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Notes -
Firstly, welcome back to your usually scheduled programming.
As the other user said, Hitler’s territorial plans had a long history that predated his rise to power. Lebensraum/the ‘Drang nach Osten’ was - far more so than antisemitism or rearmament or domestic economic or political reform - the central ideological message of the National Socialists from the mid-1920s onward. Books and articles about the idea of a ‘Volk ohne Raum’ / people without (enough) land became bestsellers, irredentism and expansionism went beyond nazism to become a pillar of the entire German hard right. Almost all of Germany’s problems were, at one point or another, blamed on it - and as you suggest, this was the means by which the Nazis blamed the Treaty of Versailles and Jews for many of Germany’s problems.
Unz makes Hitler seem like an extreme retard in this piece. If his own intelligence was informing him that America and Britain were looking for an excuse to declare war, why would he give them an excuse by taking Poland? Hitler’s own war plans largely prove Unz wrong. If he merely (as is often suggested by the far right) wanted to fight communists, the invasion of Poland and Czecheslovakia, and the deal with Stalin, make little sense. The strategy in the east confirms imperial ambitions, already plainly discussed, that in the medium term would have resulted in the ethnic cleansing of the West Slavs almost universally. As for the Jews, one of the main reasons they were concerned wasn’t their property in Germany (largely already sold by 1938, and the majority of German Jews had already fled) but the vast Jewish populations of Poland and elsewhere in CEE which they feared Hitler would expropriate, persecute or kill, which of course he eventually did.
Unz’ argument is essentially that even though predictions of what Hitler would do to occupied Eastern Europe largely came true and fully retroactively justified efforts to try to stop him, he originally - despite his consistent arguing for German manifest destiny eastward for almost two decades before he embarked upon it - didn’t actually want it. Seems pretty ridiculous to me.
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