(The narrative of this entry picks up where my entry Lenin and Rosa left off.)
Assuming that the newborn Nazi party in Germany would like to have a big brother in Soviet Russia, was an enormous historical misjudgment on Lenin’s part. Yet, had the Russians been able to go back to square one, what could they possibly have changed? Cultivating the Nazis was too consistent with Lenin’s thinking, to try doing anything differently, unless he was prepared to scrap Soviet Russia’s grand dream of superpower internationalism altogether, which, considering the way his mind worked, would have been totally absurd to expect. In other words, Lenin’s misjudgment about the Nazis was a logical and historical necessity. So was the rise of Hitler, too. (In his case, however, it was not la forza del destino, but, rather, Schicksal.)
From the beginning, Soviet Russia was able to influence the emerging Nazi Party only up to a point, but that part they seemed to have been aware of all along. There had to be a complex struggle for influence and, as a later entry in this section will demonstrate, they were ready to be in it for the long haul. Moscow had no say whatsoever in Hitler’s rise as the future Führer of Germany. Ironically, but hardly surprisingly, Lenin’s and Hitler’s careers had a lot in common. Both were launched into prominence by their jobs as police informers. And both had a mind very much of their own.
Hitler was by nature a militant ideologue. It means that his convictions could be influenced by his choosing among several incompatible extremes, and whichever extreme were to win the struggle of influences, would be espoused by him with sincere zeal. Thus, just like Japan in World War Two, Hitler had a choice between two major options, and this choice was a matter of life and death for the Russians.
Number One, the good one, was for Hitler to see the numerous advantages of the Russian friendship. The Bolsheviks and the Nazis with Bismarck’s blessing (about which see my Bismarck entry), could walk a long way together, emphasizing their common socialist ties, resolutely united in their opposition to World Capitalism. German historical enmity toward the French (which must have been going back at least eleven centuries, to the grandsons of Charlemagne, who had broken up their grandfather’s great Empire; and, just recently, had been punctuated by Germany’s humiliation at the hands of the French in World War I) fitted neatly with this option.
When Hitler sat down to write Mein Kampf in a Bavarian prison in 1923-1924, he had an invaluable Soviet agent of influence by his side and seemed to be steadily drifting into this first option. As long as France had remained on Hitler’s mind as Germany’s Enemy Number One, and as long as Rudolf Hess (selling out the store, but see my entry about him in this World War II subsection) was by his side, helping him write his master opus, the Soviet aspirations regarding the Nazis were in reasonably good shape.
By the time Mein Kampf was published in 1925, the Nazi Party had already been drawing some limited, but worried attention in the West. The so-called “second volume” of Hitler’s Buch, which came out in 1926 with a dramatic revision of German foreign policy objectives, must have been the product of an intense influence on the Führer by some powerful and generous sponsors from the West. In that same year 1926, a revised edition of the First Volume appeared also, with the revision bent on shifting from option one to option two, consistent with the content of the Second Volume.
Whether Hitler had indeed been persuaded to reverse his combative stance against France Eastward, Herr Führer, in the Second Edition of Mein Kampf, was now openly espousing the dreaded Option Number Two. It was making short shrift of Socialist camaraderie, calling for Germany’s expansion to the East to solve her problem of Lebensraum, the living space. Taking this stance made inevitable the eventual mortal combat of the two socialist gladiators, Germany and Russia, in the megacircus of the world, before a very unfriendly crowd of Western spectators shouting out, “Pox on you both!”
What an irony this must have been! The Russians had given Hitler a pair of feet, and he was walking away from them to a higher bidder!
When the Second Mein Kampf was published in late 1926, without any fanfare whatsoever, Soviet officials in Germany must have saved Hitler’s publisher from imminent bankruptcy by purchasing several copies of it, which they then promptly sent to Moscow like a secret treasure, by the sealed diplomatic pouch. On the reasoned recommendation of Stalin’s advisers, the best German-Russian translators were immediately put to work. The book’s text was divided into blocks of some fifty pages each. Two translators were then assigned to each block, doing their translations independently from each other. Then, the notes were compared, and judged by a panel of Russian/German linguistic experts, after which a cleanly typed text of Mein Kampf, in Russian, was submitted to Comrade Stalin with the most relevant pages and passages highlighted. Having a very limited knowledge of German himself, Stalin also had the original German version in front of him, and whenever he would come across a particularly interesting passage or still doubted the nuances of translation he would discuss such matters with a reliable linguistic expert on duty.
The curious role played by Hitler’s Das Buch in subsequent Soviet history would become a classic example of Stalin’s wisdom, for his apologists. According to them, it was the reading of Mein Kampf II, which gave Comrade Stalin the warning to start preparing Russia for a war with Germany six whole years before Hitler would come to power!
Assuming that the newborn Nazi party in Germany would like to have a big brother in Soviet Russia, was an enormous historical misjudgment on Lenin’s part. Yet, had the Russians been able to go back to square one, what could they possibly have changed? Cultivating the Nazis was too consistent with Lenin’s thinking, to try doing anything differently, unless he was prepared to scrap Soviet Russia’s grand dream of superpower internationalism altogether, which, considering the way his mind worked, would have been totally absurd to expect. In other words, Lenin’s misjudgment about the Nazis was a logical and historical necessity. So was the rise of Hitler, too. (In his case, however, it was not la forza del destino, but, rather, Schicksal.)
From the beginning, Soviet Russia was able to influence the emerging Nazi Party only up to a point, but that part they seemed to have been aware of all along. There had to be a complex struggle for influence and, as a later entry in this section will demonstrate, they were ready to be in it for the long haul. Moscow had no say whatsoever in Hitler’s rise as the future Führer of Germany. Ironically, but hardly surprisingly, Lenin’s and Hitler’s careers had a lot in common. Both were launched into prominence by their jobs as police informers. And both had a mind very much of their own.
Hitler was by nature a militant ideologue. It means that his convictions could be influenced by his choosing among several incompatible extremes, and whichever extreme were to win the struggle of influences, would be espoused by him with sincere zeal. Thus, just like Japan in World War Two, Hitler had a choice between two major options, and this choice was a matter of life and death for the Russians.
Number One, the good one, was for Hitler to see the numerous advantages of the Russian friendship. The Bolsheviks and the Nazis with Bismarck’s blessing (about which see my Bismarck entry), could walk a long way together, emphasizing their common socialist ties, resolutely united in their opposition to World Capitalism. German historical enmity toward the French (which must have been going back at least eleven centuries, to the grandsons of Charlemagne, who had broken up their grandfather’s great Empire; and, just recently, had been punctuated by Germany’s humiliation at the hands of the French in World War I) fitted neatly with this option.
When Hitler sat down to write Mein Kampf in a Bavarian prison in 1923-1924, he had an invaluable Soviet agent of influence by his side and seemed to be steadily drifting into this first option. As long as France had remained on Hitler’s mind as Germany’s Enemy Number One, and as long as Rudolf Hess (selling out the store, but see my entry about him in this World War II subsection) was by his side, helping him write his master opus, the Soviet aspirations regarding the Nazis were in reasonably good shape.
By the time Mein Kampf was published in 1925, the Nazi Party had already been drawing some limited, but worried attention in the West. The so-called “second volume” of Hitler’s Buch, which came out in 1926 with a dramatic revision of German foreign policy objectives, must have been the product of an intense influence on the Führer by some powerful and generous sponsors from the West. In that same year 1926, a revised edition of the First Volume appeared also, with the revision bent on shifting from option one to option two, consistent with the content of the Second Volume.
Whether Hitler had indeed been persuaded to reverse his combative stance against France Eastward, Herr Führer, in the Second Edition of Mein Kampf, was now openly espousing the dreaded Option Number Two. It was making short shrift of Socialist camaraderie, calling for Germany’s expansion to the East to solve her problem of Lebensraum, the living space. Taking this stance made inevitable the eventual mortal combat of the two socialist gladiators, Germany and Russia, in the megacircus of the world, before a very unfriendly crowd of Western spectators shouting out, “Pox on you both!”
What an irony this must have been! The Russians had given Hitler a pair of feet, and he was walking away from them to a higher bidder!
When the Second Mein Kampf was published in late 1926, without any fanfare whatsoever, Soviet officials in Germany must have saved Hitler’s publisher from imminent bankruptcy by purchasing several copies of it, which they then promptly sent to Moscow like a secret treasure, by the sealed diplomatic pouch. On the reasoned recommendation of Stalin’s advisers, the best German-Russian translators were immediately put to work. The book’s text was divided into blocks of some fifty pages each. Two translators were then assigned to each block, doing their translations independently from each other. Then, the notes were compared, and judged by a panel of Russian/German linguistic experts, after which a cleanly typed text of Mein Kampf, in Russian, was submitted to Comrade Stalin with the most relevant pages and passages highlighted. Having a very limited knowledge of German himself, Stalin also had the original German version in front of him, and whenever he would come across a particularly interesting passage or still doubted the nuances of translation he would discuss such matters with a reliable linguistic expert on duty.
The curious role played by Hitler’s Das Buch in subsequent Soviet history would become a classic example of Stalin’s wisdom, for his apologists. According to them, it was the reading of Mein Kampf II, which gave Comrade Stalin the warning to start preparing Russia for a war with Germany six whole years before Hitler would come to power!
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