ABSTRACT
Was the Second World War led by Adolf Hitler as a revolutionary conflict? One thing is clear, the expression of Hitler’s thinking and personality reached its apogee between 1939 and 1945. In the unrestrained atmosphere of warfare, he found a more complete scope for self-realisation than could ever have been the case during peacetime. For Hitler, war was something to be welcomed as a downright necessity of life. In 1927 he wrote that land could fall only to those with ‘the courage to take possession’ of it (Hitler, 1961, p. 15). Fifteen years later he declared that ‘we must wish for a war every fifteen or twenty years’, since wars ‘drive people to proliferation, they teach us not to fall into the error of being content with a single child in each family’ (Trevor-Roper, 1961, pp. 55-6). War was an essential means both to the extension of Germany’s borders (see also Chapters 2 and 5) and to the strengthening of the racial constitution of the nation. All of this meant that Hitler had to be able to rely on Germany’s military men. The early signs had indicated that he could (see Chapter 4), and to consolidate the bond between government and the military he introduced an oath in which soldiers promised him their unconditional obedience (Strawson, 1971, pp. 43-4). More important still, in early 1938, just weeks after stating his warlike intent at the Hossbach meeting (document 5.15), he dismissed the Commander in Chief of the Wehrmacht, von Blomberg, and the Commander in Chief of the Army, von Fritsch, on trumped-up charges of moral failings. Thereafter Hitler took control of defence affairs more directly and personally than ever (Welch, 1998, pp. 60-2). The army was no longer a partner of National Socialism in the Third Reich; it had become an instrument of policy (Weissmann, 1997, p. 278). This was a decisive step in preparation for an even more aggressively expansionist foreign policy (Müller, 1989, pp. 91-2).
