Written by Leon Sinfield and Lewis Waller

In December 1939, a courier for the Polish Underground described Nazi-occupied Poznan. The Polish city had been transformed in just three months. 

The city with the finest historical tradition in all Poland was now, to all appearances, a typical German community. Every sign on stores and banks and institutions was in German. The street names were in German… If a German passed by, a Pole had to step off the sidewalk. A Pole could not travel by automobile or trolley and was even forbidden to own a bicycle. He had been placed completely outside the protection of the law and all his property, movable or immovable, was at the disposal of the German authorities.

Slavs and Poles were seen as not being able to govern themselves. Germans were superior race. Joseph Goebbels reported Hitler’s feelings towards the Poles:

The Führer’s verdict on the Poles is damning. More like animals than human beings, completely primitive, stupid and amorphous. And a ruling class that is an unsatisfactory result of mingling between the lower orders and an Aryan master-race. The Poles’ dirtiness is unimaginable. Their capacity for intelligent judgement is absolutely nil.

How far did this conviction in German superiority extend? The German newspaper Grenzbote wrote:

If the good of our Fatherland demands the conquest, enslavement, elimination or destruction of other nations we should not be restrained from doing this by any Christian or humanitarian scruples.

We know the Nazi attitude towards Jews, we know about Italian colonial ambitions in Ethiopia, we know about Britain in India, and we shouldn’t forget, this was Jim Crow in America. But what would the world look like today if fascists had won? And importantly, why does this question matter – spoiler, it does.

Since WWII, thousands of novels, TV series, films, and scholarly works have tried to get at this big question – European domination? A wider Holocaust? US domination? Would dictatorship apply to all countries? Nazis on the moon? With nukes? Or maybe, as some are beginning to argue, it wouldn’t be so bad, maybe even better. Let’s look at the actual evidence.

Why?

First, why does this matter? This is Then & Now – my interest in the past is motivated by the problems of the present. Democracy, in its current form at least, is failing us. Some on the right look around and sees authoritarianism as the only alternative – a strong man with the power to cut through checks and balances and change the system.

This means minimising some of the worst moments in the history of authoritarianism, and what’s worse than an actual Nazi? The horror of the Holocaust has been Hollywoodised, the crazed-descent of Hitler and the evil of Heidrich, the banality of bureaucratic murder, all seared into our collective consciousness. In fact, the propaganda and tyranny of fascism have become the primary legitimising myth for the legitimising of liberal democracy. The Second World War structures our ethics – the good vs the evil. It is the ultimate sacrifice against the ultimate threat. It is an absolute taboo to describe anything about the Nazis – maybe even the German people in that period – as good.

For authoritarians to build up the case for rolling back on some of our democratic norms, they have to take pot shots at some of those taboos. The big one is what if the Nazis were bad, but not quite as bad as we think. What if postwar Europe would have been fine.

This kind of narrative has quite a long history. David Irving the famous Holocaust denier, argued that Hitler didn’t know about the Holocaust and Irving was also conveniently a critic of parliamentary politics. Connect the dots.

More recently, Darrell Cooper called Churchill the ‘chief villain of WWII’, Tucker Carlson is sceptical about democracy, and has been sympathetic with authoritarian leaders like Putin, and has also said some ‘interesting’ things about the Second World War. Someone like Curtis Yarvin, close to the vice-President of the United States, argues for a monarch-CEO. Let’s just say that democro-scepticism is in the air.

None of these people are Hitler, and I doubt they like Nazis. This is not the point here. What I’m interested in is the conceptual-chain – how does democracy slide into authoritarianism and how does authoritarianism morph into fascism. What does that mean for us today?

What we’ll see more of from these people, is the idea that a strong leader is needed, and that historically this has been the norm and more successful. Democratic theory, in part, relies on the opposite claim – that the best decisions come from building a consensus, that leaders are flawed and can and must be replaced.

Hitler is the ultimate strongman. He is the end of that road. The thick end of the wedge. He is the shibboleth for what happens when one man has too much power. Remember, the root of authoritarian is author – a person who can author the story, without guard rails, totally – totalitarianism. 

Asking what if? – what’s sometimes called counterfactual or allohistory – also allows us to get closer to something we were tyring to understand last time – is there a soul of fascism – a fundamental drive?

Italy

A few notes on Mussolini. He was more of a pragmatist than Hitler – often changing with the wind – and while he did have a strong grasp of what he thought the philosophy of fascism was (something we’ll get to in episode 4 by the way), how he applied that was much more tentative.

But over the fascist period, the Italian Fascists were increasingly influenced by the Nazis.

Mussolini saw the Mediterranean Basin as a new Rome – the historic and future ‘living space’ of Italy.

He borrowed the idea of a volk from the Germans, declaring in 1936 that a “people (Volk) cannot live without space (Raum).”

Mussolini’s aim was spiritual – or idealistic nationalist revolution from within – and foreign domination and conquest without. The goal was to transform “a gesticulating, chattering, superficial, and carnivalesque country” into a new nation of warriors, of real Fascists.

As we saw last time, Mussolini, like Hitler, had struggle at the heart of his ideological vision. At first, this was less racialist, coming from Georg Sorel’s emphasis on class struggle and national struggle. But by the end of WWI, Mussolini was claiming to have been influenced by Darwin too.

At the end of WWI though he said ‘The “will to dominate” was the fundamental law of the life of the universe from its most rudimentary forms to its most elevated ones.’ That man was driven by a ‘divine bestiality’. And that ‘Darwin weighed more heavily on his mind than Marx had ever done.’

He later said ‘Struggle lies at the origin of everything because life is full of contrasts. There is love and hatred, white and black, day and night, good and evil. Until these contrasts find a balance, struggle will always be placed at the heart of human nature and will be its supreme destiny.’

And in 1930 he said that in Europe, Nietzsche’s will to power was only represented by fascism.’

With this ideology in mind, when opportunity came knocking, Mussolini was easily swayed.

In their book A New Nationalist Europe Under Hitler, historians Dieter Pohl and Johannes Dafinger write ‘In a discussion between German and Italian racial experts, which took place only a few days after the Wehrmacht invaded the Sudetenland, the Roman representatives were eager to make extensive com-parisons to their own situation. As noted by Telesio Interlandi, one of the most extreme anti-Semites in the Mussolini regime, Fascist Italy faced a very similar problem: It was important to integrate the many ethnic Italians living outside Italy into the Fascist Empire proclaimed in 1936, but at the same time, the Empire included ever-larger numbers of inhabitants of “foreign” races.’

But of course, Mussolini and Italy were much weaker than Germany. But we can see how the idea of perpetual struggle was easily mapped onto to other ideas, racial struggle included.

And we might note that while Japan’s ideology wasn’t strictly fascist – as it was much more religious and elitist – there are crucial similarities and the influence of social Darwinism combined with colonialism had spread across Asia.

The 1905 Russo-Japanese War, for example, when Japan surprised all of Europe by defeating the Russias , dovetailed with the influence of racial struggle thinking. Historian Subodhana Wijeyeratne writes

 ‘The impact of the Russo-Japanese War on racial thinking in Japan was as significant as it was abroad, to the extent where the conflict was understood by key intellectuals as nothing short of a race war. These figures, including political philospher Katō Hiroyuki, historians Taguchi Ukichi and Asakawa Kan’ichi, and biologist Oka Asajirō, identified the outcome of the conflict as evidence that the established Eurocentric hierarchy of races was wrong’

But Japan is a story for another day. The obvious place to look at fascism in the ideal is Hitler’s plans.

Stages of Domination

Since the 60s, historians have been in two schools about Hitler’s plans – continental and global. The first argue hat Hitler’s goals were limited to Europe, the other that he had global ambitions. This split already tells us a lot – the evidence is ambiguous. 

We saw last time that Hitler, Musollini, and many others of the period – Henry Ford, for example – saw the world through the ‘scientific’ lens of Social Darwinism. That evolutionary struggle between races was inevitable, scientific, and ethical. This runs through almost everything the Nazis in particular did – especially in expanding German living space and diverting crops towards Germany. Hitler’s thinking is full of Darwinian terminology. To take just one – ‘This principle of selection that takes place through perpetual struggle is the guarantor of the success of our movement’

We’ve looked at this, see the last video, but the keyword for us here is ‘perpetual’ – on going, indefinite, forever.

Many historians then, argue that once Hitler dominated Europe we would have turned to the world! (insert Norm).

What’s inarguable were the explicit goals for Lebensraum in Eastern Europe – and the twin enemies of Judaism and Judeo-Bolshevism – both were to be exterminated and replaced by a continental European Empire. What would be left of Britain and France is more ambiguous. Both were Aryan, but Hitler was influenced by racialist ideas from de Gobineau and Chamberlain about racial mixing and dilution, impurity, degeneration.

He said of France that they were “becoming more and more obsessed by negroid ideas” and represent a “threatening menace to the existence of the white race in Europe” He thought that French colonial troops had mixed racially in Algeria. This justified German domination of France and a subservient Vichy Government.

But again, what of the future? What about Britain? America? What if he’d won the war?

The two obvious sources – Mein Kampff and Hiter’s lesser-known Zwei Buche – the Second Book – contain hints but they’re not systematic. 

But continual struggle, based on Darwinian principles, are clear. He writes that pacificism is only possible “when the highest form of human specimen has conquered and subjugated the world in such a way that he is sole ruler of the Earth.”’

And in the Second Book Hitler writes “that in the distant future humanity will be faced with problems that only a Herrenvolk, a higher race, will be called upon to solve, with the means and possibilities of the whole world at their disposal.”’

He talks of the ‘final victory of the healthier and the stronger.’ And a ‘core race’ – unipolarity – ‘“the final and greatest decisions for planet Earth.”’

The penultimate sentence of Mein Kampf reads ‘“A state, which in times of contaminated races, commits itself to the care of the noblest elements of its race will become lord over the entire Earth one day.”’

Most evidence points to this progressing in stages. Most famously the German historian Andreas Hillgruber who argued there was a ‘multi-stage plan’ – First Europe up to the Ural Mountains, including Moscow. So that’s the defeat of Russia and France first. Taking control of the Middle East would allow a launchpad to attack British India. Then he’d have their colonies too, and build up the fleet to access the Atlantic. Ultimately, a confrontation with the United States for global domination. 

Ian Kershaw also takes this view – that it was leading towards a final confrontation between German and the US.

Romanian Foreign Minister – Grigore Gafencu – wrote in 1939 that Hitler ‘He believed he could bring about such a plan if he modestly proceeded towards this end in stages. The Aryan race would then populate heaven and earth with German people and German Gods’

Jews

I’m going to skip past the obvious only because you know it and I’ve covered it here. I’ll just make two points. The first, social Darwinist struggle, requires a foil to struggle against. It is zero-sum. It’s an ideology that always need an enemy. History Goerge Mosse showed how the history of volkish ideas led to an anti-Jewish revolution. He wrote ‘The mass enthusiasm which over half a century of Volkish agitation had made explosive, and which, if not re solved, could become dangerous to its own creators, was shifted away from the real social and economic grievances and channeled into anti-Semitism’

There is a dynamism to it. An enemy is always required and always selected – the Jew, as the inner enemy, naturally came first. 

The second point is that there’s some debate as to whether this program of extermination would have extended outside of Europe’s borders. There’s lots of evidence to suggest it would have but that there might not have been any concrete plan.

The lesser known part is the next stage – the Slav. In looking at what the Nazis actually did to non-Jewish antagonists to the East, we can get a good idea of what their wider policies would have been if they’d won the war.

Slavs in the Nazi Worldview

Those dreaming of a stronger Germany again looked eastwards – Lebensraum to feed the Third Reich. In the 1880s and 1890s the academic Friedrich Ratzel, inspired by the expansion of the United States, set out a theory of geopolitics in which access to ‘space’ and an ability to exploit the ‘soil’ were crucial to national thriving. It is often underappreciated, as we’ll get to, how much the growth and threat of the US inspired fear in Germany.

After the First World War Karl Haushofer added to Ratzel’s work, putting the fertility of the soil at the centre of his theory of geopolitics. He believed that in agricultural cultivation a nation found its proper way of life; urbanisation, on the other hand, was unhealthy. The implication was clear: if a nation was to become stronger, it must expand to acquire Lebensraum.

When Adolf Hitler set out the vision that would later inform Nazi foreign policy in Mein Kampf in 1925, he drew heavily on these intellectual trends. Haushofer knew Hitler personally and visited him in prison as he was writing the book – Hitler wrote:

Do not consider the Reich as secured so long as it does not provide a piece of land for centuries ahead for every offspring of our Nation. Do not forget that the most holy right on this earth is the right for land which one may cultivate himself and that it is the holiest sacrifice to shed blood for the land.

Where Hitler went further than Haushofer was in his views on race. Drawing on the racialist thinkers we look at last time, Hitler believed the Slavs’ supposed cultural inferiority was biologically grounded. The Slavs were ‘sub-humans’, and, Hitler wrote, ‘generally lack state-forming powers’. 

If the Slavs were ‘sub-humans’, then the USSR was naturally one of Germany’s ‘organic enemies’, and the Russians, Ukrainians, Belarussians that made up its majority were the natural slaves of the Germanic ‘master race’. This made it inevitable that the Nazis’ future efforts to gain Lebensraum would look eastwards to create a Greater Germany – an Empire in Europe that was, crucially, contiguous, much like the US

By 1939, this vague but strong expansionist sentiment had turned into a more concrete plan. The territorial ambitions of the Nazis extended as far as the Ural Mountains, which would push the frontier of Germany nearly 2000 miles eastwards and deep into what was formerly Russia.

An SS document from around this time describes Eastern Europe as a potential ‘paradise, a California of Europe, and in reality abandoned, dreadfully neglected, branded with the stamp of a crime against culture beyond imagination even today’. This was ‘a perpetual accusation against the sub-human and his rule’. Capturing these territories would open up a gigantic space for German settlement, facilitating an explosion in Germany’s population. It would also allow the German people to connect to a mythical past and realise their natural and unrivalled racial strength and vitality, which they had become out of touch with in the industrial, urban age. This, Hitler believed, would make Germany a dominant global power.

Lebensraum Policy in Action

In the wake of Germany’s 1941 surprise invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler found himself in control of a gigantic swathe of land, from Warsaw to the outskirts of Moscow. Over the years of occupation, the Nazis began to implement their plan to ethnically cleanse Eastern Europe of its Slavic population, introducing a number of policies designed to control and weaken the people they saw no future for. While these actions only consisted in the initial stages of their plans, the damage they caused were catastrophic.

One of the central methods through which the Nazis attempted to maintain their control over the Slavic populations was through wiping out the intelligentsia, or the educated and political elites.

In the Polish territories captured in 1939, around 100,000 members of the intelligentsia and upper classes – such as priests, businessmen, judges, journalists – were murdered by the SS’s Einsatzgruppen in an operation called Intelligenzaktion. Many of them were killed in public by firing squad to terrorise the wider population, and others were worked to death in concentration camps. At the University of Krakow, for example, after the faculty was gathered for a lecture on Nazi ideology, the auditorium was surrounded by SS troopers and all inside were arrested and sent to a concentration camp, where almost all died. This was justified by ‘the traditional anti-German spirit of the University’.

The Einsatzgruppen were also highly active in the Soviet territories, following closely the rapid advance of the Wehrmacht. In addition to Jews, they targeted writers, journalists, artists, and remnants of the Soviet bureaucracy. In Kyiv, those listed as appropriate targets for execution included ‘the bearers of political ideas’, ‘undesirable elements’, ‘asocial elements’, ‘political commissars’, and ‘destitute young people’.

The Nazis also implemented a range of policies that aimed to weaken the occupied populations of Eastern Europe physically, psychologically, or spiritually. Outbreaks of disease were left to spread, with medical treatment deliberately withheld. Individuals suffering particularly severely from a particular ailment were often shot rather than given treatment. In Ukraine, for example, many of those suffering from syphilis were taken to a hospital in Mariupol where they were executed.

The Nazis also took measures that they believed would reduce the birthrate among the occupied populations. A plan drawn up by the Commission for the Strengthening of Germandom in 1939 advocated for the legalised and encouragement on abortion and contraception in occupied Poland, in order to reduce the birthrate, in addition to the permission of homosexuality.

The Nazis also implemented starvation policies. A report by the German Economic Armament Staff in 1941 talked of ‘superfluous eaters’ in Ukraine, where roadblocks were set up to prevent food getting to cities. This was blamed on bad infrastructure, while the same infrastructure was being used to transport food to Germany. Soviet prisoners of war were also deliberately starved: a Nazi official wrote in a report that most camp commanders in possession of Soviet prisoners of war refused to allow food donated by local populations to be given to the inmates. In many cases, POWs severely weakened by hunger were shot dead.

In the realm of education, the Nazis restricted schooling in order to create a more ignorant population. In the territories of Poland annexed in 1939, all Polish-language schools were closed, with Polish children only permitted to receive four years of education, in German. In Ukraine and Belarus, most school were shut down, and the operation of universities was severely restricted. In some cases school equipment was destroyed or shipped to Germany.

For the schooling that did exist, Himmler summarised its purpose as being to teach Slavic children only ‘simple arithmetic up to 500 at the most; writing of one’s name; a doctrine that it is a divine law to obey the Germans and to be honest, industrious and good. I don’t think that reading should be required’. Hitler himself recommended at one point that the education of Slavic children should be focused on giving them sufficient skills in basic German to be able to take orders from their masters.

Cultural and historical artefacts were also attacked or appropriated back to Germany. Museum pieces were stolen, library books used as fuel, works of art thrown through windows, and buildings with historical value burnt. A member of the Ukrainian Underground described the fate of the historical city of Kamenets-Podilskyi in 1943:

Strolling through the town you will only find one single enterprise which is active. This is a German company for house-wrecking. The purpose of this German activity is to destroy the cultural and historical monuments in which the ancient city of Kamenets is particularly rich. Street by street the town is systematically being leveled to the ground with typical German precision, and the famous historical buildings disappear. Similar demolition of the Ukrainian castles and ancient churches take place also in smaller towns of Podolia province.

The Nazis also unleashed what they called ‘collective responsibility retaliations’ – random massacres targeting ordinary individuals that were designed to terrorise the general population into compliance. The killings were usually carried out in response to partisan attacks on German occupiers. ‘For the killing of a single German soldier’, Wilhelm Keitel, a senior official in the Wehrmacht instructed, ‘we should retaliate by the execution of 50-100 persons’.

This principle was followed in December 1939 in the village of Anin, Poland, where 114 people were executed after two German security personnel were killed while trying to arrest a pair of criminals. Talking of such massacres, Hans Frank, the German governor of the General Government, noted that, ‘it goes even without mentioning that in most cases these actions were not directed against those who are guilty’. Despite this, it was thought that the mass killings would have a deterrent affect. Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, explained that, ‘If you stamp out every little fire that shows itself you will never have a big conflagration’.

The big point to remember here is living room – expanding the Reich for Germans – not as a traditional Empire. Hitler looked at the British Empire as obsolete because it allowed for racial mixing geographically. Italy, Japan, and Germany would represent a new type of Empire – a racial one.

The Nazis then viewed the Slavic presence in Eastern Europe as temporary. Even keeping Slavs around as slaves was undesirable – German racial homogeneity was viewed as essential, and it was only through contact with the ‘soil’, doing the agricultural work themselves, that the Germans could realise their biologically-grounded superiority. Slavic manpower was necessary to keep the war machine going, but after the victory they would be cast aside to make way for German settlement: ‘The Slavs are to work for us’, wrote Martin Bormann, Hitler’s influential private secretary, ‘In so far as we do not need them, they may die’. Ihor Kamenetsky, an influential Ukrainian-American scholar, argues that the Nazis viewed deportation as insufficient – if the Slavs were dumped in Siberia, for example, there was always a chance they would have threatened the Reich in the future. The extremity of the Nazis’ policies during the occupation demonstrate that complete extermination was more than mere possibility.

In the World Hitler Never Made, Gavriel Rosenfeld writes ‘Many would have died from this de facto policy of ‘extermination through work,’ but even more would have perished in what [Alberto] Giordano called ‘the other Holocaust’—the genocide of the Slavs. In a lengthy chapter on the infamous Generalplan Ost, Giordano described the plan, devised by various Nazi planning agencies in the early 1940s, to transfer some 31 million Poles and Russians beyond the Urals and enslave 14 million others as part of a broader program of germanizing Eastern Europe’

A lot of German research focused on this type of Empire. For example, after a young SS officer was sent to Libya for PhD research and found that families settled more successfully if the father was supported by two grown sons, Himmler suggested that German families settling in Eastern Europe should be made sure to have two adult sons with them.

Mussolini developed a similar view on Empire. Instead of colonies being acquired to exploit their indigenous inhabitants, overseen by a relatively small colonial bureaucracy, the Italian regime envisaged a large-scale transfer of population into the new territories. In order to make space for the colonists, the indigenous people, viewed as racially inferior, would have to be moved onto enclaves of less fertile land. By the late thirties, Mussolini’s plans were being put into action, with the first 20,000 colonists being resettled in Libya in 1938. It was also planned that millions more would be settled in Ethiopia. In 1936, Japan announced the ‘Millions to Manchuria’ plan, through which 20% of Japan’s farmers would be settled in Manchuria over two decades.

Ok, so what if the Nazis had succeeded here. What if they’d racially cleansed the East for Lebensraum. What if Britain had sued for peace after Dunkirk and what if America had never entered the war?

First, there were plans for a Großraumwirtschaft – a greater rational European economy based on region blocs and cartels, with a strong state, all either incorporated into Greater Germany – like Northern France, Poland, etc – or as essentially puppet regimes. Some of the biggest buildings and stadiums and roads and airports and infrastructure of all kinds were planned by Hitler and Albert Speer to show off German superiority. Hiter looked to buildings like the Colosseum as examples of enduring greatness.

What About Britain?

In Mein Kampf, Hitler talks about Britain and Italy as foundational allies. Hitler’s view here is one of an evolutionary psychologist. In Mein Kampff he wrote ‘The necessary condition for linking together the destinies of nations is never mutual esteem or mutual sympathy, but rather the prospect of advantages accruing to the contracting parties. It is true that a British statesman will always follow a pro-British and not a pro-German policy; but it is also true that certain definite interests involved in this pro-British policy may coincide on various grounds with German interests.’

Stanley Payne puts it like this: ‘Despite the brutality of his designs, Hitler expected to find indispensable allies and/or complicity abroad. The most important would be the British Empire, which he proposed to support in exchange for the return of the old German colonies and a free hand on the Continent.3 Anglo-Saxon “racial cousins” were not targets of Nazi expansionism and racial revolution, and in some undetermined fashion they might be helpful allies in the eventual ultimate struggle for world power, probably directed against the mongrelized United States by a greatly expanded Reich of the future, even after Hitler’s own death.’

British Aryans were already spread around the world, making them obvious allies in the expansion of the Aryan race.

Rosenfeld writes ‘Should the British Empire be destroyed, [Hitler] stated at a reception for a highly decorated fighter plane pilot at the end of September, 1940, “a vacuum would be created that could not be filled.”

But dictators are pragmatists plus ideologues. Hitler was irrational enough to twist and bend the ‘logic’ of the ideology to suit his needs. France, for example, were Aryan but had apparently been too corrupted to be saved, despite the vast majority of French citizens never coming into contact with the colonies.

There’s always the question of short-term vs long-term plans too. Once Britain had rejected fascist overtures for peace talks, inevitably Britain would have to be occupied. If the Battle of Britain and Operation Sea Lion (the Nazi invasion of Britain) had been a success, Britain would likely be treated like any other Nordic nation. ‘Racial-cousins’ though they were, German domination through inevitable endless struggle was the ultimate goal.

So German has dominated all of Europe up the Urals, what about the US?

America

For Hitler, America was different. In 1933, the Nazis organised a boycott of Jewish stores in Germany. In response thousands of Jewish Americans organised boycotts of German goods. 55,000 attended an event an Madison Square Garden and many similar events were organised in other American cities.

This points to something in Hitler’s view of America – that it was too far gone, too corrupted by both Jewish and African racial mixing.

His views were torn for another big reason though – there were around sixty million Americans that were of mostly Germanic origin. Hitler saw the great migration from Europe to America then out west as an Aryan Germanic striving. It was “a branching off of our German race.”

He also looked jealously at America’s great expansive continental Empire. Hitler wrote ‘The European today dreams of a standard of living, which he derives as much from Europe’s possibilities as from the real conditions of America. Due to modern technology and the communication it makes possible, the international relations amongst peoples have become so close that the European, even without being fully conscious of it, applies as the yardstick for his life, the conditions of American life.’

Jewish influenced meant America was unredeemable though. It was the mongrelized ‘headquarters of world Jewry.’ Roosevelt had become a puppet of Jewish bankers.

This made America the obvious great threat, the future struggle, the intercontinental war.

In the Wages of Destruction, Adam Tooze writes ‘America’s enormous competitive advantage in industrial technology was above all a function of ‘the size of’ America’s ‘internal market’ and its ‘wealth in purchasing power but also in raw materials’. It was the huge volume of ‘guarantee[d] . . . internal sales’ that enabled the American motor vehicle industry to adopt ‘methods of production that in Europe due to the lack of such internal sales would simply be impossible’.32 Fordism, in other words, required Lebensraum.’

American necessitated the German expansion Eastward. And in 1914, Hitler said that after the success of that expansion Germany would be ready for a ‘war against continents.’

As Hitler put in on 9 January 1941, after the conquest of Lebensraum in the East, Germany would be ready for a ‘war against continents’.

Hitler writes ‘In future the only state that will be able to stand up to North America, will be the one which has understood how, through the essence of its inner life and the meaning of its foreign policy, to raise the value of its people in racial terms and to bring them into the state-form most appropriate for this purpose . . . It is the task of the national socialist movement to strengthen and to prepare its fatherland for this mission.’

How would a war against America proceed?

There were plans to occupy the West coast of Africa, the Canary Islands, and the Azores to use as a launchpad to attack America. Hitler was hoping to for a supply of long range bombers to attack the East Coast.

But this is about as far as they got. Rosenfeld writes that ‘Göring and Keitel denied the existence of the long-range airplanes that would have been necessary, Dönitz admitted that there was talk about this within the Lutfwaffe. But he too denied the actual existence of such aircraft types or any specific plans. Jodl admitted that long distance deployments had been discussed and remembered a discussion between Hitler and Göring on this matter, a discussion which Warlimont verified as far as Hitler was concerned. During the war, Hitler had told him about the development of a bomber that could reach the United States.3 Just like Jodl, he couldn’t remember a particular type of airplane. Büchs4 was the only one to mention the Messerschmitt Me 264, which according to him had the necessary range. The mass production of this plane failed due to a lack of materials.’

What would a Nazi America look like? At this point we’re in fictional speculation. A German American Vichy-style regime, maybe? A further American Holocaust? There were no plans, but with what actually happened in the East with the cleansing of Jews and Slavs, it doesn’t take a huge leap in imagination.

I want to finish briefly by returning to the question of why this matters. You may be thinking I’ve presented a reasonable, evidence-based but lets say undesirable picture of an alternative history.

But the question for you is, what makes it undesirable. It may seem a laughable question. But it matters. Because history is meant to by unbiased, I’m meant to reserve judgement and present the facts. But you’re not stupid, you can probably tell this isn’t a history I want, even if I’ve presented it as carefully as possible.

To me history is normative. You can approach it with moral questions in mind. Those moral questions will be different for everyone. But they exist. 

Of history we can ask two questions – what happened and what might have happened? 

Counterfactual history like this – what’s sometimes called allohistory – has become more influential. It was for a long time stigmatised as unscientific, hypothetical, speculative.

But many historians are beginning to take them more seriously. What if? Becomes a useful tool for analytical thinking and debate. It enables us to think about what might have happened if other roads were taken. And it’s almost always presentist. Should you appease? Should you be more authoritarian? Should democracies or invaded nations be defended? When does an authoritarian become a fascist?

‘What if?’ questions help us to assess whether we or they made the right choice. They are a type of imaginative logic. They also help to contstruct a picture of ur-fascism, the fascist ideal, the Platonic Idea of fascism – what it would look like unchecked. We get a sense of it not just in reality but in aspiration too.

What Nazi apologists will often tell you is that Hitler just wanted a small sphere of influence and an Empire like any other power of the period. That he would have stopped at Poland. Of course, counterfactuals are limited, because you can’t predict how chains of events would have unfolded, how others would react. But I think you can at least take an educated guess – the evidence all points towards a Nazi party that had global struggle in its ideology and in its practice.

The purpose of this is as a bridge – we’ve thought about fascism in practice, fascism in the ideal, after this, we’ll look at existing authoritarianism today, and finally, we’ll finish this series by bringing it together and thinking about fascism today.

Sources

Kamenetsky – Secret Nazi Plans for Eastern Europe: A Study of Lebensraum Policies

Winstone – The Dark Heart of Hitler’s Europe: Nazi Rule in Poland Under the General Government

Stratton – ‘It almost needn’t have been the Germans’ The state, colonial violence and the Holocaust

Bernhard – Colonial crossovers: Nazi Germany and its entanglements with other empires

Mazower – Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe

Alexievich – Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II

Czesław Miłosz – Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition

Hitler – Mein Kampf

Hitler, Second Book

Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, The World Hitler Never Made

Tooze

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/09/14/tucker-carlson-conservatives-nazis-00179091