Andreas Hillgruber - Historical Perspective - The Stufenplan Concept

The Stufenplan Concept

From the 1960s on, Hillgruber was regarded as one of the world's foremost authorities on German military-diplomatic history, his theory about Hitler having a Stufenplan (stage-by-stage plan) being especially influential. In 1989 the American historian Jerry Z. Muller called Hillgruber "the most distinguished German diplomatic historian of his generation". Hillgruber argued that Adolf Hitler had a Stufenplan (stage-by-stage plan) for conquest and genocide in Eastern Europe, and then the world. In the 1960s-70s, Hillgruber was one of the leaders of a group of German historians comprising Klaus Hildebrand, Gunter Moltman and J. Henke who argued that far from being “haphazard” as was thought after the war, that Hitler possessed and attempted to executed a coherent and detailed foreign policy programme aiming at nothing less than world conquest. Hillgruber stated that Hitler’s foreign policy “geographically was designed to span the globe; ideologically, too, the doctrine of universal anti-Semitism and Social Darwinism, fundamental to his programme, were intended to embrace the whole of mankind”. According to Hillgruber, the conquest of the Soviet Union and the intended alliance with Britain were the most important stages of Hitler’s Stufenplan. Hillgruber claimed that through Hitler was highly flexible in ways of realizing his "progamme", Hitler was consistent throughout his political career in trying to achieve the "programme" he worked out in the 1920s. Hillgruber claimed that the outbreak of a world war in 1939 which Hitler had caused, but had not planned with the invasion of Poland brought forward the timing of "programme". Hillgruber used as examples to support his theory the Z Plan of January 1939 and Hitler's plans in June 1940 for annexing much of Africa together with key strategic points in the Atlantic as evidence that Hitler was moving forward drastically the timing of his planned ultimate show-down with the United States.

According to this argument, the first stage of Hitler's plan consisted of the military build-up of German strength and the achievement of the Weimar Republic's traditional foreign policy goals. The second stage was to be a series of swift regional wars to destroy such states as Poland, Czechoslovakia and France. The third stage was to be a war to liquidate the Soviet Union and what Hitler regarded as its "Judaeo-Bolshevik" regime. The fourth stage was to be a war against the United States by the now Greater Germany in alliance with the British Empire and Japan. Hillgruber argued that after the conquest of the Soviet Union, Hitler wanted to seize most of Africa, build a huge navy and in alliance with both the Japanese and the British to engage the United States in a "War of the Continents" for world domination. As Hillgruber described it:

"After the creation of an European continental empire buttressed by the conquest of Russia, a second stage of imperial expansion was to follow with the acquisition of complementary territory in Central Africa and a system of bases to support a strong surface fleet in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean. Germany, in alliance with Japan and if possible also Britain, would in the first place isolate the USA and confine it to the Western hemisphere. Then, in the next generation, there would be a "war of the continents" in which the "Germanic empire of the Germanic nation" would fight America for world supremacy".

Hillgruber wrote that:

"These enormous schemes, and particularly their connection with racist ideology, were, to be sure, the program of a single individual. But in the case of such prominent provisions as the revision of the Versailles Treaty and the creation of a "Greater Germany", they overlapped with the aims of the old German leadership and the fantasies of a large part of the German public that had never assimilated the loss of the war. To this one must add, however, that the essence of Hitler's program "violated all standards and concepts of German foreign policy to such a radical degree that it... did not penetrate the consciousness of the German public", despite its continual proclamation in his speeches from 1926 to 1930".

The American historian of modern Germany Gordon A. Craig praised Hillgruber for his "masterful delineation of Hitler's grand strategical plan".

Hillgruber maintained that the strategy of Blitzkrieg was based largely on economic factors, namely, that for the earlier stages of the stufenplan, Germany did not have the economic resources for a long war, and that therefore a military programme based upon quality, not quantity, was the most rational use of German economic capacity. Hillgruber argued that Hitler's desire to postpone the final struggle with the United States to the last stage of the stufenplan was likewise determined by economic considerations, namely that only a Germany with sufficient lebensraum ruling most of Eurasia and Africa would be immune to the effects of blockade, and have the necessary economic resources to match the enormous economic capacity of the United States. In the debate between the "Continentists" such as Hugh Trevor-Roper, Axel Kuhn, and Eberhard Jäckel, who argued that Hitler wanted only to seize Europe, and the "Globalists", who argued that Hitler wanted to conquer the entire world, Hillgruber was definitely in the latter camp. As a globalist historian, Hillgruber argued that Hitler was always intent upon a war with the Soviet Union and he maintained that Hitler's interest in Admiral Erich Raeder's "Mediterranean plan" in the fall of 1940 as an alternative to Barbarossa was half hearted at best, and that right from June 1940 Hitler was firmly committed to turning east. Other historians, such as the German historian Wolfgang Michalka, the Anglo-German historian H.W Koch and the Israeli historian Martin van Creveld, have contended that Hitler's efforts to form an anti-British Eurasian "continental bloc" that was to include the Soviet Union in late 1940 as a diplomatic prelude to the "Mediterranean plan" were sincere, that until December 1940 Hitler's first priority was in defeating Britain, and that it was only when Hitler gave his approval to Operation Barbarossa on 18 December 1940 that he finally lost interest in Raeder's "Mediterranean strategy". The Greek historian Aristotle Kallis wrote that the best evidence suggests that in late 1940 Hitler was serious about carrying out Raeder's "Mediterranean plan", but only within certain strict limits and conditions, and that he saw the "Mediterranean plan" as part of the preparations for Barbarossa by defeating Britain first.

Hillgruber regarded Hitler as a fanatical ideologue with a firmly fixed programme, and criticized the view of him as a grasping opportunist with no real beliefs other than the pursuit of power — a thesis promoted by such British historians as A.J.P. Taylor and Alan Bullock, which he thought profoundly shallow and facile. Moreover, he categorically rejected Taylor's contention that the German invasion of Poland was an "accident" precipitated by diplomatic blunders. Hillgruber argued adamantly that the German invasion of Poland was a war of aggression caused by Hitler's ideological belief in war and the need for Lebensraum (living space). World War II, for Hillgruber, really consisted of two wars. One was an europäisches Normalkrieg ("normal European war") between the Western powers and Germany, a conflict which Hitler caused but did not really want. The other war — which Hitler both caused and most decidedly did want (as evidenced in part by Mein Kampf) - was the German-Soviet one, a savage, merciless and brutal all-out struggle of racial and ideological extermination between German National Socialism and Soviet Communism.

In Hillgruber's opinion, Hitler's foreign policy program was totally unrealistic and incapable of being realized. Hillgruber argued that Hitler's assumption that a German "renunciation" of naval and colonial claims, in exchange for British recognition of all of Europe as lying within the German sphere of influence, was based on an unviable notion that British interests were limited only to the naval and colonial spheres. Hillgruber noted that Britain was just as much a European as a world power, and would never accept so far-reaching a disruption of the balance of power as Hitler proposed in the 1920s in Mein Kampf. Hillgruber wrote that Neville Chamberlain for all his attachment to appeasement, once he learned that Hitler’s aims were not limited towards revising Versailles, ultimately went to war with Germany in September 1939 rather accept the disruption of the balance of power that Hitler was attempting to carry out" Likewise, Hillgruber argued that Hitler's contempt for the Soviet Union, especially the fighting power of the Red Army, was a dangerous illusion. Hillgruber argued that the lack of British interest in Hitler's proposed anti-Soviet alliance temporarily derailed Hitler's foreign policy programme in the late 1930s, and led to the ideas of the Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop whose anti-British foreign policy programme Hillgruber called the "very opposite" of Hitler's taking precedence in the period 1938-41

In his 1974 article "England's Place In Hitler's Plans for World Dominion", Hillgruber argued that, during the Nazi period, German foreign policy went through ten different phases. Hillgruber contended that, during the early phases, Hitler was intent on having the anti-Soviet alliance with Britain he had written of in Mein Kampf and Zweites Buch. By the time of the Hossbach Memorandum of 1937, Hillgruber argued, Hitler was undertaking a course of expansion either "without Britain" or, preferably, "with Britain", but if necessary "against Britain". By the late 1930s, when it became clear that Britain had no interest in his overtures, German foreign policy turned anti-British as reflected in the Z Plan of January 1939 for a gigantic German fleet that would crush the Royal Navy by 1944.

Hillgruber noted that in 1939, when war threatened over Poland, unlike in 1938 when war threatened to occur over Czechoslovakia, Hitler received overwhelming support from the Wehrmacht leadership. The reason for this difference, in Hillgruber's opinion, was the rampant anti-Polish feelings in the German Army. In support of this argument, Hillgruber quoted from a letter written by General Eduard Wagner, who was one of the officers involved in the abortive putsch of 1938, who wrote to his wife just before the invasion of Poland, "We believe we will make quick work of the Poles, and in truth, we are delighted at the prospect. That business must be cleared up" (emphasis in the original). Hillgruber noted because of anti-Polish prejudices that in 1939 Fall Weiss served to unite Hitler and the German military in a way that Fall Grün had failed to do in 1938.

Hillgruber argued that Hitler's decision to declare war on the United States before he had defeated the Soviet Union was due to Hitler's belief that the United States might quickly defeat Japan, and hence it was better to engage the Americans while they were still involved in a two-front war. Likewise, Hillgruber argued that Hitler's decision to take on the United States in December 1941 was influenced by his belief that the Soviet Union would be defeated by no later than the summer of 1942.

In his 1965 book Hitlers Strategie, Hillgruber caused some controversy with his argument that a French attack on the Siegfried Line in the autumn of 1939 would have resulted in a swift German defeat. In 1969, the French historian Albert Merglen expanded on Hillgruber's suggestion by writing a PhD thesis depicting a counter-factual successful French offensive against the Siegfried Line. However, many historians have criticized both Hillgruber and Merglen for ignoring the realities of the time, and for using the advantage of historical hindsight too much in making these judgements.

Hillgruber's Stufenplan concept was and is not universally accepted by historians. The British historian E.M. Robertson wrote that through the Stufenplan concept seemed to explain much of Hitler's foreign policy, but noted that Hitler himself never spoken of having any "stages" or even a plan at all. Moreover, Robertson commented that Hitler's use of the phrase "world power or collapse" in Mein Kampf is ambiguous and can be interpreted in several different ways. However, Robertson went on to note in support of the Stufenplan thesis several speeches Hitler made to his senior officers in late 1938-early 1939 where Hitler did claimed to be working out some sort of a master plan in his foreign policy, albeit in a very improvised and flexible way. The Anglo-German historian H.W. Koch in a 1983 essay criticized Hillgruber's picture of Hitler following rigidly preconceived foreign policy he was alleged to have worked out in the 1920s. Koch wrote against Hillgruber that Hitler did not want a war with Poland and the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in his view was meant to pressure the Poles into making concessions instead of being as Hillgruber claimed a plan for partitioning Poland. The Hungarian-American historian John Lukacs criticized Hillgruber's portrayal of Hitler following a Stufenplan, arguing that there was much opportunism and contingency in Hitler's strategy, with little sign of a masterplan. In Lukacs's opinion, Operation Barbarossa was primarily an anti-British move intended to force Britain to surrender by defeating the Soviet Union. Likewise, Lukacs argued that Hitler's statement to the League of Nations High Commissioner for Danzig, Carl Jacob Burckhardt, in August 1939, stating that "Everything I undertake is directed against Russia…", which Hillgruber cited as evidence of Hitler's ultimate anti-Soviet intentions, was merely an effort to intimidate Britain and France into abandoning Poland. In the same way, Lukacs took issue with Hillgruber's claim that the war against Britain was of only "secondary" importance to Hitler compared to the war against the Soviet Union. The Greek historian Aristotle Kallis wrote that there is "no conclusive evidence" that Hitler "...had a clear plan for world domination..."