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Weimar prelude and the alternative to Hitler’s strategy
The book’s introduction presents two conflicting paths interwar Germany could pursue to leave the abyss it found itself in: the one it historically followed after 1933, represented by Hitler, and an “Atlanticist” geopolitical strategy implemented to a large extent in 1924-1933, represented by Gustav Stresemann, foreign minister from 1923 to 1929. Hjalmar Schacht is the middle ground.
Firstly, what did they have in common?
Both were keenly aware of America’s rise to superpower status and the importance it would play in European geopolitics. This game-changing American rise is one of the book’s major themes. Both Hitler and Stresemann knew that America’s population, land area and resources allowed it to outcompete any individual European state through economies of scale. Their strategies centered on how to preserve German and European relevance in light of this development.
Both understood the Great War as the result of imperial competition, with Great Britain as the Second Reich’s nemesis.
Both pursued a revision of the burdens imposed by the winners: reparations, the occupied Rhineland and the new borders.
Hitler’s vision of history was not deterministic, and he thus believed it was possible for Europe to achieve parity with America by forming a market of similar size and population, which would be created not through something along the lines of the EU but through a dominant state’s hegemony, as Prussia had done in its unification of Germany. This state would, of course, be Germany itself.
The primary purpose of this hegemony would be the acquisition of means of sustenance, the struggle for which he considered the engine of history. It is for this reason he calculated Great Britain would have no inherent geopolitical reason to oppose his policies. Wilhelmine Germany’s rising exports and market dominance brought it into direct competition with Britain, and hence, its allies, cementing its destruction in the Great War.
He would not repeat the same mistake: Germany would not seek primacy through economics, avoiding a commercial confrontation with Britain, and would only seek to secure its means of sustenance on the continent, where the British wouldn’t lose any means of sustenance as theirs were on the empire. It would thus be possible to have a neutral or friendly London. This was one cornerstone of his vision: Britain as a counterweight to America.
The logical conclusion was that war would happen sooner or later, allowing Germany to settle scores with the French and assert its hegemony to the East. As risky as it could be, Hitler saw Germany’s confrontations with the other great powers as an existential struggle and thus accepted the risk.