The Foreign Policy of the Third Reich: 1933-1939

The principal aim of German foreign policy during the Third Reich was territorial expansion, and in his controversial manifesto, Mein Kampf (My Struggle), Hitler specified precisely where this territory was to be found: 'If we speak of soil in Europe today, we can primarily have in mind only Russia and her vassal border states’.  During one of his wartime bull sessions in August 1941, Hitler explained to his inner circle how he envisioned Russia's future under German rule.  He said: 'What India was for England, the territories of Russia will be for us:

According to Hitler's Weltanschauung (worldview), Germany's destiny lay eastwards.  Again, the pages of Mein Kampf explained why it was necessary for the German Volk (folk) to obtain Lebensraum (living space): `[W]e National Socialists must ...  secure for the German people the land and soil to which they are entitled on this earth.’ This urgently needed territory, Hitler explained, would be needed to accommodate the projected German population growth in the decades to come.  He predicted that the number of Germans in Europe, currently a people numbering some eighty million, would swell to over triple that figure in a century:

“Today we count eighty million Germans in Europe! This foreign policy [of ours] will be acknowledged as correct only if, after scarcely a hundred years, there are two hundred and fifty million Germans on this Continent ...”. 

Hitler believed that the German Volk had to discontinue their present trend of venturing into Southern and Western Europe, and instead focus their attention eastwards.  Furthermore, Germany's pre-1914 Imperial policy of establishing colonies beyond the frontiers of the European Continent needed to be abandoned, and in its place substituted the procurement of vast tracts of Eastern soil:

“And so we National Socialists consciously draw a line beneath the foreign policy tendency of our pre-War period.  We take up where we broke off six hundred years ago.  We stop the endless German movement to the south and west, and turn our gaze towards the land in the east.  At long last we break off the colonial and commercial policy of the pre-War period and shift to the soil policy of the future”. 

How was Germany to acquire this Eastern soil?  A united and strengthened German Reich had to seize land in Eastern Europe at Russia's expense, and this could only be done by conquest.  In this way, too, would the historically ethnic German territories of which Germany was dispossessed at Versailles be reacquired:

“[O]ppressed territories are led back to the bosom of a common Reich, not by flaming protests, but by a mighty sword”. 

He repeated this precept yet again:

“[T]he recovery of the lost [German] territories is not won through solemn appeals to the Lord or through pious hopes in a League of Nations, but only by force of arms”. 

However, Hitler recognized that Germany, acting independently, might face insurmountable opposition in attempting to realize her foreign policy objectives.  Thus, he proposed that Germany ally herself with two specific nations: `In the predictable future there can be only two allies for Germany in Europe: England and Italy,’

Conversely, Hitler averred there was one European nation which was a thorn in Germany's side and always would be, regardless of which type of government she possessed:

“The inexorable mortal enemy of the German people is and remains France.  It matters not at all who ruled or will rule France, whether Bourbons or Jacobins, Bonapartists or bourgeois democrats, Clerical republicans or Red Bolshevists: the final goal of their activity in foreign affairs will always be an attempt to seize possession of the Rhine border and to secure this watercourse for France by means of a dismembered and shattered Germany”. 

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The establishment of an Anglo-German-Italian bloc would also isolate France and enable Germany to settle her generations-long feud with her hated Gallic foe:

“[T]he alliance would give Germany the possibility of peacefully making those preparations for a reckoning with France, which would have to be made in any event within the scope of such a coalition”. 

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Under Hitler's autocratic leadership, German foreign policy consisted of four key points, summarized here:

     1.    LEBENSRAUM and DRANG NACH OSTEN: the acquisition of `living space' for the German Volk by a `drive eastwards', resulting in the displacement of the native Slavic inhabitants and their replacement with German fanner-settlers;

     2.    ANSCHLUSS: the incorporation of Austria into the German Reich;

     3.    GROSSDEUTSCHLAND: the establishment of a large, homogenous Germanic bloc—a Greater German Reich—composed of all Europe's Germans (Austrian Germans, Sudeten Germans, Memel Germans, Danzig Germans, etc.) that would extend eastwards to the Ural Mountains and last a millennium; and

     4.    ABROGATION OF THE VERSAILLES TREATY OF 1919: (i) the abolishment of the 'War Guilt' clause, which declared that Germany was responsible for 'all the loss and damage' of the First World War; (ii) the cancellation of the provisions disallowing German rearmament; and (iii) the restoration of German land and colonies confiscated by the Allied Powers at home and abroad. 

The purpose of this book is to examine how in calculated, Machiavellian phases, the Third Reich—through spidery manipulation, deliberate deception, and uncompromising coercion (and despite the best intentions of the Anglo–French democracies who first practised appeasement before finally abandoning it)— endeavoured to realize the four aims indicated above between the years 1933 and 1939.