Plan for Destruction (MGM, 1943)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Withnail & I TCM showed a 20-minute morale-building World War II-era short from MGM in 1943 called Plan for Destruction, narrated by Lewis Stone from behind a desk and dealing with the geopolitical theories of Karl-Ernst Haushofer (Frank Reicher). Haushofer really existed (https://www.britannica.com/biography/Karl-Ernst-Haushofer) and was a leading proponent of the idea of “geopolitics. The Encyclopaedia Britannica article cited above explains, “A mixture of sound observations and hazy theories, geopolitics was based on the works of the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel, who compared the state to a biological organism, and on the less-scientific theories of the Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kjellen, who took Ratzel’s metaphor literally and viewed the state as an actual organism with a natural right to growth and to Lebensraum (‘living space’).” In Plan for Destruction, Rudolf Hess (George Lynn) appears as an on-screen character who attends one of Haushofer’s college lectures and decides to introduce him to Adolf Hitler as the man who can put Haushofer’s geopolitical theories into practice.

There’s just one little problem – at the moment Hitler is in Landsberg prison, serving a nine-month sentence for having tried to overthrow the German government in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 – but Hess wangles permission from the prison authorities to allow Haushofer to visit Hitler in prison for 15 minutes. The actor playing Hitler keeps his back to the camera and thus takes on the aspect of an otherworldly figure, but once Haushofer and Hitler meet the film (directed by Edward L. Cahn from a script by Karl Kamb and John C. Higgins) pretty much switches to straight documentary, complete with captured footage from Nazi newsreels to dramatize the horrors of the Blitzkrieg. According to the Kamb-Higgins narration, Hitler’s geopolitical plans started to unravel when he mounted his ill-fated invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 and met with unexpectedly fierce and determined Russian resistance (something the modern-day Russians were equally surprised by when they invaded Ukraine in February 2022 and got bogged down in a long war they expected to last only a few days). Ironically, the real Karl Haushofer had warned Hitler against invading Russia (he had wanted Hitler to follow Bismarck’s example of ensuring himself stability in the East by a German-Russian alliance that would give him a free hand in the West). Plan for Destruction ends with a speech by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt addressed to the youth of America stating it was their obligation to fight the geopolitical agenda and win such a sweeping victory Germany would never again attempt to conquer the world. It’s a fascinating little film and the real Karl Haushofer didn’t long survive the war; under investigation for war crimes, he and his wife (who was actually Jewish, ironically enough) committed joint suicide on March 13, 1946.