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alternatehistory.com
Adolf Hitler, the National Socialist dictator of Germany from 1933 to 1938, when he was assassinated by Maurice Bavaud, is one of the most popular figures of alternate history speculation. Still greatly admired by many in Germany today for his successful remilitarization of the Rhineland and the Munich Agreement which forced Czechoslovakia to yield the Sudetenland, he is also greatly criticized for his brutal persecution of Jews and dissidents. Recently economist Adrian Tooze's controversial book A War Economy in Peacetime: Rearmament in Hitler's Germany has argued that he was actually preparing for a full-scale Second Great War against either the Anglo-French, or the Soviet Union, or both. The main obstacle, he argues, was that the German economy was heavily dependent on essential imports which a British blockade would have cut off, as happened in the Great War. What if Hitler had lived, and, following through on his warlike intentions, had attempted to negotiate an agreement with the Soviet Union to circumvent such a blockade? The two countries did share a common enemy in Poland, and a mutual dislike of the western capitalist powers.