ABSTRACT

When Britain and France declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939, Hitler’s foreign policy vision, which had remained constant since the mid 1920s, appeared to be in tatters. In Mein Kampf and the Second book, Hitler had argued that Germany should develop an entente with Britain, the nation he most admired. Instead, he was now at war with Britain (France was an implacable foe) and allied to his ideological enemy, the Soviet Union, the country he had always despised. How can this apparent volte-face be explained? The first point to note is that despite the image of a strong leader, Hitler had always found it difficult to make up his mind in times of crisis. In 1932 he almost lost the Chancellorship; in June 1934 Hitler agreed to the purge of the SA (“Night of the Long Knives”) only belatedly and reluctantly; he shelved dealing with the economic crisis of 1935-6, when a serious shortage of raw materials and foodstuffs arose; and in September 1938 Hitler almost lost his nerve in the Sudetenland crisis. As has already been mentioned, Hitler’s style of leadership had led to a chaotic form of administrative anarchy. It is not surprising to discover, therefore, that his foreign policy, governed as it was by a combination of ideology, opportunism and instinct, should be equally inconsistent and contradictory. In fact Hitler never lost sight of his utopian vision of a Greater Germanic Reich, and even on the eve of the outbreak of the Second World War he still hoped that an agreement could be reached with Britain allowing Germany a free hand to expand eastwards. It was the effete democracies who were opposing his territorial ambitions and thus refusing to play the game according to his blueprint. The gamble that Hitler undertook in 1939 inevitably led to a collision course with the Western powers and the dynamics implicit in his utopian vision

drove him relentlessly from one conquest to the next in pursuit of world power status.