ABSTRACT
Hitler wanted a healthy and expanding economy so that he could convert it to the giant task of European and Asian conquest. The Blitzkrieg economy is just as elusive in the wider context of German war preparations. Industry was faced in 1939 with the prospect of rising trade and a consumer boom based on the continued modernization of the German economy. German economy, encumbered with the apparatus of Nazism, performed its tasks inefficiently. France, Russia, Britain, and even the United States were the main enemies, a conviction that wavered only with the tactics of diplomacy. This interpretation of Hitler's economic and military ambitions, which required a large rearmament and a continuing militarization of German society, accords much more satisfactorily with the evidence of war preparations, most of which pointed to a war to be fought in the mid-1940s or later.
