Did Hitler Want War? Yes.

I blogged the other day about the response to Pat Buchanan’s column last week entitled, Did Hitler Want War?  My subject then was primarily the response to his column.  Today I’d like to take up the column itself.

Buchanan, in his column (and in his recently published book, Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World) assigns the primary blame for the war on the British war guarantee to the Poles.  Had they not issued this guarantee, Buchanan argues, the Poles would have been forced to negotiate the Danzig issue with the Germans, thereby avoiding six years of war and 50 million dead.  The evidence, Buchanan believes, shows that Hitler did not want war, nor was he after world domination.

This is manifestly not so.  If Buchanan amended his question to “Did Hitler Want War in 1939?” then, yes, I would agree with him.  Hitler did not want war in 1939.  Beginning in 1935 until early 1939, he had remilitarized the Rhineland, absorbed Austria, annexed the Sudetenland, and invaded Czechoslovakia proper, all without bloodshed.  His quest for a pan-German state, for Lebensraum, would not be complete without the re-absorption of the German-speaking sections of Poland and the port of Danzig.  He thought he could achieve this goal in the same manner he’d achieved his previous conquests.  Hitler did not believe the Brits would live up to their war guarantee.  He was aware of the decrepit state of their empire and did not believe they’d risk it over such a silly issue as Poland.  He also knew that in Great Britain it was widely believed that Versailles had been too punitive on Germany; the leadership had actually expressed sympathy towards the German goal of re-uniting Danzig as part of the German state.  Why then would they go to war over the issue?

Hitler views were reinforced by his Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, who guaranteed Hitler that the Brits would not fight.  Oh, to have been a fly on the wall when the British ultimatum was delivered.  From Richard Overy’s classic The Road To War:

When finally of 3 September the British ambassador, Nevile Henderson, arrived at the German Foreign Ministry at nine o’clock in the morning to deliver a British ultimatum there was only Hitler’s interpreter, Paul Schmidt, to meet him.  He took the document over to the Chancellery where he found an anxious party of soldiers and officials waiting for news.  He was shown into Hitler’s study, and in the presence of Hitler and Ribbentrop slowly read out the ultimatum. ‘When I finished,’ wrote Schmidt, ‘there was complete silence.  Hitler sat immobile, gazing before him … after an interval which seemed an age he turned to Ribbentrop, who had remained standing at the window. “What now?”, asked Hitler with a savage look.'

One of the reasons Hitler did not want war in 1939 was that he believed Germany was not ready for a global conflict, neither militarily nor socially.  He expected war though, only he hoped it would not begin until 1942 or 1943.  Then Germany would be prepared to fight the great global conflict that he always knew was inevitable.  From Paul Johnson’s magisterial history of the twentieth century, Modern Times:

Everyone knew Hitler’s aims were ambitious.  The German masses believed they could and would be attained without war, by assertive diplomacy backed by armed strength.  The generals were told that war would almost certainly be necessary, but that it would be limited and short.  In fact Hitler’s real programme was far more extensive than the generals, let alone the masses, realized and necessarily involved not merely war but a series of wars.  Hitler meant what he said when he wrote in Mein Kampf: ‘Germany must either be a world power or there will be no Germany.’ When he used the term ‘world power’ he meant something greater than Wilhelmine Germany, merely the dominant power in central Europe: he meant ‘world’ in the full sense.  The lesson he learned in the First World War and from Ludendorff’s analysis of it was that it was essential for Germany to effect a break-out from its Central European base, which could always be encircled.  In Hitler’s view, Ludendorff had just begun to attain this, at Brest-Litovsk, when the ‘stab in the back’ by the Home Front wrecked everything.  Hence his real plans began where Brest-Litovsk ended: the clock was to be put back to 1918, but with Germany solid, united, fresh and, above all, ‘cleansed’…

…Hitler’s full programme, therefore, was as follows.  First, gain control of Germany itself, and begin the cleansing process at home.  Second, destroy the Versailles settlement and establish Germany as the dominant power in Central Europe.  All this could be achieved without war.  Third, on this power basis, destroy the Soviet Union (by war) to rid the ‘breeding-ground’ of the ‘bacillus’ and, by colonization, create a solid economic and strategic power-base from which to establish a continental empire, in which France and Italy would be mere satellites.  In the fourth stage Germany would acquire a large colonial empire in Africa, plus a big ocean navy, to make her one of the four superpowers, in addition to Britain, Japan, and the United States.  Finally, in the generation after his death, Hitler envisaged a decisive struggle between Germany and the United States for world domination.”

The italics above are mine.  In 1939, Hitler was in the second stage of his program.  He was attempting to make Germany the dominant power in Central Europe.  And he thought he could do it without war.  This is where Buchanan errs, by assuming that Danzig was all Hitler wanted.  By 1939, it had become clear to the other European powers that stage two was not the end of Hitler’s program.  They knew then that more was to come and the longer they waited the more difficult it would be to stop him.  Yes, they should have stopped him earlier but now they must stop him.  Not going to war in 1939 would only postpone the inevitable and against an even stronger Germany.  Hitler didn’t want war in 1939 but the Brits, and eventually the Allies, gave it to him, and thank goodness.  We can play the game of ‘what if’ till kingdom-come but going to war, finally, in 1939 against the brutal butcher of Germany was, in my view and most others, the right thing to do.