We’ll take the southern part of the Ukraine, especially the Crimea, and make it into a German colony … [Russia] will be a source of raw materials for us, and a market for our products, but we shall take care not to industrialise it …
If I offer [people] land in Russia, a river of human beings will rush there headlong … In twenty years’ time, European emigration will no longer be directed towards America, but eastward.
Finally, he added whimsically:
The beauties of the Crimea, which we shall make accessible by means of autobahns – for us Germans, that will be our Riviera … [for] we can reach the Crimea by road. Along that road lies Kiev! And Croatia, too, a tourists’ paradise for us … What progress in the direction of the New Europe. Just as the autobahn has caused the inner frontiers of Germany to disappear, so it will abolish the frontiers of the countries of Europe.19
This is a revealing insight into the world Hitler was attempting to create, a Reich that had been designed for him by Karl Haushofer.
The impression has always been given that the Second World War was Hitler’s attempt at total European and then world domination, but this is not necessarily completely accurate. The above statement, allied to Map 2, is a much closer approximation of what Hitler’s war objectives really were.
The Nazis’ rise to power took ten years of hard political struggle, during which the party grew into a membership that numbered well over a million souls disaffected with the Weimar Republic. From a handful of members of parliament, by 1933 the Nazis held the balance of power with over 70 per cent of the vote. Many of Hitler and Hess’s aspirations for the party had been accomplished, and their theories, as laid down in Mein Kampf, were about to be applied to the German nation. In the Germany of the 1930s, the majority accepted the concept of authoritarianism, of a ruling party which promised to take your children and turn out model citizens who would in turn have safe, if controlled, existences, free from the horrors of economic decline and the threat of the Communism. Through all this, at Adolf Hitler’s right hand stood Deputy-Führer Rudolf Hess, the upstanding, well-spoken, educated family man, who yearly took part in competition flying, and had no stigma of seediness – unlike other leading Nazis such as the drunkard Dr Robert Ley, or the appallingly anti-Semitic Julius Streicher.
Rudolf Hess’s character was one that naturally instilled confidence. He was an unassuming man, frequently called ‘the conscience of the Party’, who annoyed his fellow top Nazis – ever attired in uniforms glittering with medals and bedecked with swastika armbands – by calmly going about his work in earnest fashion, often arriving at the Reich Chancellery dressed in a sports jacket, or neatly tailored suit. The image of the brown-shirt-wearing Hess standing at his Führer’s shoulder and screaming ‘Sieg Heil!’ was for public consumption. In private he was a very different man indeed. After the war, a close acquaintance of Hess’s, Ernst Bohle, the former head of the Auslandsorganisation,* was asked whether Hess was a sincere Nazi. After mulling the question over for a few moments, Bohle replied: ‘He was sincere as an idealist, in my opinion the biggest idealist we have had in Germany, a man of very soft nature, no uniforms with him or that sort of stuff, [and] he very seldom went into the public field.’20
Hess was therefore an earnest politician, content to toil behind the scenes for the advancement of National Socialism, and in many ways he quickly became the all-round acceptable face of Nazi government.
Importantly, the high regard in which Hess was held in the 1930s was not limited to Germany. Politicians and Foreign Office officials in many other European countries, including Britain, saw him as a moderating influence within National Socialism. Hess was viewed as a reliable, solid politician, a man who did not drink, lived modestly, had a model family life, and, most important of all, was a safe pair of hands. This last sentiment, particularly in light of the surprising level of disorganisation in the Nazi administration, placed Hess in a particularly strong position not only within government, but also with Adolf Hitler.
When Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, he quickly found that his long-sought position was an all-consuming task that affected his ability to interact with the party. He therefore appointed his trusted friend Rudolf Hess as Deputy-Führer of the Nazi Party, with the responsibility of leading the party as his direct representative. Hess proved so successful an administrator that within eight months, on Hitler’s proposal, the elderly German head of state President Hindenburg appointed Hess to the position of Reich Minister without Portfolio in 1934.
Despite the ambiguity of this title, defined as ‘a Minister without an office or papers of state’, and the fact that his role during the 1930s has been largely overlooked, Hess’s position as Deputy-Führer was an important one. Whilst he did not have a prominent Ministry which people could easily identify him with (such as the air force under Göring, or propaganda under Goebbels), Hess nevertheless held a position of great power, working behind the scenes, making sure that the National Socialist machinery of state worked.
Primarily, Hess’s role was party–government liaison, ensuring that ‘the demands of the National Socialist Weltanschauung [philosophy and ideology] were brought more and more to realisation’.21 This was a very important and far-reaching role, perhaps best compared to that of a political commissar who has the responsibility of ensuring that the government’s policies and state decisions follow the ruling party’s ideology. With his promotion to Minister without Portfolio, the Deputy-Führer became a high-ranking member of the Cabinet, and with his remit to oversee implementation of the Nazi Weltanschauung in state policy, he quickly developed interests in internal and foreign affairs.
As Minister with interests in internal affairs, Hess had responsibility for applying Nazi theory to education, public law, tax policy, finance, employment, art and culture, health and ‘all questions of technology and organisation’. It was a powerful empire, the tentacles of which could infiltrate all areas of government in the name of ensuring that policy and projects corresponded with Nazi ideology.
As Deputy-Führer with special interest in foreign affairs, Hess had responsibility for applying Nazi geopolitical theory to foreign policy. For this important and complicated role he built a sophisticated foreign affairs structure, creating three departments with which to pursue National Socialist foreign policy.
Firstly, there was the Auslandsorganisation (the Foreign Organisation) under Ernst Bohle, which looked after the political interests of party members abroad. In the 1920s and thirties the Nazis had divided Germany into many political districts, each called a Gau and under a regional leader called a Leiter – hence Gauleiter, or regional political leader (akin to a Soviet Commissar). The same concept was now applied to ethnic Germans resident abroad, each region becoming a pocket of National Socialism abroad, under a leader who in turn reported to his leader further on up the chain, in a pyramid-like structure, all the way up to Ernst Bohle. Ausland members were thus all party members, ordered to submit monthly reports on events and incidents in their resident countries, which were destined eventually to land on Bohle’s desk in Berlin. Thus Bohle became the recipient of valuable up-to-date foreign intelligence, and he guarded his territory jealously, gaining a great deal of influence because of it.
Next came the Aussenpolitisches Amt (the Foreign Affairs Office), under Alfred Rosenberg. This was controlled exclusively by and for the Nazi political machine to pursue National Socialist policy interests abroad, on its own and without deference to the Foreign Ministry.
Lastly, there was the VDA, created with the aim of strengthening ethnic German groups living in Germany’s neighbouring regions such as Austria, the Sudetenland or the Polish Corridor which the Nazis intended one day to reintegrate into a Greater Germany.
Hess appointed his old Professor of Geopolitics, Karl Haushofer, as Honorary President of both the Auslandsorganisation and