There was an important shift in Hitler’s spatial thinking around 1922, however. He came to see eastward expansion as the solution. ‘In terms of foreign policy,’ Hitler said in December 1922, ‘Germany should prepare for a purely continental policy’ and ‘avoid violating British interests’. ‘One should try to destroy Russia with the help of Britain,’ he continued. ‘Russia,’ Hitler went on, ‘would provide sufficient soil for German settlers and a wide area of activity for German industry.’ Though he had not yet alighted on the phrase Lebensraum, a further major plank of Hitler’s thinking, the need for territorial enlargement to the east in order to secure the food supply of the German people and staunch the haemorrhage of emigration, was now in place. This was a policy primarily driven by fear and emulation of Anglo-America rather than anxiety about eastern communism or a desire to eliminate the Jews living there…
Hitler had said much less than one might expect about the Soviet Union, and his fear of communism was dwarfed by that of capitalism. Even more remarkably, though there were some routine scatter-gun imprecations against the Poles in specific contexts to do with disputed territories in the east, he had shown no signs of a blanket hostility towards Slavs in general or the Russian people in particular. What later became the Lebensraum conception was visible, but only in outline. His intellectual formation was not yet complete.
His authority in the party, by contrast, was now well established.