d the historic mission of destroying the Fatherland's two principal enemies, 'Jewish Bolshevism,' and France, "the European home of the concept of human equality" (Weinberg 4). The German people needed living space or lebenstraum, land for its existence, which was to be found in the east, primarily in Russia. War was unavoidable. Hitler said "it is an iron principle the weaker one falls so that the strong one gains life" (Kershaw 289). Although Hitler planned in the early 1940s to conquer Europe and the Soviet Union, his aims, according to Weinberg, were "potentially limitless," because Hitler believed that "world peace would come only 'when one power, the racially best one, has attained complete and uncontested supremacy'" (Kershaw 7).
German Weakness in 1933. Although they were then the largest political party in Germany, the Nazis never commanded a popular or legislative majority. Hitler's first cabinet contained a majority of appointees from other non-Nazi rightist parties. Germany had suffered from widespread political turmoil after World War I and the hyperinflation of 1922-1923. The somewhat artificial prosperity of the mid-1920s had been propped up by short term loans from the United States. The German economy was devastated by the Great Depression. Shirer said "Germany's position in the world in the spring of 1933 could hardly have been worse. The Third Reich was diplomatically isolated and militarily impotent" (209).
Hitler's primary focus during 1933 and the first part of 1934 was on strengthening dictatorial Nazi rule inside Germany. This included the liquidation of German communists and other left wing opponents of the regime, the eradication of civil liberties, the establishment of concentration camps, the abolition of all non-Nazi political parties, storm trooper violence against German Jews, other forms of religious persecution and elimination of regional and local government autonomy. Deficit financing managed by...