ABSTRACT

When delving into the rich contextuality and contingency of events, there is a risk that somewhere amid the detail and the complexities, the essential historical plot is obscured or even lost. The origins, causes, enabling conditions and triggering occurrences that generated World War II attract a host of expert scholars, and rightly so. But at the end of the day, as the cliché has it, the necessary and sufficient explanation for the outbreak and general course of the war could hardly be more straightforward. After 30 January 1933, Germany was led – one can hardly say governed, since Hitler did very little governing – by a man who needed to wage war in order to realize his vision of a racially pure

Greater Germany occupying territory suitably expansive for a burgeoning populace of Aryan settlers. That land was in the East; currently it was held by Slavs, and it would have to be seized by force. In order to take this land and construct a strategically secure Germanic continental fortress, Hitler needed to abolish the European balance of power and replace it with German hegemony. Exactly how and when this visionary purpose could be achieved were as uncertain in detail as its pursuit was to be unswervingly steady. Hitler intended to achieve world domination via the successful conduct of a series of wars, and he expected that process to be completed by 1950. Alone among the great powers of the 1930s, Germany had a leader who knew what he wanted and what he would, and would not, accept. He could be flexible, rationally prudent at times, and even deterred when opportunities faded temporarily. However, he could not be deflected from pursuit of his vision of a Europe dominated, actually owned, by a new, imperial Nazi German Reich.