What had caused the World War II (Why Germany attacked Europe)

At the Reich Chancellery in November 1937, a very select group - Germany's war and foreign ministers and the three heads of the armed services - listened as Hitler expounded at enormous length his vision on the next five to eight years. But the basic message was straightforward. There was little time to lose, for across the world, he told them, 'the primitive urge to colonization' was visible once more. Economic need was the real driving force. It had recently pushed both Japan and Italy to expand, and Germany needed to follow suit. The Reich with its 'tightly packed racial core" could never be self-sufficient in basic raw materials or foodstuffs, and overcrowding was a real threat to the country's future. Raising its standard of living meant gaining access to other people's resources.

But participating in the world economy would make the country vulnerable to British pressure - neither he nor any of his listeners had forgotten the blockade in the Great War - and so the only safe outlet for Germany lay within Europe: 'If we accept the security of our food situation as the principal point at issue,' he said ,'the space needed to secure it can be sought only in Europe, not - as in the liberal-capitalist view - in the exploitation of colonies. It is not a matter of acquiring population but of gathering space for agricultural use. Moreover, areas producing raw materials can be more usefully sought in Europe, in immediate proximity to the Reich, than overseas.' He had Austria and Czechoslovakia in mind in the first instance, predicting that taking over them would improve the Reich's food supply - especially if, as he anticipated, Germany was able to force three million Czechs to emigrate. If they got the timing right, Britain and France would stand aside, and Germany would then emerge bolstered economically and in a strong position to expand further.

Hitler tended to think about economics in terms of how much coal, iron and steel, edible fats and grain he could extract from a given territory. He saw international economies as a zero-sum game, not one in which the fortunes of all were bound together through mutual interdependence. This was certainly how he viewed eastern Europe in particular. But after the fall of Europe, a much larger prospect suddenly opened up - that of continental hegemony. Economic policy experts, who were acutely aware of the strains upon the Germany economy since the early 1930s, were hugely relieved. 'Today we administer a territory from the Arctic Ocean to the Black Sea, from the Gulf of Finland to the Atlantic,' boasted the German minister of economics shortly after the invasion of USSR. 'Never before in the history of USSR in 1941 - 2 - offered a resource base superior in almost every respect to that available to Stalin: only in oil did the Soviet Union remain ahead.

Yet resources were not the whole story. Europe GDP was collectively larger than that of either the British empire or the USA (even before taking into account the potential contribution of French, Belgian and Dutch colonies) but its wealth was generated not so much through extraction as through the performance of sophisticated open and inter-connected financial markets. The inter war economic crisis had hit trade among countries within the continent and reduced their dealings with the rest of the world. Nevertheless, these networks and trade interactions remain crucial to European prosperity. The real challenge for the Germans, in other words, was less how to extract resources than how to manage them.

Adapted from: Hitler's Empire How the Nazis Ruled Europe by Mark Mazower (Pages 259-260)

Ngoh Zhi Lin 10S21