Der Fuehrer - Hitler's Rise to Power (1944) - Heiden

320 DER FUEHRERempires.' Against the coming catastrophe he saw but one help, the earlyunion o£ continental Europe. As late as 1932 he could conceive of this,though reluctantly, only under the leadership of French democracy, withat least the approval of the British: 'Either democracy and pacifismcreate a sort of United States of Europe by 1950 at the latest, or theEurasian space catastrophe will inevitably occur — probably in the formof a retrogressive small-spaced dismemberment even of the so-calledcolonial powers.' The great land mass, not control of the sea, is todaythe aim of high politics.Hitler adopted as much of this doctrine as was possible for a studentof Houston Stewart Chamberlain. For the really decisive factor in allpolitics remains man, and not numbers but quality. He said:Our space is absurdly small, for a plane can cross our Germanterritory in barely four hours. That is no longer a land surface bearing aprotection in itself, as is the case with Russia whose land surface alonerepresents a power, a coefficient of security. . . . Sixty-two and a halfmillion people, four hundred and thirty-six thousand square kilometersof land surface! This land surface does not suffice by far to nourish ourpopulation. . . . German foreign policy, therefore, is concerned not onlywith liquidating the Versailles Treaty. For then the condition of August,1914, would be restored, which means that basically the life-possibilityof the nation would not be assured. ... In barely a hundred years therewill be two hundred and fifty million Germans living on this continent.... It is clear that the more a nation grows in numbers, the more its soil isbound some day to become too narrow; that such a nation must someday either succumb to this restriction of its soil and collapse, of that itwill burst this restriction and acquire new soil somewhere.Hitler tried to make one of the most important phenomena of recenthistory clear to a simple-minded audience: that new, large-space powerswere forging ahead of the old-style great powers. With a native area ofonly 94,000 square miles, and a white population of barely 70,000,000,England dominated a quarter of the inhabited earth, approximately500,000,000 people; France with a motherland embracing 212,000square miles, but a population of only 40,000,000 whites, governed anempire of 4,600,000 square miles