Biggest Reason for Hitler Starting WWII?

Biggest Reason for Hitler Starting WWII?

  • Internal Economic Pressures

    Votes: 9 7.5%
  • Ideological Fantasies

    Votes: 71 59.2%
  • Territorial Goals

    Votes: 32 26.7%
  • Something Else

    Votes: 8 6.7%

  • Total voters
    120
The internal economic pressures and territorial goals were very much tied up into those ideological fantasies... so that's what I voted for.
 

TinyTartar

Banned
I find it hard to be honest to disconnect territorial expansion from his ideology. His ideology rested on eventual territorial expansion.

Everything the Nazis did up until 1941, all of the reforms and actions taken, were preparing themselves for that moment when they would invade east. It was central to Hitler, and to be frank, many of the German elite who may have opposed him, that they took war to the east and gained territory. Lebensraum was not a new idea, nor was anti-Semitism, to Germans in general, let alone the elites. Hitler was the one to realize that the two could be combined.
 
His desire for a European empire to compete with the US.

:confused: When did the idea that the US was Germany's main rival enter Hitler's head? Much of Mein Kampf and the history of Nazi Germany seem to treat the world outside of Europe as if it didn't exist...

What often gets thought is that Nazi = Incompetent Soldier. The truth of the matter is that yes, while many of Germany's best were not Nazis, a great many of them were and were either true ideological believers, or only disagreed with Hitler on military strategy. Some good examples of this are Walther Model, Ferdinand Schorner, Joachim Peiper, etc.

You're right about Model and Schorner. However...

AFAIK no flag officer in the SS ever covered themselves in glory, as they simply lacked the training and proper leadership experience in the upper echelons of higher military command. No War Staff College for the SS.

And Peiper was only a brigade commander with to be blunt IMO holding an exaggerated level of respect in WWII. Give him a less than full strength panzer brigade equipped with Panzer IVs and fair-to-middling quality panzer troops in the Heer and I doubt you'll see him accomplishing any more than any other German officer in a similar command.

<snip>
Had the Russians not demonstrated in Poland an ineptness in occupying half the country, (1) and an assessment that the Red Army was grossly overrated in ability, Hitler may well have hesitated to invade the USSR for the time being.

The invasion of the Balkans was driven solely because of Italy's debacle in Greece and the movement of British troops into that country. (2)<snip>

1) Actually you may be thinking of the Winter War. The USSR's occupation of Eastern Poland was poorly executed, but the Finns' humiliating the Soviet Army in the first rounds of the Winter War had to really expose to Hitler's eyes Stalin's weakness. After all, if Stalin in his paranoid mania had kept his purges of the military going nonstop right up to 6/22/41...:(

2) Nothing would have changed had not one British soldier stepped foot in Greece, one plane flown overhead, or one ship sailed into the Aegean. Hitler couldn't let his buddy Benny the Moose suffer such a humiliating defeat to the Greeks, regardless of whatever the British did. He could always say that he was acting to prevent British intervention.
 
Re: Hitler's plans for America, most of them are enunciated in his unpublished Zweites Buch (lit. "Second Book"), where outdoing America is seen as a long, long term goal, the only way through which this could be achieved was through uniting Europe against the United States.
 
Top