Hitler’s Alliance With The Soviet Union :: European History Essays

Hitler’s Alliance With The Soviet Union When the world awoke August 24, 1939 it appeared that the absolute impossible had just occurred in Europe, National Socialist Germany and Soviet Russia had just agreed on a Non Aggression pact. By that morning the entire political world had changed, it had been thrown roughly on its head and people quickly asked how it could have happened? Over a period of three years the German chancellor, Adolph Hitler had repeatedly pushed the major powers to the limit with his territorial demands in the Rhineland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and now in the Polish corridor. Hitler had succeeded in each gamble and grown bolder each time as he noticed the vacillating nature of the supposed major powers that stood in the way of his completing his long held foreign policy program. This program, first coherently laid down in his 1924 book Mein Kampf, called for the re-armament of Germany and the acquisition of allies like Italy and Britain, the neutralization or destruction of his hated enemy France, and finally with Germany’s rear protected the way would be clear for the great fight against Judeo-Bolshevism in the Soviet Union, and the gaining of Lebensraum for the superior Aryan German race. Since coming to power in 1933, Hitler had completed the first phase of his program save for the making of a British alliance or at least their promise of neutrality in any upcoming European war of revision. Realizing that the British would need some coercing to accept his program, and that if war was to come with the west his eastern border must be secured, Hitler relied on his great ability to play the game of power politics and shocked the world by allying with his sworn enemy. Hitler sought the Non-Aggression pact and covert military alliance with the Soviet Union because it was a temporary means to an all encompassing end. Hitler would use the hated Soviets to secure his eastern flank while he destroyed France with or without the help of Britain, only to return the favor by attacking them when Germany was ready. It was a move consistent with the power politics and foreign policy program he had been pursuing since 1933, his attempts to force Britain into a military alliance or at least a proclamation of neutrality in any continental war, and the subjugation of France as a prerequisite to obtaining Lebensraum in the East. The Non-Aggression pact of August 1939, was the pre war culmination of policies designed by Hitler to further his foreign policy program of making