Introduction
It is often the case in history that the best laid plans founder upon the hard realities of the present. Indeed, Karl Marx argued as much when he wrote in 1852 that: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.’ 131 So when Adolf Hitler committed Germany to be militarily operational and economically ready for war in four years in his memorandum on the Four-Year Plan of August 1936, it is hardly surprising that such plans fought against and failed to overcome the structural and material realities of the time. 132 For while the German army and economy were certainly far more ready for war in 1939 than they had been three years previously, it was still a far cry from the level of readiness envisaged by Hitler in his memorandum. And yet, despite these failures the Third Reich still invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, which was swiftly followed by British and French declarations of war, thus beginning the bloodiest conflict in human history. This had, however, not been the original plan, and while there had certainly been premonitions of war throughout 1938 and 1939 it had seemed to many that a general war was still some way off. This 131 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte , (1852), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th- brumaire/ch01.htm>, para. 2, [01/04/2018]. 132 Hitler, ‘Memorandum on the four-year plan’, August 1936, in Marwick, Arthur and Simpson, Wendy, Primary Sources 2: Interwar and World War II, (Open University Press, 2001), p. 42.
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