After seizing power, Hitler’s first target was the communist party. He promised to “liberate Germany from Marxism” and later attacked the communist Soviet Union. For historians like Ernst Nolte, Hitler was, above all, an anti-communist – while leftist anti-fascist scholars have even described him as an “agent of capitalism”. Now, Brendan Simms, professor at the Centre of International Studies at Cambridge University, has written a provocative biography that turns traditional interpretations of Hitler’s world view on their head: It wasn’t communism that Hitler hated above all else, but capitalism in general and the United States in particular.
Simms argues that, “the Anglo-American capitalist world order against which Hitler revolted structured his entire political career”. And the root of Hitler’s Jew-hatred? “Primarily to be found in his hostility to global high finance rather than his hatred of the radical left.”
In terms of Hitler’s worldview, Simms claims that communists “were not Hitler’s primary concern”. Hitler’s anxieties were directed at the British and the Americans. “Hitler became an enemy of the British – and also of the Americans – before he became an enemy of the Jews. Indeed, he became an enemy of the Jews largely because of his hostility to the Anglo-American capitalist powers,” he writes.
