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

nation of German peoples rather than the German nation. It was also a part
of Europe that had a long history of bloody wars, from the terrible Thirty
Years War in the seventeenth century, to the Napoleonic Wars of the early
nineteenth century, to the catastrophic First World War. With a
comparatively small coastline along only her northern border, Germany was
vulnerable to attack from all other sides. After Versailles, she was more
vulnerable than she had ever been.
There was another factor in Germany’s geographical position, however.
The Reich lacked oil and sufficient supplies of iron and other key ores, and
had only comparatively small coal seams. These could be gained either by
foreign trade agreements or by expansion. If Hitler could attack and destroy
the Soviet Union, then he would kill two birds with one stone. First, he
would eliminate the Soviet threat to Germany, and with it Bolshevism, and,
second, he would have vast lands that could supply the Reich with all the
minerals, farmland, and manpower he needed to ensure Germany’s longterm
future. This was his Lebensraum policy. It was not an original idea; the
concept had been around in Germany since the end of the nineteenth
century. Another word for it was colonization, and that was as old as the
stars.
Before he turned to Russia, however, there was expansion closer to
home to attend to. In many ways, Hitler’s massive rearmament policy and
early territorial expansionism were entirely understandable. Certainly,
megalomania played a part, but he also believed, like most Germans, that
those German-speaking territories were rightly part of Germany.
Furthermore, he needed to make Germany more secure, by creating a
greater protective ring around the country – a kind of buffer. The stronger
the Reich, the less vulnerable it would be to foreign aggression.
And his early expansionism was phenomenally successful, which
gained him ever more popular support. The Rhineland was reoccupied;
Austria was absorbed; so too was the Sudetenland; and then, in March
1939, so was the rest of Czechoslovakia. And all without firing a shot. No
wonder the Germans loved him. He had given them pride, jobs, prosperity
and nearly all the land stripped from them in 1919, and all peacefully. It
was nothing short of a miracle.
Nearly all, but not quite. The last remaining piece of pre-1919 German
territory now lay in Poland, and it was to this new country that Hitler turned
his attention in the spring of 1939. In 1919, the new Polish state had been