The Battle of Britain Five Months That Changed History, May—October 1940 by James Holland (z-lib.org).epub

peace treaty without having to go to the trouble of mounting an assault by
air and sea.
He believed he had already done enough to bring Britain to the peace
table. Britain’s army had been trounced and her ally crushed, and Germany
had proved that its army and air force were superior in almost every way.
Britain stood alone. It did not make sense for her to continue the fight.
Only Britain now stood in the way of Hitler pursuing his bigger agenda, the
showdown with the Soviet Union. It is easy to think that Germany started
the war largely because the megalomaniac Hitler craved power and land,
and because the German people, cowed and humiliated after the First World
War and the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles, were prepared to go
along with a man who seemed to be literally offering them the world. It
was, of course, a lot more complicated than that.
Hitler viewed Stalin and the Soviet state as an evil, blood-stained
tyranny that had deliberate aims of spreading westwards. In this, he was
largely correct. At the heart of his ideology – as outlined in his book, Mein
Kampf – was the struggle against the Jewish-Bolshevik. World Jewry was a
malevolent force that needed to be crushed, but so too was Bolshevism.
Indeed, Communism in Germany was painted in much the same way as
Nazism was portrayed in Britain, that is, something dangerous that had to
be stopped. Hitler’s hatred of Bolshevism was shared by the military
aristocratic elite, who still believed that the Kiel Mutiny in 1918, which had
hastened the end of the First World War, had been led by communist
elements. It had ensured that in the post-war army it was only aristocrats
who had reached the highest command. It was for this reason that the
Wehrmacht of 1940 still had so many men from traditional German military
families in key positions – men such as von Rundstedt, von Brauchitsch,
von Kleist, von Kluge, von Richthofen and even von Manstein. These men
allied themselves to Hitler and the Nazis partly because he represented the
antithesis of Bolshevism, but also because he promised massive military
rearmament, which was felt to be necessary if Germany was to protect
herself.
And it was this vulnerability, this insecurity about Germany’s central
geographical position in Europe, which was the nub of Hitler’s ability to
drive such an aggressive foreign policy. In the 1930s, Germany was still a
very young state that had been created only in 1871. As such, it remained a