The unforeseen extent and duration of World War I interrupted much of Europe’s access to the abundant lands of the New World, on which its food supply had come to depend. In Germany, the British blockade starved some 800,000 people; mortality increased most (over 60 percent) from malnutrition-related tuberculosis. Central to the appeal of Hitler’s National Socialist movement was its call for the conquest of Lebensraum in eastern Europe and western Russia – and the expulsion or extermination of those regions’ native inhabitants – as a means to self-sufficiency in food. Both in Mein Kampf and in his “second book,” Hitler argued explicitly that neither factor substitution, factor mobility, nor new technologies could guarantee Germans’ food supply; only the admittedly costly and risky route of conquest would suffice. When Stresemann’s “export powerhouse” strategy of factor mobility collapsed after 1929, Hitler’s alternative won strong popular support. In the “breakthrough” election of 1930, the Nazi vote increased most in the cities that had suffered the highest wartime mortality from tuberculosis. Hitler’s genocidal plan appealed especially to the populations that had endured the worst wartime hunger and death.

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.

Chapter 7 examines the foreign policy of Nazi Germany during the 1930s, as well as the events of World War II from September 1939 through early 1941. Hitler did not see revision of the Treaty of Versailles as an end goal of policy, but rather as a pretext for pursuing a far more ambitious program geared toward the waging of war and the conquest of “living space” (Lebensraum). He issued reasonable-sounding demands for ethnic self-determination of German minorities in Czechoslovakia and Poland, and claimed to want peace even after telling his own military leaders that war would be necessary to achieve his aims. After annexing Austria in March 1938 with little pushback from other countries, Germany isolated Czechoslovakia, first annexing the Sudetenland in September 1938 and then destroying Czechoslovak statehood a few months later. The non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union opened the way for an attack on Poland on September 1, 1939, bringing Britain and France into the war. Germany defeated and partially occupied France in 1940 while British forces fled the continent. The German people supported the restoration of their country’s military power and the dismantling of the Treaty of Versailles but had mixed feelings about going to war.