Question about a passage in Hitler's Second Book

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Futurist
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Question about a passage in Hitler's Second Book

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Post by Futurist » 22 Sep 2020, 04:22

In Chapter 8 (VIII) of Hitler's Second Book (1928), Hitler strongly criticizes the Imperial German government for lacking clear war aims in World War I, arguing that they were idiots to subject the German people to such extremely enormous casualties without any clear war aims that would have actually benefitted the German people in the event of victory:

https://www.murdochmurdoch.net/various/ ... 20Book.pdf
On November 11, 1918, in the forest of Compiègne, the armistice
agreement was signed.163 For this, fate had destined a man who
had been one of the chief culprits in the disintegration of our people.
Matthias Erzberger,164 representative of the Center Party—and,
according to various claims, the illegitimate son of a maid and a Jewish
employer165—was the German negotiator who then also signed his
name to a document which, unless one assumes a deliberate intent to
destroy Germany, appears incomprehensible in light of the four and a
half years of heroism demonstrated by our people.

Matthias Erzberger was no bourgeois annexationist himself—one
of those men who tried, particularly at the beginning of the war, to
remedy in their own way the lack of an official war aim. Because even
though in August 1914 the entire German people instinctively sensed
that this was a battle for its very existence, as soon as the flames of
initial enthusiasm died down there was no clarity at all about either the
threatening extinction nor the necessary continued existence. The
dimensions of the notion of a defeat and its consequences were
gradually countered by propaganda that had been given free rein
within Germany, and the true war aims of the Entente were cleverly
and dishonestly distorted or totally denied. Thanks to this propaganda,
in the second and especially the third years of the war the German
people’s fear of defeat was mitigated to such a degree that they no
longer believed in the scope of the enemy’s destructive intent. This
was all the more terrible because conversely nothing could be done to
make the people recognize the minimum that must be achieved in the
interests of its future preservation and as compensation for its
outrageous sacrifices.166 The discussion of a possible war aim thus also
took place only in more or less irresponsible circles and also took on
the expression of the mindset and general political perceptions of their
respective representatives. The cunning Marxists, knowing full well the
debilitating effects of the absence of a specific war aim, now refused
to tolerate one at all, and spoke only of the restoration of peace
without annexations and reparations; however, at least some of the
bourgeois politicians tried to respond to the casualties and the outrage
of the aggression with specific counterclaims.167 All of these bourgeois
proposals were strictly border corrections and had nothing at all to do
with notions of territorial policy. At most, these people intended to
satisfy the expectations of individual unemployed German princes
through the creation of buffer states, and so even the establishment of
the Polish state appeared to the bourgeois world, with a few
exceptions, as a wise decision from a national policy perspective.168
Several emphasized economic viewpoints according to which the
border should be configured (for example, the necessity of winning
the ore basin of Longwy and Briey), while others focused on strategic
ideas (for example, the need to take control of the Belgian
fortifications on the Maas).

It should be obvious that this was no aim for a war of one state
against twenty-six,169 in which this state would have to take upon itself
the most enormous casualties ever seen in history, while at home a
whole people was literally handed over to starvation. It was an
impossible rationale upon which to base the necessity of persevering
in the war, and this helped to bring about its unfortunate conclusion.

When the homeland therefore collapsed, knowledge of war aims
was all the more lacking, as their previous feeble representatives had in
the meantime distanced themselves from a few of their previous
demands. And that was actually understandable, because it would be
truly unjustifiable and outrageous to want to wage a war of this
unheard of magnitude in order to have the border run through Liege
instead of through Herbesthal,170 or in order to install a little German
prince as potentate over some Russian province instead of a czarist
commissar or governor. Because of the nature of the German war
aims—to the extent that they were under consideration at all—they
were later all disavowed. Because in truth, for the sake of these trifles
one really could not leave a people even one hour longer in a war
whose battlefields had gradually become a hell.
Afterwards, Hitler proceeds by saying this (from the very same link):
The only war aim that would have been worthy of these enormous
casualties would have been to promise the German troops that so
many hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of land would be
allotted to the frontline soldiers as property or made available for
colonization by Germans.171 In that way, the war would also
immediately have lost the character of an imperial undertaking and
would instead have become a matter of concern to the German
people. Because ultimately, the German soldiers did not really shed
their blood so that the Poles could obtain a state or so that a German
prince could be installed on a plush throne.
What I'm wondering is this--specifically which hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of land outside of Germany is Hitler thinking of here? Poland? The Baltics? Ukraine? Belarus? Some other territories? Also, what was he proposing--with this hypothetical German WWI war aim of his--to do with the existing populations of these territories? Expel them en masse a la Generalplan Ost? Something else? Wouldn't such extremely massive expulsion plans--had Imperial Germany actually formulated such plans a la Hitler--have simply hurt Imperial Germany's global reputation even more during World War I?

Any thoughts on all of this?

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