Introduction

The Nazi state reached its final, murderous and destructive form during Hitler’s war. Clausewitz’s dictum that war is the continuation of politics with the admixture of other means is certainly true of the history of Nazi Germany between the annexation of Austria in 1938 and the unconditional surrender of the Third Reich in 1945. ‘Today Germany is ours; tomorrow the whole world’ screamed the uniformed Nazi hordes. Germany’s ‘struggle for existence’ in the Second World War was a continuation of domestic politics, of the ‘struggle for Germany’, and the realisation of Hitler’s philosophy as adumbrated in ‘ Mein Kampf. The racially determined struggle for Lebensraum (living space) removed all restraints on the deadly destructive forces within the National Socialist movement. They were turned not only against the foreign enemy but also against the equally dangerous enemy within. Jews and Gypsies, the handicapped and the homosexual, political opponents and the churches, in short the ‘racial parasites’ (Volksschädlinge) had to be exterminated and the German people purged and purified so as to become a true ‘master race’. A pure Aryan race would now dominate the lesser breeds in a racially determined millennium. History as the story of racial conflict and struggle would come to an end.