During this period, Hitler continued to elaborate and develop his strategic thinking. Throughout 1923, he lambasted international capitalism—Jewish and non-Jewish—as the source of Germany’s ills. Hitler provided a brief foreword to Gottfried Feder’s book on the subject describing it as a ‘catechism’ of National Socialism. The salience of anti-capitalism, fears of expropriation and exploitation and enslavement by foreign masters is very clear in the party’s ‘work of the committee for food security of the National Socialist movement’, which Hitler blessed in the summer of 1923. It defined the ‘internal enemy’ as ‘profiteering in the system of the national economy’, the ‘idea of class conflict’ and ‘immoral tendencies in government and law-making’. It lamented the crucifixion of the German middle class by the ‘massive fraud’ of ‘our money economy’, the general ‘spirit of speculation’ and the ‘terror of the capitalist idea’. The document made no direct mention of Bolshevism or the Soviet Union. It recommended—with Hitler’s approval—that the state protect the ‘basic assets of the nation’, namely ‘foodstuffs and manpower’ through ‘an anti-capitalist legislation in the fields of land and settlement, housing, but also in the first instance in the field of the supply of necessities’. This would require the ‘exclusion of foreign capital from German land and soil, businesses and cultural assets’.
Like the Ludendorff circle, Hitler was much less worried about the fate of German minorities and the peripheral lands of the Reich than about the fate of the core area, which he believed to be threatened with subjection and even extinction. Hitler was also beginning to look at long-term solutions to Germany’s predicament. He rejected the common notion of an ‘internal’ colonization of sparsely populated German lands in favour of territorial expansion. ‘The [re-]distribution of land alone,’ he warned in the spring of 1923, ‘cannot bring relief. The living conditions of a nation can at the end of the day only be improved through the political will to expand.’
The concept of Lebensraum is already clearly visible here, though the term itself was not used.