“From the report of the Ambassador in Moscow . . . all observations show that Stalin and Molotov, who alone are responsible for Russian foreign policy, are doing everything to avoid a conflict with Germany. The entire behavior of the Government as well as the attitude of the press, which reports all events concerning Germany in a factual, indisputable manner, support this view. The loyal fulfillment of the economic treaty with Germany proves the same thing.”
Now, that is the German Ambassador talking to you.
The reasons, therefore, which led to the attack on the Soviet Union could not have been self-defense or treaty breaches. In truth, no doubt, as has been necessarily implied from the materials presented on planning and preparation, more than one motive entered into the decision of the Nazi conspirators to launch their aggression against the U.S.S.R. All of them, however, appear to blend into one grand motive of Nazi policy. The pattern into which these various reasons impelling the decision to attack may be said to fall is the traditional Nazi ambition for expansion to the East at the expense of the U.S.S.R. This Nazi version of an earlier imperial imperative—the “Drang nach Osten” (or the drive to the East)—had been a cardinal principle of the Nazi Party almost since its birth and rested on the twin bases of political strategy and economic aggrandizement. Politically such action meant the elimination of the powerful country to the east, which might constitute a threat to German ambitions, and acquisition of Lebensraum; while on the economic side, it offered magnificent opportunities for the plunder of vast quantities of food, raw materials, and other supplies, going far beyond any legitimate exploitation under the Geneva Convention principles for military purpose. Undoubtedly the demands of the German war economy for food and raw material served to revive the attractiveness on the economic side of this theory while the difficulties Germany was experiencing in defeating England reaffirmed for the Nazi conspirators the temporarily forgotten Nazi political imperative of eliminating, as a political factor, their one formidable opponent on the continent.
As early as 1923 Hitler outlined this theory in some detail in Mein Kampf where he stated, and I quote from Page 641 of the Houghton Mifflin English edition, as follows:
“There are two reasons which induce me to submit to a special examination the relation of Germany to Russia: (1) Here perhaps we are dealing with the most decisive concern of all German foreign affairs; and (2) this question is also the touchstone for the political capacity of the young National Socialist movement to think clearly and to act correctly.”
And again at Page 654 of the same edition:
“And so we National Socialists consciously draw a line beneath the foreign policy tendency of our pre-war period. We take up where we broke off 600 years ago. We stop the endless German movement to the south and west, and turn our gaze toward the land in the East. At long last we break off the colonial and commercial policy of the pre-war period and shift to the soil policy of the future.
“If we speak of soil in Europe today, we can primarily have in mind only Russia and her vassal border states.”
The political portion of this economy or purpose is clearly reflected in the stated purposes of the organization which the Defendant Rosenberg set up to administer the Occupied Eastern Territories. I have already discussed this material and need not repeat it now. In a speech, however, which he delivered 2 days before the attack to the people most interested in the problem of the East, Rosenberg re-stated in his usual somewhat mystic fashion the political basis for the campaign and its inter-relationship with the economic goal. I should like to read a short extract from that speech, which is Document Number 1058-PS and which I now offer in evidence as Exhibit USA-147. The part I read is from Page 9 of the German text: