A Prelude to Hitler's Greater Germany

Abstract

HITLER'S Greater German Reich was foreshadowed in the many plans and partially completed framework for the victorious imperial Germany which so many Germans expected to see emerge from the First World War. The empire was to be expanded. It was to be the uncontested economic and military master of Europe. On its eastern and western frontiers it was to have subsidiary or client states closely connected with it economically, politically, and militarily. Above all, it was to be oriented politically and economically toward further eastern colonization and expansion. These plans originated in the facts of military occupation of areas outside the Second Reich, and in the economic necessity of the Central Powers, cut off from the rest of the world by the Allied blockade. On the eve of the First World War Germany had abandoned all but the semblance of Bismarck's system of security through a European balance of power, in exchange for a role in world politics which was, in fact, ill suited to preserve the peaceful world which not only her industrial and trading economy but her very geographic location and political history required. The stage was set in I914, not only for war but for a complete reorientation of German political and economic ambitions. In spite of her navy, her colonies, and her world trade, Germany at war became once more a continental state in the heart of Europe. As an industrial state, Germany needed food and raw materials which she did not have within her borders. During the war years and afterwards, she had to find more secure and defensible sources for these necessities. Germany needed a system of security to replace the Bismarckian one which had worked until modern capitalism overtook the Prussia-Germany of I890. The actions of William II and his ministers up to I9I4 indicated that they had not really foreseen the possibility of world war. A substitute system had to be constructed in wartime for the contingencies of a warring world. At the outbreak of the war most Germans, like the other people of Europe, expected a short period of hostilities, conducted with limited ob-