Hitler’s assessment of the Soviet Union and Stalin once again demonstrates the contradiction between propaganda and Hitler’s actual views and insights. While he never tired in his speeches of attacking the ‘Jewish-Bolshevist’ conspiracy, no later than from 1940 onwards he was well aware that Stalin was not the representative of Jewish interests but had eliminated the Jews and was now pursuing a nationalistic Russian policy in the tradition of Peter the Great. Hitler first alluded to the possibility of such a development in his ‘Second Book’, written in 1928:

However, it is conceivable that in Russia itself an inner change within the Bolshevist world could take place insofar as the Jewish element could perhaps be forced aside by a more or less Russian national one. Then it could also not be excluded that the present real Jewish-capitalist-Bolshevist Russia could be driven to national-anti-capitalist tendencies. In this case, which perhaps appears to be announcing itself in certain things, it would then become conceivable, however, that Western European capitalism would seriously take a position against Russia.

What Hitler later stated as a fact, namely Russia’s change from a ‘Jewish dictatorship’ into a national Russian anti-capitalist state, he described in 1928 as being a possibility and a tendency.

For the time being, however, Hitler remained sceptical towards this possible development, or at least warned against an over-estimation of this tendency in his public statements. In an article which appeared in the Illustrierte Beobachter on 9 February 1929, for example, he wrote:

Since I am on the subject of Russia, I would also like to forearm myself with caution here against the constantly recurring reports of ‘growing anti-Semitism’ in Russia. For twelve years the ‘advance of anti-Semitism’ is constantly being announced in Russia. Even popular authors frequently write this. In reality, however, the Jew is more firmly in the saddle there than ever before.

Hitler also spoke of the ‘apparently anti-Semitic Herr Stalin’.

In another article in the Illustrierte Beobachter on 30 March 1929 he again discussed this topic in detail: ‘I have always regarded it as being bad that in almost our total national and even popular press, reports on the “progress” of anti-Semitism in Russia are circulated with a certain frightening regularity.’ In reality the Jew

... is more firmly in the saddle in Russia today than ever before. But that small anti-Semitic twitches are turned into great actions also has something to do with certain emigrant circles who are still dreaming of the reinstatement of the House of Romanov and even in part make their living out of this. How improbable such hopes are could be learned from studying history. When revolutions are broken again, the new masters are still not the old ones. In the battle against the revolution a new generation of fighters and leaders grows up. It is just as childish as it is indecent to think that after the victory won by their battle, leaders with iron wills and men with the most courageous hearts will place the leadership back into the hands of those weak people who once before proved unable to hold the rudder and then fled abroad to escape the storm.

Hitler initially also regarded the conflict between Stalin and Trotsky as a mock battle, as his articles in the Illustrierte Beobachter show. Here, he said on 30 March 1929, only a ‘gigantic comedy [was being] staged’.

He was no longer quite so sure in an article published in mid-January 1930, in which he wrote:

Stalin is a Bolshevist, and as such perhaps a counterpart of Trotsky, but maybe not even that. After a repeated thorough consideration of Trotsky’s latest published work, I myself even today still have reasonable doubts whether the whole apparent conflict is not just a brilliantly staged comedy ... But even if this opinion of mine were to be mistaken, the conflict between Trotsky and Stalin would still only be a battle between two rivals. The view that the Jew Trotsky is standing against the anti-Semite Stalin is not based on anything, is even ridiculous ... Stalin himself does not even have to be circumcised, his associates, in any case, consist of at least nine-tenths genuine Hebrews. His action is the continuation of the complete uprooting of the Russian nation for its total subjugation under the dictatorship of the Jew.

It is difficult to determine when Hitler finally revised his assessment of the conflict between Stalin and Trotsky and came to the view he later constantly advocated, that Stalin had emancipated himself from the Jews and was pursuing a national and anti-Jewish policy. Goebbels reported in his diary on 25 January 1937 that Hitler had not yet completely made up his mind about the events in Russia and his assessment of Stalin:

In Moscow another show trial. This time solely against Jews again. Radek etc. Führer still doubtful whether not with hidden anti-Semitic tendency after all. Perhaps Stalin wants to drive the Jews out after all. The military is also supposed to be strongly anti-Semitic. Therefore keep eyes open. For the time being remain in wait and see position.

On 10 July 1937 Goebbels noted: ‘In the case of Russia he [Hitler] no longer sees his way. Stalin must be sick in the head. Otherwise you cannot explain his regiment of blood.’

From early 1940 onwards, however, there were an increasing number of statements made by Hitler in which his admiration for Stalin and the Bolshevist regime become clear. These, no doubt, also served the purpose of defending the pact he had concluded with Stalin in 1939. For example, he wrote a letter to Mussolini on 8 March 1940: ‘Since Stalin’s final victory, Russia is doubtless experiencing a change of the Bolshevist principle in the direction of a national Russian form of life.’ But even after the attack on the USSR, when Hitler no longer had an alliance to justify, he clung to his positive assessment of Stalin and increasingly took the view of Bolshevism already long held within the circles of the ‘conservative revolution’. On 23 September 1941, for example, Koeppen noted the following statement by Hitler:

Stalin was one of the greatest of living men because he succeeded in forging a state out of this Slavic family of rabbits, albeit only with the harshest of compulsion. For this he naturally had to avail himself of the Jews, because the thin Europeanized class which had formerly carried the state had been exterminated, and these forces would never again grow up out of the actual Russianhood.

Of course, this assessment did not prevent Hitler from continuing to spread the thesis of Jewish Bolshevism in his speeches for propaganda purposes. In his address to the soldiers on the Eastern Front on the occasion of the great offensive against Moscow, Hitler declared on 1 October 1941:

Now, my comrades, you have personally become acquainted with the ‘paradise of the workers and farmers’, yourselves with your own eyes. In a country which, because of its space and fertility, could feed the whole world, a poverty reigns such as is inconceivable for us Germans. This is the result of a Jewish rule lasting almost 25 years now, which as Bolshevism, is in its profoundest depths only the vilest form of capitalism. The supporters of this system in both cases are the same: Jews and only Jews!

In a speech on 8 November 1941 Hitler also rejected the view – quite in contrast to his internal statements – that the ‘national tendency’ had won out in Russia. In the final analysis, Stalin was nothing but ‘an instrument in the hands of this all-powerful Jewry’. At a session of the Reichstag on 26 April 1942 Hitler repeated that in the Soviet Union ‘Jewry was exercising its exclusive dictatorship’.

In contrast to these public propaganda statements, Hitler said in a table talk in early January 1942 that ‘Stalin is seen as the man who had intended to help the Bolshevist idea to victory. In reality he is only Russia, the continuation of Tsarist pan-Slavism! For him Bolshevism is only a means to an end. It serves as a camouflage vis-à-vis the Germanic and Romanic nations.’  One had to admire Stalin, said Hitler in another talk, because ‘he did not let “the Jew” into art’. On 24 July 1942 he claimed during a table talk that, ‘in front of Ribbentrop Stalin had made no bones at all about the fact that he was only waiting for the moment of maturity of their own intelligentsia in the USSR in order to make an end of the Jewry he still needed today as a leadership’.

Picker reports on numerous further talks in which Hitler expressed his admiration for Stalin or defended him against critical remarks. Hitler had always, for example, become angry when someone called Stalin a former ‘bank robber’. Hitler would then immediately defend Stalin with the declaration that Stalin had not carried out his bank robberies as a private person nor for the benefit of his own pocket, ‘but as a revolutionary and in order to finance the Communist movement’. For Stalin, said Hitler on 22 July 1942, ‘one has to have respect in any case. In his way he is quite a brilliant chap!’

Heinrich Heim also noted many positive statements by Hitler about Stalin. On 26 August 1942 Hitler said:

If Stalin had continued to work for another ten to fifteen years Soviet Russia would have become the most powerful nation on earth, 150, 200, 300 years may go by, that is such a unique phenomenon! That the general standard of living rose, there can be no doubt. The people did not suffer from hunger. Taking everything together we have to say: They built factories here where two years ago there was nothing but forgotten villages, factories which are as big as the Hermann Göring Works. They have railways that are not even marked on the maps. Here with us we argue about the tariffs before the railway is even built. I have a book about Stalin; one has to say: That is an enormous personality, a real ascetic, who has brought that huge empire together with an iron fist. Only when someone says that is a social state, then that is a gigantic swindle! It is a national capital state: 200 million people, iron, manganese, nickel, oil, petroleum and what you like – unlimited. At the head a man who said: Do you think the loss of 13 million people is too much for a great idea?

The things Hitler admired in Stalin become particularly clear in this statement: the consistency, even brutality (‘iron fist’), with which Stalin – even with the sacrifice of millions of people – implemented the ‘great idea’ and created a powerful industrial state impressed Hitler. In Stalin he saw his own reflection, namely the executor of the dictatorship of modernization who did not shrink from the employment of even the most brutal methods.

On the other hand he called Bolshevism’s social claim ‘a gigantic swindle’. Karl Thöt, Reichs stenographer at Führer headquarters from September 1942 until the end of the war, noted on 4 February 1943:

The Führer then compared the socialism of the Russians with our own German socialism. When the Russian had, for instance, built a factory somewhere, he then simply collected everybody in the region who was at all still able to work, but he only created living quarters fit for human beings for the commissars and the technical staff. The workers, on the other hand, had to look for their own shelters in the most primitive holes. When we in Germany built a new factory, then the construction of the factory only ate up a fraction of what was spent in addition for a homestead for the workers fit for human beings. The high level of culture of the German worker simply demanded a suitable recompense in addition to his work. He had built the great works in Salzgitter, for example, and for this he had had to create a whole new city, which now already numbered over 100,000 people and would soon grow to a quarter of a million. For this streets had to be built, squares, electricity, sewage, but also theatres, motion picture theatres and all sorts of other cultural facilities. The Russian did not give any thought at all to any of this. He left his people in their primitiveness and this now enabled him to conduct a far more total sort of war.

Hitler cited these arguments, since this was the only way he could still explain the difference between National Socialism and Bolshevism and its comparative superiority, because otherwise he had ‘inwardly fallen prey to the Russian example, as Scheidt writes in his notes. He had, said Scheidt, ‘lost the conflict of the Weltanschauung had preached for so long or the crusade on the intellectual level right from the start. From then on his evaluation of man and life was no longer different in any way from that of Communism.’ Hitler learned ‘to admire the rigour of the system there ... He began to suspect that he had been mistaken in Stalin and his remarks expressed admiration, even showed that his example appeared to him as an ideal which would not let him rest’:

Hitler began secretly to admire Stalin. From then on his hatred was determined by envy ... He clung to the hope that he could defeat Bolshevism with its own weapons if he copied it in Germany and the occupied regions ... He increasingly held the Russian methods up to his associates as being exemplary. We cannot fight this battle for existence without their hardness and ruthlessness, he was wont to say. He rejected any objections as being bourgeois.

After 20 July 1944, for example, Hitler bemoaned the fact that he had not purged the Wehrmacht like Stalin had and converted it into a National Socialist revolutionary army. Speer reports on a meeting of ministers on 21 July 1944:

Today he [Hitler] realized that in his case against Tuchatshevsky Stalin had taken the decisive step for a successful waging of the war. By having liquidated the General Staff he had made room for fresh forces, who no longer stemmed from the age of the Tsars. He had formerly always held the accusations at the Moscow trials of 1937 to be trumped up. Now, after the experience of 20 July he was wondering whether there had not been something to them after all. While he did not have any evidence for it, Hitler continued, he could still no longer exclude a treasonable co-operation between the two general staffs.

Two months before the assassination attempt, in a presentation to generals and officers, Hitler had said:

This problem has been completely solved in Bolshevist Russia. Completely unequivocal situations, clear unequivocal statements by the officer to these points of view, which concern the state, to the whole of expert opinion and with this, naturally, an unequivocal relationship to allegiance, a completely clear relationship. In Germany this whole process was unfortunately interrupted much too quickly by the war, because you can be sure that these courses which take place today would perhaps never have become necessary if the war had not come about. Instead the total planned education of the German officer corps, just as of all German soldiers before entry into the Wehrmacht, would have been uniformly carried out step by step. That would have gone step by step according to the procedure that I found to be right, namely without breaking any china, in other words without destroying what is good, to inevitably reach the objective set slowly but surely. Therefore there is nothing left in this struggle except to try to make up for whatever can be made up.

Goebbels wrote in his diary on 16 March 1945:

I refer the Führer to my review of the book by the Soviet General Staff on the Soviet marshals and generals and add that I had the impression we could not in any way compete with this selection of leaders. The Führer agrees with me completely. Our generals are too old and used up and National Socialist thinking and posture are completely foreign to them. A large number of our generals do not even want victory by National Socialism. The Soviet generals, in contrast, are not only fanatically convinced of Bolshevism, they also fight just as fanatically for its victory, which naturally gives the Soviet generals a gigantic superiority. The Führer is determined to reform the Wehrmacht to such an extent during the war that it will come out of the war with a fundamentally National Socialist posture.

What Hitler therefore primarily admired in Stalin was his revolutionary consistency in the elimination of the former élites. He himself had not had this consistency, and, as we have seen, traced his failure in part to this. Hitler’s admiration for Stalin was not only an expression of the respect he felt for him personally; his relationship with Stalin also reflected his ambivalent position on Marxism/Communism, which was always characterized by simultaneous fear and admiration. Hitler admired Stalin’s revolutionary consistency above all, but exactly this consistency, which went far further than his own, also made him afraid, and made Bolshevism appear as the only serious opponent.

We must note another important result of this chapter. Hitler was – and this is incontestable – most certainly a fanatical Jew-hater, but he also used anti-Semitism for purely tactical or propaganda reasons. Hitler himself no longer believed in the thesis of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ that German propaganda kept repeating as a stereotype, but this did not prevent him from continuing to use this abstruse claim for reasons of propaganda. A basic question to raise would be how far, and until when, Hitler believed in the thesis of Marxism as the instrument of Jewry, and how far he only used it because it fitted in with the principles of propaganda he developed in Mein Kampf:

Moreover, the art of all truly great leaders of the people through all the ages primarily consisted in not only being able to fragment the attention of a nation, but always to be able to concentrate it against only one opponent. The more unified the deployment of this will of a nation to fight is, the greater the magnetic attraction of a movement will become, and the more powerful the force of the blow. It is a part of the genius of a great leader to always make opponents that are even far apart [i.e., in this case, capitalism and Marxism – R.Z.] appear to belong to only one category [i.e. as an instrument of Jewry in the battle for world domination – R.Z.], because the appearance of various enemies can easily lead, in the case of weak and insecure characters, to the beginning of doubts in the justice of their own position.

In his programmatic speech on 27 February 1925 Hitler also declared that it was ‘psychologically wrong to set several battle objectives’ and it was correct ‘to only choose one enemy so that everybody can see, this is the sole guilty’. And this enemy, said Hitler, was the Jews.

It is therefore only consistent that Hitler continued to speak about ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ even though he himself no longer shared this view. While Hitler himself was readily able to see matters with discrimination, he did not trust the mass to. Hitler developed his most important principle of propaganda in Mein Kampf, ‘In this there is not much differentiation, but only a positive or a negative, love or hate, right or wrong, truth or lie, never half this, half that, or partially and so forth.’ It is therefore understandable why in his public statements Hitler rarely expressed his real opinion of the Social Democrats and the Communists. With regard to Hitler’s revolutionary self-assessment and his self-evaluation within the political spectrum, this aspect is of the greatest importance, just as, on the other hand, he judged Italian Fascism and the reactionary Franco regime in Spain far more negatively than one might be led to believe by his public avowals of friendship.