Chapter One: The Third Reich’s Strategic Dilemma
Germany began 1939 in a profoundly stronger strategic position than it had been just one year before. Austria had now been annexed to the Reich, and the Sudetenland had been absorbed. Großdeutschland – Greater Germany – had finally been achieved, but at the cost that Europe was now on the brink of war. Yet in the days following the Munich Agreement, and with scarcely concealed elation, the Reichsbank declared that: ‘With the incorporation of the Sudetenland into the Reich, the Fuehrer has completed a task that is without parallel in history. In barely five years of National Socialist rule, Germany has achieved military freedom, sovereign control of its territory and the incorporation of the Saarland, Austria and the Sudetenland. It has thereby turned itself from a politic non-valeur into the pre-eminent power in continental Europe.’ 139 Such elation was not hyperbolic. In less than five years Hitler had achieved a greater expansion of German speaking lands than even the great Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck had managed to attain in his nearly twenty years in power, and all without firing a single shot in anger. 140 Indeed, after Munich Hitler even declared ‘I have no more territorial demands to make in Europe’. 141 This was, of course, pure distraction and instead of winding down military spending the Reich increased it, while simultaneously creating a coherent short-to- medium term economic, diplomatic and military strategy. 142 The 139 Tooze, p. 285. 140 Tooze, p. 285. 141 A. J. P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War , (Hamish Hamilton, 1961), p. 66. 142 Tooze, pp. 286 & 293.
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