Conclusion

Neither the ‘Third Reich’ nor the related Second World War would have been possible without the alliance between the former petty-bourgeois Hitler, the rabble-rouser and monomaniac, and the traditional agrarian and industrial power elites who dominated both the armed forces and the diplomatic service. They ‘represented the continuity of the national-state legacy’ to a particularly high degree: ‘They had consciously experienced the rise of Germany prior to 1914, and they were contemporaneous with the economic and military springs of German Great-Power policy in all its variations. Such massive armaments and gearing of the economy to military preparedness would not have been possible without them.’ Over and above mere revision of Versailles, their general objective was the rehabilitation of the German Great-Power position, above all with ‘regard to eastern Europe, to an eastern imperium guaranteeing a self-sufficient war economy’. ‘In such a political context the use of military force was taken for granted.’ ¹²² This objective had originated during the Kaiserreich, led to the First World War, seemed to find realization in the peace of Brest-Litovsk, lay dormant during the interregnum of the Weimar republic (which continued to call itself the German Empire) and gathered momentum during the Third Reich and into the Second World War.