There it was, the grand vision (almost design) laid out clearly in 1924. There is
no reason to doubt either the sincerity of Hitler’s manifesto or the steadiness of his
purpose through all the vicissitudes of political life in the 1920s, the bold diplomacy of
the 1930s and then the shifting fortunes of an ever more total war from 1939 to 1945.
The world had been warned. However, Mein Kampfand Hitler’s public rhetoric could
not be taken seriously by responsible statesmen. His vision of a great racially based
Germanic continental empire was an example of thinking wildly ‘out of the box’. It
was so extraordinary that sophisticated practitioners of normal statecraft may be excused
for declining to take Hitler’s words at face value. And at first he did not need to be
taken seriously, because he and his party were only marginal players in German politics.
When he did seize his opportunity to assume the chancellorship, most observers were
convinced, not unreasonably, that he would be tamed both by the responsibilities of office
and by the many sober and experienced advisers to whom he would be politically
beholden. Germany was bereft neither of a prudent political class nor of a body of
cautious soldiers.
The problem was that Adolf Hitler was that (fortunately) true rarity: a conviction
politician with a vision that could not be accommodated within the existing international
order. In addition, by securing control of potentially the most powerful state in Europe,
a process fully complete only in 1938, he commanded the means to attempt to translate
vision into action. The all but demonic truth about Nazi Germany was so improbable to
mid-century Europeans that for many years they could not accept it within their mental
universe. Even well into the war itself, and in the face of accumulating evidence, the
existence and purpose of dedicated death camps, as contrasted with the long-familiar
concentration camps, was seriously doubted.
Hitler may be likened to a gangster in a hurry. He had to secure world domination
for his racial state before his health and energy failed: he was fifty years old in 1939. He
calculated that his Third Reich had a rearmament lead that would prove to be a rapidly
wasting asset after 1943. To offset the real, if potential, danger in the last point, he
believed that each of his succession of ever-greater wars of conquest would improve
Germany’s strategic competitive position for the next one. They were to be stepping
stones to nothing short of world conquest and domination.
World War II was not an accident, a mistake or a blunder, though its timing, character,
course and outcome certainly could be so judged by many. In retrospect, it is unarguable
that Hitler’s Germany had to be destroyed. It is equally unarguable that the essential,
possibly the sufficient as well the necessary, step was to change the regime and destroy
its charismatic leader, his legend and the quasi-religion of Nazism. But that which was
plain for nearly all to see in the summer of 1939 had not been at all obvious to normal,
decent (if mediocre) politicians in previous years. They and their ilk lacked training in
how to cope with one of the greatest threats in all of strategic history. They tried to
conduct diplomatic business according to the usual rules with a man who recognized no
rules and no limits to his ambition. Hitler was neither clinically insane nor irrational, but
he was wholly unreasonable in terms of the standard discourse of international relations.
Britain and France chose to go to war over Poland on 3 September 1939 because they
were eventually convinced that Hitler’s words, his promises, were worthless. There could
be no final compromise and settlement with a Germany led by that man. London and
Paris did not fight for ideological goals, though there was increasing recognition of a dark
World War II in Europe, II 145