they could be rallied to join a mindless war for future racial prosperity. In other words, Germans were disappointingly frivolous as they pursued their petty preoccupations of the Weimar Republic of the 1920s. Hitler could hardly tell them that, and he did not.

After his release from prison, Hitler still sounded radical by comparison with the ruling German social democrats or traditional conservatives, but now his radicalism was in dialogue with political rivals and meant to attract German voters. Success came in the early 1930s, when the world economy was in depression, and capitalism and communism alike seemed to have failed. This left an opening for National Socialists to present capitalism and communism as mad and doomed alternatives and themselves as rescuers rather than as revolutionaries. Hitler did not emphasize at this time, as he had in My Struggle, that only the extermination of Jews could preserve Germans and the world from the two supposedly Jewish systems. In his election campaigns of 1932 and 1933, Hitler instead presented his own National Socialism as a recipe for stability and common sense to be contrasted to the insanity of capitalist and communist ideology.

In reality, National Socialism involved the aspiration to destroy communism in order to build a massive empire that would insulate Germany from the vicissitudes of global capitalism; there was nothing remotely conservative about that aim. Hitler presented his anti-communism not as a military crusade against a great power, but as concern for the bottom line of German businesses and the full bellies of the electorate. In spring 1933, as the Soviet introduction of collective agriculture starved millions of peasants, Hitler used the specter of hunger to discourage Germans from voting for the Left. When he spoke at the Berlin Sportpalast of “millions of people being starved,” he was appealing to the middle classes and their fears. When he continued by saying that Soviet Ukraine “could be a grain silo for the entire world,” he was speaking to his Nazi followers. He veiled one sense of Lebensraum, the bloody conquest of habitat, behind the other, the promise of physical comfort.

In 1933, Hitler emerged triumphant from democratic elections during a long German constitutional crisis that had already centralized power in the office of the chancellor. His National Socialist party, which had won only twelve seats in parliament in 1928, claimed a staggering 230 in July 1932, falling to 196 in November 1932. Hitler was named chancellor of a coalition government in January 1933, supported by conservatives and nationalists who believed that they could control him. This was an error. Hitler used the arson of the parliament building in February to limit the rights of German citizens and create a permanent state of exception that permitted him to rule without parliamentary oversight.

In the weeks and months of Hitler’s consolidation of power in spring 1933, his followers carried out pogroms and organized a boycott of Jewish-owned businesses. The fifty thousand or so Polish Jews in Germany were not subject to these repressions; their Polish citizenship protected them, as it would for the next five years, from Nazi oppression. This was all the more notable in that Polish Jews in Poland organized a counterboycott, refusing to trade with Germany. The boycotts and beatings of German Jews were barbarous in appearance, again by comparison with what had come before. But they were a weak foretaste of the political Armageddon that Hitler had in mind. He would need a war, and a special kind of war. For that he needed not just power in Germany, but also a reconfiguration of German power.

After Hitler’s rise in 1933, he pursued domestic policy for more than six years before he began his first war. This is a long time without armed struggle for a man whose theory urgently demanded blood sacrifice for the restoration of nature. Hitler had learned tactics and even a certain kind of tact after the failure of his 1923 coup, but his electoral gambits did not qualify as a program. Disguising one’s own ultimate aims to gain power is not the same thing as making daily decisions once power has been won. Hitler was no believer in institutions and could hardly have been satisfied simply by turning German administrative organs to his own purposes. He was not even a German nationalist. In his view, Germans were presumptively superior to all others, but the hierarchy was to be established in practice, by racial war. He would need special measures to direct Germans towards that war, and unusual techniques to direct their state to the purposes of generating anarchy.

These were mammoth tasks; his tactics were equal to them.

An initial inspiration, according to Hitler himself, was the Balkan Model. Like a number of other politicians of his era, he saw in the Balkan nation-states that had emerged from the declining Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century the proper relationship between domestic and foreign policies. Serbia and the other Balkan states had shown how to achieve “a specific foreign policy goal” through “military conflicts.” Balkan-style militarism featured a specific political economy. The leaders of nation-states with limited internal markets and primarily agricultural exports wanted larger economies. The justification for extending the national territory was the liberation of fellow nationals abandoned on the wrong side of the border. At home, voters were told that war was liberation; in fact, expansion broadened the tax base. The only purpose of domestic politics, Hitler claimed, was to mobilize the energy and resources necessary for achieving living space abroad.

Hitler was, to a point, a Balkan-style militarist. The case he made at home and abroad for the need to expand the military was the classic Balkan one of self-determination. Domestic politics thus became the art of accumulating resources and manipulating opinion such that war became possible and seemed inevitable. Although Hitler did not seem to personally care very much about the plight of Germans abroad, he recognized that nationalism of this kind could mobilize German emotion. Hitler built up the German armed forces beyond all previous limits and apparently beyond reason. Compulsory military service was reintroduced in 1935, and military budgets grew extraordinarily from year to year. In creating his war machine, Hitler accumulated debt that could be covered only by war, a condition that itself became an argument for the initiation of one. The old dilemma of budget priorities—guns or butter—could be solved in traditional Balkan style: butter through guns. As Hitler put it, “from the distress of war grows the bread of freedom.”

He respected the Balkan Model but saw it as a first step rather than a final achievement. Although Hitler needed to control the German state, its expansion was not really his goal; although he understood the uses of German nationalism he was not really a nationalist. The national sentiments of his fellow Germans were what he called a “space-conquering force” that could propel them into the racial struggle where they could see and fulfill their higher destiny. Love of country had to be mobilized to get German men out of the country and into alien realms that they could master. As one German woman who understood Hitler would put it, the “inclination towards confined spaces clings like a sticky mass to the German people and must be overcome.” For the far greater ambition of Lebensraum, Hitler introduced seven innovations to the Balkan Model: the party-state, the entrepreneurship of violence, the export of anarchy, the hybridization of institutions, the production of statelessness, the globalization of German Jews, and the redefinition of war.

Unlike the Balkan leaders to whom he paid a grudging respect, Hitler was not a king innovating from established notions of legitimacy and sovereignty. He was not the dynastic embodiment of a people with duties or interests, but rather a clear-sighted representative—as he saw matters—of a race doomed to bloody struggle until eternity. The apostle of nature had to accommodate traditional institutions to his own vision of the future, which meant transforming them before he made war. Beginning from the legal position of chancellor within a faltering republic, inheriting a host of institutions, Hitler and the Nazis created something new.

The theoretical reconciliation between the old and the new Germany was the party-state. Such a synthesis had been pioneered by Lenin in the Soviet Union a decade earlier. The Soviet state was present in every way a state might be: with an administration, a parliament, a judiciary, a government, an executive, even a constitution. In fact, the Soviet state was subordinate to the communist party, which was itself supposed to represent the workers and their interests. The communist party, in turn, was run by a central committee, which was run by a politburo of a few men and indeed usually dominated by a single man. Lenin had the advantages and disadvantages of revolution; Hitler’s party did not. Thus the Nazi assimilation of state to party, the Gleichschaltung, took place gradually.

In 1934, Hitler was officially titled “Führer and Reich Chancellor.” This vague designation indicated that Hitler was the head of a racial body as well as the head of government. Hitler was a racial colonialist in theory and an opponent of the Weimar Republic in practice. In the name of racial consolidation he destroyed the republic’s basic freedoms and mocked its constitution. And yet its bureaucrats generally considered Hitler’s rule as a legitimate continuity of administration.

Of course, the very notion of a party-state was self-contradictory. The Nazi party was founded on the assumption of endless racial conflict, whereas any traditional state asserts the right to control and limit violence. Conflict had to be maintained but at the same time channeled. The existence of the party-state depended, therefore, on Hitler’s second innovation, the entrepreneurship of violence.

The classic definition of the state, provided by the German sociologist Max Weber, is the institution that seeks to monopolize legitimate violence. In the 1920s and the early 1930s, Hitler sought to discredit the Weimar Republic by demonstrating that it could not, in fact, do this. His armed guards, known as the SA and SS, functioned before his takeover of 1933 as de-monopolizers of violence. When they beat opponents or started brawls, they were demonstrating the weakness of the existing system. Following the example of Benito Mussolini after his rise to power in Italy, Hitler kept his paramilitaries after he himself had won power. Often after a revolution the professional miscreants are subordinated to the state and become servants of order rather than its violators. But the SA and SS remained party organizations even after the state had been won. Although their members wore uniforms and had ranks, these did not indicate a particular place in a state hierarchy. The SA and SS were organizations of power, but not of a power confined by a conventional state. Their final authority was the good of the race, as defined by their Führer. After the takeover of 1933, they became entrepreneurs of violence, looking for ways and means of murder that would serve the larger project of racial empire even as the German state came under Nazi control.

Yet this innovation, in its turn, posed a basic problem: How could the entrepreneurs propagate violence in Germany when what Hitler needed was a foreign war, and thus the strength within Germany to fight? How much blood could be shed in the very country that Hitler needed as his base for his global war in the name of race? If people accustomed to violence were to be trained in violence, where would that training be put to use? The rulers of the Soviet Union had earlier faced the same problems, and solved them elegantly. The conflict required by theory was to continue, but not on the lands controlled by the theorists. The communist party was meant to guide the workers through painful class conflict, but of course after the revolution such a thing could not be admitted to exist with the Soviet Union itself. The Bolsheviks therefore maintained that their state was a peaceful homeland of socialism that provided an example of future harmony for the rest of the world. Soviet foreign policy worked from the assumption that class conflict beyond the Soviet Union would eventually bring down world capitalism, and generate new allies. In the meantime, it was reasonable and legitimate for Soviet foreign policy to encourage this historical process. In other words, Soviet authorities monopolized violence within their own country, and exported the revolution.

Hitler’s third innovation, anarchy for export, was a similar solution to the conundrum of legitimizing and cultivating violence while preserving one’s own authority. After 1933, Nazi Germany was chiefly a base for further operations abroad, which would then transform Germany itself. German institutions were altered in part to transform Germans, but mainly to prepare the way for an unprecedented kind of violence beyond Germany. The revolution would proceed abroad, and when complete it would redeem Germans and allow them to elevate their own country. The German state had to be preserved precisely to allow the destruction of other states, an achievement that would establish the new racial order.

The outlines of this solution emerged in June 1934, a little more than a year after Hitler seized power, in the defeat of one set of violent entrepreneurs, the larger and more populist Sturmabteilung (SA), by another, the more elite bodyguard initially known as the Schutzstaffel (SS). The SA and its leader Ernst Röhm were faithful to Nazi ideology in its literal, antipolitical reading. Röhm imagined that his SA men would become a new kind of army, fomenting revolution inside Germany and abroad. He spoke of a second revolution to follow Hitler’s takeover of 1933. Hitler, by contrast, understood that a period of political transformation in Germany would have to precede the completion of the revolution by foreign war. In the Night of the Long Knives, the SS arrested and executed Röhm and other leaders of the SA, while propaganda denounced the victims as homosexuals. As so often in Nazi actions, the apparent conservatism was a cover for something truly radical. The legal theorist Carl Schmitt explained that Hitler was protecting the one true law, that of the race, by asserting himself against law as conventionally understood. By suppressing the SA, Hitler was able to appease the commanders of the German armed forces, who had seen the SA as a threat.

Whereas the SA had stood for Hitler’s youthful anarchism, the SS understood the need for a new sort of racial politics, radical but patient. The SS was not a direct rival to the German army nor a threat to order in Germany. Its commander Heinrich Himmler followed Hitler in seeing Germany as a realm of politics where change would come gradually. Rather than making claims for revolutionary power within Germany, then, the SS would take part in the destruction of states beyond Germany. This involved a future division of labor with the army rather than a present competition. The existence of useful German institutions had to be squared with the desirability of the law of the jungle; actions taken in the present in Germany had to prepare the way for the future conflict that was National Socialism’s essence. The German army would prepare the way by defeating armies, and then the SS would restore the natural racial order by destroying states and eliminating human beings.

This mission of deferred supremacy allowed the young men who joined the SS to reconcile racism with elitism, and careerism with a sense of destiny. They could believe that they were defending what was best in Germandom even as the existence of their organization transformed the German state.

After its triumph in the Night of the Long Knives, the SS implemented Hitler’s fourth innovation, the hybridization of institutions. Crime was redefined; racial and state organizations were merged; and cadres were rotated back and forth. In 1935, in a significant reform, Himmler explicitly redefined the SS and the police apparatus as a single organ of racial protection. Himmler, who served a racial movement rather than a traditional state, personally directed both the SS and the German police from 1936. The investigative service of the SS, known as the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), proposed a new definition of political crime. It was not crime against the state; the state had validity only insofar as it represented the race. Since politics was nothing but biology, political crime was a crime against the German race. Himmler’s deputy Reinhard Heydrich, whom Hitler called the “man with the iron heart,” directed the SD.

In 1937, Himmler established the Higher SS and Police Leaders, a new top level of authority that would unify the two chains of commands under a few men chosen by and subordinate to Himmler. These new positions would become significant in territories beyond Germany during war. The Higher SS and Police Leaders were constrained by the thicket of police institutions and laws in Germany itself; later they could develop a new political order in the East without such encumbrances. In September 1939, Heydrich was placed at the head of a new institution known as the Reich Security Main Office, which unified his SD (a party and racial institution) with the Security Police (a state institution). It was Heydrich who would be charged with creating the Einsatzgruppen (task forces) that would follow German troops into conquered terrains. The Einsatzgruppen were also hybrid organizations, mixing SS members and others. The police forces themselves were hybridized from within, as police officers were recruited to the SS while SS officers were assigned to the police. The secret state police (Gestapo), the detectives of the Criminal Police (Kripo), and even the regular uniformed Order Police (Orpo) were to become Himmler’s racial warriors.

Among the limited responsibilities of the SS in prewar Germany were the concentration camps, small stateless zones inside Germany itself. This precedent of statelessness was Hitler’s fifth innovation. Himmler established the first camp at Dachau in 1933 as a place where the National Socialist party (as opposed to the German state) could punish people—extralegally, as party leaders deemed necessary. The political enemy and the social enemy were the racial enemy, and the camps were to hold all of these groups. Placing socialists, communists, political dissidents, homosexuals, criminals, and people presented as “work-shy” in the camps separated them from the normal protections of the state, and filtered them from the German national community. Their labor would help prepare Germany for a war that would destroy other states.

The most important aspect of the camps was the precedent they set. The concentration camp system within Germany in the 1930s was not very expansive—German colonial facilities in the 1890s were comparable, and the contemporary Soviet Gulag was more than a hundred times larger. German camps were chiefly important as a demonstration that organs of coercion could be separated by the Führer’s will and barbed wire from the law and the state. In this sense the concentration camps were training grounds for the more general SS mission beyond Germany: the destruction of states by racial institutions. Death rates in whole east European countries, in places where the SS would destroy the state, would be much higher than death rates in German concentration camps in the 1930s.

Hitler’s sixth political innovation was the globalization of German Jews. In reality, Jews were a very small part of the population of Germany, under one percent. Most Jews were assimilated to German society in language and culture; indeed, the German high culture of the early twentieth century, including much of the modernism that remains celebrated today, was in significant measure a creation of Jews. Most Germans did not see Jews in their daily life, and were not particularly good at distinguishing Jews from non-Jews. To make a new racial optic was to consolidate the German national community, the Volksgemeinschaft.

After Hitler’s takeover, membership in the German state followed the rules of membership in the Nazi party. In 1933, Jews were banned from public service and from serving as lawyers. By the terms of the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, Jews became second-class citizens. For the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt, these laws were part of a “constitution of liberty,” since they embodied the arbitrary distinction between friend and enemy that would make, in his view, normal politics possible. As of 1938, Jews could not exercise any commercial, medical, or juridical function in Germany. The steady disappearance of Jews from public life was meant to spur Jews to leave Germany and to revise the worldviews of Germans. In everyday life, measures directed against Jews forced Germans to think about Jews, to notice Jews, and to define themselves as “Aryans,” as members of a group that excluded the Jews with whom they shared the country.

At the same time, Nazi propaganda aggressively included German Jews in an imaginary group, the international Jewish conspiracy. Often Jews were described not as individuals, but as members of Weltjudentum, world Jewry. When books were burned, the message was global: In Heidelberg those of “Jewish, Marxist, and similar origins” were put to the torch; in Göttingen books were set alight along with a sign bearing the name “Lenin,” the founder of the Soviet state. In this way the Jew became the Bolshevik, the union consummated by the very act of burning. Not so very much later it would be not books but Jews themselves who would be burned bearing such signs.

The globalization of the German Jew in the 1930s was an important but limited achievement. The Jew, as Hitler saw matters, remained inside the German. The extraction of the Jew from the German could be achieved only by removing Jews from the planet, something that could not yet be articulated in any precise way. Experience would later show that for Jews to be killed, they would first have to be physically removed from Germany. With a few hundred exceptions, Germans would not kill German Jews on the territory of their common prewar homeland. Germans beyond Germany, invading and occupying neighboring countries, and meeting Jews in places where political authority had been removed and the Jews had no protection, often described them in the impersonal way prescribed by propaganda. Jews beyond Germany were the overwhelming majority of the victims of the Holocaust. The globalization of racism succeeded when combined with world war.

Hitler’s final innovation was the redefinition of war. His version of militarism went beyond preparation for conventional wars, as in the Balkans. He intended not just to take territory that might be portrayed as ethnically contiguous, as in the Balkan Model, but to destroy entire states and master entire races. “Our border,” as the SS slogan went, “is blood.” In 1938, Hitler did away with the position of minister of war, and took personal command of the armed forces. Himmler, Göring, Heydrich, and the other Nazi leaders planned a war of extermination, starvation, and colonization in eastern Europe.

Oddly, this planning was not directed against Germany’s actual eastern neighbor. Poland was unimportant in Hitler’s writings of the 1920s and visible only as a desired ally in his policies after the seizure of power in 1933. This seems stranger still in light of the fact that Poland is where the Jews of Europe chiefly lived. About ten times as many Jews were citizens of Poland as were citizens of Germany. There were about as many Jews in individual Polish cities such as Warsaw and Łódź as there were Jewish citizens of Germany. And of course Poland was the country that lay between Germany and the Soviet Union, where Hitler’s true revolution was to be made.

A war was always the object of Hitler’s policy. The fact that one took place was above all a result of his designs and achievements within Germany. Yet Hitler made a mistake about Poland, imagining it only as an instrument in a larger German enterprise. Instead, Poland behaved as a political agent, a sovereign state.

The German calamity of 1918 was a Polish miracle. Virtually everything about the outcome of the First World War that was threatening for Germans was exhilarating for Poles. The Treaty of Versailles of 1919, a symbol of injustice in Germany, was a pillar of the legal order in which an independent Poland could exist. When German troops withdrew from the East, a new Polish army could fill the power vacuum. Poles fought the Red Army for the lands that had been German client states. Poland won the Polish-Bolshevik War, and the Treaty of Riga of 1921 established Poland’s eastern border with the Soviet Union.

Poland was a new state drawing together territories from three former empires: Russian, Habsburg, and German. Jews were present in large numbers in almost the entire country, so interaction with them was a part of daily life for the other citizens of Poland. Jews were most of the doctors, lawyers, and traders, and so mediated in contacts with the broader worlds of knowledge, power, and money. Jews paid more than a third of the taxes in Poland, and firms owned by Jews were responsible for about half of the foreign trade. There were about as many assimilated Jews in Poland as there were in Germany; the difference was that for every assimilated Polish Jew there were ten more who spoke Yiddish and were religiously observant in one traditional form or another. Jews in Poland had parallel systems of schooling, a parallel press, and a parallel party system.

The question of loyalty to the Polish state was not resolved simply by answers to census questions about language or religion. It is to yield to ethnic nationalism to imagine that all people who spoke only Polish identified with the Polish state and that people of other backgrounds necessarily did not. Not everyone who spoke Polish was loyal to the new state or even identified with it. Most Poles were peasants, and most peasants awaited some gesture from the state that would arouse their loyalty. The Polish countryside was massively overpopulated, and rural unemployment was staggeringly high. Land reform was halting and insufficient. Rather than redistributing land from the large estates, the Polish state acted as a broker in negotiations for purchases and a source of credit for purchases. Peasants were dissatisfied by slow transactions, and hurt when credits were withdrawn during the Depression. Most peasants wanted both their own plot of land and their traditional rights to shared use of common land, desires that were contradictory in ideology but understandable in practice. When all land was treated as private property with defined owners, ancient rights to the use of pastures and forests could not be enforced. Polish peasants had been immigrating to America in large numbers for half a century, but in the 1920s and 1930s new American laws held them back. Independent Poland assimilated and integrated large numbers of peasants, but had to deal with considerable dissatisfaction in the countryside.

Polish patriotism spread outward from the intelligentsia, a large social group mostly composed of the children of noble landholders and of the rising middle classes, including the children of prosperous Jews. Polish political society was divided into two major orientations with opposing ideas about the design and purposes of the new polity. The most popular movement among Poles was known as National Democracy and led by Roman Dmowski. It favored land reform but only insofar as this helped Poles rather than Ukrainians and Belarusians, who were in some eastern regions of Poland more numerous and just as poor or poorer. The second major formation, descending from the Polish Socialist Party of Józef Piłsudski, supported land reform in principle, but in power yielded to the voices of the noble landholders it came to see as bastions of the state.

The differences between the two movements on the national and Jewish questions were fundamental. The National Democrats began from the idea that Polish traditions of toleration had doomed the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the eighteenth century, and that only ethnic Poles could be trusted. National Democrats tended to emphasize the need to create a nation from Polish-speaking peasants, to regard Ukrainians and other Slavs (perhaps a quarter of the population) as possibly assimilable, but to see Jews (about a tenth of the population) as foreigners. Although the movement was founded by secular nonbelievers influenced by a Social Darwinist conception of life as struggle, with time it assimilated traditional religious antisemitic ideas, such as the responsibility of Jews for the death of Jesus. Like the Roman Catholic Church, National Democrats tended to associate Jews with Bolshevism. The significant presence of Jews in Poland made antisemitism more politically salient there than in Germany, but it also made it more difficult for antisemites such as Dmowski to present Jews in an entirely uniform, stereotyped way. Although conspiratorial thinking and the Judeobolshevik conception were certainly present in religious and secular propaganda, Polish antisemites tended to think of Jews as a Polish rather than a planetary problem.

Dmowski’s opponent, Józef Piłsudski, began his conception of politics from the state rather than from the nation. He tended to value the traditions of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and to believe that its legacy of toleration was still applicable. He saw individuals as citizens of the state, with reciprocal obligations. He began as a socialist revolutionary, and even as he moved away from his youthful ideals he maintained the conviction that revolutionary violence was justified. Though his supporters were probably less numerous than Dmowski’s, he usually had the tactical advantage of the initiative. Whereas Dmowski tended to think that the Polish nation had to be raised from its peasant roots before statehood could be achieved, Piłsudski was ready to rally the forces that were available at any given time.

Piłsudski’s moment was the First World War. He had prepared for a European crisis by organizing Legions within the Habsburg monarchy. The idea was to fight alongside the regular Habsburg forces as long as that seemed to promise political gains for Poles within the multinational empire, and then use the military training for other purposes if and when it seemed warranted. While empires collapsed he also organized a secret Polish Military Organization tasked with winning independence and favorable borders. Piłsudski was able to take power in Warsaw and even lead a victorious war against Lenin’s revolutionary state in 1919–1920. What he could not do was persuade a majority of Poles to accept his version of the state. An old socialist comrade, Gabriel Narutowicz, was elected Poland’s first president and then was promptly assassinated by a nationalist fanatic. Piłsudski then withdrew from the politics of the state he had done much to create.

When Piłsudski returned to power, in 1926, it was by coup d’état against both the National Democratic Right and its dominance in Polish society, and against the threat of a communist Left which, he thought, the National Democrats only aided with their chauvinism. Rather than altering the constitution of the Polish republic, he manipulated its institutions, finding ways to generate pliable majorities in parliament. He formed an electoral entity, the Non-Party Bloc for Cooperation with the Government, which was supported by the national minorities, including traditional Jews. The orthodox Jewish party Agudat Yisrael became a bastion of support of his regime. Synagogues adopted resolutions to vote for Piłsudski’s Bloc, and rabbis led their followers to the urns. Some of the people who ran the Bloc were secular Jews and Ukrainians.

Piłsudski brought a fake democracy combined with a pinch of renewed liberalism. His maintenance of the appearance of democratic procedures after 1926 was meant to preserve a sense of legitimacy while keeping the National Democrats from winning power. His authoritarian regime perhaps held off the worst. The years between Piłsudski’s coup and his death saw world economic collapse, the rise of the Far Right across Europe, Hitler’s seizure of power and the beginning of the Gleichschaltung, and Joseph Stalin’s consolidation of power and the famines of Soviet collectivization. Piłsudski treated the state, in what was becoming an old-fashioned way, as the equal preserve of all citizens. His governments removed all legal discriminations against Jews, and created a legal basis for the local Jewish communes responsible for religious and cultural affairs.

Piłsudski’s fundamental respect for the state, as opposed to Hitler’s basic disdain for it, was visible in the fate of the organizations that Piłsudski had used to seize power. Just as Hitler had his SA and his SS, Piłsudski had his Legions and his Polish Military Organization. But the men and women who served in these Polish paramilitary formations were integrated into conventional state institutions, either after the war or when Piłsudski returned to power in 1926. Most of the men and women Piłsudski trusted in power had served in the Legions or the Polish Military Organization. They were sometimes involved in conspiracies of Piłsudski’s making, but formed no alternative structure based in aspirations to zoological anarchy or the supposed superiority of their race (some of them, in any event, were Jewish). Veterans of the organizations certainly indulged in the romantic myth of Piłsudski as the savior of the nation, and in the general cult of secular messianism that was the spiritual element of his sort of patriotism. The essential idea was that Poles suffered on this earth so that Poles and others might be liberated—also on this earth.

With time, these ideas became nostalgic rather than energizing, as the Polish independence won in 1918 came under increasing threat from both east and west. By 1933, when Hitler came to power, Piłsudski’s old comrades in arms—now diplomats, spies, and soldiers—were preoccupied with the state mainly as an achievement that had to be preserved from both Berlin and Moscow.

Józef Piłsudski was an enemy of the Soviet Union. He had beaten the Red Army on the battlefield in the Polish-Bolshevik War, and he regarded Stalin as a bandit. His feelings about the USSR, unlike Hitler’s, were shaped by personal knowledge of the Russian Empire. Hitler, who exhibited strong convictions about Russian history and racial character, did not know the Russian language and never visited the Russian Empire or the USSR. Piłsudski was born a Russian imperial subject, and had learned to curse in Russian during five years of political exile in Irkutsk—a habit he retained to the end of his life. Piłsudski had been across the Ural Mountains, which for Hitler were as mythical as the Hyperboreans; Piłsudski had been deported to Siberia, where Hitler dreamed of deporting Jews.

For Piłsudski neither Russia nor the Left was an abstraction. As a student in Kharkiv in 1886, he moved with the Russian revolutionary populists of Narodnaia Volia, the movement that would inspire the Bolsheviks of the next generation. A year later his older brother plotted with Lenin’s older brother in a conspiracy to assassinate the tsar. Piłsudski was accused of involvement as well, and sentenced to five years of Siberian exile. Upon his return he helped to establish the illegal Polish Socialist Party and edited its newspaper, The Worker. He was a Russian revolutionary, in that he and his comrades operated in an illegal underground along with Russians, Jews, and socialists of all possible origins in the Russian Empire.

Piłsudski was perfectly aware that there were Jews on the Left: Jews in the Russian socialist movement who opposed Polish independence; Jews who wanted Jewish autonomy with whom he cooperated; Jews in his own Polish Socialist Party. Jews were among the comrades and friends of his political youth and, in some measure, his political maturity. He knew the Polish Jews and other Poles who took part in the Bolshevik Revolution. These were, for him, individuals with names and pasts who had made a terrible mistake. He himself believed that statehood had to precede socialism. During and after the First World War he plotted with and fought alongside numerous Jewish members of his Legions and Polish Military Organization. In his circles the Judeobolshevik idea was known to be a folly. The Soviet Union was an actual foreign threat, whereas the Jewish question was a matter of domestic politics.

Piłsudski and his comrades tended to see empires as incubators of nations, and progress as national liberation. As people who had themselves built an independent nation-state from territories of the defunct Russian Empire, they tended to believe that the same process could be repeated within the Soviet Union. The major national question, to their minds, was Ukraine. Whereas Hitler and the Nazis tended to see Ukraine as a zone for settler colonization, Piłsudski and his comrades saw it as a neighboring country and a possible political asset. Indeed, for many Polish leaders Ukraine was home. Piłsudski was from Lithuania, but he studied in eastern Ukraine. Many of Piłsudski’s lieutenants were Poles from Ukraine, and much of the 1919–1920 war with the Bolsheviks had been fought there. Thousands of Poles from Ukraine had been killed in battle there, as had thousands of Poles who were not. Poles from Ukraine regarded the country sometimes sentimentally and often condescendingly, but always as a place inhabited by human beings. Unlike the Nazis, no Polish statesman could see Ukraine as a blank slate or as a land without people.

After Piłsudski’s return to power in 1926, some of his old comrades in the foreign ministry and in military intelligence began a project known as Prometheanism. Named after the titan of Greek mythology who blessed humanity with light and cursed humanity with hope, this policy involved the support of oppressed nations against empires, and in particular the support of the Ukrainian cause in the Soviet Union. The USSR had been established as a union of formally national republics. Soviet leaders imagined that new non-Russian and non-Jewish elites could be recruited through an acknowledgment of the existence of the other nationalities combined with affirmative action. Their optimism was grounded in a Marxist faith about the future triumph of the working class and the socialism it would bring. The Polish Prometheans, working from a different scheme of history, saw the Soviet nations rather than social classes as the historical actors that, with proper support, might weaken the Soviet Union. Prometheanism was the hidden part of Polish foreign policy, funded from secret budgets and carried out by trusted men and women. Its centerpiece was Poland’s most Ukrainian province, Volhynia, where for several years a Ukrainian culture was officially supported in order to attract the attention and sympathy of Ukrainians within the Soviet Union.

Naturally, support of national movements within the Soviet Union, and the whole Promethean idea, were thought to serve Polish interests. Even so, many of those who took part in them also believed that they were continuing a certain ethical tradition, one of sacrifices made by one nation for the good of all. Their liberal nationalism had been confirmed rather than challenged by the outcome of the First World War. The slogan from the romantic patriots of the nineteenth century was “For your freedom and ours!” All would make sacrifices, and all could triumph in the end.

Piłsudski was right to see the USSR as a solid political edifice and as a continual threat to Poland, but wrong to view it as a kind of updated Russian Empire. Hitler grasped its novelty and radicalism, but mistakenly reduced the ideas and aims of its leaders to Jewish world domination. Soviet ideologists presented Piłsudski and Hitler together as “fascists,” which overlooked the very significant differences between an authoritarian defender of statehood and a warmongering biological anarchist. But Marxists were right to notice that the private property regime that prevailed in both Poland and Germany was so different from the Soviet system as to make communism almost impossible to understand in both Warsaw and Berlin.

The Soviet, Polish, and German systems can be defined by their relationship to land. Communists, like capitalists, had to confront the basic dilemma of maintaining stability in the countryside while satisfying urban populations. In the Soviet Union in the 1920s, those urban populations were a largely theoretical working class inhabiting largely unbuilt cities, to be fed by real peasants who in some places, such as Ukraine, were very attached to their real plots of land. The Nazis exported the land question, treating it as a matter of foreign conquest. Polish governments tried and failed to resolve it in a more or less legal way. Stalin faced the issue squarely and drew a logical conclusion: The existing Soviet peasant and countryside could and would give way to a future of workers and cities. The Poles had no glorious vision of a peasant utopia; the Nazi agrarian vision of Lebensraum depended upon a foreign triumph. The Soviets believed that their revolution could be made at home, the costs borne precisely by the large peasant class—people who had no place in socialism in any case.

In Moscow, Warsaw, and Berlin, the land question was always international as well as domestic. If Germany was recolonial, planning to seize lands from another empire, and Poland was decolonial, hoping to liberate other empires for the emigration of its citizens, the Soviet Union was self-colonial. Stalin wished to apply to his own subjects the policies that he believed imperialists applied to native peoples. Since the Soviet Union was isolated from the capitalist world and yet needed to match capitalist development, the only hope was to exploit the resources, including the people, to be found within Soviet borders. Since the Soviet Union was the largest country in the world, covering a sixth of its landmass, such thinking was plausible in Moscow as it was not in Berlin or Warsaw. The centerpiece of Stalin’s self-colonization was the collectivization of agriculture that began in earnest in 1930: the seizure of private farmland and the transformation of some peasants into controlled agricultural laborers and others into workers in the city or in the camps.

This policy brought massive resistance and then massive starvation: first in Soviet Kazakhstan, where more than a million people died in a mad dash to pin nomads to plots of land, which the state then took from them almost immediately, and then in southern Soviet Russia and the entirety of Soviet Ukraine, productive territories where peasants lost their land to the collective. In the second half of 1932, Stalin treated the starvation in Ukraine as a political problem, blamed the Ukrainians themselves, and claimed that the whole crisis was a result of Polish intelligence work. The Soviet leadership that autumn and winter applied a series of specific policies to Soviet Ukraine that ensured that starvation deaths were concentrated there rather than elsewhere. About 3.3 million inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine died horrible and unnecessary deaths of starvation and disease in 1932 and 1933.

From the beginning of collectivization, thousands of peasants fled Soviet Ukraine across the Polish border, entire villages at a time, begging for a war of liberation. One peasant promised that if “a war were to begin the mood of the people is such that if the Polish army came everyone would kiss the feet of the Polish soldiers and attack the Bolsheviks.” Another expressed the hope that “Poland or some other state would come as quickly as possible to free them from their misery and oppression.” The summary report of the Polish border guards assigned to interview the Soviet refugees read as follows: “The population longs for armed intervention from Europe.”

A deliberate mass starvation in one of the earth’s most fertile regions could hardly escape notice. But the reactions in Warsaw and Berlin were quite different. Even as they chronicled starvation, Polish border guards and intelligence officers reported that Soviet forces assembled along the borders after the first wave of flights and enforced the starvation campaign. Contemplating the lethal and unmistakably modern policy of collectivization, Polish Prometheans began to ask themselves whether they had, in fact, understood the Soviet Union. Given this new uncertainty, some began to wonder whether their prior attempts to use the national question were politically and morally sound. Polish foreign policy changed course. Poland had agreed in 1931 to a Soviet proposal to discuss a treaty of nonaggression, and one was signed in July 1932. This separated Poland from its previous Ukrainian clients and from the Ukrainian question. This too had its moral hazards.

Polish diplomats in Soviet Ukraine, in evident moral distress, observed the consequences of collectivization. The consul in Kharkiv, then the capital of Soviet Ukraine, estimated that five million people had died of hunger, which was a low estimate for the Soviet Union as a whole and a slightly high one for Ukraine itself. In February 1933, he reported that men came to his office to weep about their starving wives and children. “On the streets” of Kharkiv, another diplomat wrote, “one sees people in the last throes and corpses.” Hundreds of dead bodies were removed each night; residents of Kharkiv complained that the militia was not clearing them quickly enough. Polish intelligence reported, correctly, that the starvation was even worse in the villages. Peasants were fleeing the countryside for Kharkiv to beg on the streets. The militia tried to move them out of sight; the quota for the number of children to be seized each day was two thousand. Even as the death toll moved from the hundreds of thousands to the millions, the head of Polish military intelligence wrote in March 1933 that “we want to be loyal” to the arrangement with the Soviets, “even though they continually provoke and blackmail us.”

The withdrawal of the Poles from the Ukrainian question could be experienced by Ukrainians themselves as a betrayal, as indeed it was. The leading Polish expert on the nationalities question recorded one consequence of the Soviet-Polish agreement: “The signing of the pact annulled the hope of rescue from abroad, and so Soviet power in the conviction of the mass population became the absolute master of life and death. This was confirmed by the fact of the massive extinction of the rural population in spring 1933.” The last hope of Ukrainian peasants, as they themselves said, was a German invasion of the Soviet Union and the destruction of the Soviet order.

The Polish diplomats, accustomed to seeing nationality and loyalty as political matters, began to ask themselves how the Germans would manage Soviet Ukraine if they did invade at some later point. As one wrote, the Germans “will have to think long and hard about their material and moral approach to the local population, what the slogans will be and how they will be realized.” These nuances would have escaped Hitler. He was planning to invade the Soviet Union and seize Ukraine, but with the goal of racial colonization rather than of national liberation. He did not see Ukrainians or Soviet citizens as subjects of politics, or even as full human beings.

The political famine in Soviet Ukraine realigned the foreign relations of the major regional powers, setting the stage for the Second World War. In 1930, as mass collectivization began, Stalin and the Soviet leadership were alarmed by the consequences of their own policies and sought peace talks with Piłsudski to avoid Polish intervention during the collectivization chaos. The Polish leadership, cutting defense budgets during the Great Depression and troubled by the moral implications of intervention, was agreeable. Moscow and Warsaw signed their treaty of nonaggression in July 1932. Berlin was very sensitive to the possibility that this pact might be directed against its interests. Piłsudski assigned his new foreign minister, Józef Beck, appointed in November 1932, to balance this agreement with a similar accord with Germany. This initiative was timely. Piłsudski had tried (and failed) to arouse interest in Europe for a preemptive action against Hitler. Hitler was interested in rapprochement with Warsaw. In January 1934, Berlin and Warsaw signed a declaration of nonaggression, agreeing that their common border would not be changed by force.

For Polish leaders in 1933 and 1934, facing the rise of both Hitler and Stalin, preserving the status quo was an end in itself. For Berlin the declaration was a first step towards the grand plan of eastern war and colonization of Soviet territory. Hitler knew that peace with Poland was unpopular in Germany, but he did not care: He saw the German-Polish territorial questions as a springboard to future eastern empire. He expected that a deal could be reached whereby Poland would voluntarily concede some territories in exchange for lands gained from the Soviet Union. In that scenario, traditional German revanchists would get what they wanted—and be drawn into the war that Hitler wanted. After the joint declaration, anti-Polish disinformation disappeared from German newspapers. Joseph Goebbels, Berlin’s master of propaganda, lectured in Warsaw on the challenging subject of “National Socialist Germany as an Element of European Peace”; Beck promised to prevent an international congress of Jewish organizations from meeting in Poland. Piłsudski, now an old man in faltering health, began to figure in German military publications as the genius who had shown, back in 1920, how the Red Army could be beaten in rapid encirclement battles. His memoirs were published in German with a munificent foreword by the minister of defense. Hitler wondered aloud about what it would take to draw the Poles into a full military alliance and told his generals that this was what he wanted and expected.

Moscow had its own interpretation of the diplomatic realignment brought about by the Ukrainian catastrophe. Whereas Warsaw saw the nonaggression agreements with both Moscow and Berlin as proof of a policy of supporting the status quo, and Berlin saw its engagement with Warsaw as pointing towards a common campaign against the Soviet Union, Moscow saw the German-Polish rapprochement as a sign that Poland and the Soviet Union would never be allies. In the European war that Stalin expected, Poland would be either hostile or neutral toward the USSR. This meant that Polish statehood was of no possible value to the Soviet Union, and should be eliminated when the occasion arose. It then transpired that the large Polish minority in the western reaches of the USSR had been hostages to the possibility of some future Soviet-Polish accord. Once Stalin ceased to believe that Poland could ever be a Soviet ally, Soviet citizens of Polish nationality became disposable. Poles in the Soviet Union could be blamed for Soviet policy failures (such as the famine in Ukraine) and punished accordingly.

In the five years between the signing of the German-Polish declaration in January 1934 and the clear break in German-Polish relations that would come in January 1939, Poles in the Soviet Union were subjected to a campaign of ethnic cleansing. The first wave of deportations of Soviet Poles from border regions of Soviet Ukraine and Soviet Belarus began a few weeks after the German-Polish declaration was signed and continued until 1936. Then Polish communists in the Soviet Union were depicted as participants in a vast Polish conspiracy to undo the Soviet order. Their interrogation led to the “discovery” of this “plot,” which then became the justification for the Polish Operation of 1937 and 1938—the largest and bloodiest of the Soviet ethnic actions during the Great Terror of those years. More than a hundred thousand Soviet citizens were shot as ostensible Polish spies. This was the largest peacetime ethnic shooting campaign in history.

As the Polish Operation began, Stalin said that he wanted the “Polish-espionage slime” to be destroyed “in the interests of the USSR.” When the chance came to destroy the Polish state itself, he would seize it. Poland was the home of Europe’s largest Jewish population, more than three million people. The annihilation of their polity would be crucial to their fate.

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