The Third Reich in History and Memory by Richard J. Evans

Author:Richard J. Evans
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf, epub
ISBN: 9781408706435
Publisher: Hachette UK
Published: 2015-02-26T16:55:04.251000+00:00

16. TOWARDS WAR

‘It is with Hitler and Hitler’s intentions,’ remarks Zara Steiner at the beginning of her magisterial contribution to the Oxford History of Modern Europe series, The Triumph of the Dark: European International History 1933–1939 (2011), ‘that any student of European international history must start.’ From the moment he became Chancellor, Hitler acted and other statesmen reacted.

His intentions were fixed long before he came to power. They were breathtaking in their ambition. Hitler was not a conventional European statesman. Governed by a Social Darwinist belief in international affairs as a perpetual struggle between races for survival and supremacy, Hitler repeatedly told his leading military and naval officers that Germany would conquer Eastern Europe, aggrandising its vast agricultural resources for itself and pushing aside those who lived there to make way for the expansion of the German race’s ‘living space’. France, Germany’s traditional enemy in the west, would be subjugated to allow Germany to become Europe’s dominant nation. This was not a normal German foreign policy in any sense; nor was it determined by the structural factors inherent in the international system of Europe since the nineteenth century, as some have argued.

Of course, Steiner concedes, Nazi Germany was not controlled by a monolithic policy-making structure, and different groups and individuals in the higher echelons of the regime often pursued their own agendas. This was particularly the case with Joachim von Ribbentrop, who graduated from being head of the Nazi Party’s foreign affairs bureau to being the ambassador in England and then Foreign Minister. ‘Vain, aggressive, and self-important’, in Steiner’s words, Ribbentrop developed a rabid Anglophobia and did his best to dissuade Hitler from pursuing the idea of an Anglo-German alliance. Britain, he said, was ‘our most dangerous enemy’. Fuelled by perceived slights during his time in London, where his tactlessness earned him repeated and increasingly outspoken criticism in the press, the Foreign Minister eventually succeeded in weaning Hitler away from the alliance project. The Nazi leader continued to hope for British neutrality in the coming conflict, however.

Others, such as Hermann Göring, also on occasion ploughed their own furrow, or influenced Hitler in one direction or another. Yet in the end, it was Hitler – rather than an ill-defined ‘polycracy’ – who determined Germany’s foreign policy. ‘Whether Germany was led by Bismarck, Wilhelm II, or Hitler made a vital difference to its policies,’ Steiner observes. Germany, Hitler declared in Mein Kampf, would ‘either be a world power, or cease to be.’ Once hegemony had been achieved in Europe, so Hitler adumbrated in his Second Book, Germany would enter into a power struggle with America for world domination. In order to achieve this, Germans, equated by Hitler with the ‘Aryan’ race, would have to deal with their arch-enemies the Jews, whom Hitler’s paranoid political fantasies portrayed as engaged in a global conspiracy to subvert German civilisation.

Increasingly, Hitler came to identify America as the epicentre of this supposed conspiracy, with Jewish capital working through US President Franklin D. Roosevelt. All of this would

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