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10 - Daily Bread

Hitler, Moral Devolution, and Nazi Foreign Policy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 July 2023

Brian C. Rathbun
Affiliation:
University of Southern California
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Summary

A striking number of accounts stress the continuity between the foreign policy of Wilhelmine and Nazi Germany. Hitler was simply a more virulent nationalist and militarist, so some sort of revisionist expansion was inevitable in German foreign policy. The Nazis, however, were a fundamentally different type of right-wing force. Hitler dismissed the very existence of humanitarian ethics as a mere social construction and illusion, refusing even the typical scorn more traditional German nationalists expressed vis-à-vis its wartime adversaries. Hitler’s regime explicitly redefined the national community not as a cultural and linguistic entity but as a biological one. Rather than a continuation of previous tendencies in German nationalism, it was a decisive moral break and led to a wholly different basis for, and type of, international aggression. Hitler dismissed the ambitions of Weimar nationalists of the Wilhelmine variety, whose only interest was to rail against the injustices of the Versailles Treaty and demand the return of lost German lands that were rightly hers. For Hitler, no one had any right to any piece of territory; one simply took it. As a consequence, he defined fundamentally different foreign policy goals than his contemporaries and predecessors: the creation of Lebensraum to provide for Hitler’s growing population.

Type
Chapter
Information
Right and Wronged in International Relations
Evolutionary Ethics, Moral Revolutions, and the Nature of Power Politics
, pp. 296 - 335
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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  • Daily Bread
  • Brian C. Rathbun, University of Southern California
  • Book: Right and Wronged in International Relations
  • Online publication: 29 July 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009344722.010
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  • Daily Bread
  • Brian C. Rathbun, University of Southern California
  • Book: Right and Wronged in International Relations
  • Online publication: 29 July 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009344722.010
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Daily Bread
  • Brian C. Rathbun, University of Southern California
  • Book: Right and Wronged in International Relations
  • Online publication: 29 July 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009344722.010
Available formats
×